2013 was an innovative year in web designing. We saw more and more websites drop the heavy themes and switch to simple yet attractive ones. This led to trends in the web design industry that incorporated quality content with quality graphics. Now that we are in the heart of 2014, let’s take a look at the top 10 new web design trends to look out for in 2014.

10) Flat Designs Still In!
Minimalist designs will be trendy in 2014, just like they were last year. They are simple, modern, and stylish but at the same time they don’t take too much time to load. Flat designs provide a better consumer experience and have less clutter.

9) Responsive Designs Becoming Mainstream
Responsive designs are slowly becoming a standard for web designing in 2014. Smart phones and tablet devices have become the norm and have unlocked the potential market for responsive designs. Responsive designs are in demand as everyone is looking to make their website ‘phone friendly’.

8) Creative and Unique Images
As coding has made the transition for websites from computers and laptops to smart phones and tablets, we are experiencing better images in web designs. Integrating these images is now affordable, faster, and much easier than just a couple of years ago.

7) Parallax Designs Making News!
Big brands are pushing for what is being called the next generation of web designs. Parallax designs include powerful images, active scrolling, and creative content. We are seeing many websites switch to this trend in 2014, and it is likely that by the end of this year, parallax designs will form the norm.

6) Infographics Making the Best Use of Data
Infographics are eye catching statistics that have lots of information in small details. They are not as expensive as they were once, and are seemed to be loved by everyone on the internet. They incorporate strong colors, content, and shapes that catch the attention of the end user. Infographics have made their way into sports as well, with websites like whoscored and sherdog making use of these effective communication tools for data.

5) Fonts are In the Business
This is the year where fonts take center stage. With the introduction of mobile apps, we are experiencing all types of typography and this will influence font usage. There are many high quality fonts available today at great prices, and business owners realize that. That’s probably the reason why internet got stylish in 2013.

4) Content is King
The New York Times have recently designed their website to make it simple but with powerful content. This trend is likely to continue as it will provide users with a better experience. While it’s not something new, but putting the basics back in business will be key in 2014.

3) Vine Explosion
Vine videos took 2013 by a storm. These six second clips have encouraged businesses and services to invest in less than 30 second videos that send their message across.

2) Newsletters Improve
Email marketing is still active today as it was a decade ago. We can expect newsletters to get more exciting and creative in 2014.

1) Fixed Navigation Going Strong
Navigation bars are becoming available every time, and this trend has continued in 2014 as well. Heavy content websites today make sure the ribbon is always visible to scroll up and down whenever needed.

Here’s a scenario! You have a start-up company, and you are spending sleepless nights to reach out to maximum potential customers. You are desperately working on strategies to boost your brand image, but costs of marketing, brand promotion and operations are cutting your pocket. Your website, which serves as your primary marketing face 24/7 needs a safe, reliable, secure and stable environment to be hosted.

Without taking a big bite of your lean marketing and operating budget, learn how we can get your business affordable web hosting solutions to power your startup!

So grab your coffee mug and we shall go through the details now.

Online Presence of your brand..

Considering the picture today, it is highly difficult for a company to succeed without an online presence. With majority of the world’s population having internet dependency, consumers discover products and services more on internet than on physical shops. Hence, it is important as well as easier for you as a budding entrepreneur to have a website.

Now, if you decide to create your business website, the first thing you have to do is decide on which web hosting service is going to publish it online.

This is the first part of a series of guides on how to succeed with blogging. This guide was written by the team at XonHost.com who have helped thousands of blogs setup and achieve success over the last 10 years.

Why Start a Blog

If you’re reading this then it’s safe to assume that you have an end goal – a reason why you want to start your blog.

Identity: Domain and hosting

Some of you love to write and love it just as much if people could read your writing. Some of you have heard tales of people raking in millions with their blogs and want to try your hand at the game. Some of you need to establish yourself as a thought leader, to help your other brands grow.

We wrote this guide with the goal of helping all of you.

What is Success

Before we begin, we’d like to go over what a successful blog looks like. For the purpose of this guide we’re defining success as one or more of the following measurable results:

• A lot of readers with positive sentiment
• A lot of subscribers who read your work regularly
• A lot of people who follow your advice or recommendations (such as clicking your links)

For this guide, we won’t be treating Facebook likes and Youtube subscribers as success. That, grasshopper, is a guide for another time.

Now let’s get started.

How To Make A Blog

Here’s a checklist:

1. Pick a platform
2. Get your name and space on the internet
3. Design your blog
4. Configure your functions
5. Write, shoot, record
6. Repeat

Structure: Blogging Platforms

There are plenty of platforms you can start blogging on – medium, tumblr, WordPress, Blogger… the list goes on. We won’t debate the pros and cons of every one of them here. Instead we’ll just show you this:

The long and short of it is 72 million people, more than half of all bloggers use WordPress because:

• It’s free, including a huge number of addons you’ll need (more on this later)
• It’s really easy
• It’s secure
• It’s highly customizable

So that’s what your blog is built with. Now we look at where.

Identity: Domain and hosting

You need to self host. Forget all about free blogging platforms. You need to OWN your own blogging space.

Just imagine if Huffington Post ($14,000,000 in revenue per month) started as huffingtonpost.freeblogs.com instead of huffingtonpost.com.

No, you need your own name (domain) and your own space (hosting). Start by picking out a hosting package from http://fastwebhost.com/web-hosting.html, and you can get the domain at the same time. Most domains go for $2 to $15 per year, while hosting starts at $1/month.

Alright, now we design your blog

Design: Themes and Customization

First install WordPress. The easiest way is with the Softalicious installer. Here’s a detailed, step by step guide on how to use it :https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/Wordpress-softaculous-installation/ 

Alright, you’ve got WordPress. Now we need to design it.

Once installed, you’ll get an email with an that shares an admin url (typically www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin) and login information.  Start by logging in. You’ll see a dashboard or admin panel that looks something like this:

The core design of your website is based on the “theme” it’s running. So to change your design you change the theme. Here’s how: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/install-Wordpress-themes/ 

Visit your blog once you’ve installed and activated your theme and you’ll see the new design in place.

You can further customize it to match your needs. Start by uploading your logo or setting your blog’s name from the customize tab under appearance. You can also find a large number of settings in the customize tab including widgets and menu items. We’ve gone over a few here: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/customize-Wordpress-themes/ 

Functionality: Plugins

In some cases you might need more functionality, like a calendar of live events or a way for people to sign up to your RSS. The easiest solution is to install a “plugin”, a program that adds this functionality to your site. You can learn more about how to do this here: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/install-Wordpress-plugins/ 

Content: Posts and pages

Pages are static “one-off” content such as your about page, privacy policy, etc. Posts are where you publish most of your content. They’re the entries for your blog. They are also different in a few functional ways

• Posts are timely, they get archived in a chronological order. Pages are timeless, they get archived in whatever order you specify.
• Posts can be categorized by subject areas. Pages are hierarchical.
• Posts are included in RSS feed; Pages are not.
• Pages can have different structures and templates; all posts have the same structure

Now let’s show you how to add and edit these posts and pages.

• Create a WordPress Post
• Add images, videos or other multimedia to WordPress Posts
• Categorize posts 
• Display posts from a single (or more) category on a particular page
• Manage comments on your blog

And Again

That’s it. Now you have a blog, on your own domain name, and know how to create content. Now you start publishing.

 

Next up on the How to Succeed with Blogging series: How to Grow Your Blog’s Readership.

This is the second part of a series of guides on how to succeed with blogging. This guide was written by the team at XonHost.com who have helped thousands of blogs setup and achieve success over the last 10 years.

How to Grow your Blog Readership

In part 1 of this series (link) we’ve covered how to build your blog, and how to create pages and posts. Today we’ll show you how you can get more people to start reading those posts and pages on a regular basis.

There are 2 general ways to grow your readership – the organic or natural approach where people find your blog, and the paid approach where you pay someone to help them find your blog. We’ll go over both.

The Natural Way

Search Traffic

Quick! You need to learn to fold a shirt the fastest way. What do you do? You googled it didn’t you? Some of you also searched for it on youtube, but most of you googled it.

Search is the core of the internet. Anytime someone wants to learn something new, it starts with a search. So if you’d like to be known for something, you need to make sure you’re showing up in searches.

We call this optimizing for SEO, and we’ve got a lot of resources on this here: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/cat/search-engine-optimization/

Word of Mouth

The other natural ways for people to find out about you is if someone told them about it. That’s the social aspect of blogging, or word of mouth.

So how do you get more word of mouth traffic? Get on social media. People are already on social media, and they will see it. Your current readers and followers will see the update on their news feeds and click to come to your blog. Some will share the post with their own personal networks.

To get shares you have to do more than just post the link in a status update though. Each platform is different, so you’ll need to optimize your post for each.

For example, we’ve found the most effective way to share on Facebook is with a commentary or a related thought that brings people in and makes them want to learn more. On Pinterest a more descriptive image and tags are far more important.

Be Interesting

Now in order for people to share your content and show it to their friends it has to be one thing above all else: I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T-I-N-G

There are 3 ways to achieve that in a blog.

Exciting Titles and Feature Images

The title is the first thing people see and yes we do judge a blog post by it’s title. A boring title means no one will click it to read the whole thing, while an exciting title will. The same applies to your feature image – the one that shows up in your archives and your social media shares.

Here’s a great example:

See that? Great title and great image. The number of social shares in the corner is an added boost.

The title is the last thing you should write. Finish the entire post, then come back to write a title. Think about how you can make it more engaging so the readers are compelled to click.

Be Useful

Interesting content gets shared more often, but the most shares come from practically useful content.

It makes sense. The latest celebrity gossip is fun and all, but if you’re going to take the effort to share something it’s likely to be something that others in your network will find useful.

So how do you become more useful?

1. Give people an exact solution to a problem, not 50 different things they might try
2. Give detailed actionable steps they can follow, and stay away from theoretical stuff (unless theory is the point of your blog)
3. Provide lots of examples and case studies to prove your points
4. Show exact numbers wherever possible. Lose 20 pounds in 60 days, not lose weight fast.

Exciting People

Again, people are reading your blog because they care about what you think. Now some people don’t care about what you think, but what if someone they cared about did? Or what if you were writing about someone they cared about.

Here are some ways to get exciting people on your blog.

1. Interview someone important in your field, which is what Mixergy does for small businesses
2. Guest blog on a different bloggers site, such as George Minton’s article on Photododo
3. Analyze something someone famous said or did

When Elon Musk said he was reading Twelve Against the Gods, it sold out on amazon within a day, and prices of used books jumped up from $.99 to $99.99. Clearly, we care about what important people think. This presents a great opportunity for you to get in on the action and drive traffic to your blog.

Exciting perspectives

Everyone’s already written everything about the latest iPhone, and the latest Elon Musk book. Adding your voice to the noise is just that – noise.

If you’d like to stand out you need to say something no one else is saying. Take a unique stand on an issue, or voice your opinions differently.

Have a unique way of saying things. For example Oliver Emberton likes illustrating his points, while Mark Manson enjoys swearing at them, and David Wong mostly makes fun of them.

The important thing is to have a solid stand on a topic that people care about, and expressing it with style and force.

The Paid Way

The Paid way of getting traffic is easy. Post to social media and boost your posts. Add to a content aggregator and pay them to spread it around.

The trouble is, you might get some readers this way, but you won’t keep them for very long. And if you can’t hang on to them then what’s the point?

That’s why you need to start getting readers the natural way, and only use the paid way to amplify your reach.

Back to Work

And now you know how to write better blog posts and get more regular readers. Now it’s time to get back to writing again.

—

Next up on the How to Succeed with Blogging series: How to make money from your blog.

This is the third part of a series of guides on how to succeed with blogging. This guide was written by the team at XonHost.com who have helped thousands of blogs setup and achieve success over the last 10 years.

In part 1 of this series we’ve covered how to build your blog, and how to create pages and posts. In part 2  we showed you how to grow your blog’s followers.

Today we’ll look at how to make money from your blog.

There are 5 general ways to make money from a blog:

1. Sell something
2. Show ads
3. Make recommendations
4. Have patreons
5. Indirect income

First things first

The first and most important rule is of course to have a readership you can make money from. That’s why creating valuable content, and getting a regular following essential. All the ways of making money are pointless if you don’t have anyone to make it from.

Sell Something

There are 2 broad categories of something you can sell – physical products and digital products.

On the physical side, you could sell books, speaking events, or training/coaching programs. You could also use your blog to sell handmade goods, or manufactured private label merchandise. There are a number of services available online (such as Amazon FBA) that will help make selling easy. The downside is creating or sourcing these products will take a lot of time and money, and returns and shipping could be a hassle. In some cases you might need to maintain inventory.

If inventory troubles other you, you can look into digital products, such as eBooks, ecourses, a members area or paid subscription to your blog, and downloadable (such as audio or video clips). This puts you in full control of your product and pricing. You can also pivot quickly because there’s no question of inventory. Digital products have high profit margin – they might be expensive to develop, but they are not expensive to maintain and deliver to your customers. However, because you’re the one creating the product yourself, there will be some technical challenges and steep learning curve. Or you can outsource the creation to one or more freelancers, and incur some more expenses in the process.

You might also sell your services – your time and expertise. If you’ve got a good following then it’s clear that you’re a good writer or artist or designer, or videographer, or cook even. Why not rent out your time? There’s little to no inventory required, little to no startup costs, and you can be up and running within the hour. The trouble is, since you trade your time for money, you can only grow as big as your time allows. You’ll also face the occasional client who pays late (or doesn’t pay at all).

Show Ads

Others pay you to put their name, product or message in front of your audience. This can be simple banner ads on your blog, sponsored posts (where you mention that a post was sponsored by someone), or underwritten posts (where you introduce someone else who writes the post for your audience, promoting his products in the process).

Most of these are easy to setup and you maintain full control of the process. However, ad revenue is quite low. You’ll need a huge amount of traffic to get a decent income. For example, ad-sense, which is the biggest ad network there is, pays out an average of $1 per 1,000 ad impressions. Most people don’t like ads, so you’ll be losing a few to a lot of visitors, depending on how you choose to display ads. And finally different devices, browsers and ad blockers can interfere with ads displaying, which means you might end up making even less than the $1/1000 visitors.

Recommend Products

The technical term for this is affiliate marketing. You earn a commission every time your visitors buy a product or service you recommend. There are thousands of products and retailers to partner with, the most popular being Amazon Affiliates. You can earn passively from your posts as long as your visitors keep listening to your advice. You don’t have to worry about creating products, supporting customers, or any of the technical complexity of selling your own products or services.

Patreons

The final, direct way to make money from your blog is to accept donations. You produce all your content on your own time and publish them for free. If someone wants to help support you they do so through donations. It’s not begging. You’re essentially letting people pay whatever they want for your content, even if the amount is $0. There are 2 ways to do this – by having a donate paypal (or stripe) button on your website, or by signing up for Patreon.

In some cases this may be a bit like the subscription service we described above. Some bloggers may offer exclusive experiences or behind-the-scenes content to their backers to entice them to donate.

Indirect income

You don’t have to make income directly from your blog though. If you offer services, a blog is a good way to establish yourself as a thought leader. If you were already and author, it’s a good way to help people get a taste of your writing. While you may not make much, or any money from of your blog, you mind end up making more because of your blog.

Final Tips

So, to sum up, here are all the ways bloggers can make money:

This is the fourth part of a series of guides on how to succeed with blogging. This guide was written by the team at XonHost.com who have helped thousands of blogs setup and achieve success over the last 10 years.

So far we’ve shown you how to build your blog, how to grow your blog’s followers, and how to  make money from your blog. By now you’ve realized it all comes down to how well you create your content – whether it’s writing words or taking photos or singing songs. That’s what we’re here for today.

To have great content on your website you need to do 2 things on a regular basis:

1. Create stellar content
2. Measure results and do a content audit

Creating Content

1. Understand your readers

You need to understand who your readers are and what they want in life. All good blogs are focused on certain topics or areas of life. That’s why travel blogs may talk about the foods of different localities, but won’t really talk about cooking or foods as a standalone subject.

More importantly, there are probably plenty of blogs on the subject you choose to work with, but your readers come to you for a specific reason. You need to understand that reason, the emotions behind it, and target your content towards those emotions.

Not sure where to start? Ask your readers what general topics they’d like to see more of. Then plug the topics and keywords into google trends and buzz-sumo to see what’s trending.

2. Work through lists

Jot down ideas on your phone when inspiration strikes and keep a list of topics you can work on. Don’t worry about how you’ll flesh them out, that’s for later.

Once those ideas have a chance to marinate, you can start working on them. You should always try to take a unique stance on the topic – say something different, or try to say it in a different way.

If you ever run out of ideas, remember that most ideas work well with multiple types of content. Expand on a part of something you’ve written about before, or turn your list article into an info-graphic.

3. Be consistent

Once you’ve figured out what your audience likes you need to be consistent with it. Deliver what they want on a regular basis, but don’t rush. Remember, there’ at least 10 other people who are doing what you’re doing. Your audience comes to you for your style and quality. It’s perfectly fine if you publish only once every month.

The trick is to stay engaged with your readers in the meantime. Show them sneak peaks or work in progress on social media. You can even let them have a little control over the production process by asking for feedback on Facebook or twitter.

4. Team Up

Invite guest bloggers to contribute to your blog. They can write a complete piece which you can publish. They can collaborate on a piece with you by joining you for an interview or discussion. Or they can simply contribute a few thoughts to a piece you’re working on.

This helps bring more fresh perspectives and unique angles to a post. You can also use this to argue multiple sides of an idea for your readers.

Auditing Content

Once you start, there’s an impulse to just keep moving forward and create new content. But you need to stop once in awhile and go over what’s been done. You should do an audit at least once a year, or more depending on how often you publish.

An audit will show you what worked best, what didn’t and what can be re-purposed. You can also identify old content people are still reading, and update them.

1. Make a List of Your Content

Start by making a list of everything you’ve published. Get them all onto a spreadsheet and categorize them by what they are, what they’re about, and what they’re meant to achieve.

2. Decide on Metrics

Next you decide on what you want to measure. Each of your pieces of content would have a different objective, and so you would probably want to measure a different metric for each. In general though, some metrics tend to be useful for all kinds of content. Things like page views, time on page, bounce rate, goal conversion, and social shares are always useful metrics to have.

3. Review Analytics

We love Google Analytics. It’s free to use and can be used to get both an overview and in-depth look at your content’s performance. You might also want to look at analytics from your social media. If you’re using any other 3rd party analytics, you should record their results in your spreadsheet too.

Once that’s done, you need to divide your content into 3 lists – ones that are doing well, ones that are doing ok and can be improved, and ones that have never done very well.

4. Decide What to Do

For content that’s doing well: See what they have in common. There must be a reason they do better than the others. These audits are a great way to figure out your formula for success. Then figure out how you can make it better either by improving the content itself or finding new ways to reach more people with it. Or example, turn your best videos into info graphics so you can share them on Pinterest. See if there are ideas or points within the content pieces that can be fleshed out into their own posts.

For content that has potential: Figure out why they’re not doing better. Low click rate on social media could mean a poor title or feature image. High bounce rate could mean the opening paragraphs aren’t entertaining enough. Or it just might not be the right fit for your audience. Once you figure it out you can improve them.

For content that’s no good: You’ve got two choices here. You can try improving them, or you could just remove them altogether. It might feel wasteful to remove content you worked hard on, but in some cases it’s the best choice. Maybe the post is no longer accurate, or your views have changed and you no longer support this idea. Let it go and move on.

5. Create a Plan for Future Content

All of this should help you figure out what works better and what doesn’t. It should help you figure out your formula for creating better content. At this final stage of the audit you reflect on what you’ve seen and condense it into a clear plan and guidelines for future content, so that next year’s audit goes smoothly.

So that’s that. Now you know how to write better content, and that means you’ll be able to get more readers and more revenue from those readers. If you don’t have a blog yet, there’s no time like the present to start. Get over to our WordPress page and pick a domain name and you’re good to go.