How to Start a Blog That Makes Money in 12 Easy Steps — The Complete Beginner’s Guide

I started my first blog to avoid getting a job.

I’m completely serious.

I was coming to the end of my undergraduate degree in international affairs and the thought of getting a job at the state department or in journalism sounded like a horrible idea.

So I learned how to start a blog and built one on international affairs with the hopes of eventually monetizing it and supporting myself.

That didn’t really work out as planned. Hah.

But it did lead to a career in online marketing and now I do work on blogs to avoid having a real job.

Whether you’re trying to avoid a job entirely or trying to quit your current job, starting a blog is a reliable path to supporting yourself and your family. It takes a lot of work and some time but it is a well-traveled path at this point. It’s not nearly as crazy as it was when I started.

I’m going to walk you through the 12 steps to start a blog, which are particularly useful for beginners who have never done this before.

Before we begin, let’s cover how website technology works. There are a few things you’ll need to sign up for so it’s good to see how they all connect before starting.

First, there’s the domain. This is the URL of the website. Think of it as the address for your business. You’ll need to buy your domain.

Second, the domain registrar. This is the company that you’ll use to buy your domain and hold it for you. They don’t host your site or anything — they just store your domain and point web traffic to your site which will be on your web host.

Third, the web host. This is the company that hosts your site. Your site will be on its servers.

Fourth, the tool to build your site. Very few sites are built by hand using raw HTML and CSS these days. Almost all of them are built using a tool. The tool handles a lot of heavy lifting and makes building a site substantially easier, especially if you have no idea how to code. This is how you’ll configure your site and publish your blog posts. For blogging, these tools are called content management systems (CMS) and the only real option is WordPress. Once you’ve installed WordPress on your host, you’ll be able to start building your site.

To recap, you’ll buy a domain using a domain registrar, install WordPress on your host, then start building your site.

Now let’s dive into the step-by-step process.

Step 1: Pick a Category

The most important decision to make when starting a blog is which category you’re going to write about.

Why pick a category at all? Why not write about anything that interests you?

When it comes to building an audience, increasing traffic, and monetizing your blog, you’ll get a lot further a lot faster if you stick to a specific category.

Think of it like this: Let’s say you stumble on a blog of mine. You find an amazing post about how to turn email subscribers into fully passive income. You love it and subscribe to my email list. Then I send you an email about how to organize your closet. How would you react? Maybe you’d love it if you also really love organization. But most people would be turned off. They want more content about email lists and making passive income.

Jumping categories can be really jarring for any audience. Google also greatly prefers blogs that are focused on a single topic, which will help you with SEO a lot.

Whatever you do, pick a category and stick to it. If you want to try another category, start a new blog.

Here are a few popular categories that always do well:

• Personal finance
• Fitness
• Online business
• Investing
• Productivity
• Real estate
• Careers
• Test prep
• Freelancing

My recommendation is to pick one of the categories above and niche it down one more time. Personal finance for people making over $100,000 per year is a good example. Or fitness for people over 60 is another.

Categories get tough when they’re super consumer focused and have extremely large audiences. Celebrity blogs are a great example. There’s tons of competition in this space but also very limited money compared to other blogging categories. It’s a brutal combo. All the work without any of the payoff. Recipe blogs are another example of a brutal category. World-class competition and very few ways to monetize. Try to avoid categories like these.

One of my favorite category types is B2B. This includes categories like how to do marketing, build products, HR, customer service, manage a team, or improve your sales skills. The volume in these categories is always lower than the popular categories that I listed above. But the quality of traffic is always incredible. Businesses are always willing to spend more than consumers to solve their problems; they have access to a lot more cash. The downside is that you need to have experience and skills in these areas before being able to blog about them. They’re not nearly as easy to break into.

Hobbies can also do okay, but they’re typically more difficult to monetize. That said, I’ve come across entrepreneurs who have built six and even seven figure businesses in hobby spaces like horse riding or learning the guitar. It’s doable. It’s just more difficult because people aren’t willing to spend as much on their hobbies.

Step 2: Find a Domain

Find a domain that’s somewhat related to the category you picked and is also available for purchase.

I highly recommend you keep searching until you find a domain that’s available. While it is possible to buy a domain from someone who already has it, that’s an advanced option and can get expensive fast.

Low quality domains will usually go for a few thousand dollars. Highly quality domains that are two words can easily go for $10,000 to $50,000. I’ve even been in discussions to purchase domains for over $100,000 and the really hot ones can break seven figures. Not to mention all the hassle that comes from finding the person who owns the domain, negotiating with them, and transferring the domain if you can get an agreement.

Your best bet is to keep going until you find a domain that you like and can purchase directly from a domain registrar for about $10.

We go into lots of detail on which domain registrar to use here. The short answer, use Namecheap. It’s awesome, it’s the best, it’s what I personally use.

We’ve also got some more tips on buying a domain here.

Should you use your personal name as your domain?

If this is your first blog and you’re not completely sure what you want to blog about, I recommend that you use your personal name.

The reason is that changing your domain later will mean that you have to start over from scratch. There are a lot of mistakes in blogging that can be corrected later; having the wrong domain isn’t one of them.

Let’s say you pick a domain like fitnessfordoctors.com. Then after six months, you realize you’d rather be doing personal finance blogging for doctors. You’d need to get a new domain and start over from scratch.

Personal domains are much more flexible — it’s just a name after all. So if you jump categories after a few months, it’s not a big deal. Take down any old content that’s not relevant with your new direction, start posting new content, and you’re good to go.

That said, personal domains have two major downsides:

1. Scalability – It’s much more difficult to recruit other writers or grow your blog beyond your personal identity later on.
2. Sellability – Personal blogs, even if they’re generating serious cash, are much harder to sell. Prospective buyers want a site that isn’t dependent on a single person.

These are pretty advanced problems to have though. So if this is your first blog, the benefits of using your name as the domain greatly outweigh the costs that only show up down the road.

Step 3: Get a host for your blog

Every site needs a web host. This is the company that stores your site on its servers and makes it available for anyone who visits your site.

We went through all the main hosts for WordPress sites (by far the best tool for blogging) and put together our recommendations here.

While there are a few other choices it really comes down to two options:

Best WordPress Host for Beginners = SiteGround

For your first blog, you want a host that is popular, trusted, easy to use, reliable, and reasonably priced. No need for anything fancy.

SiteGround fits this need perfectly. The best part is that its plans start at $4/month. That’s a steal considering how many positive reviews it gets.

For the vast majority of folks starting blogs, SiteGround is going to be the best bet for hosting their blog.

Best WordPress Host for Advanced Bloggers = WP Engine

In my last few jobs, I managed blogs with hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors per month. They had thousands of posts on them. We always used WP Engine for sites of that size.

WP Engine comes with a lot of extra hosting features for security and scalability. For sites of that size, you end up having to do a lot more maintenance in order to keep the site healthy. WP Engine handles all that stuff for you. Their support team is also world-class. They do a great job.

But there’s a major downside: it’s more expensive. The lowest plans start at $35/month. This is 7X the price of other hosts.

If this is your first blog, I wouldn’t go with WP Engine.

Step 4: Point your domain to your host

Now you have a domain and a host for your site.

The next step is to point your domain to your host so that people end up at your site when they go to the URL of your domain.

Every host has slightly different settings you’ll need to configure at your domain registrar. They definitely have a support doc on with the details on what to do.

Here are the details for our recommended hosts:

• SiteGround
• WP Engine

If you have any trouble with this, contact the support team for your host and they’ll walk you through the exact steps.

Step 5: Install WordPress

You’ll need a content management system (CMS) to build your site and manage your blog posts.

There’s only one option for this: WordPress.

Seriously, it’s not even a decision. Use WordPress.

Years ago, there were a few competitors to WordPress like Joomla, Typepad, or Blogger.

No one uses those anymore.

This is going to sound kind of bad but whenever I hear of someone using one of those old WordPress competitors, I just laugh. It’s hard to take them seriously.

WordPress powers 30% of ALL websites. That’s how popular it is.

Use WordPress for your blog, end of story.

Because of how popular WordPress is, most web hosts offer a one-click install for WordPress. It’s super easy. Log into your web host, find the install WordPress opton, click it, then follow the instructions. This is what you’ll need to do if you signed up for SiteGround.

And if you’ve decided to go with WP Engine, it comes pre-installed since WP Engine is a hosting company for WordPress specifically.

Step 6: Pick a WordPress Theme

WordPress is the foundation of your site. There’s an easy way to change how WordPress looks without having to code anything yourself.

WordPress uses “themes,” little packages of code that can be swapped in and out. Whenever you change your theme, your site will also change. The best part is that your blog post content won’t change. This makes it very easy to evolve your site over time without having to rebuild your entire site from scratch.

For now, you’ll need to pick your first WordPress theme.

The number of themes out there make me dizzy. There are… a lot.

When picking a theme for any of my sites, I go straight to StudioPress. The themes are a bit more expensive at $130. (Most themes go for $20–50.) In my opinion, the higher price is well worth it. StudioPress was purchased by WP Engine and WP Engine now includes all the StudioPress themes as part of its hosting package. It’s a nice freebie if you are already planning on hosting your site with WP Engine.

If you want a wider selection of WordPress themes at standard prices, Themeforest is the most popular WordPress theme marketplace. You’ll find just about anything you want in its selection.

After you purchase your theme, log into your WordPress site, go to the Theme section which is under Appearance in the WordPress sidebar menu. Then follow the instructions for adding the theme. You’ll have to upload the theme files to WordPress and activate the theme from within WordPress. You can find the upload option by going to Themes > Add New, a button towards the top. Then you’ll see this option to upload:

You’ll be able to manage any themes you’ve uploaded to your WordPress site from your Themes section:

Step 7: Install Your WordPress Plugins

Once of the best parts about WordPress is that it’s infinitely customizable. Since it’s open-source, you can change it to do whatever you want.

WordPress plugins are little batches of software you can install within WordPress to get extra functionality. This is how you’ll add a bunch of extra features to your site without having to code anything yourself.

Be careful here and try not to go overboard.

Some bloggers will install dozens or even hundreds of plugins on their site. That can cause a bunch of problems later on. Not only can plugins cause unexpected conflicts with each other, they become a security liability since it’s unlikely that every plugin owner will maintain the plugin over time. They also become a huge headache to manage. When you have that many plugins, you’re never sure which plugin is causing a particular problem.

I like to keep my plugins limited to 5–10 amazing plugins. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Akismet – Required for every blog, it automatically filters a ton of comment spam which is a problem for every blogger. This is one of the few plugins that I happily pay to upgrade.
• Yoast SEO – The most highly recommended SEO plugin, it handles a bunch of SEO tasks automatically for you and also makes on-page SEO tasks a lot easier.
• Contact Form 7 – The most popular contact form out there. Set up a contact page on your site and then use this plugin to create a contact form that will email you any time someone fills out the form. Super easy.
• TinyMCE Advanced – A bunch of improvements to the WordPress editor that makes writing in WordPress a lot easier. These days, I usually skip this one. I write all my posts in Google Docs and then format them in WordPress using its default HTML editor.
• WP Super Cache – A good plugin to speed up your site.
• MailChimp for WordPress – More on this below. It’s easiest way to connect your WordPress site to a MailChimp account, create an email sign up form, and start collecting email subscribers.
• WordPress Popular Posts – Easiest way to add a list of your most popular posts to your blog sidebar. The list will update automatically.

There is a plugin for just about anything you could want to do with your WordPress site. Use the plugin page within your WordPress site to search for anything that you need.

When you’ve found a plugin you want, install and activate it from within WordPress.

Step 8: Install Google Analytics

Google analytics is a free website analytics tool from Google. Even though it’s free, it’s still the best analytics tool out there.

Analytics is just a fancy word for website data.

Yes, analytics can get pretty complicated and overwhelming.

Which is why we’re going to ignore the majority of what’s in Google Analytics for now.

All you need to do is create a Google Analytics account and install it on your blog. There are two reasons for this.

First, Google Analytics stores your data over time. When you’re ready to dive in later, you’ll be thankful that you’ve been collecting data since the beginning.

Second, it’s exhilarating to watch people visit your site in the beginning. I remember the first time Google Analytics recorded a visitor on my first blog. I thought it was a mistake. “Someone visited my site? Really? Why would they do that? Who are they? Did they like it?”

Seeing those first visitors come in will give you a huge motivation boost. Even if you only check Google Analytics to see your total traffic, it’s well worth the time it takes to set up.

It’s also pretty easy to set up.

Go to Google Analytics and set up your account. Once your account is created, you’ll have a unique JavaScript tracking code for your site. When you copy and paste that snippet of code into your site, Google Analytics will start collecting data for you.

Step 9: Set up your email list

Sooner or later, you’ll hear a stat like this:

“Email marketing has 22X the ROI of any other marketing channel!”

Technically, this is true.

The response from email will always dominate any other channel that you try pushing a campaign to. But you have to acquire those emails in the first — they’ve already been filtered for the most receptive people. In other words, email by its nature is more responsive, so the comparison ROI stats are kind of dumb. They’re stating the obvious.

It’s kind of like going to a strawberry field, picking the best strawberries in the entire field, putting them in a gift basket, then declaring the the gift basket strawberries are 12 times as delicious as normal strawberries. Of course they’re more delicious — you picked the best ones already!

That’s how email lists work. They’re a gift basket of the best strawberries.

Every marketing engine I’ve built for companies has relied on emails at its core.

Think of your email list as a giant laser ray you can focus on any offer you want. Selling consulting? Pitch your list. Publishing a new blog post? Pitch your list. A podcast just interviewed you? Pitch your list.

Of all the marketing channels that have come and gone over the years, nothing compares to the power of a high quality email list.

Even if you’re not sure what to send your email subscribers, that’s okay!

Using MailChimp, you can start collecting emails on your blog so that the list is ready for you as soon as you need. It takes time to build a decent size list so your future self will be extremely grateful if you set it up now.

You only need two things:

• A MailChimp account
• An opt-in to sign up on your sidebar

MailChimp has a free account for up to 2,000 email subscribers, which will cover your blog for awhile.

There’s also a super easy WordPress plugin for MailChimp. Once you install it on your WordPress blog, it’ll connect to your MailChimp account and give you an easy way to add an email signup form to your blog sidebar.

Even a super basic opt-in in your blog sidebar like this is enough to get you started:

Don’t even worry about sending any emails yet unless you want to. The main thing is that you’re collecting email subscribers from the beginning. Email lists can be a gold mine once you have a few thousand subscribers, and the money really rolls in once you have 10,000 subscribers and above.

Step 10: Get into your posting groove

Writing blog posts isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. More like a multi-day backpacking trip.

The best bloggers settle into a consistent writing pace they can maintain for a few years. That’s right, years.

Here are a few posting frequency rules of thumb:

• At the bare minimum, find a way to post once per week. This needs to be a substantial post, too: 2,000 words at least. I recommend you start here.
• Serious bloggers will post 2–3 times per week.
• Larger sites quickly get to 5–7 posts per week. This requires multiple authors.
• The heavy hitters who push things to the limit will do 25–50 posts per week. No joke, this is for large businesses using content marketing as their primary customer acquisition channel. HubSpot is a classic example of this.

I know writing isn’t easy. After writing blog posts full-time for three months, I always want to throw my MacBook out the window. It’s a grind for all of us. This is why I recommend one post per week. That still gives you the majority of the week to focus on other aspects of your site while also giving you a break from writing blog posts all the time.

A really great post should take you two days to complete. The first day is for research and outlining, along with as much writing as you can complete. The second day is for finishing the writing, proofreading, and publishing the post in WordPress.

Also, push quality as hard as you can. The key to building a site and traffic over time is to write posts that are more valuable than what other people have already published in your category.

Step 11: Build an audience

There’s a super famous article in blogging circles: 1,000 True Fans.

Basically, getting 1,000 true fans means you can fully support yourself. You can quit your job, work from wherever you like, and be in complete control of your life. All from hitting a very reasonable goal of 1,000 true fans.

With blogging, you’ll build your audience of 1,000 true fans slowly and consistently.

As long as you keep it at, you will get there. Typically, it takes a few years.

Here’s what to focus on in order to get there faster:

• Always post at least once per week. Never skip a week.
• Start posting 2–3 times per week if you can.
• On every post, push on quality as hard as you can. Google the topic and see what other people have done, then ask yourself how you can write something even better.
• Write stuff that hasn’t been written to death already. Find a new take or perspective on your topics that other people haven’t already covered.
• Find your voice and be authentic so people can get to know you. This builds connections with your audience faster. A quick hack for this is to pretend that you’re writing your posts to a close friend.
• To push even harder, get active in other online communities. Post in Facebook groups, subreddits, on Twitter, do podcast interviews, get speaking engagements when you can — anything and everything. Be as helpful as you can be in these communities.
• For all of your content, constantly ask yourself, “How can I make this as valuable as possible?”

As your blog audience matures you will want to change your traffic strategies as you grow.

Step 12: Monetize your blog

There are really only two ways to monetize a serious blog.

Yup, only two.

Bloggers try a ton of different ideas, maybe about a dozen.

Out of those dozen, only two work at scale.

So what are they?

Affiliates and infoproducts.

Check out this list of of 21 bloggers making money.

Out of the entire list, all but three or four of them make the majority of their revenue from infoproducts, affiliates, or a combination of the two.

How Infoproducts Work

I could write a book on this. For now, we’ll keep it simple. Here’s the model:

1. Get people to visit your site.
2. On your site, give them a reason to subscribe to your email list.
3. Once they’re an email subscriber, run them through a launch funnel. These are email funnels specifically designed to sell infoproducts. Usually, these are courses that include a bunch of video lessons.
4. Depending on your volume and target market, you’ll convert about 0.5% to 1% of new email subscribers into a customer at a price of $500–$2,000 for your course. At volume, that adds up fast.

Now this sounds too good to be true. While there are a few catches, it’s mostly true. What are the catches?

First, you’ll need to get extremely good at direct-response copy.

Second, it helps to be in the right category. People want money, status, and relationships.

How Affiliates Work

It’s pretty simple: You go about creating as large of an audience as possible. Then, throughout the your content, you recommend products that are helpful to that audience. When your audience clicks through the link of that recommendation, they get a special tracking code. If they end up purchasing, you get a cut of the sale.

The main downside is that only a small percentage of people will ever click through and an even smaller percentage of people will purchase. So it really helps to have a massive amount of traffic in order to make enough money from your blog.

Monetizing a Blog for Beginners

Those are really only the two options? Is there anything else for beginners?

Yes, there is.

While infoproducts and affiliates are the main ways to make serious money, you also need serious traffic in order to make them work. At least if you want them to work well enough to make six figures per year…

And to get that much traffic, you’ll need a lot of time on your blog. As much as I love blogging, getting a new blog off the ground doesn’t rain dollar bills right away.

There is one way to make a lot of money fast. It also will change your life.

Instead of trying to turn your blog into a completely passive money-making machine, go the other direction. Ditch passive and get active.

Start freelancing and consulting.

To make money quickly, this is by far your best option. It’s also the easiest to do.

When I worked at I Will Teach You To Be Rich, our freelancing programs taught thousands of people how to get started freelancing. What always blew me away was how life-changing those first few freelancing gigs are.

I went through that exact change myself. Years ago, I started my personal blog larslofgren.com and got a few freelancing clients doing it. I’ll never forget that first $100 payment sent via PayPal. The amount sounds so small now, but the real impact was knowing that I personally produced that income myself.

Guess how much traffic that personal blog of mine has? Only a few thousand visitors per month, spread across about 20 blog posts.

Anyone can create a blog that size and use it for freelancing lead generation. It’s enough to build a client base that pays you $3,000 to $5,000 per month. That’s enough to quit your job. That’s life-changing.

And it’s a much easier goal to hit than a full-ramped affiliates or infoproducts marketing machine. You always have the option to build that stuff later anyway.

What about all those other monetization methods?

Most of them are a waste of time. The impact on revenue is marginal, it’s a complete distraction. A few are worth doing for marketing and branding. The rest should be ignored entirely. Here’s the list that bloggers always try at some point:

• Books – Great for marketing. Adds a ton of credibility to your brand. But you won’t feel the impact on revenue at all.
• Events – I loathe events with every fiber of my being. All the risk is front-loaded, all contracts get locked up ahead of time, they’re a pain to sell, and you don’t even know if you’ll make any money until right before the event. Even if you do make money, the margins are terrible. For me, these are complete distractions and a huge opportunity cost for the business.
• Banner ads (Google Ads, formally Adsense, for example) – The last time these made any decent money was around 2003. These days, I’m not even sure it’s possible to get banner ads to cover your hosting bill. I’m only partially joking.
• Speaking – Done the right way, occasional speaking can be a great brand builder. And while it sounds amazing to get paid $20,000 per speaking gig, it’s not nearly as amazing once you learn most speakers never get paid, it’s takes months worth of work to create a talk that commands that kind of fee, you really need a New York Times Bestseller in order to charge real fees, and you’ll get so sick of hotel rooms after the first year that you’ll never want to travel again. Do speaking gigs when good opportunities come up; don’t build a business on them.

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A Guide To Syndicating Blog Content On Other Websites

In this guide to syndicating blog content on other websites we’re putting the focus on organic blog marketing.

There are many different ways you can organically submit your content to platforms to expose them to communities.

If you follow these strategies and while creating the type of content each community demands you have the chance to grow traffic, earn subscribers and grow your blog.

Before we get started we want to share a list of places you can syndicate your content:
https://www.buzzblogger.com/500-places-to-syndicate-your-content/

That list is very extensive and is a great resource for syndicating your content on other websites.

Again, it’s not easy to market your blog by organically syndicating your content, but it’s proven to be a good strategy for many bloggers.

Let’s get into the strategies.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it is something you may have seen on LinkedIn or Twitter. It’s a content curating tool that people use to build communities usually through social media.

Folks that use Scoop.it pull content together that is useful for a target audience. Scoop.it puts this content together in an online newspaper format making it easy for the audience to see the main page and pick and choose the articles that look most interesting.

The idea of Scoop.it is to curate content from all over the web, but the secret is that people are simply looking for useful, interesting and entertaining content.

Here is how to use Scoop.it to syndicate your content for an audience to read.

Step 1 – Choose A Popular Topic From Your Blog

Start with a popular topic in your blog. If you’re a doctor, the topic might be articles about eating right or about a specific illness.

Step 2 – Curate Your Best Content For The Topic

Look at your analytics and add the best articles to the Scoop.it. Do this each week to create weekly Scoop.it collections of your best articles for your popular topics.

Step 3 – Share Your Scoop.it With Your Social Communities

Once complete, share your Scoop.it collections with your social media audiences. Share it multiple times. Integrate with Buffer, which we mentioned earlier. This will make it easier for you to schedule updates to share your curated content on Scoop.it multiple times each week.

Step 4 – Create More Topics

Once you’ve done it for one topic expand with more topics. You can do this with existing articles from your archives. Add new articles as possible and supplement with other articles from around the web.

When you use other articles from around the web, reach out to those that you include and encourage them to share your collection. They’ll be sharing their content and yours when they do.

Step 5 – Create Email Newsletters

Use your Scoop.it to create email newsletters. This is the type of content that email subscribers love to get weekly. It’s a great way to keep those people engaged with your email program and you can mix in your marketing updates to keep the calls to action coming.

Hacker News

Hacker News is part of the Y Combinator incubator. Folks from the tech and online marketing worlds submit the collection of articles. They form another strong community of people coming together to curate and share interesting articles and content from around the web.

Hacker News has a similar community as Inbound.org, but perhaps skews a little more toward tech and development. If your blog aligns well with this type of community there is potential to have your articles do well on the site.

Here are some steps to try your hand at Hacker News.

Step 1 – Comment On Popular Posts

Commenting is one of the best ways to build your profile on Hacker News. It’s difficult to come in right away and share articles. People might click if the title is intriguing, but people also look at your profile to see who you are.

Commenting on popular posts will build your reputation. You’ll be paying it forward before you start submitting your own content.

Give first. Share second.

Step 2 – Share Content From Around The Web

You can see the most popular content on Hacker News at any time by looking at the Best section. You’ll notice that many of the topics are tech-related. They have a unique perspective that the community on Hacker News shares.

Here is what the community seems to like the best:

• Personal stories of success and pain (see: Why I turned down $5 million VC funding)
• Hacks, interesting ways to build news skills (see: How to get goo at chess, fast)
• Shocking tech news (see: Google account vulnerability)
• Virtual reality and machines (see: high frequency dating)

Use these four criteria to start finding articles and content from around the web. Share the ones that have likely not been shared before on the site (see: Guidelines).

Step 3 – Share Your Own Content

As you build your profile with comments and solid shares from around the web you’ll be able to start adding your own content.

If you want to have the best chance of succeeding in the community then create content based on the four criteria above. Those will give you the best chance of having something that does well and sends traffic back to your blog.

Reddit

Like the previous items mentioned here, Reddit is a place where all kinds of content can be shared with a large community of online users.

Here is how to have Reddit success, the front page of the Internet. This is going to be similar to the other communities on here including Hacker News.

Step 1 – Build Your Profile By Commenting On Niche-Relevant Topics

Just like on Hacker News, building your profile on Reddit can really help you to gain respect. The Reddit community appreciates people that take the time to add to the community. It’s a sarcastic community that appreciates witty, clever comments.

Short, snappy comments that are clever are appreciated. So are personal stories that you can tell in the comments to build on a popular piece of content that was shared.

Add these types of comments and you’ll receive upvotes for your contributions, which will build your profile for later on when you want to share your own content.

Step 2 – Share The Type Of Content That Your Niche Reddit Audience Loves

Here is the type of content Reddit seems to like the most in a general sense:

• Clever, shocking or awkward memes (see: grandma holding a gun)
• Amazing stories of science (see: street pipes burst from below the street)
• Shocking historical facts (see: today I learned the government profits from student loans)

There are many other types of content that do well, but these are three good content types to target. But on Reddit you’re not targeting the general Reddit audience. Start by starting your target niche. There are tons of different categories.

Share content from around the web that fits those criteria and share it in your niche.

Step 3 – Share Your Own Content

Finally, as you build your reputation as a strong contributor to the community you can start sharing your own content. Publish content that fits the criteria for successful posts and you’ll have the highest chance for success.

Slashdot

Slashdot is a community that submits and shares a variety of different blog posts, articles and other types of content from around the web. When you publish a new post, submit it on Slashdot. Make adjustments to your post if necessary to fit the guidelines for submission.

Alltop

Submit your blog feed to Alltop. Find the niche that best fits your blog. Your most recent post will appear at the top of the feed and you’ll have instant access to the thousands of users on Alltop that are looking for great content like yours.

 

Bloglovin’

Search for your blog’s URL on bloglovin’ and follow it. This will get your blog on the list for other followers to follow.

For even more blog directories and syndication sites see this post:
http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/

Conclusion

Syndicating your content is another great way to market your blog.

We’ve given you a few strategies you can use to syndicate your content around the web. Some others involve building small communities, which we discussed in other posts. That is a recurring theme in blog marketing and it will serve you well as you work to market your blog and its posts.

Want more? Check out our other guides on building your blog audience for more tips to growing your blog.

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Best WordPress Gallery Plugin – (Review Updated For Winter of 2019)

If you search for “gallery” on the WordPress plugins page, you’ll see nearly 3,000 results to choose from.

To say that number is overwhelming is an understatement.

Who has time to go through all of those plugins to determine which one is the best? Fortunately, you don’t have to. I’ve narrowed down the list to the 7 best WordPress gallery plugins for 2019.

Why You Need a Gallery Plugin

Without a gallery plugin, you’ll be forced to use the basic image gallery that’s built into the core feature set of WordPress. Does this work? Yes. But it’s extremely limiting, and you’ll never be able to take your web design to the next level with this gallery.

To add visual elements to your website that will stun your visitors and provide them with a user-friendly viewing experience, you need to install a gallery plugin.

Depending on your needs, you can find free gallery plugins, as well as paid gallery plugins. I’ve done my best to identify the best ones for different purposes, so there’s something for everyone on my list of the top seven gallery plugins that I recommend for WordPress sites.

How to Choose a WordPress Gallery Plugin

Before we dive in and look at the list, there are certain things that you should keep in mind during your search for a gallery plugin.

• Speed — Adding lots of images to your website can impact your website loading time. You want a lightweight plugin that won’t slow your site down, even as you upload more photos.
• Features — Are you just looking for grids, or do you want slideshow options? Do you want to upload only photos, or do you need video and audio galleries as well? Will you need ecommerce integration? These are just a few of the feature sets you should think about when you choose a plugin.
• Usability — Sure, having a plugin that’s packed with features is great, but not at the cost of its ease of use. Some plugins are designed for developers and people who are a bit more tech-savvy, while others have drag-and-drop features that are really easy to use, regardless of your technical abilities.
• Price — The majority of gallery plugins have a freemium version. In most cases, though, you’ll probably have to upgrade to a pro version to access the top features. You’ll want to check the feature sets for each pricing level.

The 7 Top Gallery Plugins for WordPress

Now that you know how to pick the best WordPress gallery plugin for you, we’ll take a look at some of my favorites.

1. NextGEN Gallery

With more than 900,000 active installations, NextGEN Gallery is one of the most popular WordPress gallery plugins on the market.

It’s so popular because it offers a lot of gallery options. Unlike other plugins, there isn’t one typical or standard NextGEN gallery.

You’ll first choose between the two main styles: slideshow or thumbnail. From there, you’ll decide if you want a compact or extended album style. Then, you’ll have nearly limitless choices for size, transitions, effects, timing, and things of that nature.

As you can see from this example thumbnail gallery, this plugin is perfect for photographers and artists to showcase their latest work. You can add watermarks and hotlink protection as well, which is a great feature. The lightbox galleries have deep linking options too.

But NextGEN Gallery offers much more than that. They also have ecommerce functionality, so you can sell images on your website.

You can install this plugin for free, but to get advanced features like watermarks, you’ll need to pay for the premium version.

2. Modula Image Gallery

Modula Image Gallery is one of the lightest and most responsive image gallery plugins available on WordPress. I like it because you can create galleries that are unique and fully customizable.

In addition to images, Modula lets you share video galleries as well.

This plugin has a custom grid feature — you can manually change the size of each image within the gallery. Just navigate to the custom grid option and control dimensions like height, width, and aspect ratio by simply dragging the corners of an image.

Modula Image Gallery is great for beginners, as well as more advanced WordPress users. That’s because you can apply CSS to separate galleries.

The free plugin will be suitable for most WordPress users, but if you’re looking for things like hover effects, lightbox styles, and unlimited photos, you’ll need to upgrade to one of their plans, which start at $29.

Modula Image Gallery is just for grids. To create slideshows, you’ll need to get a different plugin.

3. FooGallery

FooGallery is another highly responsive plugin. These retina-ready galleries will enhance the user experience as they navigate and explore the pictures on your website.

It’s available for free but has a pro version with additional features and benefits. But unlike other gallery plugins, the free version still comes with plenty of variety in the templates. You’ll have plenty of template options to choose from with this plugin.

Here’s how the dashboard looks in WordPress.

As you can see, it’s very easy to add photos and change the settings of the responsive gallery.

You can customize things like:

• Hover effects
• Paging
• Captions
• Filtering
• Loading icons
• Border sizes
• Themes
• Shadows
• Loading effects

FooGallery also has custom CSS for developers. Another cool feature of this plugin is the infinite scroll, which is a nice option for those of you who don’t want to have photos on multiple pages within a gallery. You can also manage video galleries on your WordPress site with the FooGallery plugin. And it has tools for generating boilerplate extensions.

4. Envira Gallery

The interface of Envira Gallery is extremely user-friendly. You’ll be able to add photos with its drag and drop functionality. Similar to Modula, you can adjust the sizes of your visual elements as well.

You’ll start with one of its pre-built templates, then customize it to your liking. In addition to photos, Envira Gallery has options for video galleries.

I also like this plugin is because it’s easy to stay organized. After you add photos to an album, you can select cover photos and choose custom tags for sorting.

All of your galleries will be mobile-responsive, so site visitors won’t have any problems accessing, viewing, or navigating through content if they are browsing from a tablet or smartphone.

Envira Gallery has social media integration and is compatible with WooCommerce, making it easy to share your images on other platforms and get your social media users to purchase content from your ecommerce store.

If you’re a photographer, you can add password protection and watermarks to galleries as well. Slideshows and lightbox mode can be viewed on a full screen so that visitors can look at images in your gallery with a closer view. These features make Envira Gallery a popular choice for artists and photographers.

5. Flagallery Photo Portfolio

Flagallery Photo Portfolio has a feature that we haven’t seen so far on this list. In addition to photo and video galleries, this plugin lets you create music and audio playlists as well.

Another benefit of this plugin is the batch upload feature. It’s great for sites that want to upload a ton of content at once, while still staying organized.

It’s easy to manage all your visual content with one centralized dashboard via WordPress. From here, it’s a simple process to create collections that are fully customizable.

The plugin is optimized for SEO and compatible with all major Internet browsers.

6. Gmedia Photo Gallery

Just like Flagallery, the Gmedia Photo Gallery plugin lets you play music on your website, as well as displays photo and video albums. Gmedia Photo Gallery lets you enable comments on your albums, so website visitors can tell you what they think about your content and you can assign categories and add tags to your galleries to help you stay organized. It even includes editing features. While all of these features may not be important to you, I know some websites are definitely looking for an all-in-one plugin like this.

The drag and drop functionality is extremely user-friendly and the results are mobile responsive.

My favorite part though is the Gmedia iOS mobile app. With the app you can upload files to WordPress without having to transfer it to another device. If you’re using your smartphone to take business photos, which you probably are, this feature will save you a step in the process. You can take a photo from your phone and directly upload it. Super simple.

7. Photo Gallery by 10Web – Responsive Image Gallery

Photo Gallery by 10Web is a top choice to consider because it offers so many different options for showcasing images.

• Slideshow
• Thumbnails
• Image browser
• Masonry
• Mosaic

With slideshows, you have the option to add a filmstrip above the images, so users can jump ahead instead of being forced to view one photo at a time in order. You can completely customize the dimensions of each slideshow as well.

Whenever you click an image in the thumbnail view, a lightbox will be opened. Alternatively, you can redirect each image to a specific URL, but I like the lightbox version better.

Masonry view lets you display thumbnails with different dimensions, depending on the ratio of those images. This is ideal if you have lots of photos of varying dimensions.

But the mosaic view option is probably my favorite.

The mosaic view uses the concept of masonry view, but the thumbnails are resized, so the entire content area is filled. I love the effect that this creates on the screen, and I think it’s a great way for your website to stand out from the crowd.

It’s worth noting that you’ll need to pay for the premium version to access all of these view options.

Photo Gallery by 10Web offers social sharing, watermark protection, and ecommerce integration as well. Overall, it’s definitely a top choice to consider.

Conclusion

If you want to take your visual content strategy to the next level, I highly recommend installing a gallery plugin. Don’t limit yourself with the basic image gallery that comes standard with WordPress.

There are thousands of plugins available, but instead of going through each of those one by one, use this list as a reference and framework to help you narrow down your choices:

• What features do you want?
• Do you need the gallery to handle just photos, or do you use other types of media? Videos? Audio files?
• How much are you willing to pay?
• How important is mobile uploading to you?

Some of these plugins have more features than others; it all depends on what you’re looking for. No matter which option you choose, any plugin on this list will improve your site from the perspective of your visitors.

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Optimal Blog Design: 11 Elements and Examples of Blog Layouts and Designs

Are you trying to create the perfect blog design?

You know, one that encourages people to read your content and share it on the social web and, most importantly, gets high rankings in the search engines?

If you are trying to create a popular blog, here are the 11 essential elements (and examples of each) that you need within your blog design.

Element #1: Threaded comments

There are a lot of commenting systems out there. From Disqus to Facebook comments, the options are endless. But do you know what the best commenting system is?

Threaded comments like this.

“Why?” you may ask. Because threaded comments will typically increase the number of comments you receive per post by 16% to 33%. The more comments you receive, the more text you’ll have on each page. And the more text you have on each page, the more long tail keywords you will rank for.

Stick with threaded comments no matter what. Even if you have an active Facebook community, don’t use Facebook comments. Facebook owns that content, and it won’t help you get more search engine traffic.

Element #2: Snippets

Have you noticed that I don’t list the full post on the Quick Sprout’s blog homepage? I only show you a few paragraphs (a snippet), which prompts you to respond to the call to action “click to continue” to read the rest of the post.

You want to have snippets instead of full posts because of two main reasons:

1. People have short attention spans – you have an attention span of 8 seconds, and so do your readers. By only showing them snippets, you allow your readers to choose from a number of posts. They will scroll until they find a post that piques their interest, and then they’ll read it.
2. Duplicate content – if you place your full post on your homepage, you will create duplicate content, which will hurt your search rankings. This is another reason why you want to use snippets.

On your homepage, you can test the call-to-action text to find out which version maximizes the number of people clicking through and reading your post. I’ve tested the phrases:

• Continue reading
• Read more
• Click to continue
• Continue

The text “click to continue” outperformed the other variations by at least 10%. You should, of course, test this as what works on my blog may not work on yours.

For example, I noticed that GotchSEO uses “Continue Reading” on is blog and I would bet that he has tested many alternatives to find what performed best for him.

Element #3: Scrolling social buttons

I’ve tested a lot of social buttons on Quick Sprout. I have had buttons at the beginning of the posts and at the end, and I have asked people to tweet about a post from within the blog post. The one design that continually outperforms the others is scrolling social buttons.

Plugins like Sharebar and Flare have increased my social traffic by 27%.

Backlinko uses a nice share bar that is clean and scrolls nicely for an example.

When using a scrolling social plugin, make sure you limit the number of options to three. In other words, pick the three most popular social networks your readers are using. For me, it’s Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

If you add too many options, in my experience, it will decrease your social traffic.

Element #4: 11-point font size or larger

About a month ago, I wrote a blog post on how text size affects readability.

I did a test on 13 blogs, and I found that by increasing font size from 8 to 9, I was able to increase the time readers spend on site by 13 seconds. I saw another 8-second increase when I went to size 10. And I gained another 6 seconds by going to font size 11.

I have noticed that the Smart Passive Income Blog uses some nice large fonts in their headings and content. Check them out for another example I like.

Granted, this only works if you are using a readable font type like Arial or Times. If your font type is hard to read, increasing the size won’t help much.

When in doubt, use a bigger font size.

Element #5: A sidebar on the right

Have you noticed that some blogs have their sidebars on the left? Or even worse, some have two sidebars? I’ve played around with different layout types, and I’ve found that the optimal layout is to have your content on the left side and one sidebar on the right side.

This way people can focus on reading your content, yet you’ll have the flexibility of promoting other things within your sidebar. Just make sure the main content area takes up at least 60% of your design. People come to blogs to read, so you don’t want to distract them with other elements.

If you want to place your sidebar on the left-hand side, you can. But what I’ve found is that it typically decreases the number of people who read your content by 15% to 25%.

I prefer the look of a blog where a sidebar is on the right side, but it tends to convert better when it is on the left.

Here’s what I learned…

When you place your sidebar on the left-hand side, you will get more email opt-ins, and more people will read your bio and do whatever else you promote through your sidebar. But you will also get fewer people to read your content.

I’ve found that having a sidebar on the left side of Quick Sprout causes a 9% drop in people reading the blog posts. On the other hand, it increases the number of sidebar opt-ins by 13%.

Overall, I decided to place my sidebar on the right-hand side even though it generates 13% fewer opt-ins.

Why did I do it anyway? Because it increased the number of blog post reads by 9%. In the end, the purpose of a blog is to educate you through content… so why would I take that away?

Here is another simple, yet effective, example from the A Better Lemonade Stand Blog. They use their right sidebar to display their featured posts and offers in a way that is very user friendly and that does not take away from their content.

In general, you should consider keeping your sidebar on the right-hand side even though it will cause fewer conversions. People are coming to your blog to read, so your primary goal should be to make your content as easy to read as possible.

Although I recommend using a sidebar, you don’t need one on each of your pages. For example, the homepage of Quick Sprout doesn’t have a sidebar.

Consider not having a sidebar on the pages you are trying to improve conversions on or make money from. Why? Because it makes people focus their attention on the area you want—the area where you make money.

So, for my “money” pages, I tend to have no sidebars.

Also, for any page that has a defined goal, you should consider removing unnecessary distractions such as a sidebar.

Element #6: Your bio

Whether you have a corporate blog or a personal blog, you want to build a connection with your readers. Without that personal connection, people are less likely to comment or buy from you.

One way you can create a bond with your readers is by opening up. Within your sidebar, put a short bio of yourself, and then link it to your full bio.

Marie Forleo does a nice job of presenting her bio in her left sidebar (however, as mentioned above, I would suggest putting you sidebar on the right)

If you have a corporate blog, put the bio of your founders or the team that manages the blog in the sidebar. Make sure you include a picture right above your bio. People need to see you in order to connect with you.

Element #7: Email subscription options

I’ve mentioned this before: collecting emails is one of the most important things you need to do if you want to grow your traffic. Your options vary from an opt-in at the top of your sidebar to a pop-up if you want to be more aggressive.

I like the way that FireNation has their email box setup as a popup. It really grabs your attention and makes you want to input your email. Who doesn’t want financial freedom??

You’ll also notice that by offering a free e-book or a course, you’ll get a good number of email subscribers. You will also see that if you ask only for people’s email addresses instead of their names and emails, you’ll get roughly 10% more opt-ins.

For the month of June, emails made up 28% of Quick Sprout’s overall traffic. That’s not too shabby. Those users also generate the majority of my comments and social shares.

No matter what, start collecting email addresses of your readers. That way you can notify them when you publish a new blog post.

Element #8: Most popular widget

Can you guess what the most-clicked area on the blog is? It’s actually not the content.

Within my sidebar is an area that showcases all of my guides, my most popular posts, and my current hits.

That’s the most popular clicked-through area on the blog. Not only does it help drive traffic to my most important posts, but it also helps with search engine rankings because of the way I cross-link.

Check out how I Will Teach You To Be Rich uses their right sidebar to display their guides and most popular posts in the screenshot below.

You too can have this on your blog if you use the popularity contest plugin. You’ll have to get a developer to modify it so that you can have tabs similar to mine.

Element #9: Yoast SEO plugin

This is probably the simplest tweak you need to make to your blog. In the long run, you’ll notice that it will help your search engine traffic grow by leaps and bounds.

If you are running a WordPress blog, download and install the Yoast SEO plugin. If you are not running a WordPress blog, you’ll have to optimize your site for search engines manually by following the steps in this post.

Element #10: Keep your color scheme and design simple

Different colors have different meanings. Make sure you pick the colors for your blog carefully. They matter, and not just from a psychological standpoint. Some colors make it easy for your readers to read your content, while others don’t.

For example, red text on a black background isn’t as easy to read as black text on a white background.

Keep things simple by creating as much white space within your blog design as possible, and use black for your text color. There’s no need to make your design complex because at the end of the day people are coming to read your content. Your goal should be to make your content readable.

The ahrefs blog does a good job of this and keep an ultra clean blog design that is easy to read on any device.

Element #11: Images

Have you noticed that I place an image at the beginning of every blog post? I didn’t always do that, but from testing, I found that it increases the number of people who click through from my blog homepage to a post.

Can you guess by how much? A whopping 37%. All from just one image. If the image you are using is appealing, you’ll see good results. If the image you use sucks, fewer people will click through.

I prefer using stock photography images. You can also use royalty-free images, but the quality of those images typically isn’t as high.

The Duct Tape Marketing Blog usually uses some stellar images in their posts that I bet improve their click through rates as well.

Infographic: The blue print of an optimal blog design

For a visual roadmap I have also created this infographic that breaks down the blueprint of an optimal blog design. Use this as a guide to improve and optimize your blog.

Conclusion

Designing a blog that can boost your traffic isn’t that hard. All you have to do is follow the steps above. If you do, you should see an increase in traffic.

If you don’t have time to make all of the adjustments above, start with installing a scrolling social plugin and threaded comments. Those two simple changes will increase your social media traffic and search traffic in the long run.

If you implement the advice provided in this post and the infographic above, you’ll see an increase in your readership.

Trust me, it works. I’ve tested a lot of these design elements on Quick Sprout, and the tweaks helped me grow my readership to the size it is today.

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How to Transfer Your Website to Shopify

Without a doubt, Shopify is our recommended ecommerce tool.

But what if you’re already on another ecommerce tool and want to make the switch?

I put together this guide to help you transfer your store to Shopify in 4 easy steps. In mapping out these steps below, I’ve assumed a few things:

• You already have a store built that’s generating revenue.
• You want to keep that revenue going while you build your new store.
• You have a domain that was purchased through another domain registrar and won’t be purchasing your domain through Shopify.

Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Build Your New Shopify Site

First let’s get your Shopify store built.

During this step, don’t worry about your new Shopify store conflicting with your old store. Your Shopify store will be locked behind a password so no one can see it until you’re ready to launch your new store. You’ll control when it becomes publicly accessible.

The store will be built on a Shopify subdomain which looks like company.myshopify.com so there won’t be any conflicts with your current store. Traffic and revenue will keep coming in like normal.

We have a complete guide on how to create your ecommerce store on Shopify here.

Most likely, you’ll have to build the store yourself. That means you’ll have to add the info for each product and page from your old store by hand. Yes, it’s definitely tedious but once it’s done, you’ll be so glad that you moved everything over. The benefits of Shopify drastically outweigh this one-time transfer.

If you’re transferring from WooCommerce, you’re in luck. Shopify does have an import process that should allow you to import the bulk of your product info into Shopify.

As you create your Shopify store, Shopify will ask you if you’re transferring stores and which platform you’re transferring from. If you select WooCommerce, you’ll see an import option in your store dashboard as soon as your store is created.

There’s more info on the WooCommerce import process for Shopify here.

Is there a way to import product pages and customer info from a CSV?

Yes, but you need Shopify Plus, the enterprise version of Shopify. If you’re a larger business with lots of revenue and thousands of products to transfer over, it is possible to upload all your product info at once with a CSV. There are details on which data can be uploaded and how to organize the CSV here. I highly recommend that you also import all your historical customers and order info if you have access to Shopify Plus. Getting all your core business data in one place avoids lots of headaches with reporting later.

But this functionality isn’t part of the standard Shopify plan. If you’re a small or medium size ecommerce site, you’ll have to copy and paste all the product info into Shopify one product at a time.

Another option is to use a migration app from the Shopify App Store. Here’s one called Cart2Cart. Price is based on how many products you want to import.

Shopify also has the option to hire a store expert through its Services Marketplace to help with the transfer.

Step 2: Get Your Redirects Ready

After you get your store built, it’s time to build your redirects.

There are two major reasons to build a list of redirects when transferring your store to Shopify:

• It will ensure that any customer using an old URL ends up on the correct page of your new site after the switch, so you don’t lose any revenue from people landing on dead pages.
• It’ll transfer any page authority that you’ve built for Google searches to the new URLs, helping your new store rank for search results and keep your traffic from dropping after the switch.

Luckily, Shopify has an easy way to add redirects to your new store. All the redirects will go live when you launch your new store.

You can add redirects within Shopify by going to Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects. There’s also an option to import them as a batch.

You’ll want to create a redirect for every URL that has a different location in Shopify. For example, products in Shopify have a URL like this: company.com/products/product-name

If your old product URLs use a different URL structure, you’ll want to create a redirect for each product. Same for any other pages that have a different location in Shopify.

Check the URL path of every page and product that you create in your new Shopify store. If they’re the same as your old store, there’s nothing you need to do. If they have a new URL path, create a redirect for them.

Do I have to redirect every URL from my old site?

Not necessarily.

Here’s the rule: redirect every URL that has a clear corresponding page on the new site. 404 everything else.

What’s a 404?

That just means removing the page so that your site returns a 404 message any time someone tries to access that URL. It tells people that there’s nothing there.

A few years ago, I was very anti-404. I used to think that every single URL needed a proper redirect and I went a bit overboard on a site. Eventually, our hosting provider reached out and told us that we had too many redirects on our site, we needed to cut them down to 1,500. We had about 2,500 at the time.

They were right, we did have too many. I was paranoid about trying to help users land on the right page. I was also worried about losing any traffic from Google and I thought 404s might reduce our rankings. I was wrong on both counts.

First, users struggle a lot more with weird redirect paths than a 404. A 404 gives a super clear message: the page you’re looking for doesn’t exist. A weird redirect is really tough for a user to understand.

Second, Google prefers 404s for pages that no longer exist. It’s a clear signal for them and they don’t reduce rankings for sites that have 404s. They’ve publicly stated numerous times how they only want sites to add redirects for pages that have a one-to-one relationship.

Definitely build out your list of redirects for the pages that have changed URLs in Shopify. For everything else, don’t build a redirect and allow the page to 404 once you switch your site to Shopify.

Step 3: Go Live and Point Your Domain to Shopify

Now it’s time to go live!

It is possible to buy a domain directly from Shopify which sets everything up for you.

But I’ll assume you already have a domain with another domain registrar since you’re transferring your site to Shopify.

In this case, you’ll need to get your domain to point to Shopify so when people visit your site, they find your Shopify store.

You’ll need to log into your domain registrar and edit your DNS settings. You’ll be adding an A record and a CNAME.

Shopify has step-by-step instructions and the exact settings you need to configure here.

As soon as you save these DNS settings, your domain will start pointing to Shopify, so make sure you’re completely ready to make the switch before doing this step.

It’ll also take up to a few hours for the changes to go live completely. This is because the DNS servers of the internet don’t update instantaneously. It takes a while for them all to spot new changes. It’s very normal for you to see the change but for someone else to still get your old site. Nothing’s broken — it’s just taking some time for the new DNS settings to reach everyone.

If you have a smaller ecommerce site and you’re not too worried about having a few hours when visitors are routed to both sites, feel free to do the switch any time.

If you want a cleaner cut between the two sites, the most popular method is to do the switch during your lowest-traffic time. For most sites, it’s usually in the middle of the night on a weekend. For major sites with tons of revenue and users, that’s typically when “maintenance windows” occur. For most of us, picking the middle of the night during the week works really well. This causes the least disruption and is standard practice these days.

My advice on when to do the switch:

• If the stakes are high and you have a lot of revenue coming in, do the domain switch in the middle of the night even though it’s inconvenient.
• If you’re not too worried about the switch, do it on a Monday morning. That gives you all weak to fix gaps or put out any fires that come up with the new site. As a general rule, you don’t want to release anything on Friday because if something goes wrong, you’ll spend all weekend trying to fix it.

What happens if something goes horribly wrong?

Keep your old ecommerce site live during the transition. The domain and all your URLs will point to your new site, but you want the old stuff on standby in case something critical breaks during the transition.

What if new orders stop processing?

What if traffic plummets and doesn’t come back?

What if conversions fall off a cliff and people stop ordering even though everything technically still works?

There’s an endless list of weird scenarios that could seriously impact revenue and your business. The odds are slim that any of these will pop up, but you want a foolproof backup plan just in case.

If something horrible happens, your backup plan is to point your domain back to your old site. It’ll take a few hours for all the changes to reverse themselves but they will reverse.

I like to keep my old site for at least 30 days to make sure everything is healthy.

Step 4: Shut Down Your Old Ecommerce Site

Once everything has been switched over and you have at least 30 days of healthy activity on your new ecommerce site, it’s time to take the old ecommerce site down entirely.

Skipping this step can cause problems later on.

I personally find it easy to neglect infrastructure cleanup items. For the time being, it doesn’t cause problems. But sooner or later, I get hit with a random fire that I’m not expecting. On one site I was managing, I found old ecommerce checkouts that were still live years after they should have been shut down. Occasionally, a customer did manage to find the page themselves and use it. This created all sorts of fulfillment problems.

Not to mention the fact that you’re probably paying for another ecommerce tool at this point. Better to get it shut down and reduce your monthly software expenses.

This step should be pretty easy. Once you cancel your subscription on your old ecommerce software, that company should turn everything off for you. Other than logging into your old account and hitting the cancel button, there shouldn’t be anything else that you have to do.

Then you’ll be completely transitioned to Shopify without any loose ends to worry about.

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