Rae

SEO & AFFILIATE MARKETING BLOG

Using Google Alerts to Find New Affiliate Programs in Your Niche

By Rae / March 30, 2016 /

Google Alerts is a free service offered by Google that will alert you to new content Google finds on the web that contains keywords you specify. Google Alerts is most commonly recommended as a way to monitor your brand – and your competition’s brand – online. But I also use Google Alerts as a way…

Read More

10 Simple Ways to Make Your WordPress Site Faster

By Rae / March 26, 2016 /

I’ve become obsessed with site speed over the last six months, systematically working through each of my sites to improve their speed. Supposed SEO benefits aside, the faster your site is, the better the user experience. And the better the user experience, the higher the conversion rate – sales, leads or newsletter subscribers; whatever a…

Read More

Comparing Email Subscribers Acquired from Pop-Ups vs. Other Methods

By Rae / January 18, 2016 /

In August I published a post examining a common question in email marketing – do email subscription pop-ups work? The post detailed how I went about implementing pop-ups via OptinMonster (affiliate), as well as the results I attained in using them on two separate sites. Despite “most people” claiming they hate them, the results were…

Read More

What Happened When I Flipped a WordPress Based Site from http to https

By Rae / January 15, 2016 /

In mid-July of 2015, I decided to flip the Sugarrae.com site to https using SSL. In the last eighteen+ months, Google has been pushing hard to “make SSL happen.” They even said it might give you a bit of a rankings boost, no doubt knowing that tons of SEOs and business owners would begin flipping…

Read More

How to Easily Optimize and Losslessly Compress your Images and Theme Files in WordPress

By Rae / October 10, 2015 /

If you’ve ever run your website through the PageSpeed Insights tool to find out what you need to do to improve your page speed, you’ve probably gotten the following message: Optimize images Properly formatting and compressing images can save many bytes of data. Optimize the following images to reduce their size by [estimated percentage] Under…

Read More

Do Popups Work for Increasing List Sign-ups? (and an OptinMonster Review)

By Rae / August 24, 2015 /

No matter how much people might say they hate pop-ups, they work when it comes to increasing subscribers to your newsletter. Period. Back in 2011, I began testing the use of pop-ups on various sites I owned. Everyone I knew claimed they found them annoying, but I kept hearing they had a huge effect on…

Read More

Grammarly Review – The Blogger’s (Free) Secret Weapon

By Rae / May 13, 2015 /

If you’ve been a long time reader of the Sugarrae blog, you may have noticed that my posts are better written from a grammar nazi perspective these days. The newfound clarity is because of Grammarly. What is Grammarly? Grammarly is an online grammar editor. With it, you can paste a post into it (or write…

Read More

Affiliate Datafeeds and Duplicate Content in a Panda World

By Rae / May 12, 2015 /

For those who aren’t familiar, Panda is a Google search filter that (in part) penalizes sites that have a large amount of thin or duplicated content. Panda has been a harsh filter for those using datafeeds in general – be they a merchant or an affiliate. As affiliates, we (and every other competing affiliate) obtain…

Read More

How to Find Out Which Social Networks are Driving Your Revenue

By Rae / April 2, 2015 /

There are tons of social networks out there and only so many that you can focus (quality) time and effort on. One of the most common questions I see asked is “what social networks should I focus on?” and the answer is always, “focus on the networks that work for you and your demographic.” But…

Read More