Planner, hello, everyone, my name is Garth O’Brien. I run the global search engine optimization program for GoDaddy. I’ve been doing SEO since 2002. I’ve done SEO for various companies, Chevron, IKEA, USA, hallmark Xbox Windows Phone been around the block and keyword.
Planner is a tool that I use pretty much every day. So, let’s get right to it now on the keyword. Planner homepage always use the call to action. Big blue button says go to keyword planner. This is going to take you to a screen and you’re going to want to select find new keywords. Now they’ve changed things up over the last year. You really can only put three keywords here. First, before you get started and what you want to do is you want to choose keywords that are closely related, so WordPress hosting hosting for WordPress WordPress websites hosting not WordPress, plugins, WordPress themes, WordPress hosting, because otherwise you won’t get good results.
The more we find. Those first three keywords are the better suggestions. Google Keyword planner is going to give you my average monthly search volume for a couple of your phrases that you put in so for us they gave us a range of 1,000 10,000 people a month are searching for WordPress hosting and 100 to a thousand. People are looking for WordPress website hosting below the terms that we specifically searched on are the suggested ideas Google’s going to give you based on various activities.
Probably people like me, searching in the past and their own search algorithm. I like to use the adding filter, not the exclude ideas, but the keyword text. This is going to give you the option to narrow it down even further, because Google is going to add you add suggestions like web hosting VPS hosting. That’s not what I want to talk about. I’m looking at WordPress hosting so I’ll, specifically put in just WordPress, hit, apply and now you’ll notice.
The ideas of the returning to you has to have the word WordPress in it, and I would go back, remove WordPress and put in hosting or put in WordPress hosting. Then I can get all the ways. People look for WordPress hosting, you know best WordPress hosting cheap WordPress hosting how to use WordPress hosting. This is going to give you a good, close-knit keyword grouping for the single page that you want to apply those keywords set to, and at that point, once you have narrowed down that nice list, you would select download keyword, ideas and Google will present you with a Excel file, that’s going to export all the keywords that they came back and for a must for us.
That is quite a few 553 keywords at that point. You have to start doing rolling up your sleeves and doing some homework by opening up that file and now sifting through and sorting those keywords wait. So what do you mean by the like ranges? They’re, assuming that one thousand ten thousand visitors fewer than 100 yeah Google used to give you a ballpark exact number like WordPress hosting 5500 people, look for this every month.
Well, they kind of limited that to only people that are paying enough through Google Adwords you’re, not paying you’re using their paid search now, you’re stuck with ranges. What I found is the low number on that range is way more accurate than the high number on that range. Okay, guys that was so much wonderful information thanks so much for stopping by and thanks for tuning in I’m Darlene, I’m Garth O’Brian see you later.
It’s how a mere used a combination of cover, songs and original songs, a unique $ 5 a day. Facebook strategy and distro kid to build a fanbase of over 30,000 monthly listeners on Spotify is actually well above that I just can’t remember the number check this out so tell me more about because one of the things that baffled me, I wouldn’t say baffled, but what I loved because I didn’t hear other artists talk about doing something like this and once again just speaks to the assistants II was you’re a $ 5 a day, Facebook strategy.
I did that in the early days so like I, I think I when I when I when I spoke to a year ago. I think that’s what I was doing bad. So I did that for about three months yeah and I’m like you know what I’m just going to, let it run like people like the song, I’m just going to just let it run and see what happens and honestly, like I kind of forgot about it, and I just let it run in the background and then after three months like I did build up when I looked back, I’m like wow and actually built me up a little bit of an audience and a fanbase and people were checking as I was dropping those songs.
Every Monday, my streams on Spotify were starting to slowly creep up and then I dropped a cover. A sorry, a mash-up I did of to me a song into you, ya know, and I mashed it with russa song, wife, you loved, like really exploded. You know so like people like that one just hit all the algorithms. It went crazy and I think it’s almost at half a million streams now on Spotify. Oh that brings a question to my head.
So that’s essentially a remix cover I’ve been axed before, and this isn’t really something I get into as far as some of the legality type things, but I’ve been eggs when you put a cover on a platform like Spotify, what does that do for you? Like? Can you do that? Have you gotten any kind of strikes or anything like that? No, I haven’t because well with district kid, the good thing is, and I would use just her kid for any artists reading they acquire the cover license for you, so you’re covered and keep in mind like there’s two licenses right, you have master recording and you have Song and you have the copyright, which is the the writing of the song.
So I don’t own the writing of the song, but I own my master, which is the version of the song that I created. So I’m allowed to use that and put it like. I’m only getting master revenue, so Spotify also pays publishing royalties to the to the songwriters that wrote the song right, so they would be getting the backend royalties that way which don’t come to me because it’s a cover. I didn’t write the song, but I created that arrangement of it and I created that recording.
So both sides, like just a songwriter and everybody who’s covering my song, is yeah. Oh there’s tons of covers on Spotify like yeah, like there’s artists, who only have covers on Spotify. It’s just you just have to buy the license right. You can do it through district head and there’s a company called louder. You can do it through them. Boom cool has their service too, or you can use it. I don’t use to incur.
The reason for me is not because they’re not a good company, but because I release so much music that it was cost prohibitive. Like I like, I would have been paying what five thousand dollars a year just a tune core and it just didn’t make any sense, gachi so um, just to hone in on my process a little bit when it comes to district kid and how they kind of Obtained the rights for you so you’re saying once you submit a song, their algorithms, pretty much picks up on the fact that it’s a cover and they obtain it or do you submit and let them know that it’s a cover.
So when you, when you choose the option, they ask you district ritas is a cover and then you click. Yes, it’s a cover and then they ask you who the original songwriter is then sorry who the original artist is and then they go and obtain the license for you. So I like that better because it’s less work for me now I don’t have to use a third party to go, get a license. You can buy a license yourself.
You can just go to louder, comm and buy one but hey anything extra. They just handle the money. No, you do have to pay, so you have to pay. I think it’s a dollar a month to have the cover license, so it can’t add up if you’re going to keep it up there. It’s not bad. It’s twelve bucks a year. You know so well, then, for the service they’re providing like now, you have peace of mind right. You don’t have to worry about getting a license and worrying about all that.
I’d rather just pay the twelve bucks and not worry you’re sure, especially as an artist I mean primarily I’m already doing too much work. Um and that’s like one less thing for me to do. You know yeah all right, as you guys can see that consistency. First of all and foremost, is what I want you guys to focus on when it comes to his $ 5, a day, Facebook strategy. That’s so much better than just doing one week right and just going really hard on some Facebook Ads.
He did $ 5 a day that allows him to stay consistent and you have to do one dollar a day. It’s something just worth trying out over time and you have to do one dollar a day over 60 days or 90 days. Do whatever you can. So you can only collect the data over time within your budget, so you can get that information and learn how to make even more specific ads for yourself to utilize. But then, of course, a big part of his strategy, which is huge when it comes to the peace of mind that district 8 offered by making it so easy for him to leverage covers, because we all know how to do YouTube covers right.
A lot of people can make that happen quickly, but when it comes to covers on Spotify, I always got a lot of questions about it. Not it necessarily know how to answer that question, and I didn’t necessarily have time to figure it out or ask somebody. So not only is it dope, they they make it super easy, because a lot of artists need peace of mind. They don’t want to town a bit like focus on all this stuff when you’re, just trying to you know being Indian grind your way up into a better situation, but it’s also relatively inexpensive.
But Mary you’re going to mention that in his interview saying you know if he was using chunk or it would have been cost prohibitive for his particular strategy and with all that being said, a lot of people have been telling me for a minute. Your brain way. You should do a podcast, you should do a podcast and I’m strongly considering it in some form of fashion, and I decided that if it happens, it will definitely happen on distro kid.
I actually already have an account, and I’m filling my way through the system and with all of the good things I’ve heard about it when knowing so many people who are using it, I felt comfortable go ahead and get a discount code for you guys and offer It up to you at all for 7 % off your first year of membership with district kid. Now, if you already have district kid great on well and fine, I will actually love if you provide your commentary and experience with it in the description below.
But if you’re something you want to check out, then you can check it through the link in the description below to get that seven percent off district kid calm, /bi, p, / brand man, but other than that. As always, if you like, this article go hit the like button and you like, you, might as well share it and if you’re not subscribed, you know what to do. He dare subscribe. You
My name is Andrea and today I’ll be presenting copywriting tips for better UX, and I just wanted to thank the organizers of work camp Toronto for inviting me to present here I’m from Montreal so not too far, but I do organize the word camp in Montreal.
So I know just how much work goes into these events and so kudos to them and also thanks to our sponsors. I work for spectrum, so I’m a sponsor and the speaker here, which is kind of fun. But let’s move on to why you’re here, which is to hear about copywriting um, so my name is Andrea and I studied journalism at Concordia in Montreal. But I worked in tech for about four years and I’m also the chief content creator at SiteGround and that’s my twitter handle.
If you want to tweet out things, follow me I’ll, be also tweeting out these slides right after the talk, so you can get them. So in the four years that I worked in content creation and in tech, of course, I’ve learned a lot of things about internet behavior and about how people engage with content and what makes for good web content and all of these tips and tricks about how to Improve that so that people are really getting the most from the time that they spend on your website and the content that they read.
But I would say that what gives me the most credibility in giving this talk on excessive bug and UX and copywriting is just how much time I spend online every day. I think I’m one of those people that always has my phone. I always have a device in my hand, I’m always looking at multiple screens and I’m just spending so much time on the internet, whether it’s consuming content shopping, engaging with people on social media and just that exposure to it.
I’ve seen a lot of good things and a lot of bad things about how people build their websites and about how people write, content and develop and design their interfaces. So I wanted to share with you today some of the good some of the bad. Some of the ugly, but mostly how you can learn to improve the that your website performs by changing the little pieces of text that are all throughout your website.
But before we get to the the meat of the content and what we’re really going to be talking about, I wanted to highlight an experience that I’ve had recently that sort of explains why we need to be making these decisions and why these decisions are going to Be made for us and why we need to be really careful about the decisions we made when designing UX interfaces for our users, so everyone has taken an elevator before correct.
I mean it’s a pretty straightforward experience. You’re staying in suite 601 you get on your elevator. You press 6 and then you quickly close the closed door button, so no one else gets on the elevator after you all right. You want to be on them, but what about that button that takes you down to the ground floor? What is that button like? What’s the label on it, and so in the past couple weeks I’ve been in like Boston, Seattle, Montreal Toronto, New York and I sort of like wanted to take a look at all the different types of buttons that you can see for the ground floor.
So, like 0 1 1 with a star s for street level, which is like weird to me, a G and RC, which is an abbreviation in French for for the ground floor. So I would say that you know in a lot of cases, you expect to have some standardization in a lot of cases you you know that is really good to have. You know a really set determine rule for the way we design things, but in real life. That’s not always the case, you know we have these discrepancies, we have this diversity of design decisions and it’s the same and web development, and I would say that it’s also the same and when we use our microcopy.
So microcopy is all these little bits of text that are throughout your website that seem really simple and almost stupid and are often built into templates. So you don’t even think about them, but you can edit these, and these are things that you can use to work to your advantage, so that your websites, cohesive and so really and it does what you want it to do so, I’m I’ve developed this talk and Divided into three different points, and so my three points here to help you improve those little bits of text that are throughout your website are to think big to perfect the small to design with empathy and to keep it simple.
So the first one they picture thinking a couple of years ago. I gave a talk in word, camp, Kansas City, and it was all about content audits and improving the content on your website. It was more geared towards larger organizations and agencies, because that’s sort of what the crowd was there, but what the main takeaway was that content doesn’t exist in a silo. It cuts across every part of your organization or part of your business.
And so it’s not something that you can just design and develop on its own. It really has to work with everything else that you’re doing, whether it’s your who, who your audience is how you’re targeting them, what your product does contents really going to get into all of that, and it has to support that. So that’s why content writers have a pretty interesting role in a company because they’re working with the developers or they’re working with the stakeholders they’re the ones who are going to be telling the story of what your company, your organization, or even just your personal brand? What it is that you do and they need to work with everyone, and so that’s why developing a big picture so that every kind everyone can be on the same page is an important part of a content strategy for your site, and it also impacts your microcopy.
So, like I would say you just zoom out, you know, even if you’re talking about what kind of label you’re going to put in your checkout cart, it all starts with who your company is. Who are you what and – and you know I know in this room – we’re talking a lot of people that just have one website, some people, work for organizations or hospitals, schools that work in agencies, but so taking us as more of like a general understanding of brand.
But you need to determine things like what are your company’s mission? What do you want people to feel about your brand? If you could picture your brand as a person? How would the act and sound, and so that’s something that is really interesting to think about, because the way that you interact with the website can seem really robotic, but it doesn’t have to be. You can develop a tone of voice where it feels like you’re, interacting with a human, and it puts forward like the human aspect of what your company is, and that builds trust.
Because when someone feels like they’re interacting with a real individual, then you can get them to really listen to you. And so I always encourage people who are working on a project that the about their brand to think about what they’re trying to convey and to come up with a North Star of who that person is or who that brand is and that helps. You then determine a tone of voice, and it helps you also to make these decisions so that it fits into your tone of voice and your branding guidelines, because what I like to say is: there’s no accidental copy or, I hope, there’s no accidental copy.
I know that we’re all super busy, so the idea of going in and editing every single thing that’s on our website might seem impossible. A lot of us wear multiple hats, so you may be the copywriter and the designer you may be the owner, and you may be doing all of this yourself. But if you have the time to go in, it’s really nice to make sure that every single thing is intentional on your website, so not to have any accidental coffee, but to have really things that you’ve chosen and so part of that is asking yourself questions who’s.
My audience: what’s the purpose of this piece of content or coffee and doesn’t make sense in a hole as a full throughout my website, does everything work together to meet my to fit into my branding guidelines, and so these are things that you also want to consider Throughout any design project like what do you want people to feel when they interact with you, do they want to feel knowledge? Do you want them to feel knowledgeable, empowered reassured and throughout that? Are you staying true to your branding guidelines that you’ve established as as a team and as a quick example of how you can change really small things, and that really set the tone for your website? I wanted to give you some examples.
So here off screen is a magazine, that’s kind of like a really hip trendy tech magazine. I’ve worked with them before and they’re really awesome, and so for their blog section, they’ve chosen the label blog, it makes sense they’re a magazine, but you’re not going to be reading the articles from their magazine, they’re you’re, going to be reading articles that they’ve published in Between issues to keep their readers interested and engaged, so that’s something that they’ve chosen blog very straightforward.
Then this is a consulting agency that does document management and document creation. So it’s an outsourced document creation agency that that can that’s really like business-oriented, so they’re really focused on providing their services that our article writing and they’ve chosen. The word articles, instead of blog, because it kind of hints it like a more professional environment, like we think of articling in law and journalism and academia, so they’ve chosen articles as a word and then MIT.
So MIT is a school which is also you know. You’d think you’d be very kind of conservative and professional, but they’re trying to show the human side of their of their schools, so they don’t really have blog posts. They have more news about the campus about research. That’s happening, and so it’s not really blog. That’s not really articles, it’s more news updates, so these are three ways that you could pretty much label the the same thing, but sets an expectation of what you’re going to find when you click on that on that label.
So you expect to find news about them, or you expect to find articles that this company has written, or you expect a blog that you can engage with and get content. So these are high level things like small decisions. That really are. Are you know you get from a high level decision on what you want your website to say, and so after you’ve determined all of that, then it’s implementing the rules so being consistent is really what’s going to help your website succeed and help your readers have a Better, a better flow or a better user experience through throughout your website.
So you know, even if you have a simple website, knowing that, if you’re talking about your blog that throughout your website, everything says, follow the blog or if they receive a confirmation email. It says. Thank you for subscribing to our blog that you’re not calling it. You know something different in every little place, and so you know that gets even more complicated if you have membership sites or if you have ecommerce sites or if you are doing like event, management and things like that.
So you know when you’re talking about people that are engaging with your website, are they your user? Are they your member, your subscriber your visitor, your reader? They may be all of those, but you kind of want to narrow in on one label that you’re going to give them. If people are engaging with your website by signing up, you know, are they subscribing? Are they purchasing tickets? Are they joining something or RSVP’ing? You want to make those decisions from day one so that when you build your website, you’re continuing to use the same label and you’re being consistent, I know I’ve seen I online.
You see a lot of like basket. Bag, cart, shopping, cart, there’s a lot of different ways that you can label that, and so it’s making these decisions from the get-go and being able to implement them throughout your design process is really going to allow your website visitors to understand where you’re going and feel Like they’re supported in the actions that they do on your website, if you’ve worked in UX at all, you know the idea of a flow, so a flow is basically like if you’re engaging with the screen.
What did you see before? What are you going to see after? Where are you going on this journey? Where do the options? Where is it going to branch out, and so one of the experiences that one of the things that helps when you’re designing, even just as a copy Content writer, is to put yourself in the shoes of your website visitor and going through these flows yourself? And so this is a really interesting exercise, but it’s also a little bit tedious.
So my my recommendation for flows is to just do like Excel spreadsheets and to track what you’re doing on your website. So if you start on one screen, you let’s say your experience starts with Facebook, so maybe you’re very active on Facebook, but you want to get people to come to your website. What is it that people are going to be engaging with on Facebook? What are they going to click on to get to your website? That’s already one action.
It’s one part of the flow once they get to your website. What are they going to do on their website? Do you want them to read your blog posts? Do you want them to subscribe after? What is that experience like? Is it successful? Are you getting them to subscribe and to to do the actions that you want? Where are they getting lost? You know, maybe you want them to subscribe, but the subscribe button is on a different page and it’s not popping up when they’re reading your blog posts.
All of these flows are things that you really want to walk through yourself, so that you can put yourself in the shoes of your website visitors and see where there might be gaps, wait, see where there may be missed opportunities. Maybe you know you’re reading through a piece of content, and this is the perfect time to highlight that you have an event coming up, and so these are things that you want to.
You really can only see if you go through your website again and again and start tracking these flows, and that’s where you can also see where your words can make a difference. So if you’re going through these flows – and you see missed opportunities, it could just mean editing that text, so it’s a little more powerful or that it actually like conveys something that that is like points to an action.
It could mean that you’re confusing your users, because you’ve started to use different language in different spots, and those are things that you can start to highlight at this point in the process. You also have options like a lot of the time. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure kind of experience when people are going through your website and so to see where they may branch off it’s fun to also get people that aren’t familiar with your product or aren’t familiar with your site at all to come in and to start using It and to be like okay: where would you naturally go after this or what’s your inclination or how are you feeling right now and so to have people go through these flows and to express out loud what what they’re experiencing it can be really helpful, and so You may have a really simple website and but have tons of flows and not even know it, for example the Facebook that example I gave, if you have a blog and you want people to sign up or you want them to continue.
Reading more articles on your site, if you have forms and prompts if you have products and if you’re having feature tours, then you definitely know what flows are because you’re getting people to go through your product right there and navigational links and search filters. All of these things are flows that people will use going as they go through your website, and so you want your microcopy to encourage you want it to reassure you, want it to to make people more knowledgeable and certain about what they’re doing and essentially that’s that’s Really the goal is you want to design with empathy, because you want your website visitors to feel good when they’re on your site, you want don’t want them to be confused, you don’t want them to feel like they’re, an idiot.
You want them to feel like they’re. There they’re in the right place and that they know what’s next and that they’re going to be able to come out of there accomplishing what they were hoping for, and so there’s the book that I really like called nicely said. It’s geared primarily towards copywriters. It’s called it’s written by Nicole Fenton and Kate. Keefe relate and I’ll tweet it out after this talk, but there is a chapter about improving flows and they give her a list of questions that you can use when you’re mapping it out.
So what the reader trying to do, what could the reader be feeling? How did the reader get here and what’s happening next and what choices can they make? So this points back to the choose-your-own-adventure, you know, maybe you have too many choices on your site. So if you want to push people into a flow but you’re telling them sign up for my event, subscribe to my blog post, follow me on Facebook.
You know go to our store. Those are a lot of different messages, and you know you may want to focus on a couple of them or you may want to have a hierarchy, because it may end up being a little bit too much in one particular flow and that’s part of putting yourself In their shoes, you know what is happening in this frame. Is it like overloaded or confusing? Does it relate to the frames before and after is it complete? Maybe there’s something missing here and does everything sound like it came from the same place? And so that’s like a final like the last one is definitely a copywriting tip because it points back to the tone of voice the sound like the same person as the previous screen or all of a sudden.
Is it super cold? Did we lose that familiarity, or maybe it’s the opposite? Maybe you know you have a flow, that’s like very corporate and then all of a sudden there’s this joke and you’re like it feels out of place. These are not bad decisions in and of themselves, but they just don’t work together and then you know a lot of it is is feelings. A lot of people underestimate how many decisions are fueled by feelings.
So when you have people on your website and you have them feeling fearful, then you know it’s going to work against you, but you can help and some of the decisions that you can make can really help to undo those feelings of fear. And so a lot of the common ones that you want to think about for people to come on your website is you know if they’re signing up fear of irreversible change, so picking a username, for example, you know when I’m picking a username, I’m part of me.
It’s like okay, how visible is this username? If I pick something stupid, am I stuck with it forever like when I first signed up to Twitter like 10 years ago, I picked a really stupid handle and I was like okay. I can’t change this. I’m going to like this is there’s some element of fear that that keeps you from doing it and so being able to support people and let them know when the changes is reversible or when there’s a little bit of flexibility.
Well, then, to complete the action more quickly and with more confidence, there’s also a fear of data loss. So if any of you, for example, use two-factor authentication, there’s a screen where they say here, your secret codes save these. If you navigate away from this page, they’ll be gone forever, and so, if that’s communicated, then you know it sort of helps, fix that fear of data loss or fear of of doing something and not saving it or if you, like click back, you haven’t saved the Form that you filled out, and so all of these things, I think, can prevent your users from moving safely through your flows and having a good time.
There’s also fear about personal data security. I mean that’s something that we’ve all been really familiar with since, like the European GDP, our and everything it’s like people or care about how the personal information is going to be stored and kept and collected shared used. All of that is information that they probably want. If they’re filling out a very detailed form, so you want to make sure that you give information about that like not just for the legal purposes, but also to help your your visitors feel more secure in what they’re doing and trust you more and, of course, the Fear of getting spammed I’ve filled out a lot of forms recently.
That sort of tell you why they need your email address, what they intend to do with it and at what frequency you can expect a newsletter for example. So you know if it says outright we’re going to email. You weekly, you know it’s kind of sets the tone and gives a little bit more information about what you’re signing up for which is nice. So, through all of these flows, you can use copy to help users get started, encourage them courage them to start.
You know using your website in the way that you intended it. Let users know what to do next so like for the example that there’s lots of things that you could do, whether it’s subscribe or follow you on Facebook and all these things. You can encourage users sort of to do a couple of actions and use words that are more encouraging. In that sense, you can explain new features. I mean a lot of the time we are working on our websites and we’re making them better, and so your users might come back and find something completely different.
But if you use copy to explain it, then it’s a lot more reassuring and if you have slight changes in a familiar context, they’re much more well received. You can also reduce cognitive effort, which is basically like people don’t want to make decisions. I think there’s a lot of decision fatigue, so if you can just buy your coffee, help people to feel confident about the decision that you’re making for them, then they’ll be better off so just by making it easier for them to make decisions like removing any of That friction of having to read and understand things and helps them to have a better experience on your site.
You can also suggest users to take a certain action, so maybe you do have multiple options, but if you can program your website to sort of guess where they’re going, you can then prompt them with some some more targeted action or an action oriented language, and you Can also help users in a moment of failure, and so I’ll talk about that in a little bit. But this is like air screens, for example. So if they do something wrong on your website, you don’t want to reprimand them.
You want to help them, and so just like basic guidelines. If you’re looking at doing some some changes today on your website, what are some things you can look at check for typos, that’s an obvious one. They slip in all the time, so you want to make sure that you’re rereading your stuff, checking it or having someone else, take a look at it so that you have a second pair of eyes, edit for consistency now that you’ve developed this great, like brand tone Of voice, you can go through your screens and evaluate it and think.
Okay does this fit with what we’ve determined as a company as an organization? Does this fit with what we want to be seeing and how we want to be saying it review the order? You know maybe there’s some screens that just don’t make sense in that sequence or someone’s pointed out that it’s feels out of place and you want to narrow the focus. You don’t want to bombard people with too much stuff and timing as well.
You know – maybe it’s just it’s part of the order, but maybe it’s just like there’s a message that comes at the wrong time or a bit too soon, so it ends up creating more fear and confusion than then if it had just been moved a little bit Further, when the user was more knowledgeable, things like that that you can think of sometimes it also just means really small changes like adding headers to your content, adding more buttons or adding like separating text.
Sometimes it can be a really simple solution to to something to a problem like that, and you also want to determine what level of information you want to give, and so that’s like. No one has the perfect answer for this, but basically the sweetspot sets clear expectations while staying out of someone’s way. So you want to give them enough information that they don’t feel like you’re patronizing, but also you don’t want to overwhelm them, and so that’s something that usually goes with testing.
There’s. No there’s no perfect answer and I’ll briefly touch upon accessibility. It’s not my forte! I’m not a developer and I’m not an accessibility specialist, but I know that there are some small things that you can do when you’re editing your micro copy in your website that can help help it be more accessible. Some of that is like using label elements and your buttons and in your content, using precise language, so not not relying on the interface itself to communicate, but actually having the label say something specific, because if you’re thinking about someone who is using a screen reader, for Example, that’s the only bit of information they’re going to be getting so you want to make sure it’s as precise as possible and all microcopy should appear as live text, no images with text, please that doesn’t that doesn’t translate unless you have really good alt tags that Doesn’t translate into a screen reader they’re not going to see the text, that’s in an image so and make sure the tooltip text is accessible.
So if you have pop-ups on your site that give more information on how to navigate you want to make sure those are accessible to so they’re, not they’re, not hidden, and also one tip that I like to do is just to read your content out loud without Looking at the site, because then it gives you an idea of like someone who’s using a screen reader without these visual cues. This is what they’re going to be experiencing.
Is this clear? Is this enough so now that I’ve said a lot of information now, I’m going to contradict myself and say: keep it simple: it’s not that hard right so easy, but it’s true that keeping it simple is a good place to start and to build from, and it Just allows you also to pare down and to get back to the basics and to help you also. It also like will help people who are new to the internet and new to these complex things.
Keeping it simple will help them feel more comfortable, and so, as you know, simply as it is a lot of, it is just rewriting your text so that it’s clear it’s active, it’s precise, like I mentioned before, avoid using jargon and idioms. I think that as a copywriter, I get really excited about puns and play on words, and I want things to be fun and I want things to be funny, but at the end of the day I you know I’m not thinking when I do that.
I’m thinking about myself, I’m not thinking about my my user, I’m not thinking about people that are on my website, who don’t speak English, that well or who don’t understand the industry that well, and so I’m using this jargon that like doesn’t really speak to them at All and so you know, I’ve changed the way that I approach things drastically, because I want to make sure that I’m understood, and that is my main goal.
If you’re not understood. What’s the point, and so I replace ambiguous language, and I focus on one idea – one task at a time: I don’t try and jam it all in. So where do you start when you’re trying to fix these things on your website? You start with your homepage. You start with your menu labels. You start with your checkout. I would say that the best place to start is the number one action that you want people on to do on your site.
So for you I mean the homepage is a big one. You want people to stay on your site, that’s the first one, you don’t want them to leave and then the next thing is. Maybe you have an effect. That’s for one specific event. So then your goal is to sell tickets. So then, you might want to just focus on that as an action, but for these examples, I’ll focus on three things that most sites have and most sites can fix fairly easily.
The first one is forms, so everyone who has a blog probably has a contact form. That’s a very simple one, but as your website becomes more complex, your forms may get more complex and you may have more of them on your site and they may be very diverse, but here’s the basic example of a way that you could change. Small things on your form and that would impact your tone of voice and your success rate so for this example like this one.
This is the standard one that comes built into jetpack and again like when you’re building websites, a lot of the stuff you’re going to be using is plugins templates forms things that come with, like basically pre-written text and it works. So it’s not like our first reflex to go in and change everything, because if it’s working it’s great, but it could be working better. So for this you know a forum, for example, I would add a little bit of intro text at the beginning.
What is this forum about? What are people going to be doing? What what is it related to and some encouraging information like sign up to get my newsletter, because XY said you can also change the way that the label is functions. So, instead of saying name, you could say your name or if you want to be a super friendly, it could be like. What’s your name question mark, you could add placeholder text.
So if there is something that’s a little bit confusing, for example, again, your name seems like a really simple field, but it could be really complicated if you’re talking about like when you booked a plane ticket. It’s very important that you write your name properly because it has to reflect your passport, so these are things that people might get confused and they’re like. Do I put my middle name? Do I not, and so, by building out that label and having first name middle name last name or adding little instructions that say, as it appears on your passport.
These are things that can help your users feel more confident, filling out the form and also avoid mistakes and all the things that can happen if they fill it out wrong and so add. Placeholder text is also an easy way to give people an idea of what that field should contain a formatting to you know if it’s phone numbers and stuff you know if you have a CRM or something where you’re managing a lot of contacts, and you have people’s Phone numbers and all sorts of different formats and stuff you know just fixing your form – might help you save some time as well.
An explanation of why do you need my website? What are you going to do with that, and some helper texts like what what to expect with that field? These are some small ways that you can make your your form like a little bit more friendly, app so again, like always use a label use. Placeholder text highlight required fields, so this is one you know if, if I want to fill out a form super quickly, I want to know what are the fields that I absolutely need to fill out.
So I can move on with my life and which ones are not necessary flag errors. So if someone fills it out wrong, don’t just say error like highlight which question has an error and why make clear buttons and customize the follow-up message. So if I fill out a form – and I get a confirmation email, I kind of expect the confirmation email to reflect what I just did. So if I signed up to someone’s mailing list – and I get an email that says like something completely different – that’s going to be a really bad experience.
I want to make sure that I customize all the triggers that happen after I complete the form to match, with the form content itself. The next one is the checkout, and so there’s a lot of documentation on how to build the perfect ecommerce website. I am NOT a specialist in that by any means, but I know that when you are working on a checkout you’re, basically working against, like fear of loss, people are going to be giving you money.
So you want to be working to help them feel more confident about their purchase and not feel like they’re losing money. You want to me feel like they’re getting value so part of that is alleviating users concerns. You want to be reassuring them like as they’re working through the checkout process. You want to make sure that they know, like almost done almost there you’re going to get your item, it’s going to be so great and if they’re stalled on any of the questions you want to give them all the information right up front.
So they don’t navigate away, for example, return policies. That’s my first question: if I’m not sure about a purchase and like I’ll go through with the purchase. If I know that, there’s a really good return policy so having a link and having that information right up front will avoid people just navigating away and then forgetting about it and never coming back. So these are some things that you can do, so you also want to motivate action.
So as people are moving through the process, you want to encourage them and point them towards completing an action, and you want to turn an empty state into a trigger. So so many sites are building these because I think they’re starting to be built into the platforms themselves. So I know they’re a lot of extensions and WooCommerce that do this. Shopify does a great job of doing it as well. If you have an empty cart or you were about to add something to a cart, the system will know, and it all send you a message that says like your carts empty.
So sad or you have something in your cart, but you haven’t checked out, and so turning these empty states like they call them into an opportunity to push someone to complete the purchase, is something that you can do with writing as well, and that’s it for that’s All I’m going to say about e-commerce websites, error messages, because there are so many error messages possible on a site and I don’t think I’ve ever edited my own error messages until like this year.
I just kind of assumed that if something was broken, the error message that the developer wrote it’s probably going to be sufficient. It’ll work, people will figure it out, but actually error messages are. Some are some of the most frustrating parts of a website when you’re a user you’re like. Where did I go wrong? I just want to sign up for the stupid email list. You know there’s like these things that can cause real frustrations and that leave people with a really negative experience of your site and, unfortunately, negative experiences outweigh positive ones when people think back about about an experience with the brand.
So you want to make sure that you’re helping people along even if they mess up on your site or maybe sometimes it’s your own fault. So you want to make sure that you’re doing it right. So you want to make sure that they match the tone. If your site’s been fairly conservative up until then, you don’t want your error message to be like too funny. It just doesn’t fit and you also want it, but you want to strike a balance and defuse a moment of frustration, so you don’t want to make them more frustrated by blaming them.
You know by sort of sounding patronizing, so you know, for example, this. This is a decent one Network problem. This is what happens when too many people read cat articles at the same time, try again in a little bit sigh okay. So this one is it’s super friendly. It’s not perfect for every website. It’s not going to be a good fit, but it’s just a way to be. Like listen, there’s a problem, no fault of your own.
It’s on us try getting a little bit and then it just kind of has empathy. It’s like sigh. Okay, that’s you know what else you going to do, and so you can work with the different you can work with your developers, for example, go through your site, determine where all these error messages could pop up and focus on the ones where it’s like a crucial Action again stupid example, but if you have an event website and your main action is getting people to buy a ticket for your event, you want to focus on all the places where that can break down throughout the flow, all the places where there can be errors.
You want to make sure that the error message instructs people on how to fix their mistake, what it is that you’re expecting and how they can and like the payoff and what they’ll get when they complete it, so that if basically, I’ve rushed through so much content. But I’m going to leave you with a couple of resources, the book that I mentioned, that I really appreciate it’s mostly geared towards copywriters and content writers, but there’s so much good information on how to make your website as successful as possible.
With with the written word, UX planet great website for all sorts of UX tips, I’m not a UX designer, I’m a journalist and a copywriter. So I rely heavily on experts to inform the decisions that I make and accessible microcopy, because I I really just had one slide on that, but I encourage everyone to check out more accessibility, tips and tricks for your websites so and again I’ll be tweeting these out.
In a second, so thank you so much I’m happy to take any questions. American-Canadian winner, european, it’s absolutely one of the hardest things I go got that everyone. Can you probably don’t people’s attention spans are extremely short, so you’re, absolutely right! That’s a nice thing with Guttenberg too is we have a little bit more control over our content now, and so you know, even if you’re not a developer, you can be building in headers and sections and paragraphs and making it easier for people to retain salient points.
In in one big context, you know one big block of text and you can create your own buttons. So that’s also a nice opportunity to do just that to work with the ever diminishing attention spans of readers and users they put in their credit card information Wow. So again, yeah not not knowing what people are going to do any other questions all right I’ll be around all afternoon. If you want to chat with me, so thanks so much for attending
Is the letter p. But once you see how this can be done, it should be pretty easy to apply the same techniques to the rest of the alphabet, so i’ll go ahead and get started here in illustrator.
The first thing we want to do is set up a new document. That’s size to 1280 by 1280 pixels and we’re going to set up our documents that we’re all working with a similar view and with similar settings. So what I’m going to do is come up here to where it says view, and I want to turn off snap. The pixel, in fact, from the view, the view menu. The only thing we want selected is snap to point and then we’ll go to window and what we want selected up here is control a line color and gradient, and then we can close out of that and what I’m going to do.
First, is I’m going to come over here to the align panel and I’m going to make sure the align two I’m going to make sure that’s set to align to artboard and once that’s set, I’m going to come over to the rectangle tool up here? If you click and hold up over that button, you’ll get this little flyout menu, I’m going to grab the ellipse tool and I’m going to hold shift and alt on the keyboard and click and drag on the canvas to create a perfectly round circle like that and Up here from this drop down, I’m going to choose this red slash to get rid of the black outline and then for the fill.
Color I’ll just choose black over here and I’m going to take the opacity of that and bring that about in half and then I’ll click out of that to deselect it and right here where it says with ellipse with we want to make sure we have. This turned on this chain link. We want that constrained, width and high proportions. We want that turned on and I’m going to change the width to 300 pixels, so I’ll hit 300 hit enter and then I’m going to Center.
This up on the vertical and horizontal axis, like that, now I’m going to grab this select tool and I’m going to hold alt and click and drag this circle to create another copy and I’ll make the width of this one 50 oops, 150 and then Center. That up on the horizontal and vertical axis as well and I’m going to hold alt and click and drag to create another copy and I’ll Center that up on the vertical and horizontal axis.
And then I’m going to a hole. I’m going to click and drag this top node right here. This top anchor point, I’m going to click and drag that up and then hold shift until it snaps to the top of the circle like that, and then we can let go and once we’ve done that I’m going to click and drag over everything right here. All three of those circles and I’m going to hold alt. Actually, no I’m going to click on the the shape builder tool, which is over here and then I’ll hold alt and click on the center circle to delete that and then we’ll go back to the Select tool.
And then we are left with something like this. So this is going to be the round part of the letter P. What I’m going to do now is I’m going to create the the talent over here. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to click and hold on the ellipse tool until we get the flyout menu and then we can choose the rectangle tool, I’m going to click and drag to create a rectangle like that. I’m going to bring the opacity of that down in half and I’m going to make the width of this one 50 and over here on the inside of this rectangle you’ll, see these little round anchor points, I’m just going to click and drag that in until it Turns until those edges turn red like that, and then it’s going to become rounded, then I’ll grab the Select tool, I’m going to hold ctrl on the keyboard, grab this node right here and then just snap it to the left side of this inner circle right there.
Just like that, and now I’ll click off of the graphic to deselect everything I want to grab the pen tool now, which is over here and snap to the top of this shape. Click then hold shift and bring that line straight through all the way to the outside of the bottom of that shape and then go ahead and click again and now we can. Let go a shift and just finish this shape up going around the outside and back to the starting point.
I’m going to grab the Select tool, hold shift click on the original rectangle, so we have them both selected and I’m going to come over here to the Pathfinder tab. If you don’t have the Pathfinder tab, just go to window Pathfinder and then I should pop up and I’m going to choose minus front. So, what’s going to get rid of that right there and what I do now is I’m going to grab the direct selection tool and I’m just going to click and drag over these two bottom nodes or irin.
Just click and drag them up and I’m going to hold shift to lock it onto the the vertical axis. I’m going to bring this up to about here so that that tail isn’t too long and what I’m going to do now is I’m going to grab the select tool, click and drag over everything, and I’m going to want to zoom in on this. So I can get a better view of what I’m doing so to zoom in I’m, going to hold alt and roll up the mouse field a couple of times and I’m going to come back over to the shape builder tool and I’m going to hold alt and Click on this little piece right here, that’s sticking out from the circle, so that’s gone, and then I’m just going to click and drag over this area.
These areas right here so it combines them all to one shape and I’m going to do the same thing with this area and this area combined that all into one shape and then I’ll just turn that green actually don’t have to go back to the select tool And I’ll turn that green or you know what let me undo that you could hit ctrl Z to undo it I’ll click off that to deselect everything and then click on just this shape and turn that green.
So you can see the difference between the two. We have two different shapes here, so the next thing I want to do is just zoom out a little bit, I’m going to click and drag over both of these and bring the opacity of them all the way up, and I’m going to color them in now. With the gradient, so let me click off with the deselect everything I’ll click on just the black shape right here and under the gradient tab.
I’m going to from the drop the type drop-down I’m going to choose linear and if you notice it gives it a white to black rating we over over. Here we have the white stop and then we have the black stop over here. So I’m going to double click on the black one and then from this drop down, I’m going to choose HSB and I’m just going to choose a shade of pink something like that. Like a deep shade of pink, almost like a red, and we can click out of that, I’m going to double click.
This stop right here. This slider again choose HSB from this drop down and I’m going to make this one like a yellowish orange sort of shade. Maybe something like go with that right there and again click out of that to uh to release it and now I’m going to click on the green shape and I’m going to give that the same gradient so I’ll come over here. The gradient, the drop-down and choose linear, and it’s going to give it the same gradient only we want to flip this around so that the pink is on this side and the yellow is on this side.
So to do that, I’m going to come over here to the gradient tool and I’m going to bring the cursor just to the outside of the right of this strip right. Here it’s going to turn into a rotate icon and once it does that you could just rotate it around 180 degrees and then hold shift on the keyboard. So it locks up exactly on to 180 degrees, and then you could let go and there you have that right there.
So we’re just about done with this design. The only last thing to do would be. Let me grab the Select tool. The last thing to do would be to put a little bit of a shadow right here, so it looks like it’s casting a little bit of a drop shadow over this. To do that, let me click and hold on the rectangle, so I can grab the ellipse tool again and I’m going to create another ellipse, I’m going to hold shift and alt and click and drag to create a perfectly round ellipse.
Let me just make this blue. So we could see we could differentiate it up against the rest of this graphic and I’ll make the width of this one 50 and I’m going to bring the opacity of this down in half and I’m going to go back to the align tab and Center. It up on the horizontal and vertical axis like that. Let me grab the Select tool, I’m going to take this top node again hold shift and then just snap it to the top right there and I’m going to create another copy of this.
So I’m going to hold alt and click to create another copy, I’ll make this one green and then I’ll hold ctrl grab this node right here and snap it over to this node right there. So it’s lined up like that and then I’ll just click and drag this bottom-right node down I’ll hold shift and just click and drag it down a little bit, maybe about that much and then hold shift and click on the blue shape. So we have them both selected and now I will go to the Pathfinder tool and choose front just like that.
Then hold shift click on this shape right here and go back to the shape builder tool, hold alt and click on this interior air right here and now we go back to the select tool, click off with the deselect everything and take just this blue piece. That’s left over and press Delete on the keyboard and get rid of that, and then I’ll just take this blue shape right here, I’ll make that black and I’ll adjust the opacity of it until it looks about light, and that should pretty much do it.
For this tutorial, that’s how you can go about creating these simple letter logos using adobe illustrator. So if you have any questions, let me know and as always thanks for reading, yes,
We have different devices. Different needs even different data requirements, and this is at the core of the PWA attitude to building for the web. We need layouts and content that work across devices if your site doesn’t adapt to the user’s device, you break the illusion and lose trust.
These quotes are from Brad, Frost and Liza danger. Gardner. You should check out that blog post about responsive design, which are linked to from the course materials as Liza says, manage risk focus on content. You know you can make virtually any site usable simply by sizing elements and content correctly. The golden rule for great progressive web app content is not to let content inadvertently overflow horizontally, especially on mobile.
That sounds basic, but lots of sites break this rule by making images inputs and other large elements on the page with fixed sizes. Using relative measurement units and RAM percentages will reduce the severity of this issue. Adding a meta viewport tag will also solve a lot of problems. This tells the browser the size of the virtual viewport on which it renders a web page without setting the viewport meta tag correctly, most browsers scaled down the page to fit a virtual 980 pixel wide viewport.
I’ve seen some great examples of this in action on w3schools, we’ll give you the URLs for that in the course materials. With this article, the initial scale value sets the zoom default. For this page, don’t set a maximum value that will make it impossible for users to zoom and that’s a big problem for accessibility. One other thing you should be aware of the viewport meta tag will mess up the layout for fixed-width sites.
The Mater viewport tag is designed to work with responsive layout. If you use it in a fixed sized layout, it will break things until you convert the site to a responsive, lay out trade document.Documentelement client to see how the viewport meta tag affects the virtual viewport. Here’s another simple technique: this solves many layout problems, you’re setting the preferred size and the maximum size and works for article and audio too so yeah.
You might think that relative sizing would fix everything, in fact, for a while back in the day, some of us thought that relative sizing could solve everything we layout. We had, you know liquid layout, maybe even text could be relatively sized, but relative sizing isn’t enough simplistic. Relative sizing, like this a diagram, means that you have content areas that are too big on desktop and to smaller mobile.
This is why media queries were invented. It’s a simple concept, use different CSS for different sized viewport based on width. That doesn’t just mean making the same layout for every device on a phone. You might want a single column layout, a two column layout on a tablet. Maybe three columns for desktop and so on. You can use media queries to select different layouts depending on the viewport size, here’s a single column layout on mobile to column, on tablet and three columns for desktop.
So do you think about devices, and you might think you could get away with this? Ask yourself what could go wrong with this approach? What about new devices new viewport sizes? What about changing window sizes on desktop we’ll come back to this later now? Is that all there is, of course not. There is a better way go back to our original exercise. Remember content is king devices, keep changing and device, viewports are getting bigger and smaller, not to mention pixel density, pixel, shape, display quality and so on.
Don’t force your designers and developers to make a change every time a new device appears start. The design process with the smallest form factor then add the major breakpoints for the form factors that you work with phone tablets, laptops and widescreen devices. You can then create minor breakpoints to handle specific changes to elements that don’t affect all elements. The final detail to keep in mind is to optimize the content for reading, ideally keep the width of your content to 70 to 80 characters wider than that value makes content hard to read.
Now that doesn’t mean you stop thinking about devices and device classes. You might want one column for phones, two columns for tablets, three columns for desktop, like we’re saying or whatever you can find out more about these recommendations on web fundamentals. Now remember the earlier media queries example in the mobile first world of PWS. We need to turn that around make small viewports the default.
Look at the example here. By the way, there is no fixed rule about whether or not to include media queries, inline or use a separate file. Also, you might want to consider using m’s or REMS for units here, but I won’t go into that now. You’ll also do responsive layout in JavaScript. If you like, this is a simple way to do. Conditional content match media is well supported and there are polyfills. Calc is really useful in responsive design, where you want to use a combination of fixed widths and percentages.
In this example, we have two thumbnail images: side by side: 50 %, the width of the parent element with a 10 pixel margin between them, no matter what size. The viewport responsive design is about more than just changing layouts, as well as changing layouts. You might actually also want to manipulate content, depending on the viewport size and device type, for example, on a phone you might want to make sure page content is visible when the user goes to your home page, so you might opt for a hamburger menu for navigation And put banner ads lower on the page.
Also, if need be, you can just get rid of stuff on desktop. Your users will want full functionality, but not on mobile right wrong. Don’t guess your users needs based on viewport size, plan, content and functionality carefully and don’t assume users want less content or functionality on phones than desktop, for example. Again, this is a crucial part of the PWA attitude. Understand your users, don’t second-guess them.
Data-Driven design, design, content, layouts and transaction processes, so users can get to what they want as quickly as possible. Our data shows that every step to get to content loses 20 % of users rather than removing content. A more sensible option can be to choose different content. Now for images this is called art direction, choosing different images or different image crops and I’ll show an example of this later.
You might even want to provide different text for different viewports such as shorter headlines, but yeah be careful again not to assume that mobile users want less content for article. The general rule is to use a smaller resolution for smaller viewports. This can result in massive reductions in bite, size, playback performance and proven sand, also reduced streaming cost. The best way to do this is with adaptive streaming or HLS, not just media queries and yeah.
You can find out more about that more about adaptive streaming in the course materials. But just to reiterate, the key point here is that when you’re delivering article to mobile, don’t use resolutions larger than you need and talking about article content, don’t forget to caption articles using the track element. It’s really easy. Let’s take a look at the relatively new technique for creating responsive layouts, CSS flexbox provides flexible sizing and alignment element reordering and better performance than floats.
Css flexbox is well supported and we strongly recommend it easy centering is the holy grail of CSS. Take a look at the code here. It is incredibly simple. I still find it slightly thrilling by the way the materials that accompany this article have links to lots of flexbox examples, including this one. Let’s look at the CSS for the examples here. This uses CSS flexbox for three different layouts depending on the viewport width.
Let’s start with the defaults for smaller viewports, remember, mobile-first, the container is declared to use CSS flex. The flex flow property means child elements can wrap. Rather than being squashed onto the same line. You can also use inline flex, that’s shorthand for flex direction and flex wrap properties. The default is ro, no rap 100 % width for each div in the container add a different layout for slightly larger viewport and different again, once the width hits 800 pixels.
The container is now a fixed width and centered horizontally using margins. Let’s take a look at the example here. Once again, this uses CSS flexbox for three different layouts, depending on the viewport width and again, let’s start with the defaults for smaller viewports. For view puts over 600 pixels in width. The order is changed on the smaller viewports. We wanted to give child 1 full width, but for a slightly larger viewport, we can put it next to child 2.
I could go on anyway, to other properties. I’d like to draw your attention to justify content, how items are packed and aligned items how items are aligned. Css grid is in some ways related to the grid system concept, familiar to graphic designers. A page is thought of in terms of lines tracks between lines, cells and areas. Css grid is coming, and it’s already behind a flag in Chrome and Firefox you’ll find more information in the resources for this article.
The lab exercises that accompany this article will help you get started with media queries, breakpoints grids and with flexbox
When I first started on YouTube, I had no idea how to get my article showing higher in search or getting them recommended.
This, of course, resulted in low views very few subscribers and it also felt really frustrating the good news is, though, by the end of this article you’re going to have a lot more success, ranking your articles, getting more views and turning them into subscribers. I’m going to break this down into a few easy steps, for you show you how to rank your articles on YouTube fast before I do that, though, please hit subscribe and the notification bar to join our growing community here on YouTube, let’s start with audience retention.
This is so important to youtube SEO and, what’s important to you, tube needs to be important to you audience retention is getting people to read most of your YouTube articles. This tells YouTube that whatever it is, you’re doing you’re doing it right, because if people want to read a lot of your content, then this tells YouTube that they’re spending longer on the YouTube platform, and that’s really exactly what YouTube wants to get this audience retention, though.
You’ve got to follow a few key steps. The first 15 seconds of your article is the most important I could say this a hundred times, and it still won’t be enough. My advice is to post-it note it somewhere that you always look or save it. As a reminder, so that you never forget this, when creating your article, I want you to see the difference that it makes for yourself, though, this is when I didn’t take this advice seriously, and this is when I did in the first 15 seconds.
You need to tell your audience what they will get from the article. A huge amount of tests and data have proved time and time again. If you don’t grab your audience’s attention in the first 15 seconds, then they’re gone. You want to quickly follow it off with a slightly longer intro, and this is going to tell your audience how the article will benefit them and what problem they have that you’re going to fix this means showing people that you know how to do it and you Provide proof of this in the article.
So, if I’m talking about how to rank YouTube articles, I need to show you an example of me doing this. So you’ve hooked people’s attention in the first 15 seconds, providing them with how you will benefit them from the article and how you’ll fix a problem that they currently have. Finally, you’ve provided them with the proof that you are the right person to show them what to do through credibility.
These simple steps will give you a huge increase in audience retention, and it’s easy to do so. You know how to get your audience reading your articles of a longer. Well, how do you get them to start reading them and ranking better right at the start? There’s a tool for YouTube that I highly recommend using. It’s helped me a lot in the last six months, rank my articles higher and get more views and subscribers this tool is called vid IQ.
It’s designed to improve your article SEO and a whole host of other amazing features. Vid IQ is a brilliant tool for ranking your YouTube articles. It gives you some really important information which you need when you’re actually searching for the right keywords to use in your article. So, let’s just take a quick look at this example: I’ve used a really general and generic term here, which is camera now.
You would expect this to have a high search, but if you didn’t know such things, then you can come over to the right-hand side. This is article Huw here which is built into my youtube search now, which is really hardly having it. On the right hand, side I can see the maximum views are 7.1 million. That’s huge. My average views are 1.2 9 million for this search term. Here I can also see that there’s some really not very well known, guy called Peter McKinnon, which has got three articles and he’s the top blog in the camera search term here, but in all seriousness, what this is brilliant at doing is telling you.
If this keyword is going to be any good for you to use, so if I just scroll down, I can see this overall score section here. I can see that the volume for camera is 80, which is really high, but the competition is also high, which tells me that, yes, there might be a lot of people searching it, but I probably would find it difficult to actually rank the article because there’s so Many people already have made articles around this, but let me give you a really good and successful example of how you could use it to find something good.
I use the search term Canon EOS RP. I have two US RPS and I have lots of experience with this camera so straight away. I wanted to make a article around these keywords. Now I can see that the maximum views is four hundred and ninety five thousand it’s considerably lower, but it’s still a very good reach. Now I scroll down. The first thing I wanted to see was the overall score and good news. For me, the volume is 61, which is still very high.
The competition this is the best bit is low, which means not many creators on YouTube have made articles around Canon EOS RP, so I thought, okay. This is really good. I’m going to use these keywords and create a article around it now. You can also take this a step further. You can start looking at the top related keywords to this, so you can make articles with these keywords. If they’re more successful or you can start seeing that a of people want to know about a review for the canon, eos RP, and this would be the right way to put the keywords for that.
Because he’s got 62 and that’s a good rank and a good score, but this made me start thinking about how to create the keywords. I knew that my main keywords were going to be Canon, EOS RP and that’s going to have a low competition and high search. So if you just take a quick look, I’ve managed to rank this article in the last month at number two for this really good search term. So straight away, you can see how good vid IQ is at providing you with some really good information on keyword search.
Now this program also takes it a hell of a lot further. You get so much analytics and data on your YouTube platform, which provides you with some really valuable information. The best thing about this tool is, though, it’s free. Yes, you do have paid accounts as well, but the free account for a lot of people will give you enough information and data, and you do have the overall score, and this C word this keyword search, which is on the free account.
So that’s the good news there now, if you’re wondering where to get this, what I’ll do is I’ll stick a link in the article, so you can click on that after you’ve readed this article and then you can sign up for a free account or a paid Account whatever is right for you, the last step I will show you on how to rank YouTube. Articles is read time, YouTube values read time as one of its most important ranking factors.
So if someone spends longer reading your article than your main competitors article, then this is good for you. There is a really cool way to do this, though you see you can find the competitors article, which is ranking high for the search term, that you want to use, and if you go ahead and make a article that’s a little bit longer than their article, then You have a better chance of getting more read time as long as your content in your YouTube article follows the steps you carried out in audience.
Retention having this added read time Towers YouTube that people using their platform prefer your article and read it for longer. This is a great way to get your article ranking higher than theirs. These steps, in the article have provided success for thousands of youtubers, giving their more views higher, ranked articles and, of course, more subscribers. The way to guarantee success for yourself, though, is to make sure you take action and start doing what you’ve learned today.
Now, if you have any more tips that you’ve personally found that help you rank YouTube articles, then please share them with the community. You can do this by leaving a comment in the comment section of the article if you enjoyed this article, and you would like to read more articles like this, please subscribe to the blog and hit the notification valve and whatever you do, for the rest of your Day make sure it’s a good one and I’ll see you in the next article
You didn’t tell me this Surprise. Oh my gosh ( laughing ) Isaac Irvine is one of our basically personal Brand gurus at work And we’re going to check out some of the things that he’s doing and how you all can use. It in the real world Ready to get started. Absolutely: let’s do it. Your personal brand is Really just your reputation or what people think about you And we’re going to use Isaac Irvine to kind of demonstrate some of these qualities.
So when we figure out what That personal brand is the most important thing. Is trying to figure out what you wan na be known for What sets you, apart from everyone else, So looking at Isaac’s profile? What do you think he’s all about? What is he trying to? What is he setting himself apart for Okay cool yeah, So I was just glancing at this. I get the very like he’s, deep rooted in being husband and dad 80’s.
Kid also Really proud of his Position over at GoDaddy – And he loves talking about Internal communications And I see a lot of positivity in the posting too – the voice, It’s very uplifting Right. He really talks about his Family is what’s the backbone of all. He does So a lot of the articles he does and things he talks. About is about his family and him being a dad and helping them out and really setting himself apart that way, So, at the end of the day, that’s what he wants to be known for just a rad dad, that’s tattooed up that likes Star Wars and Likes to be with his kids – And I got that impression – When I met him in person too Yeah, So this really lines up the personal brand online lines up offline.
Is that a really big Important thing you think: when it comes to businesses and-, You have to be consistent right, Personal brands. Yeah You got, ta really show the real you. So it’s super important To be consistent with it, So what’s the biggest Part of social media. What do you think the Biggest driving factor is: why do we have social media? Well, one of my favorite things and I think, while it Has existed to this day is that offers us a two way street a two way dialogue Right, So you can give sure Information about your brand, how you wan na, run your business.
What makes you you, But you can also have a conversation, then with your target audience. Yes, absolutely So you build that rapport even before they come into your business, while they’re at your business after they’ve left. Your business, And that to me is what makes Social media so exciting, Yes, Really embrace the social Right. Social media is about being social Like we have to have conversations What I see a lot of people do really with building their personal brand.
They try to make it all. About me me me me me, Oh my gosh tell me about it. They don’t actually just talk to people and say: hey, that’s really cool. I like that shirt or hey. I had ice cream there and start that conversation. If you could look at Isaac, Irvine’s Twitter here you can kind of see all the Things that he’s retweeting and commenting on and liking And really just having that Conversation being engaged, It’s crucial And a common misconception.
About a personal brand, is it’s not all about him? It’s not all about that person. It’s about how he helps the community and those that he’s trying to serve, And you can see that with What he’s retweeting too, on Twitter? It’s also things that are relevant to his personal brand, but it’s not him just pushing This content out there as original content – It’s like hey. I read this super great article that is Relevant to what I’m about, but it’s by this guy named Bob, So that also builds Potential relationships with other people in the industry, which is just a domino effect for potential success.
I love that And it’s really awesome too To build those relationships, because there are people that will help you build that community and that you can compliment This. Also works really. Well, in your personal lives or dating lives Like make it a conversation, If you just sit down for dinner, and you just talk about Yourselves, all the time, you’re not getting that second date, All right, I’m getting Dating advice, I love it So with social media and personal brand like yes, you wan na have Those conversations You also wan na create your own content or just let people into your life, And I love Instagram.
For that reason, Instagram stories is fantastic to just go quick little 10. Second, article of cool: this is my day. Or here’s what I’m doing and help people really relate to you and just open up I’m a huge fan of Instagram stories. It’s all about the gram. I love it Cool, so you have This great understanding of using social media For your personal brand And the next step is Really to just experiment Figure out what you can do and kind of go beyond just Staying in your comfort zone, It’s really easy to just be a thing and just post random.
Pictures of yourself all day But like if you check out Isaac’s Instagram here Yeah, I just pulled that up He’s got a lot of random stuff, There’s a ton of variety. So really what catches your eye! When you look at his profile Well, I instantly wanted To have a good chuckle’cause, I’m seeing him In a Santa Claus, outfit – And I wan na click on this, just because what could that caption possibly be And Santa Claus in April? All right, Oh well, when you Forget your hoodie at home and grab a jacket.
You have lying around to warm up and it fits perfectly. He really is living his best life and showing people how He’s living that best life. Definitely I see that And you’re right about experimentation when it comes to your personal Brand on social media, it’s not like one size fits all. Here’s your guidebook just follow that you’ll do great. No, you have to do trial and error Check the analytics and Metrics and see what works And what works for Isaac may not work for you or whoever else.
With a personal brand, You got ta experiment with Article with captions, with images with storytelling with Instagram Stories, go on and have conversations on Twitter, maybe check out LinkedIn. Whatever is relevant to your brand. Try it out At the end of the day, You’ll figure out it works, awesome, keep going and if it doesn’t scratch that off to not do in the future Yeah exactly.’Cause his audience is unique to him.
It’s personal, Hey! Look! He went to Voodoo Donuts, I’m hungry Justin. Thank you so much for coming in this was super helpful, very personable, And if you want more articles like this subscribe to our blog Look out for what we’ve done and what we’re going to do in the future.
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Today’s article is going to be a little bit different. I always get so many questions about blogging and it stops like how I got started any advice for someone who wants to start, etc, etc. So I figured why not jump on here and do a whole article just going through my entire blogging journey from the beginning.
All the way up until now, so let’s just jump straight on in when I first started blogging. I think that was all the way back in like 2016, I want to say it’s like middle 2016 and I don’t know I was like probably most of you reading now who was just makeup obsessed and also just loved, to read articles on YouTube and just into That kind of thing – and I also really really from the beginning – I always make sure to only use cruelty free stuff.
But I also started to get really really interested into product ingredients and only using brands that have less toxic ingredients in it. And that kind of thing so initially when I started vlogging, I just started on Instagram, I’m pretty much transitioned from my personal page at like a thousand followers and I just kind of turned it into a blogging page slowly so yeah that was just strictly on Instagram.
At that point, I hadn’t, how do you tube blog and I like it, wasn’t really in my mind to have one. That’s a lie I feel like it was in my mind, but I was still kind of like, like I don’t know. If I can do all of that, so it was kind of just on the back burner for that time it wasn’t until I think, chopped in 2017, so that was December 2017. When I was like you know what I want to document this process, so I article myself and carp right before my big chop.
I set up my little camera at the salon, a article that entire whole big chop situation and ended up posting it on my Instagram and I feel like. I got a lot of interest in this article and I feel like that’s when I kind of was like wow people are really saying. This is a big deal. People really want to know about this and see this journey, and so that’s when I decided that I kind of wanted to not completely let go of makeup.
Kids, honestly, that’s still like my passion and so obsessive makeup still product drunky, that’s me, but I realized that I also had something very special and unique when it came to my natural hair journey and it was just something that everyone was interested in. I got lots of questions all the time, so I was like you know what I’m going to keep on going with this. I’m going to keep people updated with my journey and kind of put more focus on that and less of a focus on makeup.
Just simply because that’s what I found people were interested in, it wasn’t until like February 2018, when I actually got it together and started my youtube blog with my first article ever it was like when I look back on it, I’m like oh cringe. It was just like a really short and sweet one-minute article, just saying hey guys, like it’s me like a little intro to my entire youtube blog and then I just did a whole bunch of little hair, tutorials, etc, etc.
So that’s pretty much how I got started when I first started. I obviously was not making any money off it. To be honest, like making money, wasn’t really in my mind, I wasn’t like going into it like. Oh, maybe I can make some extra money. Let these bloggers or rich online I feel like, if that’s your intention, blogging, probably isn’t for you, because this is really not like a get-rich-quick scheme kind of thing like it’s really not.
I really just went into it with my passion for these things and it kind of paid off. I guess so I didn’t start getting paid for a while, like it was a while. My first post was maybe like a $ 50 thing on Instagram. It really wasn’t until I started to gain a lot of traction on instagrams when I was like, like, I really need to figure out how these bloggers do get paid. It did a lot of research online like a lot when on YouTube.
When I Google read articles – and I just kind of scoured the internet to find out like how could I get paid because it’s so much work, it is so much work and so much of your time and effort that goes into it mind you to me it Was fun in a way because it was literally, like I said, she’s just my passion like I was happy to share these things, but just producing content in general. A lot of people don’t understand, like all of the things that are behind creating a piece of content.
Even just a photo, a lot of people think like selfie, easy done, but there’s planning that goes into it. I plan ahead for a week usually know what I’m going to post when I’m being good, not always like. Not always. I still have a 95 job right now currently, so it is really really hard for me to kind of juggle everything, but I try and stay as organized as possible. Applying content out people just don’t understand like how much work goes into this, but anyways back to when I first started making money.
I learned that what bloggers pretty much do is just charge on a per post basis. So what I did was I went on this website that I found called canva com. It’s actually a really great tool. If you like, digital, creating and stuff, you can create, like Instagram, post little things like it’s just a free tool that you can use online to create graphics. Pretty much so I went on canva and I created a little media sheets and the cute little media shake, and I listed out like Instagram photo for X amount of Instagram article for X amount YouTube article for XML.
The main reason why this media she was so important was that, when brands started to reach out to me, then I could just supply this them and say hey. These are my grapes. Let me know if this works boom BAM so yeah. That is pretty much still. How it works for me currently, except I like to target Browns myself as well. I feel, like people think that Browns are just reaching out to bloggers directly and boom done, but bloggers actually do a lot of work to actually target Browns themselves and reach out to them themselves and say hey.
This is what I’m capable of this is what I can offer for you are you willing to collaborate with me? That’s kind of how, like the whole Brown partnership works for me personally, I really wanted my pages, both on Instagram and YouTube, to be very, very authentic. To me, I just wanted it to stay genuine. I didn’t want it to feel commercially like I was always trying to sell stuff like I really really wanted to stay away from all of that.
So my main goal, when I transitioned into becoming more of a hair blogger, was to just encourage women from across the globe to love and embrace their natural curls. Just the way that I did because I felt like the day of I felt such a transformation and such a light inside of me, it was just I don’t know. It was life-changing for me, and I wanted to be able to encourage other people to do that and to experience that for themselves as well like to this day.
That’s really what keeps me going. That’s really my purpose and my goal for my blogs. It’s for people to just love and embrace their natural selves, so yeah without being my main goal, I always was very picky like even from the very beginning. I was very, very picky with which brands that I would work with. So, for me, when it comes to a brand and the type of brands that I work with, they one need to be 100 % cruelty, free, that’s something that I’ve stuck with from day.
One number two: it needs to be relevant to my brand and what I feel so that’s pretty much my story. I also wrote down. I have a few little pieces of advice in case you are thinking about vlogging or, if you’re trying to vlog, but you feel like it’s not going anywhere. I have a few pieces of advice from over the past few years, things that I’ve learned and things that I wish that I could tell myself when I first started.
Okay, so first piece of advice – I kind of went over this a little bit, but it’s like not bad at all. To reiterate this: do not get into blogging for the money people will be able to see through that, if you’re, not in it with your passion, if you’re not putting yourself like fully into this people will be able to see through that, and you won’t be successful. Also bond was a lot of work and especially in the beginning, you do a lot like a lot of a lot of content creating for free, that’s just the nature of the business.
You have to start somewhere build yourself up and once your followers start to grow, you can then use that to leverage payment. My second piece of advice is to visualize it. This is for somebody who’s, just starting out or even hasn’t started yet, but it’s just been in the back of your mind and you’re, really considering like how to do it, you need to visualize, like the big picture of what you’re trying to achieve.
You have to have a purpose behind it, and then you also need to visualize what it’s going to look like. Are you just going to do Instagram articles and stick to Instagram? Are you going to do YouTube? We’re going to do both? Are you going to write a blog? Are you going to have a website? You know visualize your endgame goal of like what you want, everything to look like look at your favorite bloggers on YouTube and Instagram and make notes of what you think makes them stand out and things that you like about them things you don’t like about them.
Just make note of everything know what kind of vibe you’re trying to bring across. Is it more like a sexy and boom, I’m the shit kind of thing, or is it more like a bubbly and warm, I would say like tiny, more bubbly, fun and goofy it’ll. Just make it a lot easier for you and you’ll have a better idea of what exactly you need to do in order to achieve it. My next piece of advice is to start and to start small, so, firstly, is to start like I waited so long before.
I started my youtube blog. I stalled myself because I was so I just made myself super overwhelmed and I gave myself every single reason why I couldn’t start yet. You know like oh, I need a nicer camera and I need better lighting and I can’t afford that. Yeah and buh-buh-buh-buh there’s always going to be a hundred reasons. Why you can’t start you need to find the one reason why you can and just start so starting in itself is like a major step and just know that starting small is the whole point of growth.
As you go through the process, every time you film and every time you edit, you learn different things. You learn how to articulate yourself better. You learn, oh like I need to stop saying um. Ah, whatever, like you literally learn as you go, so it’s important to get started as soon as possible, so you can hurry up, learn everything you can possibly learn and then continue to perfect your craft, just as you go.
Another piece of advice is to find your niche and just stick to it, so you’ll be able to find your niche. If you listen, it’s your audience. So, for example, in my journey, like I said, I started with makeup very makeup heavy and once I started going natural, I realized that that’s really what people were interested in what they wanted to see what they had questions about. So I was like you know what let me place a bigger focus on here and just do makeup here and there kind of thing you know so for me, my natural hair peeps, that’s my niche and when you’re creating content, you want to create content with that Niche in mind, so I’m creating my content in mind of a person who is going through a natural hair journey who is thinking about big shopping and that helps you to create content.
That is going to be useful for people when you’re creating useful content. That is when you are going to grow all right and then, once you have your niche, you got a post and you’ve got a post consistently. So that’s my next piece of advice is consistency. It is so important that I show up all the time they’re going to know Alyssa post articles on YouTube every Sunday, every Sunday they’re going to log on and wait for that article.
If you are haphazardly producing content here and there, people are going to forget about you honestly, like so many bloggers and so many different things to see online nowadays, you want to be in people’s face constantly all the time. It’s super super important to be consistent and then, as you’re going through your whole blogging career, it’s really really important to continue to set goals for yourself.
That’s one thing that I actually learned recently is something as simple, as that was just like a huge ignite and a difference for me in terms of the type of content I’m creating like in terms of everything really like setting goals is so important. But for me I have a set list of brands that I have, as my target brands brands, that I would love to collaborate with by just listing out those brands and just like having that in the back of my mind, saying: okay, this is my target that Helps me to gear my content towards that, and that way I’ll be able to position myself for an opportunity to work with that brand.
You need to have your goals like they need to be clear, set goals so that you know exactly like what you’re working towards and how to get there, because if there’s no destination like you’re, just kind of like in here doing nothing. So you need to have goals, set them, write them down. I actually have a really really great. I guess it’s an app and it’s also a website called Trello. That is where I have my little vision board.
My whole social media life is like plunder on trouble. So I have a board for my content planning any content ideas I have for like YouTube. Instagram I listed out all in there. I have a board for my vision board. So that’s where I set all my goals, target brands, etc. I have a board for like a to-do list. It’s just a really amazing tool, so check it out I’ll, also link it below alright and then my last piece of advice is something you may have gathered already from this entire long drama.
Article is that this is a journey, just as any kind of career path is like a path. It’s a journey, something you’ve got to work towards continuously blogging is the same way, so it’s very very easy to look online in see other bloggers who have already made it and think like. Oh, I can do that. That’s easy, like I’m cute, I can take cute selfies too, like it’s fine, it’s a really long journey and it’s hard there’s a lot that goes into content, creating it’s definitely one of those things where what you put into it.
It’s definitely what you’ll get out of it. There is no way that you’re going to work your ass off, producing amazing content and not get noticed if you are putting in your work. It’ll happen it’ll happen in its time. It’s really important to not look at other people and say: oh she’s, growing faster than me. I definitely definitely was guilty of that in the beginning and I would get on myself and there would be a lot of self-doubt and a lot of Tears and me wanting to give up all the time and honestly that still happens today.
But you just have to know that everything happens in its time and if you are putting in the work you will get the reward. You will just it’s just a matter of you just keep on going and that’s it you you got this. You you reading right now you got this and you can do this boom. That’s it drops mic wow I feel like I spoke forever. If you guys have any additional questions, please comment them below.
I really hope you enjoyed this and found it useful. If you did, please go ahead and give a girl thumbs up and also if you aren’t subscribed, I’m judging you just subscribe and make sure you hit that notification bell, so you can be notified every single time. A new article drops thank you guys so much for reading. I will catch
So the reason why I wanted to make this article is the other day I found an image of me having my lemonade stand at nine years old making. My coin, I feel like I was obsessed at a young age to make money, not because I was a greedy bastard and what the heck, but oh you’re, nine years old. What the heck do you know it was because I loved creating a product and seeing people’s reactions from it.
I was obsessed – okay, I literally quit high school two years ago to pursue my online business as you can see from this like mediocre background, I don’t have a ton of money, but I was able to make a full-time living off of my online business and today I’m not sure cuz how I support myself and make my money let’s get started, quickest camera. I’m very well aware that this article could come off a little bit braggy.
I don’t want to sound like that at all, like I’ve come from very humble grounds like I was not able to afford my violin lessons, I wasn’t able to afford doctor appointments like I know how hard it is to just make it by what I do want To show you guys in this article is how it’s so possible to take your passion and make a living. So I hope this article gives you that light and choosey that things are possible.
So with that being said, let’s talk about money maker number, one other than the lemonade sandwich. I don’t really count as a business just yet. My first way of making money was selling through Etsy. I use at sea in a combination with eBay, but what I would do is sell vintage dolls for 20 % more than they bought it. Actually, I think I have it right now. Let me see if I can find it literally do not judge.
I know so. Many of you guys are going to judge me for this and think I’m a freak for collecting antique dolls but uh. This is her, so it was like 2010 okay and these dolls were hot. If you guys remember Paulette dolls, please comment below cuz you’ve literally, you will be my best friend, but these pulp dolls are retail like a hundred dollars each, but I would sell them for $ 200 or three or they are always sold out.
So that is how I make my money. When I was 10 years old, I was able to make, I believe, like three hundred dollars a month by selling a doll. It was pretty good for elementary school student and I was really happy with this business because came from a passion of loving dolls and if I could share another doll with someone else, I was just super ecstatic to do so. So the pros of selling dolls or products online is that it super-fun.
I found that, like I was able to educate customers because I love the product so much. I could tell you what’s the weight of this leg? What’s the material of the hair, like I love dolls, so much that uh. I was obsessed with talking about it and that actually made me such a good marketer, because organically I was able to create a YouTube blog surrounded by dolls. So I could sell and market these products keep in mind.
This is 2010 YouTube, okay yeah, so I wasn’t so cool with the editing yet. But this is an example of some of articles I made to sell my dolls: hey guys I’ll, be selling my pull-up wigs. That I have for sale and I might be selling this – I’m not very sure, but I bought it for $ 26, but it sold out it’s in good condition. The second week I have for sale is ten dollars, no doubt about it. The cause of selling products online is it’s really not scalable.
I’m very well aware that you don’t need to scale everything, but I couldn’t sustain this business because it required you to buy like all these products ship out yourself – and I just didn’t have that time, because I was a kid so yeah. That is the cons. But I really genuinely enjoyed my career in this field. Literally guys go to your closet, find antique toys that you have and your kid pop it into eBay, and you can actually see what are people selling it for and how much lower can you sell it for and it’s really easy to turn a profit just based On products you have at home all right to drop shipping.
So when I was 10 years old, I basically was like fuck this shit. I want to sell other products than dolls and I turned to Alibaba. So during this time of YouTube, it was like the kawaii age, for basically all animal products were giving personalities. So there was this like bear called Rilakkuma. It was a famous freaking bear and I would buy these key chains of this bears face and sell it on Amazon, and I was able to make $ 5,000 a month based on that product.
The pros of shop stripping in 2011 in 2012, was there’s literally no competition. Now the cons is, it’s just now really competitive and I would say it’s pretty cost intensive, at least the way I did it. I fulfilled it out of my own home. You have to keep in mind that someone has to do those physical labor work. I’m not sure how it is right now, just because I don’t do that anymore, but that is just something to keep in mind.
Alright guys so number three of how I used to make money was freelancing. You guys, if you are a student or you’re someone who is a teenager, you want to make money. This is my best advice to get started. You don’t need to be a serial entrepreneurial. You don’t need to create a lemonade said. All you needed to do is have a single skill and make it worth for someone else, and all I did was provide photography services, my school’s hard to know me as the Instagram girl.
So I was like okay guys. If you want photos, it’s going to cost you 20 bucks a session, so I went on these photo shoots. I had this very cringy like portfolio account where I would show my clients, and I would go on these $ 20 shoots. Honestly, it was super fun like I just organically grier, my little photography business started to do senior portraits, oh and by the way, pro tip guys, suburban moms, with a little bit of cash flow or your best clients.
Okay, if you’re doing photography for senior photos, especially those moms gotcha, I would actually recommend to literally go to Zillow and type in like high income houses above like half a million dollars or a million dollars and literally go to those house areas and, like hang up Flyers or Facebook ads to hyper target them on those houses because they have more money to spend on your services like, I was able to charge a hundred and fifty dollars for senior photos, and that was Bank at my time so going to find the best customer.
I can actually afford your services if you do that. So that’s a pro tip now I feel like Jayde. I don’t have a skill in photography. How do i, freelance? I would actually recommend fiber comm? This is not sponsored. I just heard they have other virtual assistant type of tasks, whether you can do email replying for someone else or company. You can do like some bitch work, essentially there’s tons of offers on Fiverr that you can just pick up by sending up an account, and I haven’t personally done it, but I definitely know there’s way more skills and taking photos that you can do so with freelancing.
I was able to make a thousand dollars in the summer and I was a bank for me. I was just rolling in dough, so highly recommend freelancing all right. So now, for the controversial lesson of the day, a lot of people say no you’re worth when it comes to freelancing. Now I have a contradiction to that. I also think it’s just as important when getting started to do free work. I remember that I couldn’t charge people $ 20 for a photo shoot, so it just took photos on my friends to build up my portfolio for a whole year instead, and I think there’s not a lot of people talking about that, at least in what I’ve seen So I just definitely think like yes charge your coins this and get your money, but also don’t be afraid to do free work like sometimes here and there.
For my businesses, I will sometimes lose by taking projects, but I know it’s in a build of experience and build up my technique to get better. That’s just something to keep in mind, don’t be afraid of free work. Alright, so the fourth way to make money is social media. When I was around 16 or 17, that was a time I actually dropped out of high school and it was because YouTube was starting to pick up.
I make money on YouTube in three ways. One is Adsense, so I get place ads you see on this article. I got paid for affiliate links and I also got paid for sponsorships honestly for a 1 million viewed article. I get paid around 4 to 5 thousand dollars for that just coke campaign, so it was able to sustain me for like a few months and that’s why I felt a little bit more comfortable to drop out of high school at like 16 years old.
So I was making a little bit of cash from those articles. I do have to say, though, the pros starting a YouTube blog is it’s very profit friendly like you only have to invest in a camera, and my parents really did help me kind of get my feet off the ground and invest and help me get this camera. But the cons is it’s not a sustainable, as you think I definitely have articles with a million views, but I also have articles with like two thousand views and that variance and views can also correlate to income.
So I realized that, like obviously yeah, I made a few thousand dollars through YouTube articles, but I have to diversify and create a sustainable brand. So it will lead me to my other revenue streams in just a second. But that’s just something to keep in mind of wins, earning YouTube blog. You have to diversify as soon as possible, so with diversification, number five consulting. So, as my blog surpassed like a hundred thousand subscribers, I started to get approached by brands to consult for their Instagram and YouTube strategy to grow their brand, and I got paid like seventy-five dollars an hour which is pretty cool like I was able to afford apartment In LA travelled the world, it was pretty good like I made a decent living, but I definitely think it’s a tricky situation when you trade time for money, because you could be someone’s bitch easily.
So I really tried to at least you know charge more throughout the years. So now I do around $ 500 an hour give or take. I don’t do too many hourly consulting sessions anymore, because I prefer to do project-based stuff. I just find that training money for time can easily become a job like I didn’t start a business to get employed by someone. I started a business to create my vision, so it’s really important if you guys do do consulting like just to be very mindful of that, because, yes, it’s very profitable, but you can easily be someone else’s bitch.
If you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re just not charging enough for it, because I’ve lost more money, sometimes by consulting because it took me a flight to get there come back book. A hotel like I’ve definitely lost money. So just to be mindful of that profit and cost me guys, if you’re so far and trying this article make sure to give this article a like to. Let me know that you’re doing it subscribe to this blog for more articles about entrepreneurship.
Alright number! Six! Now I currently make money through software in my own products, so basically after consulting like I said, I just became very, very tired of just trading money for time and I realize, like my dream, has always to build a product like since the lemonade stand days. I was just obsessed creating experience, I just didn’t do it anymore, just like it was so sorry, I’m being dramatic.
I was just super grateful for those opportunities. Of course, like I’m, not saying, I’m not grateful for those consulting sessions, but I am saying, though, is I knew that it was time to start something new. So, a year ago, with my co-founder, I started a text message. Software called PBJ app, and this has been amazing journey. Pbj is a text message platform for brands to use to grow their business and for every customer we get it’s around fifteen hundred dollars and the pro of software is that it’s very scalable, like adding one user.
Doesn’t cost us too much money, however, the biggest cons of doing software is it’s very capital intensive at the start, like we probably put in over a hundred thousand dollars into your platform so far, and we still have another half a million dollars to go to finish. Our platform like it is not cheap and I literally pour every lick drip of money. I have into this project cuz. I really believe in it, but yeah, that’s just one of the cons of building your product, but I love it.
I really love our platform and, if you guys want to know more information about my text, message pod for I’ll just put information in the description box and you guys can check it out around the same time I started PBJ. I also started East Lake, which is a food box. I’m not going to go too much in detail about this project, but I started a food subscription box company. Don’t ask why I just pull myself into very interesting opportunities that don’t really make sense all the time, but yeah each box is thirty dollars, so we don’t make a ton of profit honestly on the boxes.
We actually lose more money, but yeah. That is another revenue stream that I’m currently working on and really trying hard to build and hopefully become profitable. I actually have a whole article about how apps don’t make money. I will link it up here in the cards on the description box. If you guys want to know why most companies aren’t profitable, alright guys so to break it down, you saw six ways of how I make money, and now I’m going to show you guys where I make my money, mostly so 30 % of my revenue, I would Say is from piaget gap its customers that pay us to use our text message platform, then the other 30 % is consulting.
I could sold for Shopify brands to grow the business for e-commerce. My father and I have kind of worked on that together, another 30 %. I do make from YouTube whether it’s ads sponsorships. I definitely think that YouTube has brought me so many opportunities with that and, lastly, how this like little sliver percentage, our just random gigs that I do like I do have each like. I have a couple other side.
Hustles I like have an obsession with running businesses, as you can tell like. If there’s a lemonade stand opportunity, I’m jumping on it so yeah, I definitely spread myself a little thin. Sometimes my main focus has always been PBJ consulting and youtube. So those are the ways I curly make money, hey guys. So I just say thank you so much for reading today’s article, if you guys want to know more about entrepreneurship and how I spend my money, give this article a thumbs up and shout out to the comment winner.
That’s supposed to be beach for the next step. This comment: if you have any questions about business finance, I’m not an expert. I actually don’t have his savings. If you guys want to know a whole article about why I don’t have savings, let me know – and I can talk about how I spend my money – I’d love to hear thoughts. Thank you guys. So much for reading and I’ll see you guys in the next one.
We need to do my makeup just a little bit, just the slight something white, something sample, look who’s running in, say: hi, hey, alright! So in this article today we are going or I am going to be, showing you my lash room here at home. I do lash from home, I am licensed, don’t get it listed.
Okay, if I really anywhere to work out cuz, I don’t want to work for nobody. I kind of just want to work on my own, make my own money or something to give it to nobody. I’ve been looking for like a rental space, but here where I’m from or where I’m at personally there’s not really any buildings where we can rent a like a space. I think they are building one a little bit down the road, but until then I’m working from home and I’ve been working from home for almost two three years now, so I’m going to show you my little setup I have here is a little cute.
Oh, what of aww umm but just keep reading, because I do have my 1k giveaway in this article, so keep reading. Ok! So when we first walked in here we have this space that is so Kade 1k giveaway. But I have nothing on this wall. I was kind of thinking I would do like a setup right here, ish and kind of film and use that as like my back drop type of wall but anyways. I do have a fan right here on the floor because honey it gets hot as hell with this ring light.
I have a little chair set up here. This right here is a little shaker that I use for my glue. I kind of plug it in here. Sometimes got my little chair and then as we get over here, I have my wall, so be you be beautiful. I have some cleansers just a little sign, some nice flowers and then so here is my shelf of goodies. I originally had a shelf kind of thing here, but I felt like this room looked very crowded, so I took it off and I bought these shelves on Amazon I’ll link everything down below.
I bought these cute little cubby thingies from Amazon as well. Here I have my iPads and I have my tape. I have business cards. Aftercare cards might raise my goody glue in my rice. I have this right here for cleaning and then I pass them when they have runny eyes. Another tray. Here I have my water, my lash cleaner, my brushes my glue rings and then here I kind of just have a few manuals. My fan, the tweezers that I use currently in there, my dental mirror and then up on that shelf.
I have my waxing stuff, along with my barber side, to clean my tweezers, so I have my waxing stuff there that there’s nothing really in there. It’s kind of thing for you here I do have my certificates. I have my certification of completion for eyelash, and I have so many more in here in this little folder like so many more certificates and stuff. I just have a hung up because I like to hang with the same frame, but I can’t find that frame at IKEA because that’s where I originally got it and then my school diploma up there for aesthetician license so and then we get down to this goody Right here, so I have oh that’s nasty.
I have my wax here. My sticks here, my waxing strips some more sticks, hand sanitizer, essential some larger waxing strips a hard wax. My laksa, I can’t say it out loud because and then she’s going to try to record or she’s going to try to listen, but I got my hard beads here: some more sticks down there, just extra stuff and then down at the bottom bottom. I have my teeth: whitening equipment, so I have gloves and then I have all my teeth – whitening stuff here so yeah, that’s my little cart here and then I have to the gem equipment here and then right.
Next to it. I have my teeth: whitening LED light. So then we get over here we have my. The lighting in here is so bad, so we got my bed. We have my ring light, which is why I have the fan to kind of face me when I’m lashing, because when I have this down here, that is hitting them, and it’s hitting me as well and it gets really hot. So then I have this mirror that I custom-made so I bought the big mirror at Walmart last year for Black Friday was $ 15.
So I was like you know what this is ugly. Let me DIY it, so I did I put some flowers. I was going to go all the way around with flowers, but momma was, like just add some bling. So that’s what I did. I added some bling hello. I got these little frame things from Target there when it’s Christmas time they put out a whole bunch of different decor, and I got those during the Christmas time and I just put some Christmas lights up.
They’ve been up but they’re never on, and here is another mirror that I di wide a long time ago and I used to live at home. I have a TV, yes, it works, but it’s never on and in here is kind of like nobody ever looks or sees in this closet. You guys, so I have like all my jackets that don’t fit in my closet. In my room I have backdrops. I have my mannequin head for when I decide to make wig my body.
Contouring kit is in there like the gel, the everything I need for body contour in there, my old light um just junk pretty much lashes stuff, my Barber’s um yeah. This is junk in here pretty much that I don’t really necessarily pull out for any need. So this is always closed, so you walk in it’s always closed and then down here. I kind of just have a few products and shipping stuff. So I have like all my trays and stuff in there.
I have shipping stuff in there and I have a whole bunch of cool rings and stuff in there. So that’s kind of where I keep all my supplies. Alongside of right here, I kind of have my go-to trays that I have in order right there and guys if you have any way of how to take glue off of a wall. Let me know I know how to take it off the floor. Pretty much. I just put the remover and it comes off, but off the wall I don’t know how to take it off without actually damaging the wall.
So let me know if you guys know any way of taking this off the wall. Now, let’s get into the fun part. Okay, you guys um if you’re part of the Instagram people who came to subscribe to me. The secret emoji is a crown emoji yeah. So comment account emoji down below in this article and go comment it on the photo that I’m about to post again for the giveaway on the basics, Co on Instagram and you will be entered to win this thing of goodies for the giveaway.
I do have three eyeshadow palettes. I have this rain by covergirl eyeshadow palette right here. I do have three more freshest morphe brushes in here. I have three so good, so for eyeshadow palettes in total, I have the warrior three by julius. I have the warrior two by julius and i’m moving here, showing you guys, I’m not even in frame and then I have the Nubian. So I have the Nubian yeah. What were your two and the warrior three.
So in total you guys are getting four pallets. Very beautiful colors and all up in his grill, I got lip balm. Facial mask a few of them actually keep itself clean honey with these facial masks against make facial masks with these facial masks, make sure you’re washing your face, and I put some mists clear. No make clear facial water here to clean bath bombs a whole lot of the basic items, so we have the mini glasses.
We have the squeezy lost lip glosses. We have one and I last year, another eyelash here and then we have the three here boy. Three here, so you got one two, three, four, five, five eyelashes in total. You get the Gucci shades here, these so mama. These are the only shades that I use. Actually, then we got the bigger glosses. I made sure I put all of them in here, so we got the bigger glosses here.
This is my absolute favorite gloss right here. You guys, um. You got the two lip liners. You get a booty blender, you get anklets the gold and the silver that is on line mascara, eyeliner and pomade. For your eyebrows. Not tell me you guys, like all you have to do, is go comment. The crown emoji down in this article and down and the photo that is related to this giveaway. It doesn’t matter which photo as long as it’s part of the giveaway.
You guys go comment, the crown emoji and you will be entrance for a chance to win all of this stuff and honestly, you might be done one back front because he’s running around throwing it around like if it’s a ball. So this is your hole. Give of course, you’re going to get it in a package like in the mail or whatever, but this is what kind of where I’m keeping it stored for right now: okay, yeah! You guys are getting that lavender bath Bob you’re only getting this beth mom, because you hear he’s just throwing it around like.
If it’s a ball, don’t have kids, you guys don’t got kids, and I hope you guys, like this article, don’t forget to Like comment, share and subscribe to your girl. Oh don’t forget to comment account. Emoji, see you guys in my next article UUM up up. I see you move, you move, you move, try to rope, stop cleansing! Spa he’s over here. Touching everything! Ah, stop touching Shh! Oh get it! Oh my god. Don’t have kids! You guys he’s not even mine enough.
That’s exactly why you guys aren’t getting the lavender bath! Mom because he thinks it’s his ball to to kind of throw around so yeah. Actually I’m going to sum one day like the I go through with this little kid because he’s not the angel everybody thinks he is this boy. So, okay, I’m trying to record edit right, have to do with thought. I let you guys see.