Turbocharge Your Opt-Ins With Content Upgrades

By | Last updated 7

What is the best way to build up your list? Most marketers these days stick with tried and true methods like a sidebar optin form, maybe a feature box, a lightbox popup or even all of the above.

The problem is that these sorts of incentives are not very targeted. Unless you are already well known in some way, you are unlikely to get more than 1% of your visitors to optin using these methods.

Luckily, there is a better way to get opt-ins that is much more targeted.

It's called the Content Upgrade, a term popularized by Backlinko's Brian Dean. Brian didn't come up with the concept himself though. Folks like Kim Roach (who is one of my favorite marketers) has been using content upgrades on her blog for a long time now.

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The Cheapskate’s Guide To Free Genesis Child Themes

By | Last updated 28

FreeGenesisChildThemes

One of the biggest advantages of choosing the Genesis Theme Framework is the enormous variety of child themes available for it. Each child theme gives you a unique foundation from which to change the look and feel of your site.

Having a wide variety of child themes to pick from makes the Genesis framework a great choice for building a wide variety of different types of websites from your basic blog to your next business website. Especially if you are building sites for clients or own several sites of your own.

If you were just browsing around the StudioPress website, you might get the impression that there are only premium Genesis child themes available. That’s what I thought at first too.

But if you do a little digging, you will find that there is a whole ecosystem of free Genesis child themes available for download. And some of them are quite good.

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How To Speed Up Your Site With MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache

By | Last updated 3

In my last post, I told you guys that the next step in my quest for faster page load times was to start using a content delivery network (CDN).

So that is what I did.

A content delivery network, for those new to the concept, is essentially a set of servers deployed around the world. With a CDN, copies of your website’s static files (images, CSS, javascript files) will be hosted on each of these servers.

So now when a visitor comes to your site, they will download your site’s content from a server that is closest to them (as opposed to from where your web host’s servers are). This means all your visitors will see consistently fast page load speeds, no matter where they are coming from.

maxcdn-banner

There are several different CDNs to choose from, but after some research, I decided to go with MaxCDN. It seemed to be the most popular one amongst bloggers and it’s being used by a lot of well known sites like StumbleUpon, Yoast, and CSS-Tricks.

This post isn’t meant to be a full review of MaxCDN since I’ve only been using it for a couple of weeks so far. I’ll save that for a future article.

Instead I wanted to publish a quick tutorial on how to quickly get up and running with MaxCDN by integrating it with W3 Total Cache.

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Awesome New Additions To Thrive Content Builder

By | Last updated 10

I did a review of Thrive Content Builder (TCB) back in May, but a lot has changed in the 3 months since then.

When you purchase a Shane Melaugh created product, one thing that you can count on is frequent updates to his products. And not just some small, random bug fixes. But awesome new features that always make me smile whenever they get posted on the ThriveThemes blog.

For those of you who haven't been exposed to Thrive Content Builder yet, it's a wordpress plugin that replaces the default WordPress editor and allows you to add custom Thrive elements to create highly converting landing pages. No custom coding is required and everything can be added to your page in real-time just by dragging and dropping elements on your page.

In fact, this post is written inside of Thrive Content Builder so I can demonstrate some of the new features that were added.

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4 Simple Steps To Boost Your Google Page Speed Score

By | Last updated 21

BoostPageSpeed

After my last post on the Fastest WordPress Themes, I thought the next logical step was to see what it would take to boost any site’s Page Score to as close to 100% as possible. So for this post, I decided to take a look at this site, SlickWP and see what things I could do to improve my Page Score.

What I came up with, are four actionable steps that any WordPress owner can take right now to improve their Page Score rating.

What’s the point of doing this whole exercise?

Amazon has even calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. (source)

Slow loading websites make a bad impression on your visitors, so anything you can do to make your site load faster is worth doing.

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