Blogging & Content

SEO & AFFILIATE MARKETING BLOG

How to Make Your WordPress Website Secure (SSL) in 6 Steps

By Rae / July 19, 2017 /

If you’ve looked into search engine optimization as a promotional technique for your website, you have likely come across the advice to make your website secure (having an https:// appear in front of your URLs instead of http://). Google has been very vocal in pushing for all websites to make the move to being secure,…

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27 Detailed Ways to Generate New Blog Post Ideas

By Rae / July 7, 2016 /

Coming up with good topics for your blog posts can be a struggle, especially after you have been blogging for a while. When I get inspired, blogging is easy for me. When I have to sit down and write like it’s homework because I need to publish two posts one week, I often sit there…

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How Bloggers Can Fix a Manual Penalty Caused by Compensated Content & Reviews

By Rae / April 13, 2016 /

This past weekend Google sent out a round of manual penalty notices citing “unnatural outbound links” – later confirmed to be targeting sites publishing compensated content and reviews where the blogger is linking out to the brand or site that compensated them. If your site received the notice, you’ll find some advice for fixing your…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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5 Simple Ways to Make More Money from Your Blog

By Rae / September 24, 2012 /

Based on the reader survey, website monetization ideas are a hot topic. So you have some traffic – now how do you go about monetizing it (and without selling your soul)? Affiliate programs are obviously my top choice for monetizing. Being a direct affiliate for a merchant and driving traffic to their website via ads,…

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How to Make Money Blogging

By Rae / August 23, 2012 /

I was recently trying to explain to a friend new to the concept of affiliate marketing how I made money from blogging. For this post, I’ll use Sugarrae specifically as an example of how I make money by blogging since most people blogging primarily to earn extra cash (or a full-time income) are doing it…

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