7 WordPress Guides to Make 2017 Your Best Year Ever

With a new year just around the corner, it means that you need to make sure everything is in place to have your best year ever. While most bloggers and online marketers will look at their success based on their latest individual post or ad campaign, it’s really important to focus on what’s working best in the big scheme of things and put most of your efforts in that area.

A great example of this is if you were a niche blogger and had a site that was pushing Amazon products through their affiliate program. Amazon is great because you can make money promoting anything on their site, and you will also earn a commission any referred indirect sales as well. As an affiliate of Amazon or create your own niche site, you will probably have a lot of competition right away and might not be ranking in the search results for the first few weeks. However, if you put in the time, work and effort, your site could be on page one in a few months from now.

What I’m getting at, is that if you build a solid foundation and marketing strategy around your site from the beginning, you can quickly establish yourself (or your site) as an authority in its space and this can greatly pay off, versus trying to find small wins here and there.

With all of this in mind, I’ve listed seven great resources to help you find the most success with your blog, while also putting you on the right track to have 2017 be your best year yet!

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Follow These WordPress and Blogging Guides to Blow Past the Competition in 2017

If you want to create a successful website or blog, you need to not only keep an eye on the competition, you also need to make sure your site is optimized, content-focused and also monetized in the best ways possible. That is exactly what you are going to find in each of the resource guides below.

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The Best Ranking Sites are Fast Loading Sites

Of the many different things you need to actively monitor and improve on, site speed it one of the most important. Not only are loading times and page speed important to keep your audience engaged and not waiting around for your content to load, it’s also a huge ranking factor in the eyes of Google. In fact, Google even provides site owners with Webmaster Tools where they can check the speed of their sites, optimize performance and make sure all contest is fully responsive in the process. For a summary on all of this and more, I recommend you check out these reference guide on speeding up a WordPress site.

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Niche Down as Much as Possible

Something I often talk about is ‘niching down’, but most people aren’t doing it correctly. What I commonly see from people when choosing a niche, is making a decision between topics like “sports’, “business” or “WordPress topics” and then just creating content. This is completely wrong. You need to choose a niche, then continually niche it down as much as possible until you’ve eliminated most of the competition and have an audience where you always know exactly what they want. You can see a perfect example of this in my blogging guide, which shows how you can go from basketball, to basketball skills training, then basketball jump training — which is very niche specific.

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Focus on Your Content Promotion, Not Just Content Creation

Another area where bloggers are doing many things wrong is in the content space. Stop ‘just creating content’. Instead of creating five articles per week just to put something out there, publish maybe one or two really in-depth and thorough articles per month. Spend the rest of your time promoting these articles and getting them to rank. Brian Dean explains this best when he said “It’s not about content creation. It’s all about content promotion”. Be sure to check out his skyscraper article on how to create amazing content, then getting it to rank through outreach and link building.

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Social Media Sharing Should Still Be a Huge Focus

Social media is still one of the best ways to reach a massive audience not only for free but also to have others help promote your content as well. I still see a lot of people using social media wrong and not having the correctly sharing buttons on their site. One quick tip to improve social media engagement and sharing is to include sharing buttons at both the bottom and top of your articles (also floating when possible. Also be sure to use a plugin that allows you to include your Twitter handle within each retweet. This will allow you to see (and engage) whenever someone shares your content. For more resources, check out this article on the best social sharing plugins for WordPress.

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Become an Expert in Your Space with Expert Roundups and Interviews

Once you’ve niche down as much as possible and already have some great content out there, it’s time to focus on becoming an authority within your niche. A great way to accomplish this is through the use of guest blogging, but there are also other working methods as well. One that has worked quite well lately, is expert roundup posts. The concept is simple… ask one question to a bunch of experts in your space, then publish it on your site. Or, as an expert, you can simply partake in these round ups and gain more exposure and links back to your site.

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Build that Mailing List Like Crazy!

Your WordPress site is going to act as the main hub for all of your content, marketing, and branding. One of the most important things to do once you have a site up and running is to make sure your mailing list is taking advantage of every visitor that comes to your site. Don’t just stick a traditional sign up form on your site, offer some value and get creative with your mailing list.

The truth is, most people that visit your site for the first time aren’t going to come back again. This is simply a numbers game, which means you need to use the best methods possible to get visitors on your mailing list — otherwise, you will likely never hear from this again. View these examples of top bloggers using popup windows to increase their mailing lists. This is one of the best working methods out there, just be sure to offer something of value in exchange for someone submitting their email address.

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Old School Monetization Methods Still Work Extremely Well

Last but not least… the money! Yes, it’s what all website owners and bloggers are fighting for. Nothing provides inspiration like a few six-figure monthly reports or pictures of recent checks flowing into John Chow’s bank account. But at the same time, you need to realize this type of success doesn’t happen over night. We all need to take baby steps and use the most simple forms of monetization before launching our own projects or sending out promotions to a list and ranking in a few thousand dollars. In fact, I wrote a similar post on this several months ago on how to successfully make money with a blog. Three of the best methods out there are still affiliate marketing, Google Adsense and creating your own product. Keep your focus in these three areas, then scale and implement new monetization methods in over time.

Will 2017 Be Your Best Blogging and Profit Year Yet?

I’ve provided the resources and tools to help you get to that next level. Now it’s time for you to take action and turn your side-hobby into a full six-figure business. It’s all possible through the power of content marketing and blogging. It’s up to you to make it all become a reality!

Click Here To Download John Chow’s New eBook, The Ultimate Online Profit Model!