Add Multiple Links to Your Instagram & Take Advantage of Instagram Bio Link

In this article, I will be sharing a trick about creating a splash page, where you can provide multiple links and then get a single link that you can put in the bio of Instagram. As of January 2020, Instagram has got 1 billion active monthly users. Out of which 500 million users check out their Instagram daily. The collectively post over 500 million stories and over a hundred million videos and photos on Instagram feed. So the number can tell you that it’s a big platform where you must have a presence. A couple of years ago, I wrote a handy guide to get a decent amount of following on Instagram, some parts of the article are still relevant. If you are an influencer or a blogger, who uses Instagram, I am sure you may have read a lot of articles about how you can utilise Instagram. Aside from the smart use of locations, #hashtags, and beautiful photographs, there is one more area you can take advantage of, and it’s the bio section. You may be aware that you cannot put clickable links in your posts on the Instagram feed, and the only place where the link is clickable is the bio section, where you can put only one link. Instagrammers are already taking advantage of the bio section, all they have to do is, write down a call to action in each of their posts and ask users to check out the link in the bio to find more details revolving around that post.

Use Splash Page / Landing Page Services

While it is okay for a lot of people, you can do better. What if you do not have to change Aaj the link in the bio section every time you post something new? What if the users land on a Splash page, where the content dynamically changes, and have got every element you want to showcase to this new curious user who clicked on the link in your Bio section. There are already a handful of services available, that easily lets you create Splash pages. One of the oldest one is About.me. About.Me started in the last decade and has evolved a lot ever since it has added more features which I think Instagrammers can take advantage. Although most of their features come under their Pro version, you can still benefit from the features included in the free version. And the free version of about me as a feature where you can showcase your podcasts or videos from platforms like YouTube, and the best part is it can also dynamically change whenever there is a new podcast or video. It is helpful because you won’t have to change the link in the bio, every time you update something on your other platform in want let your Instagram followers know about it. Natively you can use other services such as Create which is more premium but is also easy to use, Create we are also let you that up Splash pages for your Instagram followers, which you can put in the bio section. Ideally, you can put any link on Instagram by a section that can take the user on a webpage where you can mention more than one thing, suggest the collection of items.

Create A Custom Page on Your Blog for Instagram

Because you can create a custom page, specially designed for your Instagram users, and when I say specially designed for Instagram users, it means it should have elements which Instagram users would be interested in. If you want to connect with your Instagram followers on a different platform, Youtube Aur Facebook, you can put this link on the Splash page, and you can put a link to your blog posts. Here is an example of a Splash page for one of my Instagram accounts. It is a brand Instagram account which also has got a website, so I simply created a dedicated Splash page. It is a blog about my local city where I am currently living, and I use Instagram for teachers of the videos and a mix of content that I put up on my website and YouTube. So on the Splash page, I have a button to let the users watch my latest video on YouTube and also links to other social media platforms where they can follow for updates. And then at the bottom, there are articles from the blog. I currently show three of the most recently published blogs on the Splash page and then a button that will take them to the homepage. So the next time I have to tell my followers to go check out the recently published article or video I can simply ask them to check out the link in the Instagram bio, which is easier for a lot of people, rather than going to another platform and then checking out the content all by themselves. I use the Newspaper Theme, on my blog, which has several options to design a page, input the elements required, so you don’t have to know coding are web designing. It’s an awesome theme, and I have written a review of it on the blog. The wordpress theme is currently on its version 10 and has improved a lot since then.

Convert Your Articles into Audio Podcast for Free in WordPress

0
A lot of you will agree to the fact that audio format is an easy way to consume content, in comparison to reading for watching something because it requires our full attention. This is the reason why podcasts are so popular for consuming informational content because they can be consumed while driving or even while working out. But it is a little tricky for everyone to create podcasts. Not everyone is comfortable recording your voice and putting it up there for public examination. If you are a blogger who writes an article and wants to reach a wider audience, here is an opportunity for you to create podcasts out of your articles, that too for free. In this blog post, we are going to take a look at how we can turn articles in audio. And not just that, we will embed the audio write inside our blog post the users have an option to listen to the article instead of just reading them. You can also take the audio and distribute it on platforms like SoundCloud, or even YouTube.

How to Turn Articles into Audio Format Automatically in WordPress

To convert the articles into audio, we will use a service created by Amazon and is a part of their ASW (Amazon Web Services). It is known as an Amazon Polly. It converts texts into lifelike speech and keeps the audio files saved on their cloud server. Since it is a premium service, you’ll have to pay for it, but it does have a free tier. Here is an excerpt from the pricing page for Amazon Polly. The free tier includes 5 million characters per month for speech or Speech Marks requests, for the first 12 months, starting from your first request for speech. For Neural voices, the free tier includes 1 million characters per month for speech or Speech Marks requests, for the first 12 months, starting from your first request. You are billed monthly for the number of characters of text that you processed. Amazon Polly’s Standard voices are priced at $4.00 per 1 million characters for speech or Speech Marks requests (when outside the free tier). Amazon Polly’s Neural voices are priced at $16.00 per 1 million characters for speech or Speech Marks requested (when outside the free tier). For example, this post has roughly 7000 characters (updated after published). So, if you use the Neural voices, which has 1 million character requests in the free tier, you can convert approximately 140 articles.

Install AWS for WordPress Plugin

You will have to install a plugin inside your WordPress blog. The name of the plugin is AWS for WordPress. Go to the plugins area, click on add new and then search for the plugin. Once it appears, you can click on the install button and then activate the plugin. Once the plugin is activated, you will find its option appearing below settings. When you land on the General tab inside a table, you will find that you will have to type AWS Access key as well as the Secret Key. To get these access and secret key, you will have to click on the link mentioned below. Create an AWS Account, created an account on AWS, and log into the AWS management console, search for IAM. Or click on the direct link here. Once you are on the page, it might look a little intimidating, but trust me, it is not. Click on Users. For me, it is showing one user since I already was using one of the services from AWS. For you, it might show 0 users. Click on Users, and on the next page, you will get the option to add a new user, click on the button ‘Add User,’ and you will be taken to the next page, where you will have to write down the username. You can be a little descriptive by using your domain name or the website name, along with the service you intend to use this for. For me, Lifetippr is the website name, and speech is the service I’ll be using it for. Once you have selected the name, click on Next. On the next page, select ‘Attach existing policies directly’ Indian search for ‘WordPress’ in the policies.  Select the policy which reflects in the results and click on Next. This page is optional, where you can add the text so that you can organize the services better. If you are not planning to use a lot of services, you can skip this and click Next. On the next page, you have to click on ‘Create User’ and go to the next page, where you will be able to see the access key ID and secret access key for the user you just created. You can use these in the WordPress plugin with just installed. After typing the Access key ID and Secret access key, the third option is to select the region. I would suggest you select the region closer to the majority of your visitors. But you have to keep in mind that some features like neural voices would only be available in all regions having the US and UK English. So, for the sake of this article, we will be keeping it US East.  After you are done, click on save changes, and then click on Text-to-Speech, found below General under AWS options. Keep the English language selected, and check the box to enable text-to-speech support, and click on Save changes. You will notice several options appearing on the page. This is where you will be able to select the voice for your podcast from several options available. It has voices available for English US and English UK, English Australian, and English Indian, with different male and female voices. The other option is to enable neural text to speech, which will offer a more natural, human-like sound. [note note_color=”#fffda6″ text_color=”#333333″ radius=”5″]Note: As we talked earlier in the article, Neural voices have only 1 million character requests in the free tier, and also costs 4x the standard (which is $16 per million characters). [/note] If you have neural text to speech enabled, there are two styles available, one is the Newscasters style, and the other one is conversation style. You can pick the one which you feel is right for your type of article. If you have a website that covers news articles, then the newscaster style would be a perfect fit; otherwise, you can go for the conversation style. By default, the WordPress plugin embeds the audio player inside your article, and you can select the position of the player on this page by default it is before post, so I suggest you keep it that way. You can use a descriptive label to the player, such as Listen, Play the Audio, etc. Then at the end of the page, there is an option to display or hide ‘Powered by AWS,’ you can do as per your liking and then click on save changes. The changes are saved, you can go to the post editor area in your WordPress blog, and open any existing article. In the screenshot below, you will find that the Amazon Polly WordPress plugin will give you the option to select the voice for individual articles as well. You can also enable or disable the feature for individual posts. Click on the update button for the article to publish a new article it will take a few seconds for the audio to get generated. When you go to the particular article, you will notice the podcast player would appear before your article starts, giving your readers an option to listen to the article. I am currently using different voices for different types of blogs, and the sound does feel natural. I am currently in the free tier, but I may continue doing so for some of my blogs.

Convert Your Words into Podcasts and Publish on Audio Platforms

Show the above method is used for converting your articles into audio so that your readers have the option to listen to the articles, not just read them. You can go one step further and turn your articles into podcasts and publish them on audio platforms like SoundCloud. This allows you to reach a wider audience who are not into reading articles but love to listen to informative content. You have the option to download the audio files converted using the WordPress plugin, or you can directly do it using Amazon Polly from the AWS Management Console, here is the direct link. It lets you convert up to 3000 characters into audio format and download them immediately so that you can use them elsewhere as a podcast. It means even if you do not have got a blog are you do not want to create podcasts out of your articles. We can still use this feature directly first to write down and then convert it into audio. If you follow this particular article, you will know how you can turn your audio into the video so that you can upload it even on YouTube since YouTube is also one of the popular Pro platforms where people prefer to listen to informative content.

How to Secure Your WordPress Site from Hackers

Did you know that on average, around 30,000 new websites are hacked every day? If you do not give attention to this fact and not secure your WordPress site, your website might be one of them. And I can say that from my experience, and I am not talking about your website taken over by someone else, I am talking about the hacks that you won’t even realize. Something that happened to me on one of my sites. The hacker was so smart that he added my IP address so that I wouldn’t find anything suspicious when I open my website, and only the people who are visiting the website from search engines would be affected. And not even everyone. The installed scripts that would randomly take my visitors to some random pages filled with pornography and adult content. So embarrassing, I know, and that’s why I have added that extra layer of security on all my WordPress sites. In this article, you will learn how you can do that as well. Or

Watch the Video Instead

Do not use Nulled WordPress Themes and Plugins

Your computer can get attacked if you use infected websites to download pirated software or movies. The strange thing is, your computer can still get infected if you did browser any such website to download anything. It can happen if your computer does not have an anti-virus installed. The same thing can happen to your website as well. It can get infected with malicious codes if you have been using pirated themes on your WordPress blog, which means downloading paid items from pirated websites. So, I strongly urge you not to download WordPress Theme and Plugins from such sources. It’s okay if you can not afford a premium theme or plugin right now, there are so many free ones available, and there are plugins available with free versions. Try using these free versions of WordPress theme and plugin until you can afford the premium version.

Install Wordfence WordPress Plugin

Just like your computer requires an anti-virus, your WordPress website also requires something that keeps on scanning your website and makes sure that your website does not get attacked by hackers. Wordfence WordPress Plugin is my choice of security plugin for WordPress that I use on all my websites. I’ve previously written an article about how to find if your WordPress site is hacked. This goes electric in-depth about how you can scan your website to find if there is any malicious code already installed so that you can get rid of it. Even if you do not find anything fishy at the time of installing, I would suggest you keep it installed so that it keeps your website safe by doing regular scans. Apart from that, it also has got a Firewall that will prevent any hacker from making malicious attacks on your website.

Install All in One Security Plugin

The other WP Plugin I suggest everyone install is, All In One Security Plugin. The security plugin limits the login attempts by people on your website will record your IP address so that it can block it out to prevent your website. In the plugin settings page, you can customize the settings, such as the number of attempts you want the person to make, before blocking them out, giving them the option to request unblock the username, which is helpful if you run A multi-author blog. Once you install this plugin up, it will show you the number of items made by different people on your website, and you will be shocked to see how many people are attempting to log into your account.

Start using a secured password

If you are and already falling at the start doing it right now. Do not use passwords you have used elsewhere. So many data breaches keep happening worldwide, and if you are using the same password on different accounts, the same password can be part of a data breach, and hackers might try to get into your online accounts. You can use WordPress inbuilt password generator which gives you a pretty strong password.

Setup SSL on Your Website

Another important point is to set up SSL on your website. This will not only allow you to have a secure connection while logging into your account so that no one can steal your password when you are on open Wi-Fi connections. Apart from that, SSLs are also now one of the ranking factors of Google. And you don’t have to worry about spending money on and as you can set up free SSL certificates using services like Letsencrypt. We have previously written an article telling users how they can use free SSL on Serverpilot. Serverpilot is a more natural way to host your website on Digital Ocean. Although the article is specifically about setting up free SSL on Serverpilot, you can pretty much do it on any server, with the help of Google. (all let me know in the comments I should make a tutorial about it as well).

ManageWP Lets you Manage Multiple WordPress Sites from a Single Dashboard

0
I wrote about ManageWP in 2015, while most of the information is still at element because it’s an amazing tool for WordPress Admins, a lot has changed in the last 3 years. So I have added some more information to make this article is relevant in 2020 and beyond.  A blogger is a very creative person, he wears more than one hat at a time as he is the one who creates content, promotes it and looks after the maintenance of his blog. You know all that stuff, keeping the WordPress versions and All the plugins updated, looking after the drafts and scheduling the posts etc. It’s a full-time job, or perhaps a job of more than one person. Multiply that with the number of blogs you own and the pain gets multiplied as well. If only there was a way to make things automated so that you don’t have to worry too much about the maintenance part. If you own multiple WordPress blogs, you will find this post very useful as I am going to tell you about an ultimate service that makes managing multiple WordPress blog as easy as eating a piece of a cake. ManageWP_SiteUpdate ManagaWP gives you the ability to add all your WordPress blogs to your account and manage them just from a single Window. There is a similar service we covered on the blog a while ago that lets it’s users monitor the web data from a single dashboard. But unlike Cyfe, ManageWP also lets you publish posts on your blogs from a single window. ManageWp_Multisite So, with ManageWP, you can do more than just keeping your WordPress versions and Plugins updated. Features like Moving and copying WordPress plugins or the Whole WordPress blog to a different domain is an ultimate time saver. If you are someone who runs a business of providing blog services, you can also offer a service of maintaining their blogs charging them monthly or annually. Just add them to your ManageWP account which will make the process of maintenance very easy. Even if you decide to use ManageWP for your own network of blogs, it still has a lot to offer. You might want to use the same type of contact or about or policy page on all your blogs, you can easily duplicate the pages on all your blogs. ManageWP_Dashboard Imagine how sorted the life can be when you can see all your posts, comments, stats on different blogs from a single window. ManageWP offers exactly that. ManageWP has a premium revenue model, so going premium can get you more features if you really want the hands-free experience that can save you some more time to create content for your blogs.

Connect Unlimited Websites for Free

ManageWP has changed to their pricing model, and now you can add unlimited websites in the free plan. And you get a bunch of free add-ons or features that you can use. Such as, manage and update plugin somethings from a single dashboard, monthly cloud backup, one click login, collaborate with team and clients, manage comments, and much more. The free account of ManageWP lets you add 5 domains and has some features locked, for example, you cannot manage users on your blogs, cannot create sub-users for ManageWP account, no bulk publishing of posts and pages either. But their standard and professional plans are still very affordable at $0.80 and $2.40 per domain respectively. Plus Annual Plans give you two months for free.

You also get premium add ons that you can get for your websites.

Such as, taking backups will cost $2/month per website, you can get white label for $1/month per website. It will allow you to to customise the branding of WordPress dashboard where you can set your own logo and hide plugins you do not want your clients to see. There are other Addons also available, surcharge uptime monitor for $1/month per website. There is automatic Security Check as well as automatic performance check along with link monitor all of which cost $1/moth per website. So there are really a lot of features included in ManageWP. I have been using this service to manage 5 of my blogs from the free account and I am still loving the ability to manage them from one place. It definitely saves a lot of time even with the free account. Get 15% OFF on Professional and Business Accounts Sign up now

How to Find If My WordPress Site is Hacked?

It doesn’t matter if you are a newbie blogger or an experienced blogger, security of your WordPress blog should be your number one priority. But a lot of people are not aware of it, and they don’t care. Or, they do not know if their site is hacked. Because there are many types of hacks, a WordPress site can be hacked and infected with something malicious even if you see it being loaded in your browser, usually. You are noticing people visiting your blog just like any other day. I can see this from personal experience. One of my blogs was hacked and infected with malicious code, and I came to know about it six months later. Since the website was pretty small, and whenever I opened it, once a week, it was running fine. I came to know about it only when I tried visiting from the search engine while looking for rankings. I was redirected to A fishy website, which was one of those scam sites that you come across. The surprising thing, it only happened once, and when I tried visiting my website through the search engine, it did not happen again. After a lot of research, I came to know that it was randomly redirecting search engine users so that no one can find out if it is hacked.

How to find if your website is hacked?

Even if something like this doesn’t happen to you, I will strongly advise you to follow the steps mentioned below to find out if your website is hard or not. It is a healthy exercise, and you should be doing it on all your web properties, which has got WordPress.

Install WordFence Security Plugin

Install the WordFence from the WordPress plugins repository. New website and let you know if something fishy is going on. Once you have installed and activated and setup the WorFence WordPress plugin, go to the Scan area of the plugin and start scanning your website. If the plugin finds something malicious, it will give you a list of all the files that have got the issue. It also offers an easy way to delete all the files that were infected and were not part of the core WordPress. But there would still be some files left, which you cannot delete because the course was injected in the core WordPress files. For such files, you will have to edit the WordPress core files. You need an FTP client to access the root directory of your website and then open the file to make edits. I would recommend you use FileZilla which is available for both Mac and PC. Alternatively, you can also use File Manager Plugin which also gives you the root access of your server. Using this, you can open the infected file and remove the malicious codes. Once you have removed the codes from infected files and deleted the files that could be deleted, go to the advanced settings of the scan and enable us to scan the folders and files outside of the WordPress directory, so that it can find other infected files if it has been placed elsewhere. Enabling this will increase the scanning time because it will have to scan more files and folders, but it is totally worth it because sometimes you may find infected files outside of your WordPress.

Optimize WordFence Firewall

Once you are done with that I would suggest you to go to the firewall section of Wordfence and click on optimize WordFence firewall, it will ask you to download the .htaccess the file for backup and will automatically update with quotes that will maximize the WordPress firewall. You will immediately notice, the WordFence firewall score increases from 35 % to 55% or maybe even more. It is the setting I am using for the past few years, and I did not find any issue. I would suggest you read another article talking about how you can secure your WordPress blog so that you can keep the hackers and attackers at bay.

A Step by Step Guide to Start a Food Blog

Start_Food_Blog
If you want to be successful at blogging, make sure you love what you choose to write about, and if you love food, love trying different recipes. Here is a guide for you to learn how to create a successful food blog. Having created a successful food blog myself for my wife, I am going to tell you the exact process you need to follow to set up your food blog all by yourself.

Choosing and Buying a Domain Name

You must be aware that you need to buy a domain to set up a blog on, many people turn down their idea of creating a blog just because they have to deal with all the technicalities of buying a domain name and setting up a blog on it. Use Godaddy.com to register your domain name, there are many more companies but I like GoDaddy. Recommended Reading: Tips to Choose a Perfect Domain Name for Your Blog. It’s not that tough to buy a domain name and doesn’t cost much either (only $10/year), decide a name you want to choose as your domain name, it can be your full name, or it can be something descriptive, for example, foodmagic, foodmagazine, evergreenrecipes, etc. While all these fancy names might not be available now, but you can still try by combining two words to make a unique name for your blog. Also, make sure you can get the twitter and Facebook username using the same term; it will help you in branding. For example, twitter.com/foodmagic, facebook.com/foodmagic and so on, But don’t be sad if you have found a good name for your domain name and it is not available on Twitter or Facebook, you can always use _ or prefix/suffix to your social media profiles.

Buy Hosting and Connect Your Domain Name with it

Now that you have bought a domain name, you have to buy the hosting for your blog. Hosting, in plain English, means a remote hard disk where all your blog content will get saved and gets browsed by people who visit your site. The companies that offer hosting, maintain these hard disks that are always connected to the internet. The most recommended hosting is Hostgator; it is the hosting I am using for this blog. There is another excellent company called Bluehost, which is equally popular. Choose any of the above, and you will thank me later for the ease of use they bring for users. Choose the plan that lets you host one domain name, if you plan to expand and create multiple blogs later, you can buy the other plan that lets you host multiple domain names. [pricing_table] [plan name=”Hostgator” price=”3.96″ before=”$” period=”per month” btn_url=”https://asiogroup.net/go/hosting/” btn_target=”blank” btn_text=”Sign Up” btn_background=”#C2353A”]
  • Single Domain
  • Unlimited Storage
  • Unlimited Bandwidth
[/plan] [plan name=”Bluehost” price=”4.95″ before=”$” period=”per month” featured=”yes” btn_url=”https://asiogroup.net/go/BlueHost/” btn_text=”Sign Up” btn_background=”#C2353A”]
  • Unlimited Domains
  • Unlimited Storage
  • Unlimited Websites
[/plan] [plan name=”Hostgator” price=”6.36″ before=”$” period=”per month”  btn_url=”https://asiogroup.net/go/hosting/” btn_text=”Sign Up” btn_background=”#C2353A”]
  • Unlimited Domains
  • Unlimited Storage
  • Unlimited Bandwidth
[/plan] [/pricing_table] When you register for either of them, you will get an email with the information that is required to connect your domain name with the hosting, Find Nameserver values in your email and put them in your domain by going to GoDaddy. It will take a few hours for nameservers to propagate and connect the domain name with hosting.

Setting up the Blog on the Domain

Now that you have bought a domain name, hosting and have connected them, you have to set up the blog on your domain. We use the WordPress.org script for our blog, which is the most popular platform for blogging; it powers over 40% of the websites on the internet, which is enormous. The hosting services offer a one-click solution to install WordPress on the server, so the process is smooth. Download the eBook to set up your first blog

[sociallocker]eBookCover2 Set up a Blog Download [/sociallocker]

If you still don’t get it, I have written an eBook explaining about it, it is for some other blog the process of setting up a blog is almost the same. Download the eBook from above.

Installing Plugins on Your Blog

This is the step where you will realize how awesome WordPress really is, it lets you install plugins that lets you increase the functionality of your blog without doing and coding stuff. We will be installing a few plugins that I am using on my food blog. Here is a list of Plugins Akismet: For preventing your blog from spam comments etc. Contact Form 7: For Creating contact forms, like this one. Easy Social Share Buttons: Beautiful share buttons, these will cost you $12, you can use Digg Digg which is free. Evergreen Post Tweeter: Food Recipes are timeless posts, you can use this plugin to tweet your older posts which will help you get more visitors from Twitter. Go Codes: This plugin is useful if you plan to monetize the blog using affiliates, this plugin will turn those long urls into sweet one which will be much easier to remember. Google XML Sitemap: Use this plugin to create Sitemaps, which is very important for your blog to get indexed in Google quickly. JectPack by WordPress: Jetpack is a plugin that has too many great features like Wp-Stats, Endless Scroll, Short Links etc. jQuery Pin it Button for Images: This plugin will enable a ‘Pin it’ button on your images, which is a great way for visual content to get shared on Pinterest. Quick Adsense: This is a great plugin to put ads (not just Adsense Ads) in different areas of your blog, like below post, above post, afters 1st paragraph, after 1st image etc. SEO Friendly Images: It tags the images with the title of the post, which makes it useful for people to land on your blog when they do image search for a particular term. W3 Total Cache: Optimize your blog and improve your site speed. Wp-Optimize: It helps you delete spam comments, post revisions, empty tables in the database. Will be helpful in the long run. WP Smush.it: You will use High-Quality images of your recipes, which will be very large-sized images that will take up a lot of bandwidth on the server, and will make your site slow. This plugin will decrease the size of images without decreasing the quality of images. Rich Schema: It’s a lovely plugin to put rich data into your posts that will reflect in the Google search and make your blog stand out in the search results. WordPress SEO by Yoast: Being a newbie, your whole focus should be on creating quality content. Still, the least you can do to help your blog with SEO is install this plugin and do a little bit of on-page SEO, like proper title, tags, etc. [shadow][note]Remember: You can install as many plugins you want, but that doesn’t mean you should install hundreds of plugins. It takes resources of your hosting servers and will result in slowing your blog down, so use the only plugins you want, the above list is enough. [/note][/shadow]

Designing Your Food Blog

Now, the design part is interesting, you might think it’s beyond your limits, but it’s the power of WordPress themes that let you create nice designs without actually doing any coding stuff at all. I am using Newspaper Theme on my food blog, (Evergreen Recipes) and I created that design in less than 40 minutes and that too without any coding stuff at all. WP-Prosperity is a fantastic theme that lets you create any layout you want. I have been recommending this theme to every blogger, no matter which niche they are into. I am using it on this blog as well. Here is a list of amazingly beautiful WordPress themes for a Food blog we have tried and tested and recommend to everyone.

Publishing Recipes on the blog

[shadow][note]Remember: Consistency is the key to a successful blog, try to be regular, whether you post one recipe a day or 2 recipes a week, try to follow the routine, you will see great results[/note][/shadow] Use of Categories and Tags Now that you are all set to post recipes to your blog let’s understand the use of Categories and Tags to organize your recipes accurately. Categorize the recipes into parts like Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Healthy Recipes, Fast Food, etc. What you can do is create different categories for the type of recipes you will be posting daily. Use Tags like Drinks, Pasta, Tomato, Salt-Free, Sugar-Free, 5 Minute Recipes, etc. and use them for recipes you put in different categories, as one type of Pasta can be in Lunch. The other can be in dinner, or a recipe from any category can be under the tag of 5 Minute recipes. The same goes for drinks, tomato, salt-free, etc. The basic funda is to link to similar kind of recipes into one post easily, or, say, someone asks for salt-free of sugar-free recipes, you can give them the link of the tag or mention it in a blog.  It has many uses and makes life easy once you have a lot of recipes posted on the blog. Formatting the Recipe Posts Decide a format for your recipes and stick with it. It will be easy for regular readers to understand your methods; the proper format is crucial for a blog’s success. Usually, food bloggers post the main photo of their recipes on the top. Then they provide preparation time, ingredients, etc., there they write the method along with step by step photos followed by the final images of the recipe. It is the format we have been using on our food blog since day one, and it has been appreciated by all the readers who tell us how easy it is to read and follow the recipes. So, I suggest you create your format and stick with it. Capturing Photos of Recipes You may have visited many popular food blogs on the internet. All have one thing in common, excellent photos. You can invest some money in a nice DSLR for that. We are using Olympus EP1 Macro Four Third Camera, which produces reasonably lovely images, but we are looking to upgrade the camera whenever the budget approves. The all this comes to the point that you should invest in a good camera only if your budget approves it like ours was under $500 and I don’t see the point of buying a $1000 camera to increase the quality of pictures slightly, there are other things to worry about. So, if you don’t have a budget to invest even $500 in a camera, that is perfectly okay, use your smartphone, most of them have excellent quality cameras these days, mine has a 13 MP. Always remember, the best camera is the camera you already have, make use of it. Use photo editors like Gimp or Picnik to make them look good, here is a list of free photo editing tools.

Promoting Your Posts on Social Media

Food recipes is a type of visual content that works well on Social Media, so you should use your primary images to lets users know what exactly you are sharing. Pinterest and Facebook work well for food blogs because of the same reasons. Sharing your recipes on all Social Media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. is also very important as it lets you showcase your recipes to as many people who will directly influence visitor count. Use services like Buffer, Hootsuite to automate the process of sharing, These tools also let your schedule your posts so that you can reach maximum audience. Alternatively, you can also bookmark the pages of your social media accounts to share your recipes in one click. [shadow][note]Remember: Try to be consistent in sharing recipes on Social Media channels, choose the only websites where you are sure you can share recipes consistently, inconsistency doesn’t reward anyone.[/note][/shadow]

Monetizing your Food blog

It is recommended to even think of monetizing your blog after at least three months, and I have already written a couple of posts related to monetizing a blog, A food blog has it’s a limitation because of the lack of advertisers or at least lesser than any other niche out there. But you will do pretty well with a food blog. I talk about giving three months to the blog so that it can gain some momentum, and you can put your energy on things that will grow your blog. Three months you give you a lot of ideas about how things work on the internet. This article will give you some idea about what you can do in these three months. After three months, you can try the advertising model, of the affiliate model, or maybe product selling model in later stage.

How to Setup Free SSL On Your Website Hosted on Serverpilot Free Plan

In 2018, Google started advising every Webmaster to use SSL on their websites. And the latter included it as one of the ranking signals in the search engine. Almost every website you will see these days has got an SSL. But having an SSL does not mean that you have to spend extra money on getting them. Although there are companies who are capitalizing on it and offering SSL certificates that you can easily enable for your websites, they charge a happy amount. For example, Serverpilot has been offering a free plan for many years and it was sufficient for both newbie and advanced bloggers who hosted their websites on cloud storage services such as Digital Ocean or Vultr. I have got a few websites that are hosted directly on Digital Ocean, and then I have got a few sides for which I have used Serverpilot’s free plan. The easiest way to get an SSL certificate for or a website is to use server Pilots paid plans. You get an easy interface where you can and using a toggle button to enable or disable SSL certificates on your domain. But, since it costs money and you have to pay for every website if you want to use an SSL certificate, some of them. Although I would recommend, use their paid plans since it is the easiest way possible, I still understand it is not a way for a lot of bloggers, especially those who are starting and struggling with funds to manage. There is a not so easy way to get SSL certificates even on the free plan of Survey pilot. It involves a bit of technical knowledge, but if you follow this guide word to word, hopefully, you will be able to do it by yourself. We will be using let’s encrypt free service to get SSL certificates for free and applied them on a website using ssh commands. If you are hosting your website on Digital Ocean or other cloud storage, which has given you ssh access, you can use it to log in to your server copy paste a few commands, and you will be done. Protip here: if you have got your login credentials from your hosting service, I would recommend you save them somewhere, which is easily accessible by you. I have it saved in Google Keep so that it is just a browser tab away. If you are on a Mac, you can use the inbuilt terminal app (, which can be enabled from utilities if not enabled already). App called Putty, both allow you to access your server via secure FTP and push some ssh commands.

If you know how to log into your server, you can directly go to the step second.

1. Get your login credentials from Google Keep are from where you have saved them. Type as follows
ssh root@123.233.445
The route is the username which is usually ‘root’, and numbers are the IP address of your server. When You Hit enter after typing this, you will be prompted to enter the password, which you can copy-paste into the app. 2. Once you are logged in, you need to type this,
sple.sh
It is a script that will make the process of installing, let’s encrypt the SSL certificate on your domain name. The winter looks like this after you type the command and press enter. You have to follow the instructions from thereon. It will ask you to enter your App name, which is the name of the app in yous Serverpilot account. After which it will ask you to type in in the server name, which Serverpilot uses ‘serverpilot’. After which it will ask you to type up all the domains and subdomains where you want to enable, let’s encrypt. Here you will have to type in your domain name like this,
asiogroup.net www.asiogroup.net
It will start generating the SSL certificate for your domain and prompt you once it is successful doing.

Set up auto-renewal for Letsencrypt certificate

All the SSL certificates have got a validity that gets expired. Usually, the premium ones, the paid ones, that you get from hosting websites offer 1-year validity. In contrast, letsencrypt only offers fit for three months, which means you will have to renew it every three months. The good thing is that you can set up auto-renewable so that you do not have to worry about renewing it manually.

You can do it by using the following commands

Type this command
crontab -e
A file will be opened in the Terminal or the Putty app. You will have to use the arrow keys to no scroll down and bottom. Then you need to paste this after the last line.
0 */12 * * * letsencrypt renew && service nginx-sp reload
After copy-pasting this command, you need to save the file and exit it, the process to do would be mentioned in the app itself. If you are having difficulty to find it here, it is Type Control + X, herbal prompt you to save the file and exit press Y and press enter. Before exiting make sure you restart your server using this command
sudo service nginx-sp restart
You can then log out of the Terminal all putty app, and the SSL has been generated for your domain name

The changes You need to make in WordPress

After getting the SSL certificates, your site will be accessible at both http and https. You will have to force your users to the https version of your website, even if the type http. So from the settings area in WordPress dashboard, you have to change your website URL from http to https. And then you need to add these codes to the .htaccess file of your website.
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !=https
RewriteRule .* https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
The .htaccess file can be accessed via an FTP manager such as Filezilla. Or, you can also use this WordPress plugin to access root directory of your WordPress without AC panel or FTP client. Alternatively, you can also install a WordPress plugin that will easily redirect http to https. One such plugin is use this WordPress plugin

What to do if your website is partially secure?

For the SSL to completely be enabled for your website, you will see a lock I can appearing against the domain name in the address bar of the browser. You can tap or click on it, and you will get something like this written in green, which means that the SSL certificate has been enabled correctly. If you are saying something like the website is partially secure, it means that some of the content of your website is still hosted on http. If you have a bit of knowledge about codes, you can open inspect elements and view which website links are in http and try to make them https. This can be done by simply removing and uploading the file that has got an HTTP connection, such as the logo of the website or any other file.

How to change all your internal links from http to https

In the past, you may have used http link to interlink your blog posts. Doing them manually is going to take a lot of time, and you won’t be sure where you have inserted the links. The best and the most natural solution is to use search and replace plugin and then replace all the http links of your website into https. Please search for http://websitename.com and replace it with https://websitename.com. Important: Make sure you use the exact domain name, just is added to http. This will replace all the entries in your database making it’s a super easy and convenient way to change all the links on your blog from http to https.  I hope you find this article useful you can check out more useful articles on the blog subscribe to why our newsletter or turn on the push notifications to get notified about the next article. Let me know if you want to make a video tutorial about it, using the comment section below. I shall make one and update this article.

How to find more time to work on your blogs in 2020

0
Each one of us has got 24 hours a day, and how you spend decides how successful you are going to be. We will talk about some great time management skills that you can apply this year to make more time for work.

Start getting up early

I know it is a little cliched to tell that you should start getting up early to get more time to work, but it works. You may be sleeping 8 hours a day no matter what, but if your timing is wrong, then you are wasting a few hours because of it. Like some people, I want to say that sleeping is a waste of time sleeping for at least 8 hours helps you become more productive as you feel energetic throughout the day, but if you choose your sleeping hours wisely, you can be even more productive. Suppose if you are staying late at night working on your blog, you go to bed late, and you get up late, so even if you slept at 2 a.m, it wouldn’t be before 10:00 a.m start functioning correctly. Now, if everybody else sleeps at 11, you might get 3 hours of quiet time to work on the stuff you care about, but if you go to bed by 11 and get up by 7, the three hours you get between 7 to 10 a.m. will be more productive. The morning time is it still quite time with the difference being having full energy after a good night’s sleep. And I am saying that from my personal experience so you can try it yourself and see.

Limit your mobile usage

Smartphones were meant to make humans more productive, and the indeed are helpful in many situations, but when it comes to work, which is outside of your smartphone, it can be counterproductive. Be it the endless scrolling of the Facebook Newsfeed, Instagram, Twitter, be chatting to someone, or watching YouTube videos, you end up spending more time than you intended to. The newer versions of Android and iOS have got a feature to limit mobile usage time. Apps like Facebook and YouTube app also has got an inbuilt feature to track the screen time and notifies you when you are past that so that you can limit your mobile usage. But if those featured do not work for you, then you seriously need to uninstall that he does not want. Facebook still can be accessed from the mobile phone browser if you have to but will be less of a time-waster then the native app, as it keeps sending notifications and keeps leaving you into their system. I usually give my smartphone silent throughout the day, and I even keep it away from me so that I do not regularly check my smartphone every few minutes or so. It is not as easy as it sounds, but with a bit of practice, we will be able to do it, and you will see the difference in productivity.

Automate as much as you can

This is something I have talked about in my previous articles as well. It would help if you used automation whenever possible. One such example is getting the automated social media publisher and scheduler such as Postcron, Buffer, Hootsuite. These are pretty helpful in sharing your articles and other content on all your social media profiles from one single dashboard. They also let you schedule your posts so that you can do it in batches when you do not feel like doing something important. Another part of automation is to use Grammarly that can help you to speed up the process of proofreading your articles.

Outsource the stuff you don’t like to do

Finally, some things won’t be possible to automate, and you wouldn’t enjoy doing them either. You can outsource the stuff. Surely this is going to cost you a bit of money but which can be used in doing things that you enjoy and that matter. For example, if you are not a coder and you have issues with your website design, doing any graphics, you can get it done by someone else. That’s it like fiver.com can help you get someone do it for as low as $5, so it is also not heavy on the pocket. If you smartly apply these techniques, you will be able to make more money e then spending on Outsourcing the stuff that you don’t enjoy.

Do not get burnt out

I used to do it a lot, so I learnt it the hard way. Do not try to you work so much that you get burnt out and end up wasting more time. Your energy levels are up. Sometimes your energy levels are down, and on the days when your energy levels are up, you feel like working nonstop. But if you spend more time working, then you will end up wasting the next day. Blogging is a game of patience, and you need to keep patience, take baby steps, working chunks, and you will be able to do it without getting burnt out. Do the only thing that matter You don’t have to be on every social media platform; neither does your blog. It’s a good thing that we have different types of social media platforms out there, but they are men for another kind of people, so if your blog is about the specific topic, it does not make sense to post it on every platform. Just pick one or two social media platforms where you think your audience hands out the most and then try to gather your audience on that platform. Do your best on 1 or 2 platforms, instead of doing mediocre on all the platforms. So these were the things I want to tell you if you are just getting started or struggling to find time for blogging. I am sure this article will be helpful to you. You can subscribe to the newsletter, turn on the notifications for the news articles that get published on the blog. If you are a solo blogger I would recommend you read this article as well.

Helpful Tips for Solo Bloggers to Succeed in 2020

0
So, finally, we are in 2020 now. I wish you a lot of happiness and prosperity in your life. Since this blog is about online business and blogging, we will talk about how we can improve as a blogger. I had posted an article about how to succeed in 2020. One of the points that I made was, outsourcing the unproductive work so that you if it was on the things that matter. Solo bloggers need to follow these strategies and follow the path of smart work instead of hard work. So, here are few helpful tips for solo bloggers to succeed in 2020

Follow 80/20 Rule, The Pareto Principle

If you aren’t already familiar with this principle, check out this Wikipedia entry defining it. It means that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. And it holds in every aspect of life. It’s pure gold if you get it and start following. You can save as much as 80% of your time by not worrying about the rest of the 20% of results.

Let me share a few examples for a better understanding of how it works

Let’s say you spend 5 hours of your day creating content, another 5 hours promoting it on Social Media, giving 1 hour on Facebook, 1 hour on Instagram, 1 Hour on Twitter, you get the idea. Maybe only Facebook is bringing you the majority of the traffic. And if that is the case, it does not make sense to spend your time on Twitter and Instagram, which you can otherwise spend on other things. Maybe you are a video creator, and it takes 5 hours to edit a video. The video might only take 2 hours to make it presentable enough, but you spend another 3 hours polishing it. It just doesn’t make sense if you don’t have resources or time to do it.

Use Automation Tools Wherever Possible

Thankfully, for a blogger, there are a lot of automation tools available out there, which can help you save a great deal of time. Though you will have to spend some money on some pro tools. However, it depends on you how much you want to spend, as there are free options available as well. For example, you can use services like PostCron, which makes life a little easy by automating Social Media Management. It provides a unified platform from where you can push content on several Social Media sites all at once. I’ve written about it here. The good thing is, it has a free version, although the paid version brings more features and support for more accounts. Similarly, apps like Buffer, Hootsuite are free alternatives that can automate social media management.
6 Best Tools to Manage & Schedule Posting on Multiple Facebook Pages
Another area where you can automate your workflow is Creating content. Use Canva for creating graphics, which has got a massive library of templates, all you have to do it make edits, and it is ready. You can also automate your writing process by using Speech to Text or speed your proofreading process by using Grammarly. You can combine these two apps and create more content in the same time frame. It would help if you found a way to automate your workflow as much as you can do that you do not get tired and also save time.

Don’t do things you do not like or you are not an expert of

Bloggers spend hours tweaking their blog themes, which is just a pure waste of time. I’ve done this myself, plenty of time. Fortunately, I’ve stopped doing this long ago. If I have something to be fixed on the blog, I turn to Fivver and hire someone, it costs as less as $5, let an expert do the job and save your hours to do stuff that you like to do, or you are an expert of, which is, creating content or promoting it.

Don’t think too much about link building

Newbie bloggers have been fed the information that without backlinks, it is impossible to succeed in blogging, which is a partial truth. Backlinks do make a difference in ranking a blog, but it is not the only factor. Google keeps changing their search algorithms, and they have always maintained that bloggers should focus on creating great content. If you are a solo blogger, your time is better to spend in creating great content than building links. I’ve done this myself. One of my blogs is successful only because of its content. I never worked on creating backlinks for it and spent all my time creating content. There are many things you should do as a solo blogger. The idea is to do more in less time without getting burned out and quit blogging altogether. Here is a list of tools I personally use and it saves a huge deal of time for me on a daily basis. I’ll be posting more blogging and online business-related information on the blog. Make sure you follow it on Facebook, Twitter, or Subscribe to the Newsletter.

Pro Tools that are Saving Me Huge Amount of Time on a Daily Basis

0
Pro_tools_for_blogging I don’t want to sound pro and all with that kind of headline. I am a simple guy who loves to work on a few websites from a small home office. I am very fortunate to have the ability to spend my time with the family, skip the corporate rat race, and make a decent income from my online business. But working online can be tricky; the above lines seem so lovely to read; a kind of ‘dream comes true’ thing. But if you ask me, I have to work hard just like everybody else. Yes, I am working from my home office, and I am just a few steps away from the family, food, comfortable bed, TV. But, I am locked in a room typing on my computer, completing this post, which will go live on the blog a few weeks from now. Because there is a lot of process between writing and publishing it on the blog. There are a handful of other things that I need to take care of. Like, how much traffic each of my websites has got today, how much is the Adsense revenue for today, affiliates earnings, list subscribers, where are the coming from, what I need to improve, and oh my god, the brain can blast at any point of time I one person has to do it every day. And this is not everything I have mentioned, because I don’t want you to hate me (or my work). Thankfully some tools automate these tasks and make everything done is a specific timeline, which can otherwise be achieved only by a superhuman. ManageWP ManageWP I have been using ManageWP recently to manage all my WordPress sites from a single tab. It lets me update plugins, take backups, view the admin dashboard of all the sites, and notifies for the same. I am also using it to access the WordPress editor to publish blog posts. Earlier I was using Windows Live Write and have used it for well over half a decade. But WordPress has evolved and is now capable of things required for the formatting of the posts. Get 15% OFF on Professional and Business Accounts Sign up now I have written a review of ManageWP which you can read here. Cyfe Cyfe It’s the newest edition to my productivity suite. I did not even try to find something like this initially, because Checking and analyzing the different type of data of my websites is something every blogging expert has asked everyone not to give importance to. It can suck a lot of time, so one should not bother about it too much. I tried a lot not to get carried away with such kind of data, but I’ve found that this gives me a lot of room to improve the direction of my blog as well as the earning. Cyfe allows me to save a lot of my research time while still giving me an overview of the essential data from a single dashboard. You can connect widgets from different services like Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Adwords, Calender, WordPress, Aweber, Mailchimp, and what not, to your dashboard. There are over 90 sources you can add widgets from. You can read more about Cyfe from my earlier post about it. Trello Trello Knowing about all the projects you are involved in is a basic thing everyone should keep track of, and how you keep yourself informed is a bit tricky. I started with the traditional Pen and Paper, where I wrote down all the websites I owned, which one I was actively working on, what projects I am planning to do for what sites, what’s the revenue model, traffic generation methods. I used to write all that on a paper, but then it started to become challenging to have access to that paper all the time, then I moved to sticky notes (those fancy yellow notes on my desktop). I loved using them, they were editable, movable, and they were always in front of my eyes. But it was still not available on every device I work, including mobile. That made me shift to Wunderlist which is fantastic to create different lists, you can add tasks, sub-tasks to each task, comment on the tasks, share the task or list to someone else (team member), plus it was available on all the platforms. Update: Wunderlist got accquired by Microsoft, the brought a similar Task app called To-Do by Microsoft.  But then I thought of trying Trello for a few weeks, It offers everything Wunderlist Offers, and it is more visual than it. You can create cards and do everything with it like you can do to a task on Wunderlist. You can also move them between the lists, such as, ‘To Do,’ ‘Doing,’ and ‘Done,’ which helps you get a much clarity of where a particular task is, whether it’s still being done or has been done. If you are the only person working on your sites, you can use Trello, much like Wunderlist, that is, to maintain different lists. But if you have a team that works on projects, then Trello is pure magic. Bigger teams like Mashable, Digg, and many more are using Trello to collaborate on stuff they do. Here is an ultimate post by Lifehacker showing the different uses of Trello. You will love it now matter which industry you are working in. Google Docs Google_Docs Microsoft Office used to be my choice of tool when I started blogging because that was the only tool that could correct my spellings, do auto capitalizations after a full stop, and I could change font styles. But when the workload increased and it was challenging to make time for sitting on the desktop and write. I Moved to Google Docs as the files can be accessed from anywhere. Now, I have access to all my documents even when I am traveling on the way. I love the collaboration part of it. I love that it is available on the mobile phone so that I can add a few more lines to them when I have something in my mind while waiting in a long queue or before going to sleep. It has also helped me switch to Chromebook without compromising much on productivity. I have linked Writebox (a Chrome extension and an Android App) to Google Drive and using this tool to write in a distraction-free environment on Desktop, Chromebook, and Mobile. It certainly helps to write longer on Mobile phones as well.

Dropbox

Dropbox I use Dropbox for saving important files, hosting eBooks in the public folder, and put the link on the blog, and it becomes straightforward to update the eBooks with the latest information without much hassle. It is a super fantastic tool that I rely on for saving my most essential files in the cloud. It has helped me keep screenshots and other data from 2007 and even earlier, secure also though I changed so many computers since then. I also share files with other team members. It is just like a folder on PC where the files magically appear, it saves a lot of back and forth emails with the files attached to them,

Other Mentions

Apart from the five tools I have mentioned above, there are few more that play a vital role in my workflow to make the work organized and a little easy to achieve. Grammarly is a tool that I have been using too much lately. It makes it so easy to find typos and grammatical errors in an article. I use it for the seconds draft of the articles, 3rd draft is the formatting and adding photos. The time I spend on 2nd draft has been reduced to almost 50 percent, thanks to Grammarly. Fun Fact: This post had 13 errors after the final proofreading. Grammarly fixed it. Like Google Calendar, which I use for things like Important tasks such as meeting someone, following up someone via email, repetitive tasks such as Hosting and Domain Payments, Advertisement renewals, etc. I use Google Keep for saving a little piece of text that I need to remember for a short time, for a few days or weeks. Pocket App for saving long articles I come across during the day, the articles are so tempting that you just cannot ignore and if you read them you can kill your most productive time, So, the Pocket app helps you save your work time by saving the article for later. I read the articles on my mobile before going to sleep or when I am traveling or when I am helping my wife with her shopping bags :-). Buffer App takes care of the social sharing, you can sit and put all the links to your blog posts in the queue, and they will be shared in the time you have selected. It makes social sharing so much easy and reachable to the audience. Feedly, an RSS reading app that helps you read posts from the blogs you add it. It is a good practice to keep a tab on the blogs related to your niche, but manually browsing them can take time, you can forget to check them, so this app makes it easy to see what kind of content they are posting to their blogs. Feedly has Mobile apps (Android and iOS), so you can read whenever you feel like. So, these are the ones that make my work life. Apart from the apps I have mentioned, several other apps help make life easy, you have to see what works for you. If you are a blogger or someone who runs an online business, check out the deals on products that can make your life easy.