We don’t mean to intrude, but you’ve just landed on the perfect blog post for such a state of mind.

If you’ve had enough of punching time cards, having your meal times determined by a scheduling program, and answering to middle-management, then perhaps there’s no better time than now to turn those daydreams into reality.

There’s a lot to consider and plan for when becoming your own boss and starting an online business — like what kind of business will you start?

How to Start an Online Business

We live in a connected world, with the internet and technology enabling ample opportunities to start successful businesses online. If you decide to give up the office or retail life and become a digital entrepreneur, you’ll be in good company.

Online, home-based businesses are on the rise and are valuable sources of income for many. Depending on your needs and goals, your business may be a part-time side hustle or it could be your full-time venture.

Is starting an online business a good idea? Online businesses may require fewer investments as compared to brick-and-mortar businesses that require external facilities or a hired staff, and they offer a flexible work-life balance as it’s dictated by you. However, keep in mind that you may need to convert part of your home and living space to support your business, especially as it grows.

Let’s explore some online business ideas that you can launch with a little business planning and a website (and that aren’t MLMs.)

15 Online Business Ideas

Ready to be your own boss? With these business ideas, you can be.

1. Web designer

Web designers are in demand.

As brick-and-mortar businesses convert into online retailers, they all need websites. Business owners often don’t have the time to create and design beautiful, functional websites. Even with the advent of easy-to-use website builders, they seek outside counsel and assistance.

And it isn’t just small businesses that need web design help, large companies frequently hire design consultants to assist with their needs.

Web design is all about creating an intuitive, beautiful experience for the end-user, so if helping others and designing are your passions, this is a great business idea to consider starting from home.

2. Personal fitness trainer

The pandemic has shown us that traditionally in-person businesses can be successful online. You may be accustomed to going to a gym or studio to learn and instruct, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing that online, too.

A website, camera, and open floor space are all you really need to get started if you’re knowledgeable about proper exercise, motivation, and healthy living. Once you build your reputation and your business grows, you may find that you’ll want to start making house calls or letting your clients come to you.

Before starting a personal fitness training business, make sure to research local guidelines to determine if any special licensing is required.

3. Copywriter

Do you have a way with words? The ability to sway people by pen or keyboard? If yes, it’s time to give serious consideration to becoming a copywriter.

Great copy helps convert website visitors into customers, so website owners everywhere seek help writing content like FAQs and blog posts.

To attract those website owners and convince them to hire you, you’ll need to put your skills to work. Start by creating a website to showcase your strengths. Make sure to include an “About” page where prospective clients can learn about you, samples of your work, and make it easy for them to contact you — a “Contact Us” page is great, but your contact information should be discoverable from every page.

4. Interior Designer

Some people have an eye for style, and some don’t. If you do, why not help others create the living or workspaces of their dreams?

Someone, somewhere, doesn’t understand that houndstooth can’t be matched with plaid, or what color walls best pair with their flooring. Your stylistic expertise is what they need and they’ll be happy to pay for a consultation.

As with any business, social proof is important, so you’ll want to showcase your work on your website. Consider adding a blog to your site to keep your readers up-to-date with trends and inform them of what you’ve been working on.

5. Dropshipper

Have you thought about starting an online retail business, only to abandon your dream because you don’t have the funds to invest in a large inventory of products?

Dropshipping solves that issue for you. With dropshipping, you can sell products on your site without worrying about stocking and inventory. It works like this: When you sell a product on your site it’s purchased from a third party who fulfills shipping, so you never have to touch the product. These third-party sellers are normally wholesalers or manufacturers, and you’ll still make a profit from the sales.

Dropshipping means low overhead. You don’t have to purchase any products unless you’ve made a sale and it’s been paid for by the customer. This also gives you great control and flexibility when it comes to testing new products in your market. 

6. Personal chef

Does everyone rave about your cooking? Perhaps now is the time to turn your culinary prowess into a profitable business.

Depending on local regulations and guidelines, you can use your home kitchen to create nutritious, enjoyable meals for your clients. As your business grows, you may need to find a commercial kitchen and hire helpers, but the majority of your marketing, planning, and business work can be done from the comfort of your own home.

Happy clients and referrals will help your business grow, so don’t hesitate to create a website to show off your delicious meals and share information about your offerings.

7. Grant writer

Non-profit organizations rely on donations to fund their goodwill initiatives. There are many opportunities for them to apply for grants to receive funding, but oftentimes, the people behind the scenes are juggling many roles, and don’t have the time to write the incredible grant proposals they need to secure funds.

This is where you come in. Are you a master of pen and keyboard? Do you have a knack for laying information out concisely and persuasively? There are so many organizations vying for a limited amount of grants, that it’s imperative for proposals to be well-formatted and well-written.

There are many free resources online that can help you learn how to write the perfect proposal. Once you’ve nailed it, pitch your services to different organizations and create a website where people seeking grant writers can contact you.

8. Life coach

Does everyone in your friend group rely on you for advice? Do they seek you out for your sage wisdom on love, work, and any other number of personal and professional issues?

Sounds like you might already be a bit of a life coach. Life coaches aren’t therapists, but they do help individuals focus on the life they want, provide guidance and counsel, and help people to achieve their goals.

Some life coaches prefer to coach and speak to big crowds, but it’s a career that can easily be done from your home. While life coaches don’t technically need a license to operate, there are programs designed to help you become a life coach that offer certifications. As with any business, you’ll need to invest in your online presence to build your audience of prospective customers.

9. Blogger

Blogs and websites have democratized the information age, letting anyone who has an interest or is an expert on a topic hold court. Blogging is one of the most popular ways that people share information, and you can manage your blog from home or anywhere!

To be a blogger, you undoubtedly have to have your own site. To be successful, you’ll need to create fresh, interesting content that appeals to your audience. Encourage your readers to share your posts with their friends and on social media to grow your following.

As your blog gains more and more engaged readers, you can offer advertising space on your blog for additional income. If you’re seriously considering becoming a blogger, check out this post about what you need to know when starting a blog.

10.  Virtual assistant

Are you an organizational powerhouse? Have you been called “Type A” more than once? A virtual assistant position may be perfect for you.

Busy executives and business owners can reach a point where they’re inundated with responsibilities and don’t have the time to manage all their tasks. Appointments, emails, video calls — all of these things add up and are time-consuming.

As a virtual assistant, you’d be stepping in to provide the help and organization they so desperately need. You’d carry your tasks out at home, from scheduling meetings and appointments to replying to emails, fielding phone calls, and managing documents. And all of these things are easily achievable using cloud-based solutions. 

So, if you’re the type who plans everything from morning to sundown, you can have a lot of fun and find fulfillment as a Virtual Assistant. 

11.  Consultant

Someone, somewhere, needs your expertise. Consultants are experts in their fields, and they are paid to advise others in their field or to address specific issues others are facing. It’s not the same as a coach, who provides advice and motivation so you meet your goals.

Usually, consultants offer their services to businesses, although individuals sometimes seek out consultants, too. As a home-based consultant, you have the flexibility to determine your own schedule and rates, and there isn’t much overhead when starting your business. However, it takes time to build your clientele, so make sure you highlight your expertise and other relevant information on your site and include social proof where possible. 

12.  Instructor/Tutor

Covid-19 has changed the face of education, and now is a great time to start an online tutoring business. Parents everywhere are struggling to run their households, manage their careers, and act as secondary (or primary) teachers as their kids attend remote schooling.

If you’re knowledgeable and have a gift for teaching, why not help out in this time of increased need and get paid for it? All that’s required are a computer, a website, and a camera. You can conduct online lessons and tutoring sessions, and add helpful content to your site.

If you do well, your students’ parents will be your best advocates — touting your expertise and sharing your information with other parents in similar situations, and word-of-mouth is a powerful marketing tool.

13. Podcaster

Podcasts are insanely popular. In fact, almost 60% of U.S. consumers listen to podcasts.

If you like the sound of your own voice and think others may, too, then consider starting a podcast. All of us have stories to share and knowledge that we can impart to others.

To get started with podcasting, you’ll need the following:

• A quality microphone
• Software or tools to record audio
• Audio editing tools
• A website

To gain more listeners, try partnering with other more well-known podcasters or thought leaders as you get started. And don’t forget to encourage your listeners to leave reviews!

14. Domain Investor

You’ve heard of real estate investors, but did you know that domain investing is a thing?

Just like real estate properties, domains are great investments because a good domain name will only increase in value. Domain investing means buying domain names and then selling them for a greater amount.

Good domain names have to meet certain criteria, like being short, memorable, and brandable. Business owners will pay for the right domain name because domains are the core of a business’ digital identity. You’ll need to do your research before jumping into the world of domain investing, as you’ll be using your own funds to get started, and you don’t want to lose your money.

Luckily, there are many online resources that can help you get started with domain investing, and there are plenty of sites, like BuyDomains.com, that offer reasonably priced premium domain names which you can resell.

15.  Freelance Editor

Does the thought of correcting someone’s diction and syntax excite you? Do you have fond memories of red pens in the pre-digital era? Are you the person your friends rely on for reviewing and improving important documents?

Sounds like you’ll make a mighty fine freelance editor. Freelance editors take on many roles, from editing grammar to content, and even SEO.

To get started, you’ll want to create a site to showcase your work. Ask friends and family that have relied on you for editing services to provide testimonials, and reach out to businesses you think could benefit from your services. Your work as a freelance editor can be done from anywhere — at home, while traveling, or in a rented space, whatever you prefer.

Ready to start your online business?

There’s no better time than now to launch an online business. We hope these ideas have inspired you to get started and pursue your dreams!

Before investing your time and money in a new venture, it’s always a good idea to take the time to validate your business idea and create a business plan. This way, you’ll know exactly who your audience is, and the best way to conduct your enterprise.

Do you have any other online business ideas you’d like to share? Comment below!

As you begin learning the SEO ropes, you may feel like you’re learning a complex second language.

Don’t let that defeat you — you’ve got this, and SEO jargon doesn’t have to be a mystery. Use this glossary of SEO terminology to help orient yourself and understand the terms you need to know to succeed in search. 

Already a master of SEO lingo? Scroll down to the bottom for additional SEO resources, including a beginner’s and more advanced technical guides.

SEO Terms: A Glossary

A

Algorithm – A computer program used by search engines. This program allows them to retrieve data and deliver results for searches.

Algorithm Change – Refers to when search engines update or change the algorithms they use.

Authority – The signals search engines use to assess and “grade” sites and pages to determine rank in search engine results. 

B

Backlink – AKA inbound link. A link from another (3rd party) site to your site or one of your webpages.

Black Box – This term is used to describe Google’s esoteric programs. Google’s algorithm is a “black box” — we can observe it in action and see its effects, but can’t fully access the program itself or know everything about it. 

Black Hat SEO – Risky and ill-advised SEO tactics that Google frowns upon. These tactics are contrary to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Engaging in black hat SEO tactics can result in penalization or removal from search rankings. 

Competitor – Your competition in the market. Generally, they fall into two categories:

• Direct – they sell similar goods and services to a similar target audience.
• SEO – competitors who bid on the same keywords as you and increase competition for the same organic traffic. 

C

Crawler – The program(s) a search engine uses to crawl the web. AKA: Bot, Spider.

D

Domain – Your website’s name. It follows the ‘www.’ in the URL, and also what follows the @ symbol in an email address. For example, in ‘www.Domain.com’ the ‘Domain.com’ is the actual domain name.

G

Google – The most popular search engine. Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998. Google created a revolution in search — moving away from human-edited web directories and toward web crawling technology using an algorithm(s) to analyze and rank websites.

H

Heading – Also called H tags, they range from H1-H6. These tags designate sections of your content from the most important (H1) to the least (H6.) Heading tags, especially the H1, should always incorporate your target keywords.

Headline – An H1 tag. The most important of your headings, and should always include your keyword(s.)

Head Term – A keyword with high search volume (e.g. “email” with 1.2 million). Since head terms are popular search terms, it’s harder to rank for them. AKA: Head Keyword, Short-tail.

K

Keyword – The word or phrase you’re focusing on in your content. Keyword selection should be influenced by the terms your target audience is using in their online searches. Including keywords in your content helps search engines know what pages to surface in search results.

Keyword Research – A process of discovery. It helps you understand what keywords your audience uses in their searches and provides insight into the topics and themes most relevant to them. You also determine the keyword volume (frequency in search) and what competition exists for the term. All of this helps you determine the best keyword(s) to focus your efforts on.

Keyword Stuffing – Spam (Black hat SEO) tactic. It’s the practice of using a keyword too many times or using irrelevant keywords, in forced and unnatural ways. By doing this, spammers hope to rank higher in search results. It could result in page demotion or removal from search page rankings.

Knowledge Graph – Google’s database of knowledge. Contains data about keywords and search intent which is used to improve search results and surface relevant or related results. Displayed in a Knowledge Panel, or carousel, at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP.)

Knowledge Panel – A specific section of results in the SERP. Appears as a box at the top of the first page of Google’s search results (or right side of the page on desktop.)

L

Link – A connection between two sites or web pages that are created with HTML code. They’re integral to how sites and pages are graded by search engines and pivotal to site navigation.

Long-Tail Keyword – Multiple-word search terms. Usually highly specific. People who use long-tail keywords are known to display greater purchase intent. These keywords are less popular and it is normally easier to rank for them. E.g. “Email marketing” with 18k in search volume instead of “Email” with 1.2m in search volume.

M

Manual Action – The term Google uses to describe a penalty. This happens after a human reviewer manually reviews a site to verify whether or not it complies with Google’s Webmaster guidelines. If not, pages or sites can be demoted or entirely removed from search results.

Meta Description – The short blurb that describes what a search result is about that appears below the title and link on the SERP. It’s a tag added to the head section of an HTML document, it succinctly illustrates what the content on a webpage or site is all about. The more accurate and engaging your meta description, the better your Click Through Rate (CTR) will be. Include keywords.

O

Off-page SEO – SEO boosting activities and tactics that do not occur on your website. E.g. — brand awareness campaigns, social media marketing, offline marketing, and link building all help improve SEO without occurring on your actual website.

On-page SEO – The SEO boosting activities that occur on your website. This can include optimizing the HTML code across your site (heading tag, H tags, meta descriptions, etc.), publishing good content that targets the right audience and keyword(s), intuitive site navigation, and more.

Organic Search – AKA unpaid or natural search results. Organic search results are ranked and displayed in order of most helpful and relevant. The ranking is done in accord with search engine-specific algorithms. You do not and cannot pay for organic search result placement.

Outbound Link – Links that direct away from the domain they’re found on, these links direct visitors to other (3rd party) websites.

P

Pagerank – This algorithm measures the importance of a page based on not just the volume of links leading to it, but also the quality of those links. Google says, “Not all links are equal.”

Page Speed – How much time elapses before a webpage completely loads. This factor affects your search results ranking.

Paid Search – Search results whose position is paid for. These pay-per-click ads are marked “Ads” in Google search results and are placed above and sometimes below organic search results.

R

Rank – The placement of a specific webpage in organic search results concerning a specific query.

Ranking Factor – Ranking factors are the various things deemed important (or not) that all influence search engines’ respective algorithms. They help search engines understand where to place a webpage in search results. You can directly influence many ranking factors on your webpages and site.

S

Search Engine – Computer programs that index websites, webpages, and countless documents and files on the Internet. They make it possible for users to input queries and receive results from the search engine’s index. They’re created and updated over time using crawlers and the information and data therein are analyzed by algorithms.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The practice of optimizing a site and all of its content so that it’s highly visible and gets good placement in organic search results. Good SEO involves keyword research, understanding your audience, creating good and relevant content, and good website structure, navigation, and loading speed. A great SEO strategy addresses content and marketing, and technical elements, too.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – This page is full of the results provided by search engines after an online search is conducted. Results are sorted in order of relevance and helpfulness. SERPs normally include a list of no more than 10 links, but they can include other sections like:

• Ads
• Images
• Knowledge Panels
• Local Pack
• Shopping Results
• And more.

U

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) – This is the string of numbers and symbols located in the address bar at the top of your web browser, which includes all of the information your computer needs to find the right page, image, or document on a website. For example, “https://www.domain.com” is the URL for Domain.com.

Put these SEO terms to good use

It’s time now to build an SEO strategy that’ll help increase the visibility of your website and drive more traffic to it. As you do so, keep this glossary of SEO terms handy for use as a quick reference.

You don’t have to do it alone though. We’ve got the resources and tools you help you create that amazing SEO strategy of yours. 

SEO Resources

Check out these blog posts for more information, advice, and next steps:

A Guide to SEO Basics for Beginners

Achieving online success — whether that be launching a lucrative eCommerce business or hitting a milestone of 10k blog subscribers — is directly influenced by SEO. You can’t build a successful strategy on a shaky foundation, so start with this post if you’re new to search engine optimization. 

The Complete SEO Checklist for Blog Posts and Webpages

This helpful infographic lays out the 10 things you must have to achieve SEO perfection on your blog posts or webpages. Hang on to this one, you’ll come back to it as you create content for your site. 

For the Love of Your Business — SEO Strategies to Implement Now

When we wrote this post, we did so with your website’s best interests at heart. We consulted Mike, our resident SEO expert, and asked him for 10 elements that together, create an effective SEO strategy. Show your site how much you care about it by implementing the tactics covered here. 

SEO Audit Your Website in 2021 [Technical Guide]

Ready to level up your SEO game? This guide lays out your path. What does a website audit entail? What tools are available to you to conduct and track the audit? What should your goals be? We get into the minutiae in this post, but don’t let that deter you. Read this post, take action, and outperform your competitor in the SERPs.

How to Audit Your Online Presence in 2021

Not all SEO-boosting activities occur on your website (reference glossary above: Off-page SEO.) Not as technical as the previously mentioned resource, but just as thorough and equally as important. First, get your house in order with on-page SEO, and then, grow your off-site reputation with the strategies you learn about in this post. 

Keep this SEO Terms Glossary handy

Download this Glossary of SEO Terms to always have on-hand when you need it. 

Do you want to make the most out of your website — increase your conversion rate, improve your SEO, and have the most engaging content? Because to do so you’ll need to audit your site on a regular basis.

In this post, we’re covering ways you can perform a review of your site so you know what’s working and what needs improvement.

How to Perform a Website Audit

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

In order to successfully audit your site, you need to know three things:

1. What a website audit entails.
2. Who your ideal audience is.
3. What your goals are.

The first because, well, how can you perform an audit without knowing what it is? And the second because your site should be designed with your ideal audience in mind. Any improvements you make to your site based on your audit should make life easier for them, not harder. Finally, you need to have identified your website goals. The improvements you make to your site should support your goals (e.g. – increase conversions by 5% month over month.)

Many people and online resources will tell you that a website audit has everything to do with SEO. While that is a large part of it, your site is more than just an SEO machine and we have to look at the bigger picture.

We appreciate BluLeadz’s definition of a website audit. They say that “a good website audit takes into account all the factors that can influence your website’s success: From your perspective, your customer’s, and Google’s.” Considering Google held 88.47 percent of the search engine market as of 2019, their perspective and opinion of your site is absolutely crucial to your success. Your customers’ perspective is essential, so part of your audit will revolve around reviewing the user experience of your website. And of course, your perspective is vital. Who knows your goals and motivations better than yourself? Now is the time to make sure your website is aligned to support them.

Website Review and Audit Tools

It’s difficult to determine where you should begin working on your site if you don’t have a solid understanding of how it’s currently performing. It’s best to first perform your audit and then plan your improvements based on the results.   

A good thing to do at the beginning of every website audit is use a tool built for that specific purpose. You can find both free and paid website audit tools by doing a quick Internet search. Many free tools require that you provide an email address in exchange for their services (it’s called lead generation), or you can pay for a tool to provide a more in-depth review of your site.  

Website Grader

HubSpot created a popular tool, Website Grader, that provides information on your site’s performance, mobile-friendliness, security, SEO, and more. Check out Domain.com’s grade below.

What isn’t pictured here is the plethora of information you’ll receive by starting your website audit with this beginner-friendly tool. You can use the insights from the audit to hone in on the areas where your site needs the most or immediate work. In fact, the last section, titled “What Should I Do Next?” lays it out for you.

Google’s Site Audit Tools

Google offers multiple tools to help you review and understand your website. Here are three of their resources that can best assist you with your audit.

PageSpeed Insights

The name, “PageSpeed Insights,” is pretty telling isn’t it? It’s a tool that “reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.”

Insights ranks your webpages using a numeric grade — 90+ is a fast page, 50-90 is middling, and anything below 50 is without a doubt a slow webpage.

Note that this tool only reviews the webpage URL that you supply, not your entire website at once. Depending on the size and complexity of your site, it may not be feasible to enter the unique URL for each and every one of your webpages.

Maximize the efficacy of this tool by identifying the most important pages on your site and reviewing those first. You can figure out what pages are most important and receive the most traffic by using heatmapping tools, or by utilizing the next Google tool in this list.

Google Analytics

Analytics provides an incredible amount of information and insight into your website. If you’ve never used it before, here’s a great beginner’s guide to Google Analytics to help you get started.

Now, some of you might be wondering why we’re focusing on this tool since it provides in-depth information on your site visitors’ behavior. But think about it: Your site visitors’ behavior, in large part, correlates to the quality and efficacy of your website and its content.

Have a slow loading site? You’re going to see some big bounce rates and small dwell times. People won’t hang around waiting for the page to load; instead, they’ll leave and find another faster loading website that suits their needs.

Google Analytics helps you identify your most popular and well-trafficked landing pages. These could be the pages that people are landing on from search results, other sites, etc. most often. Consider running these pages through the PageSpeed Insights tool to make them as good as can be before moving on to less trafficked pages.

Google Search Console

Once upon a time, Google Search Console was known as Google Webmaster Tools. We like the newer name, because it speaks to this tool’s purpose: to help you “…monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.”

If you have a website, you can benefit from Search Console. It’ll tell you things like:

• How often your site appears in Google search results.
• What terms and queries people search by that lead to your site in the results.
• Indicate any issues you may be experiencing with indexing.
• And more!

Google provides instruction on getting started with Search Console here. The information and insights you gather from this tool will be instrumental in improving your website’s SEO and overall success.

Questions to Ask During a Website Audit

Going into things blindly isn’t a great plan. This is especially true for your website audit.

Before spending a lot of time with the resources we mentioned in the last section, make sure you know what questions they’re supposed to be helping you answer.

Auditing Your Website for the User Experience

Your website’s user experience is integral to its success.

When you create a user-friendly website, you’re really inviting those users to stay longer, interact more, and hopefully, convert (that just means they take the action you want for them to take — purchase, sign up for email, etc.) on your site.

To audit your site for user experience, ask yourself the questions below. (Bonus: Many of the improvements you’ll end up making for user experience will directly improve your SEO!)

• Do I know my target audience?
• Are my CTAs (call-to-actions) and content geared toward my audience?
  • Good CTAs are effective. They are clear and deliberate in telling someone what action to take.
• Is my marketing funnel optimized for these users?
• Is my site’s load time too slow or experiencing any issues? (If so, it could mean the answer to the following question is “Yes.”)
• Are my site visitors bouncing?
  • Follow up by looking into their dwell time.  
• Is my site mobile responsive?
  • If your site doesn’t display well on mobile devices, you’re missing out. As of the end of 2019 mobile devices drove the most website traffic, coming in at 52.6%.
  • This is also important for SEO because Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.
• Does your site navigation make sense?
  • Once someone lands on your site, will they be able to easily find what they’re looking for and move around?
  • Here’s an (admittedly extreme) example of a site with terrible navigation.

• Is your website design up to par?
  • If your site looks like it walked straight out of the 90s then you’re in trouble.
• Do you have a lot of broken links?
  • It’s a bad look, and your visitors won’t think of your site as reliable.
• Is your contact information easy to find?
  • We recommend making it available on every page, even if at the footer.
• Do you have any intrusive pop-up ads or is your site cluttered in ads?
  • Use a browser in incognito or private mode to get a sense of the ad experience for your visitors. 

Audit Your Website for Technical Issues

A technical audit helps get down to the nuts and bolts of your website: Are the systems and technologies working, or are they not?

• Is my website secure?
  • SSL is integral to the security of the information exchanged on your site.
    • Without SSL, information passed from an end-user (site visitor) to unsecure sites (like during a purchase or email sign up) and vice versa isn’t encrypted. This means it can be intercepted by lots of bad actors out there on the Internet.
  • Secure websites are favored by Google in search results.
  • Browsers display whether a site is secure or not, and that can make all the difference in a visitor’s trust (remember, they’re your potential customers.)
    • Below are examples of sites with and without SSL.

• Is your personal information protected from the Internet’s prying eyes with Domain Privacy + Protection?
  • Keep your site safe from both hackers and human error.
• How does your site display across the most popular browsers?
  • Test your site across all the major browsers so there are no surprises or bad experiences for your visitors. Make any necessary changes to improve how your site renders on these browsers.
  • Don’t forget to test the mobile versions of these browsers!
• Are you using a CMS (content management system) like WordPress?
  • If yes, are you using the most up-to-date and secure version?
  • Audit any plugins to make sure they’re running the newest versions and don’t pose security issues. Remove any no longer needed or used.  
• Is your site backed up?
  • Before making any big changes to your site, you should create a backup. Wouldn’t it be terrible if something went wrong while making updates to your site? Without a backup created of your site, that can equal lots of heartache, time, and lost revenue. 

Audit Your Website for SEO.

An SEO audit helps you optimize your website so that it performs well and ranks higher in SERPs, search engine result pages.

• Do you have a sitemap created so that Google and other search engines can easily crawl and index your site?
• Is your robots.txt file accurate?
• Are all the pages on your site optimized according to the various SEO ranking factors?
  • Moz provides a run-down of different On-Page SEO ranking factors here.
• Are you using appropriate and relevant SEO keywords across your site and content?
• Do all your pages have title tags and meta descriptions?
  • Title tags and meta descriptions are HTML elements that appear in the header on a web page. When a page shows as a search result, its title tag and meta description normally display right along with it on the SERP (search engine results page.) This is important because it can influence whether someone clicks through to your site from the SERPs.
• Is your website accessible?
  • Do your images have alt text?
• Do you have any broken or misdirected links?
  • Domain.com’s resident SEO expert, Mike, thinks SEO Minion, a free 3^rd party SEO tool, is good for checking broken links. Please note, this is not a Domain.com product or resource.
• How many backlinks do you have?
  • Backlinks are links created when one website links to another. You may also hear them referred to as “inbound links.”
  • Are they quality backlinks?
  • Moz created Link Explorer, a free tool to help you identify your backlinks and provide other link metrics, but it does require that you sign up for a free Moz account.
  • SEOquake is another 3^rd party tool (free plugin) that offers great insights into your SEO.
• Is your URL structure optimized?
  • URL structure matters to both search engines and the people visiting your site.
  • Here’s Search Engine Journal’s guide to an SEO-friendly URL structure.

Wrapping up Your Website Audit

Auditing your website can seem overwhelming at first. If that’s the case, break it out into smaller sections and complete them one by one. It could take a few days or a few weeks, but either way, audits are necessary for the success of your site.

You should plan on auditing your website at least a couple of times each year. For more complex websites, consider auditing them more frequently.

Reviewing and auditing your site will give you a leg up with search engines, your customers, and your competitors.

Did you have any other tips or recommendations for auditing sites? Let us know in the comments!

If so, you need to learn a thing or two about SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is made up of various strategies and best practices that exist to improve your position in search engine results.

Google, the dominant search engine, relies on different SEO ranking signals to determine what websites or pages are the best results for different search queries. These ranking signals consist of things like: a secure website (SSL enabled), appropriate keywords, a site’s mobile friendliness, and quality of links. When your site is optimized for SEO, you have a better chance of ranking higher in SERPs, or search engine result pages. This is vitally important considering “75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines.”

There are two kinds of SEO: On-page and Off-page, though we’ll mostly focus on the former in this post. So without further ado, let’s look at some SEO strategies that can help boost your business in search results.

SEO Strategies for Your Business

We asked our resident SEO expert, Mike, what strategies and tactics he recommends as the most impactful that you should implement ASAP. He’s developed successful SEO plans for small businesses, agencies, and large corporations, so he’s well-versed in what helps a website rank higher in search results.

Here’s what he had to say.

Understand Users and Their Intent

Remember when typing three keywords into Google would still give you decent, relevant results? That doesn’t cut it anymore. Now, people are searching the Internet using more complex, natural speech patterns. Considering how voice search is on the rise, this trend doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. To make the most of it, you need to know a thing or two about your users.

How well do you know your audience and user base? Understanding them will give you a leg up in search results.

Are you wondering how that’s possible?

Search engines value content and sites that users themselves find valuable. So how does Google know what content and sites users find valuable? They use information like bounce rates and dwell time to determine whether someone is staying on your page, consuming relevant content, or bouncing away because your site doesn’t meet their needs or answer their query.

You can use Google Analytics to help you understand who your users are. You can figure out how they’re reaching your site, where they’re landing, and more information to help you refine the user experience of your site.

Google BERT (one of Google’s newer search algorithms released in October 2019) supports your need for a user-focused site. BERT, “is Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP)…” and “in short, BERT can help computers understand language a bit more like humans do.”

Optimizing Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Page titles and meta descriptions are some of the first things users and search engines see and they influence how your page is understood.  

Page titles are the clickable titles that display in SERPs, like you see in the example below, circled in red. Depending on the browser you’re using, you may also see page titles in your tabs.

Meta descriptions are little snippets of HTML content that describe the content on a page. Optimizing them for SEO is crucial. You can see Domain.com’s homepage meta description circled in blue below.

Page Title Optimization

Your page title is one of the most important on-page SEO ranking factors. To make the most of it, keep these tips in mind:

• It should be no more than 65 characters in length (including spaces.)
• Your most important keyword should feature in your page title.
  • Don’t stuff it full of keywords. That’s ineffective and search engines see right through it.

Meta Description Optimization

Meta descriptions are brief snippets created to describe a page or site. Good meta descriptions increase the click-through rate from search results to your site. Create effective meta descriptions by:

• Including a CTA (call-to-action) in your meta description.
• Keeping your description between 50-160 characters, including spaces.
  • While you can write longer meta descriptions, Google tends to truncate them if they’re too wordy.
• Including keywords is important, but don’t keyword-stuff for the sake of keyword-stuffing.  

Create and Write Longer, Better Content  

Articles and pages that appear on the first page of Google search results tend to average ~1890 words. If you’re still writing 500-word fluff and puff pieces, your SEO is in trouble.

Let’s hearken back to the first SEO strategy Mike suggested, understanding your audience. If you can find out why people are coming to your site, you can cater your content to them.

Writing good content takes time, but it’s worth it because the quality of your content matters. Good content is:

• Engaging. It keeps people on your site longer.
• Shareable. If your content is good and trustworthy, others are more likely to share it and that gains you backlinks (a form of Off-page SEO.)
• Editable. Good content needs to be tweaked. Google likes “fresh” content, so be sure to revise your content to include updated keywords, newer facts, or reflect changes in user-behavior.

Remember, search engines want to display the best results for search queries. If your page has the best, most comprehensive content that answers a question, naturally, it’ll rank higher over time.

Secure Pages

Having a secure website is essential to your success. You might think you can get away without SSL if you’re not running an e–commerce website or asking for user’s personal information (like via an email sign up form), but you’d be mistaken.

SSL isn’t just vital for site security; it also matters for appearances’ sake — never discount the power of perception. We’ll explain below.

Since Google introduced security as a ranking signal in 2014, SSL has been a must-have. SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer” and it protects and encrypts the information passed between an end user (site visitor) and your site, and vice versa. It keeps information safe ranging from credit card details to email addresses. Without SSL, hackers and bad guys can intercept, read, and alter that information.

Remember how we said perception matters? Consider this: Sites with SSL enabled have a visual indicator in the URL bar that signals the site as safe and secure.

Sites without SSL, or not secure sites, show up with an ugly indicator, like you see below, that can cause site visitors to lose trust and confidence in you.

Don’t push your site visitors away before they’ve had a chance to peruse your pages. Enable SSL on your site and reap the benefits of increased customer trust and the secure exchange of information on your site.

Use Your SEO Tools

If you’re working on SEO, it makes sense to use SEO tools designed specifically to help! As an added bonus, many of them are free. Let’s look at two resources created by Google that are indispensable to your SEO efforts.

Google Analytics

Use this tool to understand basic KPIs (key performance indicators) and benchmark performance. With Analytics you can:

• Understand your audience.
• Gain insight into performance fluctuations.
• Visualize user behavior.
• Create reports.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console has one main purpose: to help you understand how GoogleBot has interacted with your site.

What’s GoogleBot? It’s Google’s Search Engine Bot that crawls webpages. It uses sitemaps and links to catalogue sites on the Internet. Google stores this information in their index, which is like a massive repository of sites that exist online.

GoogleBot crawls sites using different SEO ranking factors and looks for things like broken links or updated content. When it finds these things, it updates and makes note of them in the larger index.

When using Search Console, don’t forget to look at your Index Coverage Report (ICR). Your ICR:

• Lists both the pages you’ve submitted to Google (like via a sitemap) and all the pages Google has discovered on its own.
  • Each page displayed in the report will fall into one of the following four buckets.
    • Valid
    • Valid with warnings
    • Error
    • Excluded

Use the status of your pages to make any necessary changes to your site. For example, if you find a webpage that’s excluded from search results that shouldn’t be, you’ll need to correct it.

Search Console also lets you see the queries people made to find your site! Neat, right? This is incredibly insightful information that allows you to:

• Improve your keywords, and therefore, your content.
• Understand your most valuable organic keywords.
• Gauge and monitor keyword movement to see what you should be targeting.

Technical SEO

Have you ever completed a technical audit of your site? If not, now’s the time to start. As a best practice, you should audit your site at least once a year (more if you have a complex site.)

Technical site audits help you understand various things about your site, like:

Are You Searchable?

• When people make search queries, are your pages surfacing as results?
• Help you understand what “noindex” tags exist on your site that shouldn’t be there.
• Check the validity of your webpages (especially by using Google Search Console in your audit.)

Clean up Your Redirects

• When you click on a specific URL, but the page that loads has a different URL, it means you’ve encountered a redirect. Redirects are ways of getting people from one webpage to another.
  • Here’s an example of how it could work. Let’s say you used to sell tons of Product A because people just loved it. But you discovered Product B, something far superior, and stopped carrying the other one.  If someone has the old page for Product A bookmarked, you can use a redirect to get them to Product B’s page instead of seeing an error.  
• Over time, your redirect chains can get longer and longer and that can dilute your SEO equity.
  • This also adds load time to your pages.
• Check for temporary redirects and make sure they stay that way, temporary! They shouldn’t be used as long-term solutions.
• If you need a permanent redirect, make it a 301. We repeat, 301 redirects are permanent, but they transfer the SEO equity of your old page to your new one, unlike a temporary redirect.

Evaluate Site Traffic

• To evaluate your site traffic you’ll need to use either Google Analytics or Google Search Console.
  • For Google Analytics:
    • Click on Acquisitions > All Traffic > Channels > Organic Search (under default channel groupings) and select your time frame.
    • We recommend choosing a longer time frame to really get a sense of any patterns or issues.
    • Use this information to identify landing pages with irregular performances.
    • Evaluate these pages individually looking for potential errors.
  • For Google Search Console:
    • Navigate to Performance > Search Results > Change date to “Compare.”
    • Sort results by significant differences in your KPIs to identify and evaluate your site performance trends.
    • Seeing a big gap in click and impression data? Bridge them by identifying the keywords you’d like to strengthen and then focus on those terms within that page(s).

Update Your Robots.txt File

Robots.txt files are made to communicate with web crawling robots (like GoogleBot.) These files tell the bots what webpages they can and can’t access for crawling on your site. It’s a file that creates “rules” around your domain.  

• Robots.txt files
  • Make sure no important elements from your site are being blocked from crawlers and therefore, search engines.
  • Block elements of your site (of your choosing) from crawlers and search engines.
• You should always check your Robots.txt file.
  • You can view its real-time performance from within Google Search Console, just look for the Index Coverage Report we mentioned earlier.
  • For example, anything that results in “valid, but with warnings” means your Robots.txt file should’ve prevented those URLs from being crawled, but they’ve surfaced anyway. If this happens, make sure your Robots.txt file is set up appropriately.
  • You could also see things marked as “excluded.” This means those URLs are appropriately and correctly blocked from SERPs by the robots.txt file.
    • We recommend giving anything an “excluded” status a once-over to make sure you haven’t accidentally blocked any pages that should be crawlable.

Review Your 404 pages

• 404 errors surface across pages that have been removed, deleted, or are otherwise categorized as “Bad Requests.”
  • Do you have any 404 pages that have actually gained significant value for your site?
    • This could be because they’ve generated a lot of backlinks, have great keyword ranking, bring in decent traffic, revenue, or a variety of other reasons.
    • If yes, you should consider redirecting those pages (remember, 301 redirects maintain all the SEO equity that a page has built) or reconfiguring them so they’re still relevant.
• View your 404s with a web crawl or with Google Search Console.
  • In Search Console, go to your Index Coverage Report and then navigate to the “Errors” section. This will display all the 404 errors that came from your sitemap.xml file.
  • In that same report, navigate to the “Excluded” section.
  • This will report on any pages with a 404 crawl anomaly or any pages throwing soft 404 errors.

Implementing These SEO Strategies and Tips Will Boost Your Business

We want your business to succeed as much as you do. That’s why we’ve compiled these SEO strategies and hope that you implement them on your website.

SEO is crucial to surviving and thriving online, so don’t let your website and business get behind. If you’ve never worked on your SEO before, consider starting with this beginner’s guide to SEO.

If you have any questions, or other SEO strategies you’d like to suggest, let us know in the comments.

It’s pretty pervasive.

No matter where you look, someone is on their phone checking on their social media — updating friends, posting photos, or shopping via links businesses share.

If you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur and your business doesn’t have a social media presence, then it’s time to create one. Considering social media is one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing, you really don’t have anything to lose.

Just as with websites, people want to visit good-looking social media profiles, and that’s where this guide comes in handy.

Social Media Image Sizes

In our social media image size guide, we’ll be covering what you need to create to run ads on some of the biggest and most popular platforms.

Keep in mind that your business doesn’t need to be on each and every existing social media site. You only need to have a presence where your audience and customers are. It may take some trial and error to narrow down what platforms they’re on, but it’s worth the effort.

Facebook Social Media Image Sizes

Facebook is frequently updating its algorithms and making changes to its platforms. Often times this means tweaks to the way personal and business pages are displayed.

Facebook Cover Photo

• Your Facebook cover photo is only going to appear on your page. It won’t be seen throughout Facebook or in other locations.
• It will display differently on a desktop than it will on a smartphone as Facebook crops cover photos to best fit the devices they’re displayed on.
  • Due to this cropping, keep the focus of your cover photo towards the center of your cover image. Any important details or designs along the borders could risk getting cropped and not displaying on certain devices.
• 820 x 360 pixels (Facebook recommends 851 x 315 pixels but that’s the absolute minimum you should use. Any less and your photos risk looking distorted.)
• Cover photos should maintain a 16:9 proportion.

Facebook Event Cover Photo

• Will your business be creating events on Facebook? If so, make sure your event cover photos are sized at 1920 x 1080 pixels.

Facebook Profile Photo

• Your page’s profile photo displays at 170 x 170 pixels on desktop, 128 x 128 pixels on smartphones, and even smaller on feature phones.
• Your profile photo will appear cropped into a circle.
• We use a 400 x 400 pixel image for our profile photo and recommend you do the same.
• Instead of uploading a JPG try uploading a PNG for your photo. This ensures a better quality photo that won’t look pixelated or stretched.

Facebook Photos Shared in Posts

• Facebook posts with images get a 37% engagement rate on average whereas posts with only text receive about 27%.
• Sharing a link with a photo? That image should be 1200 x 630 pixels. (This size is also perfect for Twitter and LinkedIn!)

Facebook Stories

• Facebook Stories take up the entire display on mobile devices.
• Images should be maintain a 16×9 ratio.
• Images should be optimized for Stories at 1080 x 1920 pixels.

Twitter Social Media Image Sizes

Twitter updated most of its image sizes in 2017 and changed the aspect ratio of its header image (similar to Facebook’s cover photo, it’s the image at the top of your profile) in 2019.

Twitter Header Image Size

• Twitter recommends uploading a header image at 1500 x 500 pixels. 
• Uploading a vector-based or line art image? Use a GIF or PNG file.
• Uploading a photo? Use a JPG or PNG file (although we recommend always using PNG.)
• Although Twitter says that your header image will be cropped into a 2×1 aspect ratio on mobile devices, that no longer seems to be the case as of summer 2019. Now, images still display at a 3:1 ratio whether on mobile or desktop.

Twitter Profile Photo

• Your profile picture should be 400 x 400 pixels and it may be resized to fit.
• Profile photos display in a circular shape, so make sure to center your image on a larger background if you’re afraid of important details getting cropped out.

Twitter Images Shared in Posts

• When sharing posts or links with a single image or GIF, Twitter recommends that they are a minimum of 600 x 355 pixels. However, if you want your image to be optimized when people click on it for a larger view, and still look good in your feed, we recommend 1200 x 630 pixels.

Twitter Advertising Creative Specifications

• You can create and share a variety of types of tweets if you’re doing paid advertisements on Twitter.
• Here’s a link to their creative specifications page for advertisers so you can see your options and find the correct dimensions and specs for your images, GIFs, and videos.

Instagram Social Media Image Sizes

Instagram is a visual platform that’s great for connecting with your customers and followers. It was created as a photo-sharing app and was purchased by Facebook in 2012.

Instagram Profile Image Size

• Profile images on Instagram display at small sizes.
  • On desktop, they display at 152 pixels.
  • On mobile, they display at 110 pixels.
• We recommend uploading a larger image of 400 x 400 pixels to avoid any issues with quality and so you can ensure nothing important gets cropped out of your photo.

Instagram Shared Photo Size

• Instagram images aren’t restricted to squares anymore, but keep in mind that they will be cropped into squares when shown on your profile.
• Square images should have a 1:1 aspect ratio and be uploaded at 1080 x 1080 pixels.
• For horizontal, or landscape images, upload photos at 1080 x 566 pixels.
• For vertical, or portrait images, upload photos at 1080 x 1350 pixels.

Instagram Stories Photo Size

• Images and photos uploaded to your story should be 1080 x 1920 pixels.
• People using phones with larger mobile displays may see cropped images, in which case, try uploading them at 1080 x 2340 pixels.

Pinterest Social Media Image Sizes

Pinterest is an image based social media platform. It inspires people to try new things and get creative with their ideas. Many businesses see good results from sharing their products and services on Pinterest, and by using it to connect with their audience and customers.

Pinterest Profile Image Size

• Your Pinterest profile photo displays at 180 x 180 pixels. You can do that or go a little larger, like 400 x 400 pixels, to make sure it’s good quality and doesn’t get overly cropped.

Pinterest Board Cover Image Size

• Unlike most pins, board cover images are square. They should be at least 340 x 340 pixels, but we recommend going larger at 600 x 600 pixels.

Pinterest Shared Pins Image Size

• Pinterest recommends creating pins using images in one of three sizes:
  • 600 x 600 pixels, 1:1 aspect ratio.
  • 600 x 900 pixels, 1:1.5 aspect ratio (according to Pinterest, this is the optimal size.)
  • 600 x 1250 pixels, 1:2.1 aspect ratio.
• When someone clicks on your pin it’ll display no wider than 564 pixels.

Pinterest Profile Cover Image Size

• Some business profiles can now edit their Pinterest profile covers.
  • This feature hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet, but keep your eyes peeled for future updates.
• Cover images should fit the 16:9 aspect ratio, or 1920 x 1080 pixels.

LinkedIn Social Media Image Sizes

Once upon a time, businesses primarily used LinkedIn as an HR and recruiting tool. Nowadays, the platform has grown into so much more. You can use LinkedIn to build your personal and business brands, create and raise awareness, and leverage the power of your connections.

LinkedIn Personal Profile Image Size

• LinkedIn recommends uploading an image between 400 x 400 pixels and 7680 x 4320 pixels.
• Images cannot be greater than 8MB.
• You can adjust your photo after it’s been uploaded.

LinkedIn Personal Profile Background Image Size

• Background photos appear behind your profile photo. Don’t put any important details or design elements in the bottom left corner of your image as they’ll likely be covered by your profile picture.
• Recommended size is 1584 x 396 pixels.
• Files can’t be larger than 8 MB.

LinkedIn Company Page Logo Image Size

• If you’re uploading your logo to your business page, make sure it’s sized at 300 x 300 pixels.

LinkedIn Company Page Cover Image Size

• The minimum size that LinkedIn allows for a page’s cover photo is 1192 x 220 pixels, although they recommend uploading an image at 1536 x 768 pixels.

LinkedIn Shared Image Size

• If you’re only sharing an image(s) to your personal or company page, make sure it’s sized at 1104 x 736 pixels.

LinkedIn Shared Image with Link Size

• If you’re sharing a link with an attached image, then upload the image(s) at 1200 x 628 pixels.

Snapchat Social Media Image Sizes

Is a younger demographic part of your target audience? Hootsuite reports that as of 2018, around 71% of Snapchat users were under 34 years old. With around 188 million daily active users, Snapchat (rebranded as Snap in 2016) could be the perfect social media platform for you.

You’ll need to create a Business Account only if you plan on using Snap’s advertising features.

Snapchat Profile Image Size

• Unlike other social media platforms, Snapchat doesn’t allow you to upload your own profile picture. In the past you could upload a GIF, but now you must use Bitmoji.

Snapchat Shared Image Size

• Images shared on Snapchat should be 1080 x 1920 pixels.

YouTube Social Media Image Sizes

If you plan on doing any sort of video marketing for your business or side hustle, then YouTube is the place to be. 2 billion people across the globe use and log into YouTube on a monthly basis, and it’s the most popular social media platform in the United States. In fact, 73% of U.S. based adults use YouTube.

YouTube Channel Profile Image Size

• Although your channel’s profile picture only displays at 98 x 98 pixels, it should be uploaded much larger. We recommend using an 800 x 800 pixel image.
• Profile images display as circles, so the larger image means important details are less likely to be cropped out.
• You can upload JPG, GIF, BMP, or PNG files.

YouTube Channel Cover Image Size

• Since people can access YouTube from so many different devices it’s important that your photo be optimized to display as nicely as possible.
• The largest your cover image can display is on a desktop at 2560 x 423 pixels. However, the smallest it displays is on a mobile device at 1546 x 423 pixels. Keep the focus of your image within the 1546 x 423 pixel area so it isn’t cropped out on mobile devices. This is the “safe zone.”

YouTube Video Uploads Size

• Videos need to maintain a 16:9 aspect ratio when uploaded to YouTube.
• For your video to be considered HD it needs to be at least 1280 x 720 pixels.

Create and Optimize Your Business Social Media Profiles

Your audience is on social media, are you ready to find and connect with them?

When creating your social media profiles, try to keep your usernames the same or as close to your domain name as possible. This helps carry your branding and name recognition from your website to the rest of your digital presence.

We hope this guide for 2020 social media image sizes helps you optimize your social media profiles so your business is represented in the best light possible.

Are there any social media platforms that weren’t included in this list that you’d like to see? Let us know in the comments!

It’s ok, we’ve all been there.

Perhaps it’s time to sit down and think about how you can be more productive in accomplishing your goals. There are only so many hours in a day, and as a small business owner or entrepreneur, we’re sure you can use every single one of them if not a few more. Let’s look at some popular productivity tips, tricks, and hacks so you can make the most of the upcoming year.

Productivity tips to get more accomplished. 

Productivity is all about increasing your efficiency in getting things done. How many times have you hastily scribbled a To-Do List on the back of an old receipt only to find that most of those tasks never get done?

There could be a few issues at hand. Are you trying to tackle too much stuff in a day? A week? A month? Before reviewing popular productivity tips and tricks, make sure that you consider the time and resources you have available and how those could affect your plans. Even the most well-laid plans go awry when there isn’t the time or resources to see them through to fruition.

Keep in mind that the productivity hack that works best for someone else might not be the best one for you. Maintain an open mind and understand that you may need to try a few tactics before you find what works for you.

10 productivity tips, tricks, and hacks you need to try.

1- Write it down.

You’ve heard this before, we know. But if it hasn’t worked for you yet, consider this: You’re probably doing it wrong.

The concept of the To-Do List is simple. Think of the tasks you need to accomplish, write them down, and cross them off when done. But that didn’t help when you scrawled your list across the back of scraps of paper, did it?

When creating your To-Do List make sure you’re defining the tasks that need to get done with S.M.A.R.T. goals. These goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. By giving yourself S.M.A.R.T. goals and writing out exactly what you hope to accomplish and by when, you’re setting yourself up for success. They also help relieve some of the stress and anxiety you might feel when faced with a large task by breaking it into manageable chunks.

The act of handwriting your list instead of typing it out will help you remember what needs to be done. The reason you can more easily remember something you’ve written is because of something called the “Generation Effect.” Thinking through what needs to be done and then generating a list based on those things helps to encode the information in your brain. “Encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed.” And that helps us humans remember our responsibilities.

So write down what needs to get done, or risk forgetting your important tasks and brightest ideas.

2- Eat Your Frogs.

Start the list (and your day) with your largest, most cumbersome tasks. If you put off the large tasks until the end of the day, odds are good you won’t get around to accomplishing them. Humans have a tendency to procrastinate, so get to the big tasks first instead of putting them off.

Brian Tracy, an accomplished professional speaker, touches on this in his book, “Eat That Frog!” The title stems from a Mark Twain quote, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” What he’s really telling us is that if you get your biggest, most uncomfortable tasks done first then you can have the satisfaction of knowing they’re done the rest of the day.

3- Batch and break.

Working non-stop for hours on end day in and day out is a great recipe for burnout. “Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress.”

So what can you do to avoid burnout and maintain your productivity levels? Batch and break.

Group your routine tasks together and knock them off your To-Do List one after another. These could be tasks like checking and responding to emails or returning customer phone calls. Don’t waste time you don’t have by spreading these tasks throughout the day. Lump them together and get them done at once so you can move on to your other responsibilities that require more focus and thought.

After you’ve finished a batch of tasks, take a break. By giving your brain and body a brief respite, you’re mentally preparing yourself to tackle the next thing on your list and you’re reducing your chances of getting burnt out.

4- There’s an app for that.

Need to increase your productivity but can’t stay away from your cell phone?

It’s ok, we understand the pull of technology. If you must keep your phone by you as you tackle your To-Do List, try putting it to work in your favor.

Many apps exist for the sole purpose of helping to increase your productivity levels. They range from digital list makers to project management tools to social media publishing tools.

Need some help staying focused while working on your tasks? Try an app based on the Pomodoro Technique. “The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method … [that] uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.” Some of these apps are complex and offer additional features, or you can use something like the Bear Focus Timer, a simple app to help you concentrate and stay focused.

5- Join the cloud.

Is it distracting when you have to bounce from one program or software to another? Check your email here, write documents and blog posts there, and track inventory somewhere else entirely. While they’re not technically apps, G Suite and Microsoft Office 365 offer cloud-based solutions to help you stay on track. From a professional email address that matches your domain name to online meeting solutions, you can find what you need to take your productivity to the next level.

6- Turn off notifications.

You might think that a minute here and a minute there don’t amount to much, but they really do add up. If you must have your phone accessible while you work then turn off all non-essential notifications. By turning off the notifications, you’ll remove the temptation to check them every time you see one.

7- The Eisenhower Method

How do you decide what tasks are more important or urgent than others? If you’re struggling to determine what needs to be prioritized, try using the Eisenhower Method, designed by former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

8- Learn to say “No.”

“No” is a powerful word. You may not be comfortable saying no to tasks and requests, but you’ll never get it all done if you say yes to everything.

Say no to distractions. Say no to non-urgent and unimportant requests. Say no to unnecessary meetings. Say no to preserve your sanity and leave time for your most important tasks and responsibilities.

9- Stop multitasking.

Do you think you’re good at multitasking? Research says probably not. When you think you’re “multitasking” you’re likely just switching between tasks quickly, like checking your email and attending to a webinar. Odds are good that when you’re focused on one you aren’t truly attending to the other.

David Strayer, PhD, is a professor of Cognition and Neural Science at the University of Utah; his research indicates that only 2% of the world’s population can truly multitask. These folks are called “supertaskers” and “the supertaskers are true outliers.“

10- Fuel up appropriately.

Everyone knows that sugar will give you a rush. That rush feels good as it happens, but everyone also knows that what follows is a crash.

Instead of relying on sugary food and drink to give you quick but ineffective bursts of energy, try eating a balanced, healthy diet.

The Harvard Business Review writes that “Not all foods are processed by our bodies at the same rate. Some foods, like pasta, bread, cereal and soda, release their glucose quickly, leading to a burst of energy followed by a slump. Others, like high fat meals (think cheeseburgers and BLTs) provide more sustained energy, but require our digestive system to work harder, reducing oxygen levels in the brain and making us groggy.”

Get productive and stay productive in the new year. 

We have faith that you’re going to accomplish what it is you set out to accomplish this year.

Whether you’re starting your online presence by getting a domain name and website, to taking your business to the next level, all your goals will be easier to achieve when you’re productive.

Remember, write down what you need to get done and don’t be vague about it. Batch similar tasks and take breaks after they’re complete or at regular intervals. And instead of letting technology distract you from your tasks, use it to your advantage.

What other productivity tips and tricks do you rely on? Share them with us in the comments!