What Makes a Great Business Landing Page?

Your landing page makes or breaks your online marketing strategy. Around 65 percent of marketing professionals feel lead generation and driving traffic to a website is one of their most important tasks. The two goals work intricately together, so those who visit your page are most likely to become customers.
1. Know Your Audience
The key to a landing page which converts is knowing the target audience for that page. Create a buyer persona which represents the typical customer who lands on the specific page. Gear the tone of the writing, images and even CTAs to the preferences of your buyer. For example, if your audience is mostly Generation Z, you might use pop culture references and a lighter tone than if your audience is made up of baby boomers.
2. Have One Purpose
Most sites offer multiple landing pages, but each page should have one primary purpose. If you provide too many different options on a single page, buyers grow confused about what they are supposed to do next. A strong landing page moves users to a sole purpose. For example, if your goal is to get site visitors registered for your newsletter, you might explain what your newsletter offers, give them an incentive to sign up
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18559/what-makes-a-great-business-landing-page

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/24/what-makes-a-great-business-landing-page/

How Discovering WordPress Changed my Young Career

Discovering WordPress all the way back in 2004 was a turning point in my young career. Here’s how it came about.
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18558/how-discovering-wordpress-changed-my-young-career

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/how-discovering-wordpress-changed-my-young-career/

James Kemp and Iconic – How I Built It

Sponsored by: James Kemp is the founder and lead developer of Iconic, a popular WooCommerce extension shop. James has managed to do well in an increasingly saturated space. His approach to solving problems and determining if there’s a market for his new ideas is an interesting one. He offers lots of great advice on everything from research to development, and launching.
The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained (CGP Grey)
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18557/james-kemp-and-iconic-how-i-built-it

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/james-kemp-and-iconic-how-i-built-it/

SEO writing guide: From keyword to content brief

If content is queen, and the critical role SEO plays a role of bridging the two to drive growth, then there’s no question as to whether or not keyword research is important.

However, connecting the dots to create content that ranks well can be difficult. What makes it so difficult? How do you go from a target keyword phrase and write an article that is unique, comprehensive, encompasses all the major on-page SEO elements, touches the reader, and isn’t structured like the “oh-so-familiar” generic SEO template?

There’s no one size fits all approach! However, there is a simple way to support any member of your editorial, creative writing, or content team in shaping up what they need in order to write SEO-friendly content, and that’s an SEO content brief.

Key benefits of a content brief:

• Productivity and efficiency – A content brief clearly outlines expectation for the writer resulting in reduced revisions
• Alignment – Writers understand the intent and goals of the content
• Quality – Reduces garbage in, garbage out.

So the rest of this article will cover how we actually get there & we’ll use this very article as an example:

• Keyword research
• Topical expansion
• Content/SERP (search engine results page) analysis
• Content brief development
• Template and tools

Any good editor will tell you great content comes from having a solid content calendar with topics planned in advance for review and release at a regular cadence. To support topical analysis and themes as SEOs we need to start with keyword research.

Start with keyword research: Topic, audience, and objectives

The purpose of this guide isn’t to teach you how to do keyword research. It’s to set you up for success in taking the step beyond that and developing it into a content brief. Your primary keywords serve as your topic themes, but they are also the beginning makings of your content brief, so try to ensure you:

• Spend time understanding your target audience and aligning their goals to your keywords. Many call this keyword intent mapping. Rohan Ayyr provides an excellent guide to matching keywords to intent in his article, ‘How to move from keyword research to intent research’.
• Do the keyword research in advance, it will allow writers and editors the freedom to move things around and line it up with trending topics.

How does all this help in supporting a content brief?

You and your team can get answers to the key questions mentioned below.

• What will they write about? Primary keywords serve as the topic in your content brief.
• Who is the intended audience? Keyword intent helps unearth what problem the user is trying to solve, helping us understand who they are, and what they need.

Now with keywords as our guide to overall topical themes, we can focus on the next step, topical expansion.

Topical expansion: Define key points and gather questions

Writers need more than keywords, they require insight into the pain points of the reader, key areas of the topic to address and most of all, what questions the content should answer. This too will go into your content brief.

We’re in luck as SEOs because there is no shortage of tools that allow us to gather this information around a topic.

For example, let’s say this article focuses on “SEO writing”. There are a number of ways to expand on this topic.

• Using a tool like SEMRush’s topic research tool, you can take your primary keyword (topic), and get expanded/related topics, a SERP snapshot and questions in a single view. I like this because it covers what many other tools do separately. Ultimately it supports both content expansion & SERP analysis at the same time.

• Use keyword suggestion tools like KeywordTool.io or Ubersuggest to expand the terms combined with Google search results to quickly view potential topics.

• Use Answerthepublic.com to get expanded terms and inspirational visuals.

• Alternatively, Ann Smarty offers up four additional tools, for related keywords to support topical expansion.

You’ve taken note of what to write about, and how to cover the topic fully. But how do we begin to determine what type of content and how in-depth it should be?

Content and SERP analysis: Specifying content type and format

Okay, so we’re almost done. We can’t tell writers to write unique content if we can’t specify what makes it unique. Reviewing the competition and what’s being displayed consistently in the SERP is a quick way to assess what’s likely to work. You’ll want to look at the top ten results for your primary topic and collect the following:

• Content type – Are the results skewed towards a specific type of content? (For example, in-depth articles, infographics, videos, or blog posts)
• Format – Is the information formatted as a guide? A how-to? Maybe a list?
• Differentiation points – What stands out about the top three results compared to the rest?

Content brief development: Let’s make beautiful content together

Now you’re ready to prepare your SEO content brief which should include the following:

• Topic and objective – Your topic is your primary keyword phrase. Your objective is what this content supposed to accomplish.
• Audience and objective – Based on your keyword intent mapping, describe who the article is meant to reach.
• Topical coverage – Top three related keyword phrases from your topical expansion.
• Questions to answer – Top three to five from topical expansion findings. Ensure they support your related keyword phrases as well.
• Voice, style, tone – Use an existing content/brand style guide.
• Content type and format – Based on your SERP analysis.
• Content length – Based on SERP Analysis. Ensure you’re meeting the average across the top three results based on content type.
• Deadline – This is only pertinent if you are working solo, otherwise, consult/lean on your creative team lead.

[Note: If/when using internally, consider making part of the content request process, or a template for the editorial staff. When using externally be sure to include where the content will be displayed, format/output, specialty editorial guidance.]

Template and tools

Want to take a shortcut? Feel free to download and copy my SEO content brief template, it’s a Google doc.

Other content brief templates/resources:

• https://izea.com/2018/05/02/content-marketing-brief/
• https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/12/content-strategy-kit-marketers/content-brief-example/

If you want to streamline the process as a whole, MarketMuse provides a platform that manages the keyword research, topic expansion, provides the questions, and manages the entire workflow. It even allows you to request a brief, all in one place.

I only suggest this for larger organizations looking to scale as there is an investment involved. You’d likely also have to do some work to integrate into your existing processes.

Jori Ford is Sr. Director of Content & SEO at G2Crowd. She can also be found on Twitter @chicagoseopro.

The post SEO writing guide: From keyword to content brief appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/16/seo-writing-guide-from-keyword-to-content-brief/

How to Easily Create a Job Board in WordPress (NO HTML Required)

Do you want to create a job board in WordPress? Job boards allow people to find jobs and companies to post their own job listings.

With the growing trend of the gig economy, starting a job board has become a popular online business idea. You can make money by accepting payments for job listings.

In this article, we will show you how to easily create a job board in WordPress and make money from it. You can also use this tutorial to add a job board to an existing WordPress site.

Getting Started with Your Job Board Website in WordPress

You will need the following items to create a job board website with WordPress.

• A domain name (This will be your website’s address. Example, wpbeginner.com)
• A web hosting account (This is where all your website files will be stored)
• A job board extension for WordPress
• Paid job listings add-on (if you want to accept payments for job listings)

Let’s start with the domain name and web hosting account.

Domain names cost around $14.99 per year and web hosting plans start from $7.99 / month (usually paid annually).

This may sound like a lot of money if you are just starting out.

Luckily, the folks at Bluehost are offering WPBeginner users a free domain name, free SSL certifcate, and discount on hosting. Basically, you can get started for $2.75 per month.

→ Click Here to Claim This Exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

Bluehost is one of the biggest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.

Once you purchase hosting, Bluehost will automatically install WordPress for you. If you need instructions, then follow our guide on how to install WordPress for detailed step by step instructions.

Now that you have WordPress ready, it is time to create a job board website with WordPress.

Setting up a Job Board in WordPress

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Job Manager plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will need to create a few pages that the plugin will use to display different sections of your job board.

On each page, you just need to enter a title and then add a shortcode.

Let’s get started. The first page we’re going to create will be for jobs. Simply create a new page and enter Jobs in the title field. In the content area, you need to add a shortcode block and paste the following shortcode inside it:

[jobs]

After adding the shortcode, click on the publish button to save your changes.

Next, you will need to repeat the process to create a ‘Submit Job Listing’ page and add the following shortcode:

[submit_job_form]

Lastly, you need to create a ‘Jobs Dashboard’ page and enter the following shortcode in the content area:

[job_dashboard]

Now that you have created all the required pages, let’s move on to plugin’s settings.

Head over to Job Listings » Settings page and click on the ‘Pages’ tab.

From here, you need to select the pages you have created earlier and then click on the save changes button to store your settings.

After that, you need to review other settings on the page. Let’s start with the ‘General’ tab first.

On the general page, you can select the date format, add Google Maps API key, or delete data when you uninstall the plugin.

Note: Google Maps API key requires you to provide billing information, and you will be charged based on your usage. If you don’t want to use Google Maps API, then you can leave this option unchecked.

After that, you can switch to the ‘Job Listings’ tab. There are a number of options on this page to control the display and features available for job listings. You need to review and adjust them to your own requirements.

Similarly, you can control the job listings submissions by switching to the ‘Job Submission’ tab. From here, you can control new account settings, submission moderation, edit controls, and more.

To protect your website against automated spam, you need to switch to the reCaptcha tab and enable it by adding the API keys. You will find a link to generate the required API keys next to each option.

WP Job Manager also sends notifications to site administrators and users. You can control them under the ‘Email Notifications’ tab.

Bonus tip: we recommend using the WP Mail SMTP plugin to fix the common WordPress not sending email issue.

Once you are done, don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.

Adding New Job Listings

Depending on your settings, logged-in users can submit jobs directly from Submit Jobs page you created earlier.

As an administrator, you can directly add jobs from the WordPress admin area.

Simply go to the Job Listings » Add New page and provide a title, description, and the job type for the job listing you are adding.

After entering the title, description and choosing a job type, you need to scroll down to Job Listing Data section. There you can provide more information about the job such as location, application email or URL, company information, company logo, job listing expiration date, etc.

After filling the job listing data, you can preview the job by clicking on the preview button.

After that you either add more details if you need to or simply click on Publish button to post the listing.

To manage existing job listings, you need to go to Job Listings » All Job Listings page in the WordPress admin area.

There you will be able to see all the job listing posted on your job board. You can click on the pencil icon to edit a job listing, see the filled jobs, and delete existing job listings.

Your website visitors will be able to view all job listings by visiting the jobs page you created earlier.

Logged in users will also be able to manage their job listings by visiting the jobs dashboard page you created earlier.

Adding Paid Job Listings

You may have seen several reputable sites adding a job board to generate extra revenue from their website. If your blog has a good reputation among industry peers, then companies wouldn’t mind paying a small fee to get their job posting listed on your site.

To enable this feature, you will first need to install and activate the Simple Paid Listings plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

It is a paid add-on for WP Job Manager and allows you to accept payments for job listings using PayPal or Stripe.

Upon activation, you need to visit Job Listings » Settings page and switch to the ‘Paid Listings’ tab.

On this tab, you can choose your preferred payment gateway and provide API information.

Note: You will need to enable SSL / HTTPS on your website to receive payments. See our article on how to get free SSL certificate for your site for detailed instructions.

We hope this article helped you easily create a job board in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of proven ways to make money online for more ways to generate revenue from your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Easily Create a Job Board in WordPress (NO HTML Required) appeared first on WPBeginner.

source https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-easily-create-a-job-board-in-wordpress-no-html-required/

Elementor Performance Tests Vs Normal Theme

In this article, I would like to present you a performance load test over Elementor page builder to see exactly how much is increasing your page load time. These days is important to have a fast loading site to be better for your visitors and have a more good bounce rate. This speed is important especially on mobile where the internet speed is not that good as on a desktop and where the user doesn’t have that much patience.
Elementor is the best page builder plugin that you can use as it has a lot of features and can help in creating very beautiful websites designs in minutes, it is mobile responsive and not expensive at all it even can be used for free with the free version.
Many are telling that if you are using Elementor you don’t even need a WordPress theme and you can just use Elementor for everything. This is actually true but you will see in this article that the things are not quite like this.
Plugins and Theme Used for Tests
For these tests, I am using a couple of Plugins and Astra Theme to test the Elementor Performance increase from the normal Astra load time. The plugins that are installed on my site are:
Yoast SEO
ThirstyAffiliatesa
Affiliate Coupons
WP Rocket
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18556/elementor-performance-tests-vs-normal-theme

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/elementor-performance-tests-vs-normal-theme/

TranslatePress WordPress Translation Plugin Guide

I think you will agree with me when I say creating a multilingual website is no easy task. Especially for a beginner. Which translation plugin do you choose? Do you translate your website manually or automatically? Do you hire a professional translator? Does translating your website affect your SEO rankings?
All these (and more) are pertinent questions to ask yourself as far as translating your WordPress website goes.
Turns out you can easily translate your WordPress website into more than 200 languages using the TranslatePress plugin.
And in this guide, we show you exactly how to install and translate your website with one of the best WordPress translation plugins of 2019 and beyond.
Read on to learn how you can use the TranslatePress WordPress plugin to offer your content and products to visitors from all over the world without breaking a sweat.
What is TranslatePress?
Before we get lost in the impressive suite of features, let us first learn more about this multilingual WordPress plugin.
What is TranslatePress? TranslatePress is a nifty WordPress translation plugin handcrafted by the same awesome guys who brought you Cozmoslabs. It is loaded to the brim with all the features you
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18555/translatepress-wordpress-translation-plugin-guide

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/translatepress-wordpress-translation-plugin-guide/