LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰: January, 2019
Welcome to my new kind of posts where I talk about interesting topics I read about in the SEO and niche/affiliate marketer blogs and forums I follow.
I always try to make this blog useful for you guys and for myself as well. I think such round-ups will kill 🐦🐦 with one stone. I hope it will be interesting for you to read. And I really hope it will make me read blogs and forums more often. They contain so much in terms of knowledge and I often regret I do not read them regularly and learned about something important too late.
So I decided to do a monthly round-up of these kinds of topics. Hopefully, it will be helpful for me (to read more) and interesting for you.
Let’s start with one of our most favorite topics: Updates in the Google ranking algorithm.
Anyone saw any ranking changes around January 6th?
It seems that Google released the first algorithm update of 2019 around January 6 😱 Many noticed some ranking shifts and the tools tracking such shifts also picked up the changes.
Also, many said they saw traffic growth ⬆⬆⬆ at the beginning of January, myself included. However, I would attribute it to the end of the holidays and thus people being active on the internet again.
How are your rankings? Any unusual movement you can attribute to the update?
Elementor is a powerful post formatting plugin that has started to gain some popularity recently. Many webmasters are switching from ThriveArchitect to Elementor due to its compelling features. For example, it makes it really convenient to re-use groups of elements via copy-paste and creating templates. The plugin has a free tier so you can try it without paying anything (I use it on here on my blog for some of the fancier posts).
So, what’s the best WP theme to go with it? 🤔
Seems like Astra is a popular choice among the Elementor users with GeneratePress taking the second spot. In fact, the question boils down to a simple “it depends”. It depends on what you need from a theme and both themes are good but have differences in the features.
The developer groups of both themes have good ties with the Elementor folks so the plugin is well integrated into any of the themes.
If you are curious about Elementor, check their intro video:
But do you have to use Elementor or any other formatting plugins? What about Gutenberg? 🤔
Anyone else de-elementoring? And going full Gutenberg?
This is another topic that got discussed in the closed forum by AuthorityHackers.
As you know, WordPress 5 is out and it has a new default editor called Gutengerg. The question is: Will Gutenberg replace other formatting plugins such as Elementor and ThriveArchitect? It seems that the change is inevitable but it won’t happen anytime soon 😼
The original poster of the topic is already using Gutenberg with a bit of CSS. One significant benefit of switching from Elementor to Gutenberg was that the roundup pages got faster by 40% 😱
Some members (myself included) complained about bugs 🐛🐜🐛 in Gutenberg. For example, Gutenberg tables are not fully format-able and there are other glitches such as drag and drop inserting for images not working, editing for the featured image not working. After all, the Gutenberg plugin has a horrible rating of 2 out of 5 and tons of bad reviews 😨
However, if you know how to deal with CSS, you should be able to overcome the problems.
I personally decided to stay with ThriveArchitect for now. I am not ready to fix (and re-fix and re-fix again) bugs with CSS. Plus, it’s my VA who uploads and formats the articles on my niche websites and I have good instructions and templates for it.
Related 👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻 Listen to a podcast episode of AuthorityHackers that talks about the future of the way we will be building websites in 2019:
Are you doing social media marketing with Pinterest? If so, do you use hashtags #️⃣ in your pins?
Turns out, Pinterest loves hashtags and it makes tagged pins 📌 appear in Pinterest feed much faster.
TailWind, an automation tool for Pinterest and Instagram, published a useful post about Pinterest hashtags on their blog. They explain how to choose hashtags, how to use them, and write about a case that proves the benefits of having hashtags in a pin description. Pinterest hashtagging seems to be different from Twitter and Instagram. For example, you should avoid including hashtags in your description text but rather put them in the very end. Also, you should not include hashtags that have zero volume.
BTW, the TailWind link above ☝🏻 is an affiliate one. I’ve started using TailWind in December 2018 after knowing about it for at least a year (I’m soo fast 🤣🤣🤣) and for me, it’s for a must-have tool for Pinterest. Will be writing a review soon!
Following building a niche website in almost real time
Do you like to read about new successes and failures of other affiliate marketers as much as I do? 😋 If so, this link for you! (as well as the whole post series that the link is a part of) Spenser Hawn, a guy behind nichepursuits.com, publishes regular updates on his Niche Site Project 4, in which he’s building a new niche website from scratch 👍🏻
This update is for December 2018. In December, his new site made its first sale. Spenser writes about how much content he published in December and the link building he used. He used Skyscraper and the results were not what he expected it to be 😒
The post also has results of the Niche Site Project 4 participants who build new sites at the same time as Spencer.
If you are curious about live updates of the real affiliate websites and what’s working for new sites and what does not, this is a great post (and the post series) to read 😀
And here’s another update on a new website building….
How fast can an affiliate website that follows white hat techniques (no PBNs or massive link building) make its first money?
It turns out that it is possible to do in the very first month after the website is launched.
On December 1st, 2018, One of the members of the HPD forum launched a new website in a tech niche. Then, he started adding content.
The first article was published on Dec 6 and the regular content uploading started on Dec 8. Since then, the average speed of content upload was 1 post a day of 700-1000 words. First 10 days, it was only info content, and starting from Dec 18, the webmaster started adding commercial articles. The backlinking strategy was to comment(1-2) each day on Quora, Yahoo, and related blogs and forum Q/A threads.
And tada 🎉🎉🎉 The first sale happened on Dec 31! The second one followed closely on Jan 2nd 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
In total, the website has in total 34 articles, of which 14 articles are commercial of 3k words on average. For the content creation, the webmaster found 2 interns on Facebook who were interested in the topic the website is about. since that, the interns are no longer interns but full-fledged writers and the website owner plans to hire more writers.
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Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. I will receive a small fee if you choose to buy after clicking on any of these links. Thank you if you do! 🤗
Update: Fixed "Outsourced writing" expense + totals + totals chart; before, used a combined number for both January and February Here comes the first month of the year 2017. Time flies…
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