However, if you don’t want to go through the hassle of submitted to the official chrome extension store, you can just side load it locally.

Here’s how to do it.

how to install chrome extension locally

First go to chrome://extensions/

This will open up your Chrome extensions menu. Chances are your Developer mode is disabled, toggle this button so it is enabled

Next, click the Load Unpacked button

Assuming you’re done coding your own solution or downloaded someone else’s code, you’ll need to first find the folder, click on the folder in your finder or explorer and then click Select (for Macs)

You should now have a local Chrome extension loaded. Click the Extension icon, find your extension in your list and pin it if you want to see it on the main extension tool bar

Back in the extension menu, there are a couple helpful options

1. Make sure this is enabled (by default it should be), if this is disabled, the extension won’t be visible in the list
2. If you are developing locally, clicking this Refresh button will reload the extension assuming it is in the same folder directory, this saves you time from having to side load it multiple times.
3. Remove button uninstalls the extension
4. Details button is helpful if you want to enable things like showing your extension in incognito windows etc.

Note that this extension is ONLY loaded locally. If you move workstations you won’t have this option, it does not sync with your Google profile like other production level extensions so you’ll need to save these files somewhere accessible or submit to the Google Chrome Extension store.

Happy coding.

Using the instructions below, you can build your own regex so you can easily highlight a custom ai banned word set (hello “delve” – I see you) and decide if you want to edit it out.

Steps

Copy Keywords List

Modify as needed (maybe you like to keep some words in and add other ai banned words) Credit goes to Casey Keith for coming up with this initial list

Additionally,As an AI,last knowledge,As well as,Beacon,Bombastic,Boost,Buckle up,By the same token,Comparatively,Conclusion,Correspondingly,Demystified,Discover,Delve,Elevate,Embrace,Enhance,Equally,Ever-evolving,Explore,Finally,First,Generated by AI,Get ready,Gone are the days,Hitherto,Identically,In light of,In the sea of,Labyrinth,Leverage,Likewise,Look no further,Maximize,Navigating,Nested,Not to mention,Now lets move on,Overall,Picture this,Plethora,Realm,Remember that,Shed light,Similarly,Solace,Starting a sentence with By,Switching gears,To say nothing of,Together with,Top-notch,Treasure,Uniquely,Unleash,Unlock,Various,When it comes to,Whilst,Whimsical,addition,crucial,digital landscape,digital world,embark,essential,go deeper,important,innovative,journey,ultimate guide,unveil,transition,deep dive,dive in,ensure,optimal,assessing,strive,comprehensive,we know,we understand,testament,captivating,eager,refreshing,edge of my seat,breath of fresh air,to consider,it is important to consider,there are a few considerations,its essential to,vital,its important to note,it should be noted,to sum up,in terms of,with regard to,its worth mentioning,its interesting to note,significantly,notably,essentially,as such,therefore,thus,interestingly,in essence,noteworthy,bear in mind,its crucial to note,one might argue,its widely acknowledged,predominantly,from this perspective,in this context,this demonstrates,arguably,its common knowledge,undoubtedly,this raises the question,in a nutshell,in today's, digital age, digital era, era, age

Use Chat GPT to write a Regex

Here’s the prompt

build me a regex for google doc so I can find (control + F) and highlight all of these words:
[insert your cusotm word list here]

The output should be something similar to the output below. You may need to regenerate it a few times if it doesn’t work or just manually modify the one below.

(?:\bAdditionally\b|\bAs an AI\b|\blast knowledge\b|\bAs well as\b|\bBeacon\b|\bBombastic\b|\bBoost\b|\bBuckle up\b|\bBy the same token\b|\bComparatively\b|\bConclusion\b|\bCorrespondingly\b|\bDemystified\b|\bDiscover\b|\bElevate\b|\bEmbrace\b|\bEnhance\b|\bEqually\b|\bEver-evolving\b|\bExplore\b|\bFinally\b|\bFirst\b|\bGenerated by AI\b|\bGet ready\b|\bGone are the days\b|\bHitherto\b|\bIdentically\b|\bIn light of\b|\bIn the sea of\b|\bLeverage\b|\bLikewise\b|\bLook no further\b|\bMaximize\b|\bNavigating\b|\bNested\b|\bNot to mention\b|\bNow lets move on\b|\bOverall\b|\bPicture this\b|\bPlethora\b|\bRealm\b|\bRemember that\b|\bShed light\b|\bSimilarly\b|\bSolace\b|\bStarting a sentence with By\b|\bSwitching gears\b|\bTo say nothing of\b|\bTogether with\b|\bTop-notch\b|\bTreasure\b|\bUniquely\b|\bUnleash\b|\bUnlock\b|\bVarious\b|\bWhen it comes to\b|\bWhilst\b|\bWhimsical\b|\baddition\b|\bcrucial\b|\bdigital landscape\b|\bdigital world\b|\bembark\b|\bessential\b|\bgo deeper\b|\bimportant\b|\binnovative\b|\bjourney\b|\bultimate guide\b|\bunveil\b|\btransition\b|\bdeep dive\b|\bdive in\b|\bensure\b|\boptimal\b|\bassessing\b|\bstrive\b|\bcomprehensive\b|\bwe know\b|\bwe understand\b|\btestament\b|\bcaptivating\b|\beager\b|\brefreshing\b|\bedge of my seat\b|\bbreath of fresh air\b|\bto consider\b|\bit is important to consider\b|\bthere are a few considerations\b|\bits essential to\b|\bvital\b|\bits important to note\b|\bit should be noted\b|\bto sum up\b|\bin terms of\b|\bwith regard to\b|\bits worth mentioning\b|\bits interesting to note\b|\bsignificantly\b|\bnotably\b|\bessentially\b|\bas such\b|\btherefore\b|\bthus\b|\binterestingly\b|\bin essence\b|\bnoteworthy\b|\bbear in mind\b|\bits crucial to note\b|\bone might argue\b|\bits widely acknowledged\b|\bpredominantly\b|\bfrom this perspective\b|\bin this context\b|\bthis demonstrates\b|\barguably\b|\bits common knowledge\b|\bundoubtedly\b|\bthis raises the question\b|\bin a nutshell\b|\bin today's\b|\bdigital age\b|\bdigital era\b|\bera\b|\bage\b|\Delve\b|\Labyrinth\b)

Highlight ban words in google doc

• open your google doc with your copy
• command+f / control+f to open the find and replace window

1. Paste your regex from above (see image below)
2. Check the “use regular expression […]” option
3. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate

Edit your Copy

1. The dark green highlight is the current word (see image below)
2. type the word in this field you want to replace or click next to ignore
3. Click Replace when ready. Do Not Replace All.

Then continue from word to word and decide if you want to replace it.

This is the most common challenge for small business owners. The web hosting industry is incredibly competitive and they will do anything to get your attention.

Don’t get tricked into their traps (I see you – 3 year lock in plan Bluehost!). In my guide, I’ll walk you through the things you need to consider when choosing a web hosting service as a small business.

Your Business Objective

By far, the most important factor in selecting a host is first identifying what the purpose of your website will be.

Will you be optimizing for keywords and SEO traffic or will the website be generating leads for a local service? These decisions upfront will help you narrow down your choices.

For example, if you are writing for traffic, it doesn’t make sense to get Siteground’s “StartUp” tier that caps at 10k visitors per month. Once you hit this limit, your website will no longer be able to receive traffic.

Instead, look for hosts that will keep your website active even after the limit has been hit. You can find out by emailing their customer service.

Another example. If it is business critical that your website never goes offline for even a few minutes, you’ll want to look for features like “99% uptime” – this is code for, we have backups of backups to make sure they kick in when the power goes out.

Now that you know your objective let’s get into the types of hosting

• Shared Hosting – this is the most common for smaller businesses. It’s like sharing an apartment building with other tenants. You’re all on the same server or set of servers and the bandwidth is shared.
• Dedicated hosting – this is like owning your own home. You have full control, but of course, it is more expensive.
• VPS hosting – this is like the best of both worlds where you share some resources, but have some flexibility.

Hosting Types

Here’s a table breakdown

Customer Support

When it comes to hosting, nothing beats a good technical customer support team. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve created a helpdesk ticket only to come back and see the host actually just did the work for me.

However, not all hosting brands are created equal. If you just go with the least expensive host, you are giving up this level of service most likely.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to know if customer support is good without actually using the service or asking for help. It is a bit of trial and error or you can consider posting on Reddit to get a sense from other users.

Which leads me to the next tip..

Don’t purchase multi-year plans

This is the mistake I see happening over and over where businesses will purchase 36 months of web hosting because the per-month cost is so attractive (read: dirt cheap).

This is a trick! Don’t fall for it.

While moving hosting can be a pain, it isn’t worse than abandoning a host that you paid hundreds of dollars for upfront and can no longer use after 6 months because your business needs change.

To avoid this, never purchase hosting for more than 12 months at a time. This also lets you take advantage of annual deal seasons.

Black Friday Deals

We all know Black Friday is an incredible time for computer deals and furniture you’ve been eyeing all year, but did you know Web Hosts also get in on the deal action?

Saving 25% off on the first year for a good host can go a long way. It makes it easier on the budget and 12 months is enough time for me to see if WPX is a good host or not.

So if you can wait until November each year, this might be a good plan to save some money.

Site Speed

You’ll want to consider site speed if your website needs to load fast. While technically we all want our sites to load fast, it is especially important if most of your revenue comes from website leads.

For example, if you are running ads on your website, you need each page to load fast so visitors will stay on as long as possible.

Running site speed tests is incredibly time-consuming so luckily the folks at Theme Isle have already done a comprehensive test that you can review for the fastest web hosting companies. (heads up, their report is full of affiliate links).

Auto Backup Services

You don’t need to have the web host do this for you, but it sure is nice when they can do weekly or even daily backups as part of the hosting plan. I would say this is a nice to have.

You can also install your own backup plugins (all in one migration or updraft are two good options).

Having at least a regular backup plan can relieve a lot of stress while running a business. At least you know you can always roll back if something catastrophic happens.

Pricing

The right price is the one that checks all your business objective boxes and still fits within budget.

If you can opt for the annual deal, go for it, but otherwise, go monthly.

On average, you can expect to pay $2.50 to $30 per month depending on the features you need. Anything above that is likely overkill at this time until your business scales.

That’s it

That’s it? Don’t I need to worry about this and that..

No, this is it.

For the vast majority of new websites, you don’t need to worry about anything else.

Best of luck. You can chat with me here in Discord username dlinyvr if you have questions.

While most of the use cases and chatter about ChatGPT has been about creating blog articles and idea generation, you can actually use the tool to improve your efficiency at work.

You can even leverage it to generate sales leads (more on this below).

In this article, I’ll go over how to quickly sign up for the Openai service and then dive into each of the ways I use it right now at work to get my work done fast (work smarter, not harder, right?)

Key Takeaways

• How to Create an OpenAI account, setup API keys
• Understand the OpenAI pricing models
• 7 unique ways to use it at work or in your business to improve efficiency

Click here to skip right to the 7 ways, if you’re already familiar with Chat GPT.

what is chat GPT

Chat GPT is an artificial intelligence language model that was created by OpenAI. Though there were previous versions, the most popular version was the GPT-3 model that was released on November 30, 2022 with GPT-4 being the current model.

Since then, the software has taken the world by storm and dominated the news cycle for the entirety of 2023, shattering records of user adoption along the way.

What makes the tool particularly useful is simply the way you can converse with it in natural language.

How To Sign Up to Chat GPT (OpenAI account)

To sign up to an Open AI account just follow these steps

1. Go to: https://chat.openai.com/auth/login
2. Click Sign Up and enter your email address or use one of the single sign on options (Google, Microsoft, Apple) and click Continue.
3. Select a strong password and click Continue.
4. After you verify your email, you will see a confirmation

5. After the onboarding screens, you should be at the main chat interface.

Understanding ChatGPT (OpenAI) billing models

There are two main types of billing

• ChatGPT Plus, aka subscription at $20 per month recurring
  • This gives you access to ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0 plus Dall-E and a host of other features at time of this writing
• Pay as you go – only pay what you use; here is the per-use pricing page

You may be wondering what your costs will be like. I would consider myself a “light” user. I use it a few times a day and don’t use it to write long form (over 2k words) blog posts. You can see my highest month was $11.09 which is far from the usual $20 per month if you decide to go the subscription route. I would recommend starting with pay as you go and then keeping an eye on your usage rates regularly so you don’t go over.

Many of the 3rd party tools that will be discussed will use the pay as you go model, meaning you need to add your credit card to the billing page and then create an API key from your OpenAI account in order to use the tools – discussed in the next section.

The Subscription model provides access to the easy to use User Interface that OpenAI has created for their ChatGPT product.

You can read more about the subscription here.

Setting up Pay as you Go billing and Creating API keys

After you’ve signed up to an OpenAI (chatGPT) account, go to the billing page. Add a payment method if one doesn’t already exist.

Next go to the API key page and Create a new secret key. It’s also helpful to name it something useful, usually the name of the 3rd party app you will use that particular key for.

You could use the same key for multiple apps, but if you want to stay more organized, just make separate keys.

Now you will be ready to use these methods discussed below.

7 ways to effectively use chat GPT at work or for your business

1. read contracts like a lawyer

Requirements: Free ChatGPT or higher

Depending on the industry you work in, you may have a need to read through several contracts on a regular basis.

Luckily for you, if you don’t have an in house counsel, you can take advantage of Chat GPT’s brain.

Before you begin, I find it helps to prime it with context. You can use this prompt:

I need your help reading a series of contracts for my project.
This project consists of video editors, script writers and producers.
I will paste the contents of their contracts into the next chat and I want you to read and understand the contract. Afterward I will ask specific questions.

Do you understand?

You should get a response like the one below:

Yes, I understand. I can help you with reading and understanding the contents of the contracts related to your project involving video editors, script writers, and producers. Once you paste the contents of the contracts, I'll review them and then you can ask specific questions about them. Please go ahead and paste the text of the contracts.

Next, simply follow through with the directions you gave it. Give it context of the contract. There are a couple of options for this step:

• You can copy and paste text directly from a PDF
• or you can convert your PDF to word and then copy it
• If you have the subscription version of GPT you can upload the entire PDF directly without having to convert the PDF or copy and paste text, but it is not required to have the subscription to execute this method.

Next, you can ask Chat GPT specific questions about your contract like:

• List the Deliverables and Responsibilities in a table for this contract such that this person would have an easy-to-follow timeline for project management purposes
• What are the payment terms for this contract along with payment deadlines? List any milestones associated with payment dates if applicable and include any rates
• Who owns the intellectual property rights after the work has completed? If there isn’t a clause covering this, please write me one that I can use as a baseline for the contract
• What are the confidentiality and non disclosure clauses
• What happens if either party terminates the contract
• What other questions have I not asked yet that might be important as a production manager?

This last question is particularly powerful because it allows you to open a loop of more critical questions that you can then feed back into this same chat session sure your contract is air tight.

2. Tag / Categorize rows in Google Sheets or Microsft Excel

Requirements: Pay as you go billing setup for OpenAI with API key

Sometimes, in my workflow, I need to categorize expense items quickly. I can quickly do this manually when I have 10-20 rows.

But what happens when you have hundreds of expense items you need to categorize for your accountant?

That’s where using Chat GPT within Google Sheets comes in handy.

First, watch this video below so you can see what the outcome looks like. In Column D, I have 30 expense categories. And in Column A, I have 115 expense line items.

I want Chat GPT to match the Category in Column D with the expense line in Column A and output the ideal category into Column B.

Click below to watch a quick demo.

To get set up:

• First go here for a getting started guide by the developer (Microsoft Excel users can use this doc)
• Make sure you set up your API key for the plugin (remember that API key you created earlier? This is the time to use it)
• You can see the full list of features and functions along with the syntax

You can download a copy of my google sheet (you’ll need a google email) if you want sample data to practice on, but the developer also provides his own.

Edit: Here is formula from my specific google sheet (there was a small mistake in the video above)

=GPT_CLASSIFY(A2,D$2:D$31)

3. Create Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel Formulas

I used to spend hours trying to get formulas correct for google sheets. This is a problem of the past with ChatGPT.

Let’s say you have a list of dates and times in this ISO date, and time format listed below, but you want to label them by Month (ie, November) instead.

2023-05-12 9:22:45
2023-08-21 14:57:30
2023-03-04 21:10:15
2023-09-18 8:36:52
2023-06-27 16:48:20
2023-01-09 12:25:37
2023-12-15 19:04:11
2023-07-08 3:14:59
2023-02-23 11:33:42
2023-10-06 22:07:05
2023-04-17 7:55:28
2023-11-30 13:40:18
2023-08-02 18:29:54
2023-05-24 5:16:37
2023-01-28 23:49:03

Use this prompt here, and ChatGPT should give you the correct formula.

I want you to help me create a google sheets formula
In cell B1 I want you to look at A1
the format will be like this: 2023-11-29 17:40:02
this is november 29 2023. 
I want B1 to return just the month "November"

Paste that newly discovered formula into Sheets or Excel and watch the magic happen. Here is a screenshot of what the worksheet looks like for reference.

Just double-check that the results are correct with a few spot checks. Revise your prompt if you’re not getting the output you were looking for. Then, you can save this chat session later by naming it something useful so you can find it later.

4. Check for Malicious Code

Let’s say you’re an amateur web developer like myself and you need some custom code and you’re not a programmer. How do you know the code a random stranger has on the internet is legit?

While it is difficult to know without being a bonified coder, you can at least get a quick sense check by asking ChatGPT.

Here’s the prompt

Please check if this code is malicious in any way.
Here's the code:

5. Personal Copywriter for any Document

If your business or work requires you to write copy regularly, ChatGPT is a wonderful writing assistant. Not only can it check for grammar, help with expanding and contracting paragraphs, but it can help with SEO bits as well.

Here’s a prompt I use mainly to help me create ideas for meta data for my blogs, but it also provides an alternative intro and conclusion.

Here’s the prompt.

I want you to help me write some parts of a blog post.  I will provide the copy from an entire blog post for you to provide the following to me:

Part 1 - Provide a conclusion that summarizes the main findings and their implications of the article.
Part 2 - Using the output from Part 1, create a compelling introduction paragraph that will hook the reader in a few short sentences
Part 3 - Using the output from Part 1, create a meta description that is SEO optimized to entice the reader to read the article.
part 4 - using the output from Part 1, create another introduction but using the AIDA framework to hook in the reader.

From this point on, I can decide if I want to revise my introduction and conclusion and then create my final meta description. Note that this prompt is far from optimized, but it does the job for me. The meta is almost always too long, but you shouldn’t copy and paste output anyway.

Instead, just use the output to avoid writer’s block.

6. Customer Support Assistant

A while back, I wrote a review on Chat Base, an AI assistant built on ChatGPT. What I was able to do with this software was create a custom virtual assistant that could answer the most frequently asked questions for the company that I work for.

After it was implemented, not only did we get more insight into what customers were having challenges with, but we were also able to create better documentation for customers.

One of the most common problems not obvious to our team, was that customers couldn’t figure out how to log into the app.

But don’t worry, even if you don’t have a need for a custom GPT, you can still use the regular ChatGPT to help with customer service by:

• asking it how to revise answers in a more formal (or other tone) way
• help with basic translations if your customer base is global
• provide research on technical topics if they are out of scope for your current job
• helping with data analysis
• and many more other ways!

7. Lead Generation Assistant

Unless you employ sales reps on both halves of the world, at some point, your sales team will need to rest.

But with a custom GPT, this is a problem of the past.

Simply setup your custom GPT (they have a free tier) and feed it all the sales documentation you have. Before you know it, you’ll have a 24/7 sales focused, customer service answering machine.

Be sure to test out the results and revise the chat bot’s answers before going live and turn on lead capture so you can collect those emails.

Wrap Up

I hope I was able to demonstrate some creative and useful ways to incorporate chatGPT (free or paid) into your work flow. By using it, I can easily say it has saved me 2–5 hours a week depending on what I’m working on.

Like with any tool, getting started can be a bit of a challenge, especially with a new tool like this. You may feel the outputs aren’t quite what you expected, but hopefully my prompts (and several more on YouTube) help get you started on the right foot.

Happy Chatting!

In 2023, I went through my 3rd blogging course and decided to go at this online blogging business one last time. I’m glad I did because this time, it finally clicked, and I made over $17,000 in 2023.

But it it was far from easy. Trying to make money blogging (and, more specifically, learning SEO) is probably the hardest skill I’ve had to learn in my entire career so far. What attracted me to it, however, was that anyone could learn it – take it from a C-average student from college.

In this article, I’ll share the nitty-gritty details of what I did on my own blog and how I will adjust my strategies in 2024 to set you up for success should you choose this business model.

Before we continue, this post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission if you purchase something through the links at no extra cost to you. This helps me run my business for free to my readers.

Revenue – My Income Streams from Blogging in 2023

Affiliate Revenue – 2023 Earnings: $400

This revenue stream is the quickest to setup and complements a well ranking blog post. When you rank keywords related to a product or service and you apply for their affiliate program you can quickly make your first internet dollar.

I only promoted 2-3 products that paid out, and while this method has potential, I just didn’t have time to develop it fully in 2023 because I went straight to client services. I may focus about 20% of my time in 2024 on this.

Here are a couple receipts from 2023.

This blog that made commission was one of the earliest ones I posted, and I didn’t think much of it, but it did make almost $100 to date – modest beginnings.

I also dabbled in the Amazon Affiliate Program, and it also made some commissions, but certainly nothing to write home about. It seems to require a lot of traffic to scale this.

SEO Services – 2023 Earnings: $13,000 in revenue

The majority of my revenue came from SEO writing services. I’ll create more guides around this in the future on how to execute this in detail and make videos about it on YouTube.

I’ve written in all sorts of niches ranging from tech, finance, and agriculture – you name it. Here are the stripe payments from a different client.

I promise I’m not trying to brag, but it’s important to show this is possible and a skill someone can learn in 6-12 months of focus.

My service offering typically includes keyword research, writing articles, and publishing them for the clients if required. I do all the on-page SEO for them and advise on strategy occasionally.

Ad Revenue – 2023 Earnings: $4,000 in revenue

This revenue stream started for me only in the last two months of 2023 and will be my primary focus for 2024. Ad Revenue gets a bad name, but for the right brand, it is one of the easiest ways to monetize for sites that can get a lot of traffic.

No need to sell any services, just needs a lot of clicks.

Due to the ad network’s guidelines, I cannot show screenshots of my revenue dashboard, but I have a way around this in a future update.

Now, I will break down each income stream and how I set them up.

How to Leverage Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers

The advantage of affiliate marketing is it allows you to generate revenue quickly. I’ve seen bloggers generate them on their first blog post, and others like me took several months before I saw a single dollar.

Either way, this method of income generation is a must for your beginner bloggers. Heck, if the New York Times can promote Amazon affiliate links, why shouldn’t you?

Understanding Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is where you (the affiliate) recommend products in your blog articles related to the topic you are writing about. In essence, it’s a middle man play.

It’s a profitable partnership between a blogger and a company offering a product or service. You, the blogger, earn a percentage commission each time a person completes a purchase through your unique affiliate link.

This symbiotic relationship opens up income streams while allowing you to retain your authenticity. Your links act as little salespeople who are always working 24/7.

Your audience continues to benefit from your high-quality, honest content, and you enjoy an added paycheck. 

It’s a no-lose scenario – companies reach larger audiences and gain customer trust, and bloggers, in turn, monetize their blogs effectively.

Affiliate marketing can provide decent recurring income. It doesn’t require a substantial upfront investment, making it suitable for bloggers at all stages.

Choosing the Right Affiliate Programs

While selecting the right affiliate program is important, I wouldn’t worry about this for your first 6 months. This best plan is to ONLY apply for programs you have experience with.

After you start making revenue, you can be more strict in finding the right affiliate program depending on these factors:

1. Relevance: Choose products that mirrors the niche you are writing for and that resonate with your target audience. Promoting mismatching products can harm your credibility.
2. Commission: Investigate the commission structure. High commissions are tempting, but ensure they aren’t a mask for low-quality products.
3. Payment terms: At the beginning, this isn’t a huge deal, but you ideally want to get paid in higher frequencies (at least monthly) but some payment terms are 60 days meaning what you generate today, you won’t see in your bank account for at least 2 months.
4. Quality: Prioritize programs that offer top-tier products/services. These will bring you repeat commissions and improve your blog’s reputation.
5. Support: Opt for affiliate programs that offer excellent support and resources, making your promotion job simpler. For example, do they offer affiliate marketing collateral?

Promoting Affiliate Products Effectively

When you’ve landed the first affiliate product, the real game begins. 

Effective promotion is an art and a science. It requires an understanding of your audience’s needs, strategic positioning, persuasive copywriting, and thorough tracking of your results.

Connect the power of the written word and compelling visuals to build an appealing narrative around the affiliate products. Integrate your affiliate links naturally within your content. Avoid stuffing your posts with affiliate links – it’s a turn-off for readers and search engines alike.

Track your promotional tactics’ performance. This real-time feedback allows you to fine-tune your strategy and maximize your earnings from affiliate marketing.

For example, if your article does not rank for any keywords after a few months, then it has nothing to do with the product. This means the article needs rework.

If you are getting clicks to the article, but no one is buying, either the article is ranking too low (and therefore doesn’t have enough traffic to convert), or your copywriting needs work.

Be careful not to spend all your time just looking at dashboards – this is a total momentum killer and made me prone to distraction.

Monetizing With SEO Services

Now that you understand the basics of affiliate revenue let’s talk about how you can provide SEO content writing as a service. Of course, you’ll need to learn the skill before offering a service. Let’s dive in.

Quick overview of SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is all about writing content that humans find value in and that follows proper formatting guidelines (on-page SEO). More specifically, you need to:

• Understand keyword research – finding out what you should write about, or put another way, find out what people are searching for.
• Understand search intent – why do people google the terms they do, are they looking to purchase or are they just looking for information or is it trivia night and they need to confirm an answer?
• Create good enough content – Give actual valuable information to the reader. Bad news: AI writing isn’t going to cut it, but it will improve your production time.

Step 1: Find What You Enjoy Writing About

Some bloggers call this “picking a niche,” but it’s more than deciding what to write about. To make this venture less painful, pick something you enjoy writing about.

For example, I enjoy researching and trying out different tools in the marketing space, so it made sense for me to write about anything related to blogging, as it is a natural fit. It doesn’t require much extra effort as I already have experience in this field.

Another topic I could have written about was project management. I have PM-ed for over 20 years now, but this is not something I want to write about every week. It was an incredibly boring part of my career, and I’d rather just leave it behind me.

Beginner bloggers (like me last year) get stuck here because they don’t want to blog about their 9-5 career as it may not be their passion, so it is worth spending some time on what you would like to create content about for the next 3-5-10 years.

It is worth noting, most profitable niches like health, wealth and relationships are highly competitive and therefore, your expectation on the time to monetization needs to match. Highly competitive niches take longer to monetize, but are still profitable nonetheless.

For example, a blog I write for in the finance niche (trading stocks specifically) and I’ve written probably 10 blogs now for it and it has yet to rank for anything meaningful. The time horizon to break into finance is just much higher than agriculture which took me maybe 3 articles to find meaning traction (clicks to website).

Step 2: Setup a blog with WordPress.org

You can technically use any platform you want (squarespace, shopify, wix among a dozen others) but WordPress is still king for bogging and allows for the most flexibility while keeping costs low. Just understand the difference between the two – hint: .org is the one you want.

If you are a programmer, you get a few more options, but most of us (including myself) are not coders. Even if you are a programmer, I recommend WordPress because you can always move your Content Management System around later. 

If you do choose WordPress, you will need to purchase hosting. Hosting can start at under $3 a month for the first year and will be over a hundred dollars a year to maintain after that for a decent host (fast loading etc).

Step 3: Learn how to keyword research

Keyword research is a method that lets you search for the terms that others are searching for. A very easy way to achieve this is through Google’s autocomplete feature.

Start typing a term, and Google will attempt to fill in the most common terms. If it appears in this list, there is at least some demand for that search term.

The challenge with this method is that you can’t see the monthly search volume, so you could spend time writing about something that only gets a few searches a month.

You can also use trend data to see if a topic is worth covering. 

With tools like ahrefs and SEM Rush, keyword research is much faster. If you’re on a tight budget, I recommend Keysearch.io.

Because this step is important, there will be a future blog post about this, which I will link when available.

Step 4: Understanding Search Intent

Have you tried googling “lemon?” You’ll see that you get a very wide range of results. This is because Google doesn’t know what your search intent is.

When you look at the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) image below, it is clear, “lemon” is not enough words to tell google what the searcher actually wants. As a result, Google will serve up a couple of options. Too many options mean it is not a good keyword to go after.

However, if you google “padded socks,” you’ll most certainly get ecommerce store product pages. This is because the search intent of padded socks is that you, the searcher, are looking to purchase padded socks.

Search intent is simply understanding what the searcher wants when they enter the terms into a search engine. This is the same concept for other engines like Bing and Yahoo etc.

When you can quickly identify the intent, you can start to make content that aligns with it, which gives you a higher probability of ranking in search results.

Step 5: Create Valuable Content

Notice I didn’t say “good content.” Valuable is what we are going for and value means you are solving a problem. Value equates to high-quality, engaging blog post ideas that solve the searcher’s problem.

Your job? To ensure every blog post you produce solves a problem.

Hopefully, this blog you’re reading solves your question, “How to make a profit with a blog.” At least, that is what I believe the intention is when you land on it.

Making engaging content doesn’t require a magic formula. It does require a mix of patience and understanding of what your targeted readers want. What are their burning questions? Can you predict what they will ask next? What are their unfulfilled needs? 

Answer these in your blogs. Remember, quality trumps quantity. Invest your resources into producing excellent content rather than churning out mediocre posts.

Google even gives you a hint in their People Also Ask section. For example, if I were to write an article around “padded socks,” I would maybe want to include a section about “cushioned socks” as they are closely related.

Step 6: Build lasting relationships with other bloggers

Start meeting other bloggers because they will become your best allies in building your business.

Here are 6 practical ways to build relationships, all of which I did in some capacity this past year.

Join Blogging Communities Online: Websites like Reddit, LinkedIn, and specific blogging forums are platforms where bloggers share their experiences, ask questions, and connect. Most courses also have their communities, this is how I found 95% of the folks in my blogging networks.

Participate in Social Media Groups: Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms have groups dedicated to blogging where members can interact, share content, and support each other. This was the method I used before joining a paid course. I made a few connections through Facebook that I still connect with today.

Guest Blogging: Offering to write guest posts for other blogs or accepting guest posts on your blog can be a great way to build relationships. Some of these guest bloggers will also go on to build huge businesses of their own, and you can cross-collaborate with them later when you’ve built up your blog.

Collaborate on Projects: Collaborating on side projects can help you connect with fellow entrepreneurs as you journey through this together.

Attend Local Meetups and Workshops: Look for local blogger meetups, workshops, or networking events in your local area.

Use Direct Messages on Social Media platforms to Reach Out: Don’t hesitate to reach out to founders you admire on platforms like Twitter/X or Instagram. A simple message expressing your interest in their work can start a conversation. I’ve met founder in private slack groups that are some of my favorite online friends to date through this method.

Step 7: Focus on inputs and not results

This one is tough to wrap my head around because I’ve been taught since college to set goals. Goals are useless without proper inputs.

Instead of having a goal to make $10,000 blogging (results), make the goal to publish 2 highly valuable blog posts for your own blog per month (inputs). The money will be a byproduct of the inputs if you are doing proper SEO research and allow enough time for the search engines to pick it up.

Step 8: Find someone to be accountable to

I am terrible at staying accountable. What I found helpful was to join a community of like minded bloggers so I could see their wins and challenges to remind myself why I was doing all this work. These short messages can help boost your confidence each day and keep you going.

When I first started, I had no one to talk to about making money blogging. I felt weird trying to learn this skill that none of my in-person friends were doing, so I never really shared what I was doing.

This all changed when I purchased a course and decided to blog as a real business. I was able to meet lots of like minded people and go on this journey together.

With that, I’d like to invite you to…

When to offer SEO services

To know when to start offering SEO services, you have to ask yourself if you are confident in delivering results.

You can gain confidence by writing more articles and checking if they are fetching keywords to rank. Once you can successfully rank 2-5 articles on page one of Google, you are likely ready to find your first client.

I’ll be honest: if you’re not used to selling done-for-you services, this first time will put you out of your comfort zone.

To help with this, you can potentially direct message a founder of a small startup – usually a single founder and ask if they would be ok to publish your content and let them know, in exchange, you want a testimonial for your work (assuming it nets results).

You only need a single testimonial, but continue providing articles for other brands for free until you are confident you can get results. You can always offer a money-back guarantee if you don’t rank anything in 6 months.

Action: What to do next?

With that said, to put this last section into action and start putting in your reps to learn how to write SEO content, start by:

1. Purchasing hosting for your website
2. Setup your WordPress website
3. Setup your About page
4. Publish 1 blog
5. Find an accountability partner

I will create how to guides for all of steps above in the near future (my inputs!). If you can’t figure out these 5 steps above on your own, try to use YouTube – This was what I did in year 1. Find someone you can learn from and teach in a style you resonate with.

Generating Ad Revenue from Your Blog

After you’ve written between 10-20 blog articles, you’ll start getting into a rhythm of blogging and better understand what works and what doesn’t.

At this point, you’ll want to learn what it takes to apply to receive ad revenue.

Understanding Ad Revenue

Ad revenue is the income earned from advertisement placements. Be it display ads or sponsored posts. Each has its role and benefits to your blog’s income. The beauty lies in the scalability of ad revenue. As your blog’s readership grows, so does your income potential, even without requiring you to develop or maintain products on your own.

If you google “Mediavine commission” and click Images, you’ll see that some bloggers have posted their commissions which ranges from$50-$4000+ per month. Due to Mediavine’s guidelines, I cannot show you my commission dashboard.

The key challenge? You typically need to accrue significant, consistent traffic. More eyeballs equate to more ad impressions and potential click-throughs, further translating into higher ad revenue.

For example, the Mediavine network typically requires 50,000 monthly sessions before you can be considered for their network. This means you will need 50k clicks (not just impressions).

Choosing the Right Ad Networks

The choice of ad network can significantly impact your blog’s ad revenue. Consider payment terms, ad types, and minimum traffic requirements. 

For example, Google AdSense might be a natural choice for beginners due to its easy setup and widespread use. However, it’s worth exploring other platforms like Mediavine or Infolinks, which might provide a better revenue share or more suitable ad types for your audience demographics.

I’ve only ever tried and used Mediavine, and I would recommend them if you decide to monetize your blog with ads. They allow auto insertion into your blog posts (you don’t need to place the ads yourself), and their dashboard is easy to use and understand.

Optimizing Your Blog for Ad Revenue

Once accepted into an ad network, it’s time to find out where to put ads on your site. You could start with the highest-traffic blog pages, which would almost instantly generate revenue.

Additionally, consider a mobile-friendly layout. I’ve seen stats as high as 90% that use mobile as their internet browsing device.

Balancing ad placement with an excellent user experience should be the aim. Check your Google search console to see if there are impacts on click-through rates when ads are inserted.

Remember, experimenting is key. Keep assessing what works best for your blog, continually tweaking for the best results.

Brand Impact of Ads

Inserting dynamic ads does require you to consider your brand. Inserting ads typically will degrade the user experience in some form. Many ad networks let you control which pages to insert ads on. You may want to turn off ads on landing pages, for example.

If you’ve ever been on websites littered with ads and don’t want the same experience for your readers, stick with affiliate marketing or offering SEO services. It is a much more subtle way to make your blog profitable.

Just know you’ll leave some money on the table if you have high traffic and no ad placements. It is a balancing act; only you can decide the right balance for you and your brand.

Making Money through Sponsored Blog Content

Full disclosure: I haven’t personally been approached or approached by brands for sponsorship. I’m improving this in 2024, but this is how I would do it.

Understanding Sponsored Content

Much like a sponsored Instagram post, sponsored blog content refers to blog articles or posts paid for by a sponsor who wants to promote their product or service. It is an attractive route for making money because it combines income generation with strengthening brand awareness.

Why sponsored content? It’s a two-tier benefit. Firstly, sponsors pay directly for the visibility and promotion. Secondly, well-curated sponsored blogs can amplify your brand and attract more traffic, increasing the likelihood of future sponsorships.

Finding and Pitching to Potential Sponsors

Finding a sponsor begins with isolating a list of companies whose products or services align with your blog theme. 

The next phase is your pitch. Communicating your blog’s value effectively to the potential sponsor can clinch the deal. An impactful pitch should highlight your blog’s metrics, audience demographics, past collaborations, and, most importantly, how sponsorship can be mutually beneficial.

Always remember pitching is a dynamic process. Be open to tweaking your approach based on feedback or even sponsor preferences.

It’s also important to decide up front how much you’re willing to give up for a sponsor. Some sponsors are quite particular about the terms, and even though they may provide a nice paycheck, it might not be worth the hassle. 

This is dependent on which phase your business is in. You always want to put your blog in a place of leverage and not seem desperate to get the sponsor so you can negotiate better terms.

Creating Engaging Sponsored Content

Sponsored blog content is not just about mindless promotion. It is about creating valuable, engaging content that syncs with your sponsor’s brand while resonating with your audience.

Here are some best practices:

1. Understand your audience: Ensure your sponsored content aligns with their interests, preferences, and needs. Research can come in handy here. You can provide surveys if you have an audience already or just show your work in progress in blog forums to get feedback.
2. Align with your brand: Don’t alienate your audience by promoting something they’d never expect to see on your blog. An apparel brand promoting travel insurance might make sense (you need clothes to travel, after all), but a supplement brand promoting Bluetooth keyboards is clearly off-brand.
3. Transparency: Clearly mention that the content is sponsored. Ethical practices always yield long-term relationships. It can also be against regulations not to disclose this relationship in many countries.
4. Content Quality: Your sponsored blog posts should match, if not exceed, the quality of your regular posts.

Navigating through affiliate marketing to sponsored content might seem like a leap. However, it can be a smooth ride with a planned approach to finding sponsors and creating engaging content.

Selling Digital Products on Your Blog

Types of Digital Products You Can Sell

Any blog can become a marketplace, showcasing an array of digital products. Digital products are cost-effective and have infinite scalability, allowing customers instant access to their purchases, no matter their location.

Here are just a few ideas of what you can sell online. With tools like ai writers, executing these strategies is much easier than ever before.

1. E-books: Transform your expert knowledge into an enriching E-book. They’re inexpensive to produce and can cover many subjects, from professional advice to personal experiences.
2. Online Courses: Share your expertise with eager learners by creating online courses. With options for videos, quizzes, and interactive forums, these can offer in-depth knowledge in an engaging format.
3. Subscription Services: Offer premium content, early access, or exclusive features to those willing to pay a monthly fee. This approach ensures a regular income stream.
4. Webinars/Workshops: Impart knowledge to a live audience. These interactive sessions offer real-time engagement and can be repurposed later.
5. Software or Apps: If you’re a programmer, custom-made software, apps or tools catered to your blogger niche can prove profitable.
6. Sell Consulting Services: After you have gained enough experience and have case studies of your results, you can start charging for your time. It’s important always to make each exchange valuable regardless if anyone becomes your customer. This is the primary revenue stream in my business right now.

Creating Your Own Digital Products

Creating a digital product requires some groundwork. Begin with understanding your audience, their needs, and their preferences. Once their demand is analyzed, devise a strategy that aligns with your blog’s brand and purpose.

Deciding on a Product: Base your product decision not just on your expertise but also by reflecting on your audience’s demands, interests, and willingness to pay. Again, see if you can collect some information in the form of a survey or even just chatting in the communities.

Align with your Skillset: If you are more comfortable over video, consider creating a short course. If you prefer less facetime, consider a paid community where you offer your time as part of the package.

Creating the Product: Invest your time and energy into creating a high-quality product, whether it’s an e-book, online course, or software. Again, always prioritize value as we’re trying to solve someone’s problems with our solutions.

Pricing Your Product: Pricing can be tricky. Too high, and you might deter potential buyers; too low, and your efforts may not deliver the desired profit—research similar offerings on the market to strike a balance.

Promoting and Selling Digital Products

Success in selling digital products depends on strategic promotion. Following are some actionable steps to ensure your digital products reach the right audience and fetch anticipated returns.

Leverage Your Existing Audience: Your blog readers are your primary potential customers. Announce your product on your blog, social media channels, and newsletters.

Offer Discounts or Bundle Deals: An initial discount or interesting bundle deal can help trigger initial sales and generate customer reviews. Grandfather in these early adopters as they will become your best advocates and future affiliates.

Affiliate Marketing: Collaborating with industry influencers and offering them a commission for every referral can expand your reach substantially.

Customer Reviews and Testimonials: Positive reviews and testimonials instill confidence in potential buyers. Encourage your customers to leave feedback after their purchase. Be creative here. You can offer discounts to the first 5 people who give you testimonials.

Frequently Asked Questions about Making Money Blogging

How many articles do I need to write to make money

This will vary based on the niche you select, how quickly you can learn SEO fundamentals and how often you publish a blog online. But that isn’t the answer you are looking for so here is an example to help.

A reasonable timeframe to expect is 6 months of consistent blogging where you write 4 articles a month that are high quality and well keyword researched. At this publishing velocity, you can reasonably get first affiliate revenue and then put yourself in a good position to apply to ad networks or at least build a small email list for future projects.

Here’s my personal experience with why I believe the above is the ideal time frame.

I published 32 articles on an established website that was 2 years old. That website now generates $2,000 a month in just ad revenue (not to mention the service also generates revenue).

The website intitially had less than 15 clicks per month before I started. It took me 6 months to publish all the articles starting from around Janurary 2023 and it took almost a full 12 months before there was enough traffic to be accepted into Mediavine. There was zero backlink building, not because I don’t believe in it but because I was focused on publishing content first. Ideally I would have done both.

How Much Money Can You Make from Blogging?

From personal experience and what I’ve seen others do, my best estimate is $2,000 per month by the end of year 1, $10,000 per month by the end of year 3, and then from there it varies depending on what you offer, and if you go digital product route or just stick with affiliate marketing.

Earning potential depends on factors such as your niche, your audience size, and how you monetize your blog. Some bloggers manage to make a full-time income, while others earn enough to supplement their main income (like me). Others may only make a small amount, but the key point is this: Being consistent creates successful bloggers if done right.

When deciding how to monetize your blog, research different methods and decide which ones are most likely to resonate with your audience and your writing style.

How Long Does It Take to Make Money from Blogging?

A reasonable timeframe to shoot for is 6 to 12 months from publishing your first post. I’ve seen people make $10,000 in affiliate marketing with an absolutely terrible blog website design, but they were consistent in making well-researched content. So the main factor, more than anything else, is your consistency.

This variability is because blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It needs patience, commitment, and a lot of hard work.

Being consistent in creating quality content, promoting your blog effectively, and engaging with your audience are some ways to expedite this process. But remember, long-term success is always preferred over short-term gains.

Can You Make Money Blogging Without a Large Audience?

100% Yes. Contrary to popular belief, making money blogging does not always require a large audience. Quality often outweighs quantity. 

Having a smaller audience that is highly engaged and trusts your opinion can be just as profitable. In fact, some bloggers with smaller, loyal audiences make money online through affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, and selling their products or services.

The key is understanding your audience’s problems and providing a relevant solution. If your audience values your content and sees it as a reliable resource, they’re more likely to convert into paying customers.

What Are the Most Profitable Niches for Blogging?

Certain blogging niches do tend to be more profitable than others, but this doesn’t guarantee monetary success. Personal finance, health and wellness, tech and lifestyle are popular, profitable niches due to their broad appeal and multiple monetization opportunities.

Still, the most profitable niche for you is likely to be one that you’re passionate and knowledgeable about. This passion and expertise will enable you to create unique, high-quality content that engages your audience and leads to financial success.

All in all, making money from blogging requires a mix of strategic monetization, consistency, quality content, and patience. Profitability is possible, no matter the size of your audience or your chosen niche.

Wrapping it Up 

Ok we’ve covered a lot. I hope that I have inspired you to at least consider this blogging journey. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful to be employed, but I can’t always assume my job will be there and I wanted to build an asset that would serve me in the future.

Successful blogging isn’t magic—it’s strategy, consistency, and (at least for me) finding accountability. These are the things you should keep in sight. And remember, there’s no hidden catch, and there’s no overnight success in this game.

The next step is action! Create a profitable blog by crafting your content, publishing regularly, and staying dedicated—each blog post brings you closer to your goals. It will feel like you’re just talking to no one initially, but this will change over time. Best of luck.

Remember, if you’re still feeling stuck, just come on over and chat with me in Slack. I’ll get you unblocked.

What is Penfriend.AI?

Simply put, Penfriend AI creates the most realistic human-like first draft copy within minutes using AI.

They position themselves as saving you hundreds of hours on prompting (which it does), but what it does behind the scenes is where the time savings happen.

During the article process, you also get the added benefit of a Title Generator and an SEO-backed outline.

Who made Penfriend and How it Started

Penfriend was co-founded by these three folks below:

• Inge von Aulock – COO
• Tim Hanson – CCO
• John Harrison – Head copywriter

I could try to explain their history, but I wouldn’t do it justice because John’s copy is already perfect. Here’s an excerpt from the launch campaign they created.

Why John, why did you do this?
Because I needed Penfriend around 5+ years ago when “the blog” was one of my 1,000 tasks.

I was part of a tiny marketing team in a startup with huge ambitions. The uncrackable puzzle was between quality and quantity. We didn’t have the time or money to invest in content [rather, we chose not to…] and so traffic dwindled and the blog became a box on a marketing checklist I rarely checked.

By the way, Tim was our contracted content strategist back then. We started out-ranking banks for mortgage related keywords. So, Tim’s strategy works. It’s just we couldn’t crack the quality/quantity puzzle.

Inge needed Penfriend about 7 months ago too
Inge had contracted Tim for content strategy on her AI tools directory, TopApps.

She spent a lot of money getting content made for the blog. It was insanely expensive. She contracted several freelance writers and 3 content agencies! She even hit the limit on what those agencies could produce each month.

The content ranked, and fast. But it was in no way a sustainable way to build a traffic generating blog.

So Inge proposed an idea.

AI-ify Tim’s brain
Turn that man into a robot please.

Make an AI blog article writing tool that replicates Tim’s content strategy.

That was the plan.

Tim’s been an SEO content strategist for over a decade now. And he’s a systems based guy, which meant when ChatGPT came along last year, he feverishly started building prompts to replicate his processes. Processes that have delivered £24.6M in the last 3 years. So far, he’s spent over 600 hours refining prompts that build high quality blog articles.

And so, for the last month, we’ve been working with a dev agency turning Tim’s prompts into a tool anyone can use.

[…]

– Official Penfriend waitlist campaign email by John

And of course there are the developers and I’m sure other key people involved to make this product happen.

Needless to say, this isn’t just another wrapper app around Chat GPT put together overnight.

How does Penfriend AI work?

Now that you know what it is and who’s behind this product, let’s get into how it works.

Get the Free Credit

First, it’s worth noting that everyone who signs up gets three free credits, but before you claim the credit, read below on what types of articles NOT to use with this writer so you get the most out of your test. (hint: using Penfriend to write this review would not have worked out – more on this later).

Penfriend Onboarding

You’ll land on the dashboard after you go through the usual sign-up flow (no credit card required). Just the usual email and password.

There’s no need to sign up for a paid plan yet.

The dashboard is very minimal by design:

My Penfriend – this is your home for the dashboard and where you’ll spend most of your time going through the drafting flow on the right.

History – once you finish your articles, they will be archived here so you can retrieve them easily.

Profile – Edit your name – that’s it for now.

Billing – where you subscribe when ready. Details on pricing are below.

In the top right-hand corner, you’ll see your total credits.

As you can see, the next logical step is to add your keyword and press that nice orange Generate button. This is one of the things I enjoy about this tool: just how straightforward it is.

How do credits work

Your credits are in the top right corner of your My Penfriend home screen. You should start with 1 credit when you sign up.

Once you press “Generate Outline” the writer will start creating your article outline and the credit will be consumed. This step is immediately after the Title Generation step.

Creating an article with Penfriend

These are the steps to starting an article:

• Add a keyword to generate titles
• Select a Title to generate Outlines
• Confirm the Outline to generate the Draft

Generating Titles

To start the draft process, you need to have decided on the keyword to generate the article with. Assuming you’ve done the keyword research already, type in the keyword and press Generate.

Notice that a credit is not consumed during Title generation. This saves you time from going back and forth to another tool like Chat GPT.

If you don’t like the Titles, just click the “X” and Generate again until you find a compelling title.

Behind the scenes, Penfriend is going out to the SERPs, analyzing the results of your keyword and suggesting ideal titles for your topic while giving it a score.

According to their website it pairs down the 19 titles into the top 5 based on score – though I’ve been getting 6 titles sometimes.

Generating Outlines (uses 1 credit)

When you are ready to generate an outline, select the Title from the proposed list and click Generate Outline. Penfriend will then create a compelling outline based on its proprietary prompts.

What sets their outlines apart from other AI writers is that each section of your article and outline is crafted with a dedicated prompt. This is a much better method than trying to one-shot the article like many people tend to do.

Here’s an outline generated for the keyword “penfriend ai review” as a test. What is interesting about this outline is that despite the lack of SERP data (this tool just came out Dec 1 2023.), it still nailed it. You’ll see that I used several headers from the outline in this review.

The outline had these helpful features.

• Each header was clearly marked and well written, H2, H3 etc.
• It included an introduction and concluding paragraph bullets
• It included the ideal call to action based on its research
• The logical order of the headers makes sense
• It adds related keywords which is always helpful to have in the back of your mind when writing.

Is the AI Generated Output Good?

Now onto the main event. Because the keyword “Penfriend ai review” doesn’t have enough data, I will show you the draft for “Jasper ai review,” which is a very similar topic, and how I would have expected this article to turn out had it had enough data.

Here’s a snippet of the output below, but here is the full article draft output from Penfriend, if you want to read the entire draft.

What I liked about the output

• Overall, the draft quality is excellent, the most human like content I have seen from AI. Sentences like these have never come from Chat GPT when I prompt it: “Over time, I’ve taken Jasper AI under my wing. Not for the sake of experimenting, but because it has proven its worth”
• The output was generated in minutes. No more waiting 5 business days for a writer to reply.
• There are really helpful tips that nudge you into adding more to the content to enhance it. They are usually labeled starting with “MANUAL CHECK”
• Word count is very high (in a good way) – this example outputs over 3500 words which is what I would expect from a topic like this.
• Uses elements of EEAT – the output showcases many elements required for EEAT with sentences like “Personally, I found the pricing of Jasper AI justified, given the quality and versatility of the service provided.”

What I didn’t like about the output

• Introductions are a bit over the top. Let’s face it, intros are hard to write. Everyone is going to have a different style, and right now, I just prefer to craft my own.

• Three bullets are added to most H2s. I’m not sure if this is an SEO thing I just don’t understand or this was just a note for the editor, but right after the H2s, there are almost always three bullet points before going into the H3s. Typically, I write a lead in a sentence and move right to the H3. Some documentation around the intent of this feature would be great.

• The conclusion paragraph had a headline. Again, this might be obvious for someone else, but I couldn’t figure out why there was a headline in the conclusion. Was this meant for using that headline for the conclusion? I would have preferred the H2 to just use the headline instead of having it beneath and maybe “Conclusion” in brackets after the H2. I’m just being nit-picky at this point. But again, documentation might be warranted here.

• Sometimes “manual check” tips get buried in the copy. Just a heads up that sometimes these tips get lost in the copy, but we should all be proof-reading our articles for this type of stuff anyway.

Articles you should NOT write with Penfriend

As with all AI writers (and tools in general), you need to know when to use them and when not to. As a rule of thumb, you don’t want to use this writer on any topic that has little to no SERP data. Here’s an example.

I really wanted to use Penfriend to write this article you’re reading now, but I suspected it would be a bad idea and wanted to confirm.

I started with Google Trends and as you would expect, with a new tool, very little interest.

Another quick SERP check before I added this keyword into Penfriend shows that Google has no idea really what this is about. Only the branded and one other website related to the product show up. Everything else is about another similarly named product.

At this point, I only used the Penfriend Outline feature but not the actual writer itself. I didn’t want to take the chance of writing generic content on a topic that wasn’t heavily researched to date.

Since the tool looked at the SERPs, it was likely to get confused with the other Penfriend product.

Penfriend Pricing – Is it Worth The Investment?

For me, Penfriend is absolutely worth the investment, but here is why.

Assuming one of the reasons you want Penfriend is either to save time, money or both, all we need to do is account for the current expenses.

First, here are the subscription tiers for Penfriend. They have monthly and annual plans to fit any budget. I’ve also broken it down by a per article cost for simplicity.

Depending on the project, I pay between $100–$300 per article. But, before I can even get the article, I have to do my keyword research, generate an SEO-optimized outline, and put it into SurferSEO before it is handed off to a writer.

Round trip, before Penfriend, the time from when I generate the outline to get an article back is 3-5 business days – minimum.

That would typically be considered fast by most standards. The total cost of my previous setup is several hundred dollars plus at least 1 hour of my time to create a good SEO outline.

With Penfriend, I just need the keyword, and I have my draft back within 10 minutes. And the total cost? On my Advanced tier plan, a generous $14.11 per article.

So the comparison really needs to be between whether the quality you’re receiving from your freelance writers today is better or worse, given the savings of time and per article expense for your particular content pipeline.

You need to also factor in editing time. Again, it was simple for me: reduce the number of articles I outsourced and have Penfriend do more heavy lifting for instant savings.

Penfriend vs Other AI Writers (Alternatives)

All of the AI writers are so different now that it’s not even an apples-to-apples comparison.

Here is how I use the writers based on my needs for the article.

• Penfriend.ai – Best for when you need a really human like draft and a great first draft quickly. Penfriend only handles blog posts right now.
• Frase.ai – Best for when you need an SEO keyword optimizing tool, I use this in conjunction with Penfriend AI – read my review here.
• SurferSEO – similar to Frase, when I need an SEO keyword optimizing tool, I will also use this with Penfriend AI
• ZimmWriter – Best for when you need to have full control of the headers you are writing about or doing bulk ai writing on a budget (will add a review soon)
• Jasper.ai – Best for when you want to quickly generate ai content for the entire marketing pipeline and not just blog posts (social media etc.)

Tips When Using Penfriend

• The output is in British English – You’ll need to do a quick find and replace if you are writing for the American market.
• You don’t need a markdown converter – When you copy from the app, it has all the right headers, no need to use a markdown to HTML converter like other apps.
  • This has also changed recently. You’ll now require a markdown converter when you copy the text from Penfriend’s output.
• Be sure to remove MANUAL CHECK lines – The manual check tips are to help you make your article more unique. Be sure to remove these as you review them. Although they mostly start with the term “MANUAL CHECK” sometimes they use other phrases. I like to highlight them as I go so I don’t miss it later.
• Get help through email at support@penfriend.ai – Sometimes apps have issues, and these guys reply fast, even when they are supposed to enjoy their weekends (Thanks, John!)

Recap

Well, there you have it. If you’re looking for a streamlined first draft machine, you just stumbled upon one of the coolest new apps on the market that won’t break the bank.

If you are already hiring freelance writers, you owe it to yourself to try this out (and the first three articles are free). The best part is it will only get better from here. I can only imagine how many iterations the core prompt is going to go through in the coming months.

Out of the box, Penfriend AI is smooth like butter and while it won’t wholesale repalce my current AI apps, it is a welcomed addition to my content pipeline.

Change List

Since this is a new tool, the features may change quickly. I will document the main changes to my review in this section. Check back often to stay up to date.

February 2, 2024 – Penfriend allows 3 free credits now.

December 12, 2023 – Credits are now consumed when the Generate Outline button is pressed and not when the Generate Article is pressed.

This is the year of the custom GPT intelligent chatbots. Chatbase is yet another entry to what appears to be hundreds of GPT chat programs using natural language processing. But can it do what the others have not been able to achieve – a chatbot that can give answers with precision?

In this article, I break down everything you need to know about Chatbase and whether it is for you.

Key Takeaways

What is Chatbase.co?

Chatbase is a custom AI chatbot tool that lets you train it using your own dataset. Instead of training it on the entirety of the internet, you can use Chatbase to train just on the pages that are important to your website or brand.

There are a variety of ways to input source data, including Q&A style (similar to Frequently Asked Questions) uploading PDFs, .docx among other file types.

What makes this tool particularly powerful is the ability to find out the pain points of your customers quickly. This is something that some brands never actually achieve and leads to a lack of product market fit.

When programmed properly, this tool can cut out hours a week of repetitive customer service ticketing so you and your team can focus on revenue-generating tasks while improving the conversational experiences for your website visitors.

Who can benefit from a Chatbot?

While you could make a case that everyone could benefit, I do find that brands, and in particular those with a SaaS or e-commerce product, benefit the most.

By using a chatbot builder, you can tailor the answers to drive traffic directly to your category or landing pages. This helps your prospect bypass the pain of having to learn your site navigation. What’s easier than just asking and getting a direct and useful answer to where you want to go?

Now, with natural language and the ability to custom program your chatbot, there isn’t a better time to add a service like Chatbase to your tech stack. And when I say “program,” I’m not talking about coding. These are still under the category of no-code tools, so there are no excuses for not making the user experience better with an NLP chatbot.

Ok, let’s get started with the main features.

Primary Features

• Upload multiple sources of (training) data: Chatbase accepts quite a few file types, including .txt, .pdf, .doc and .docx files. They also have a dedicated Question and Answer feature, which makes training very simple and straightforward.
• Embed chatbot on an unlimited number of websites: If you have several websites for different regions, you can use the same bot on all of them without having to train them all separately.
• Suggested Messages: This option allows you to create “buttons” on the chatbot that simulate pre-filled chat options like “How to Contact Customer Service.” Typically, you will put your most asked question here or a promotional offer.
• Ability to lead capture: Whether you want a visitor’s contact info so you can reply back to them or you want to capture a potential prospect, the lead capture form can capture Name, Phone number, and Email out of the box.
• Ability to revise answers to spec: Your chatbot will need time to refine its answers. You can speed this along by manually revising it so it never gets that question wrong again. Add hyperlinks to get the answer to your customer quickly.
• Customizable base prompt for more control: While the Chatbase base prompt is good enough to get you going, you may want to update it to customize it for your brand or style. Chatbase allows you to get access to the primary prompt that runs the chatbot.
• ChatGPT API Keys: Bring your own ChatGPT API key on the paid tier if you need to scale past the message limits on your tier.
• Use GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 models: For Standard plans and higher, you can use GPT-4 models for an even deeper chat experience. Note, the costs are higher with GPT-4, and you’ll need to have a paid ChatGPT subscription to have access to it.

Pricing

With flexible pricing models, you’ll be sure to find a suitable tier for your business.

How does it work

Set up your Chatbase chatbot in 3 easy steps.

1. Upload data

One of the key features of Chatbase is the ability to upload multiple types of data.

• Files: Upload a wide range of files in either .pdf, .doc, .docx. or .txt and if the document can be copied or the bot won’t be able to train it. I found it particularly useful to upload company PDF Files that were created from the product team to help with the learning.
• Text: this field allows you to just enter information in a plain text field.
• Website: add your sitemap or URL and the bot will start to crawl the website to find pages. Then you can select which pages to include in the learning.
• Q&A: The bulk of your training time will be spent here. Every time you “revise” an answer, it will show up in the Q&A. You can also manually input Q&A as a starting point for the chatbot.
• Notion: A newer feature, the chat bot can now use Notion DB as a learning source.

With all of these options, you can create a robust knowledge base to ensure there will be a high chance of customer engagement with the chatbot.

2. Adjust Chatbot Settings

In the Settings tab, you can configure the following

• Set the base prompt
• Adjust your model, GPT 3.5 Turbo or GPT 4.0
• Customize the Chat Widget: You can change the colors of the chat bubble, chat messages, and the chat icon (profile picture)
• Whitelist specific domains
• Look up your list of leads
• Setup notifications
• Setup custom domains

3. Embed the chatbot

Chatbase gives you two options to embed your chatbot. You can either add it to a specific page or to the entire website using their snippet codes.

That’s it for setup. From this point on, you just want to visit your Dashboard section on a regular basis to revise the answers – see below.

Customer Service from Chatbase team

You can reach customer support at Chatbase at support@chatbase.co. They seem to have a couple of different members answering questions, and I get replies within 24 hours. The only way I could see this being better is if they had someone on live chat during core hours.

For everything else, you can just go directly to their Chatbase Chatbot which of course, is completely trained on their own dataset. I’ve done this a couple of times to ask about basic account and setup questions and have found it to be useful.

To date, I haven’t had a single negative experience, and they’ve been able to help me with some really nuanced problems for the chatbot I setup for work.

If you need more support they have some documentation here:

• Developer docs
• Chatbase guide

Practical Use Cases for Businesses

Customer Support Chatbot (For most Businesses)

The most obvious use case is to use Chatbase to support all your customer service requests to improve customer satisfaction. By having it handle all of your frequently asked questions, you can significantly cut the time your CSRs spend answering really mundane questions. Their time is better used to solve more complex problems or follow up with past customers for an overall better user experience with your brand.

Businesses that book appointments

With Chatbase’s Suggested Messages feature, you can lead customers down specific user paths that your visitors are looking for most often.

Let’s say you own a salon, and your customers just want to see your availability or store hours. Simply program these Suggested Messages in the Settings tab and cut down the time it takes to find this information.

E-Commerce Businesses

For e-commerce businesses, you can promote specific items using the Suggested Messages feature or train the entire dataset of your product lines so that customers can ask specific questions about ingredients, sourcing, shipping, pricing, etc.

Make sure to go back into your past customer’s questions and add them to the training dataset to get a comprehensive chat experience.

My Personal Experience

I first came across this by chance when I was browsing the AppSumo directory. I had seen that a few other companies have had customizable GPT chatbots but none of them seemed that interesting.

The main reason I purchased Chatbase was to make a prototype for work. I currently work in the Education Tech sector and during the summer we don’t have as many customer service staff, and I personally thought it would be more beneficial to the company if we could reserve some of their time working on more difficult problems than “How can I reset my password” type of queries.

So I picked up the Tier 2 license from AppSumo in case any other clients wanted to try this out, and I started programming it.

Right away, you could see some interesting results. The bot was very easy to train, and I had a trained, working prototype within the day.

I took the questions I found in our HubSpot database as well as our own website’s FAQ and added all the data to the bot’s “brain.”

Then, I started testing it for chatbot performance. It is a good idea to spend a few hours testing the bot to make sure it doesn’t make up information or give incorrect information. Every brand will have a different level of tolerance for non-perfect outputs, so do use caution if you are implementing this for work or clients.

For example, one of the test questions I asked was, “Who was the CEO of our company?” and it completely got the founder incorrect. The reason was obvious: most of the data kept talking about another notable educator instead of our CEO, so it naturally “decided” – incorrectly so – this was the founder.

After I had a good working prototype (as in, it got most of the answers correctly), I pitched the chatbot to our CEO and he was onboard to greenlight the project.

We slowly rolled it out to only a few web pages at a time so we could get questions from the public. Each day I would revise the answers and add hyperlinks to our product pages to further streamline the chatbot.

The maintenance for the chatbot is pretty low, depending on the volume of chats. I can check and revise about 10 chats quickly within a half hour. Over time, I expect this maintenance to go down as we will have answered the majority of the questions.

Downsides

While I was quite happy with my Chatbase experience, it wasn’t all roses, and other customers have expressed some of the same issues I’ve seen.

I like the basic idea of Chatbase but I get so frustrated with the bot answering questions it shouldn’t and making up links that don’t exist on the website

comment from appsumo member

Unfortunately, this is a problem with GPT in general and not only Chatbase. The chatbot will make up answers when not trained thoroughly. See troubleshooting tips below to fix this.

Other complaints have been the lack of customer service response, but this was mainly only during the initial launch of the lifetime deal. I personally have not had this problem with the company.

I’m also not a fan of the current UI for the dashboard. It has a two tiered menu which is confusing and their training section is under the header of “dashboard” which is not intuitive. The integration documentation is lacking as they talk only about how to integrate the bot into other tools, but no documentation on how to actually use it once it’s integrated.

The quality of your output is going to be directly related to how long you train your chatbot. If you spend only the time to complete the setup, but no time training, you can expect to get poor output. The key to great output is increase the training time and match your inputs with what a visitor would type in – this takes testing time and slowly roll out the chatbot.

Troubleshooting Tips

1. Spend time to train the bot

This step alone will solve the majority of your problems.

Spend the extra hour or two when you launch to test your bot for obvious questions and then the more nuanced questions.

Use your own customer service data and ask your team to write the most frequently asked questions and answer them all in the Q&A section of the Chatbase dashboard.

Chatbots do well when there is a large dataset, less conflicting information and clear question and answers. If you leave it with less information, it will either not know how to answer it, or worse, make up answers.

2. Chatbot keeps saying the same output even after revision

I ran into this problem where the chatbot would not give the proper hyperlink even though I repeatedly revised the answer to do so.

To solve this, update your base prompt to the following:

I want you to act as a document that I am having a conversation with. Your name is "AI Assistant."

You will provide me with answers from the given info. If the answer is not included, say exactly "Hmm, I am not sure." and stop after that. 

When I provide you with information in [] then (), embed the link in the () to the text in [] and provide the text that is in [] as a hyperlink.

Refuse to answer any question not about the info. Never break character.

This allows your links to output consistently.

3. Roll out your chatbot slowly

I wouldn’t recommend launching your brand new chatbot to the entire market or website you plan to use it on. Instead, have it show up on some pages that get a reasonable amount of traffic (not your highest traffic pages).

Check and revise the answers everyday. When you revise your answers they go into the Q&A section of the tool so you can always go back and delete duplicates or answers that are conflicting.

3. How to add hyperlinks

The syntax for adding hyperlinks is as follows:

Type your answers in the answer box and then put the [anchor text in brackets like this](https://google.com). Then, follow it up immediately without a space with the URL in parenthesis.

Then make sure you test the question and answer to ensure the link will show up.

4. Prompt to get consistent output

Sometimes, you want the output to always be the same. For example anything around customer service, you may want the output to say the anchor text and URL exactly the same way.

To do this, follow this sample prompt.

Say exactly "To contact customer service go to the [Contact Page](https://yourwebsite.com/contactpage )" and stop after that.

The key is to wrap the prompt in quotes with the instructions to say exactly the output.

Final Thoughts

While Chatbase still has a long way to go to be considered a full custom chatbot assistant, it has some serious potential.

In its current state, with a simple setup and the ability to quickly train the bot and maintain it over time, there is no excuse for saving your customer service rep’s time with this tool.

I would love to see better integrations in the future where support tickets could be automated based on certain language triggers or sequences. And the ability to integrate right into a CMS without software like Zapier would be a plus as well.

If you haven’t tried any AI product before, this is a fun one to play around with since it has a Free tier option.

FAQ

How does the Slack integration work?

The installation for the Slack integration guide can be found here, but what you may be wondering is what does the integration actually do?

By integrating Chatbase with Slack, it allows you to “talk” to the chatbot directly from Chat.

Once you finish integrating Chatbase, you will need to invite the Chatbase app to your channel. Do this by selecting the correct channel and do the “/invite” command. Select the “Add apps to this channel” and select Chatbase.

If Chatbase is not on the list of apps, then it was not integrated properly. Return back to the help doc and try again.

After you add Chatbase, you can chat with it by mentioning it. For example, “@chatbase how are you doing” will start a dialog with the chatbot.

If you have trained your chatbot on your internal documentation, then you could use this Slack integration to quickly find the right documents, saving your organization time.

How many more tokens does GPT-4 cost compared to GPT-3.5 Turbo?

According to Chatbase it cost 20 times more credits. For example, 1 GPT-4 message = 20 message credits vs 1 GPT-3.5 message = 1 message credit.

gpt-4 is much better at following the base prompt and not hallucinating, but it’s slower and more expensive than gpt-3.5-turbo (1 message using gpt-3.5-turbo costs 1 message credit. 1 message using gpt-4 costs 20 message credits)

help text in chatbase around message credits

With customer communication tools, it doesn’t need to be this way. In this article, I break down the software you should use to delight and gain insights from your customers.

Why You Must Understand Your Customer

With the rise of AI, content production has skyrocketed through the roof. While this is exciting for marketers, often, the customer is left behind in wondering why the email they are reading doesn’t address their needs.

This is how brands lose prospects or, worse, customers.

Here are just a few advantages to understanding your customer:

• Identify sales and marketing qualified leads, saving your sales team time.
• Marketing campaigns will have a better chance of meeting and exceeding targets.
• Anticipate your customer’s needs before they even have them – showing that you’re actually listening to them.
• Simply, to retain your customers and attract better ones.

Best Customer Communication Software

Personalized Video Software

There are more creative ways to communicate with customers than just the usual email. Personalized video gives that extra touch and shows your customers you took the effort to get to know them, and sometimes, that’s all it takes to get a response.

List of Video Software

• Loom – record short-form video with ease. Use these videos to record personalized videos for prospects and customers.
• Videoask – fun personalized video with the ability to add calls to action.

Social listening software

Stay in tune with your audience by implementing social listening software. Advantages include:

• Monitoring the online conversation: You can find out if your audience is mentioning your competitors or your brand and how the sentiment is based on the conversations.
• Identify customer needs: People can often be unfiltered online, especially on anonymous platforms. Collecting this feedback can help inform your future marketing efforts.
• Improve customer service: Are you seeing the same conversations about your brand’s lack of service in a particular area? These can become low-hanging fruit of issues to solve for your customers.

List of Social Listening Software

• Brandwatch
• BuzzSumo
• Keyhole

Chatbot software

Chatbots come in all different sizes now with the assistance of AI. Traditional chatbots were more logic based while the latest versions are fully trained through natural language processing.

The best chatbots have features that allow you to give help desk answers for customers as well as the ability to have a human jump in.

List of Chatbot Software

• Tidio – Best for combining AI and human support
• Crisp.chat – Best for small businesses – Read the Review
• Intercom – Best for enterprise, now powered with AI as well
• Chatbase.co – Great entry level NLP powered chatbot – Read the Review

Survey Software

This strategy has been around for decades and that’s because it works. Customers need to be given the chance to voice their experience and it’s often in the most positive and negative feedback, where you can find the gold nuggets.

Surveys let your brand:

• Get the necessary feedback for your product. This is particularly crucial for early start-ups.
• Measuring customer satisfaction. The best way to keep customers is to keep a pulse on what is and fix what isn’t working.
• Craft personalized experiences. By understanding what resonates with your customers, you have a higher chance to improve the “delight” factor with them.

List of Survey Software

• Tally.so – My all-time favorite form builder. If you’re a notion fan, this is the best form option.
• SurveyMonkey – The most customizable (and popular) survey software on the market
• Google Forms – Used by many corporations of all sizes due to its ease of use and straightforward UI
• Typeform – Best-designed forms on the market and widely supported integrations

Tips for Understanding Customers

We just went through a list of software to help you get in contact with your customers. Now let’s talk about what we can potentially do with the information we’ve learned.

Review Key Data Points

Particularly for e-commerce brands. Understanding purchase history and intent is key to understanding your customers. If you know a segment always purchases around the same time each year, consider a proactive approach in reaching out (even better if it’s personalized) and give them a special coupon code.

Avoid Overpersonalization

We’ve all been there. We clicked on a link in our Whatsapp group and suddenly we have sneaker ads following us around. It’s annoying.

Yes, it is possible to overdo personalization. Even something as simple as “Welcome back” can make people feel like they are being followed around on the internet.

Make sure you just do a sense check before sending out your communication and ask yourself, “will they wonder how we know this about them?” Which brings us to the next point.

Put Yourself in Their Shoes

By simply running through the same user experience as a prospect and customer, you can catch a lot of errors and issues. Just try it once before pressing the publish button on your campaign.

Ask open-ended Questions and Listen

You can learn a lot if you get a chance to listen to a customer in real-time. Ask questions like

• Why did you choose our product/service?
• Do you use a product similar to ours?
• What was the most frustrating thing about our product/service?
• Could you provide an example?

Wrapping up

In conclusion, understanding your customers is crucial for the success of your marketing efforts. By utilizing customer communication software, such as personalized video, you can gain valuable insights and connect with your audience in a more meaningful way.

By prioritizing customer understanding, you can improve sales, meet targets, anticipate needs, and ultimately retain and attract better customers.

In this article, we’ll discuss eight key website design guidelines that will help set your website apart from the rest:

1. Start with a goal
2. Clean navigation and structure
3. Design consistency
4. Use of colors and fonts
5. Integrating multimedia thoughtfully
6. Keep load times to a minimum
7. Create mobile friendly pages
8. Use white space effectively

Website design guidelines

Start with a goal

Before starting your web project, consider taking the time to plan out the website’s actual objective. Without this simple task, you can build the most beautiful full of content but won’t actually achieve any business goal.

Even if you are creating a space to host your portfolio, it’s still worth taking the time to map out the golden path of your visitors.

Here are some ideas of what a meaningful goal could be for your website

• to build your email list
• to clarify your thoughts through writing
• to sell a product or service

While each page on the website will have its own objective, understanding the main objective of the website will help you make design decisions down the line on what features to remove or keep.

Clean navigation and structure

Effective navigation is the backbone of a user-friendly website. It guides your visitors, helping them understand where they are and where they can go next. A logical flow can be achieved by using a clear and hierarchical structure that reflects the contents of your website.

This way, visitors can intuitively find what they’re looking for, effortlessly transitioning from one page to another. Whether exploring your services, reading your blog, or looking for your contact information, every click should bring them closer to their desired destination.

There are various types of website navigation options to consider:

• Navigation menus – provide a bird’s eye view of your website
• Sidebars – helpful for supplemental information
• Footers – additional navigation and helps keep the main navigation less cluttered
• Breadcrumbs – show the user’s current page hierarchy, so they know how deep in your pages they are
• Hamburger menus (mobile) – offer a clean, uncluttered interface for mobile users.

Love and Lemons uses a simple top bar navigation and a sidebar to introduce themselves as a personal brand.

A well-designed website doesn’t need all of these options but should have features that make sense for the overall objective of the website. When applied thoughtfully, these design decisions can significantly enhance the user experience.

Design consistency

A consistent design throughout your website makes your site look more professional and trustworthy and provides a sense of familiarity and ease of use for your visitors.

Keeping elements such as backgrounds, color schemes, typefaces, and the overall writing tone consistent creates a seamless, enjoyable experience that encourages users to stay longer, interact more, and ultimately convert.

Design consistency goes beyond aesthetics. It aids in usability by creating predictability, helping users understand how to interact with your website, and reducing the learning curve. For instance, if all buttons across your site look similar, users will intuitively understand that these elements are interactive.

However, consistency doesn’t imply boring designs. Different layouts can be employed for specific types of pages, like landing pages or informational pages. The key lies in maintaining a balance – diverse enough to cater to different content types yet uniform enough to provide a coherent visual language. A well-implemented consistent design can subtly guide your visitors, providing a comfortable and satisfying browsing experience.

Take this example from Exploding Topics. Notice how the design is consistent as you navigate through their website. The main navigation doesn’t change, and they have a “graphing” theme on many of their pages. Colors are also consistent with this design.

Use of colors and fonts

The colors you choose for your website design enhance readability and user engagement. They serve many purposes, including reinforcing brand identity, creating a pleasant aesthetic that draws visitors in, and stimulating specific emotional responses.

The strategic use of primary colors can draw attention to important elements on your site. This is crucial to consider as colors have a deep psychological impact on users, capable of subtly swaying their decision-making process. For instance, a well-selected color scheme can bolster website traffic, increase sales, and strengthen your target audience’s bond.

There are two important concepts to understand when choosing colors: the color wheel and color models. The color wheel is a collection of 12 colors, including primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Color models, on the other hand, such as RGB (Red, Green, Blue) for screens and CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) for print, are systems for creating a broad spectrum of colors. Utilizing these tools allows for a more informed choice in your website’s color palette.

Techniques like complementary, analogous, diad, split-complementary, triad, tetradic, and square can be employed to select harmonious colors that work cohesively on your site. Understanding the psychology of colors allows you to use specific colors to evoke particular emotions and create associations.

For instance, blue is often associated with trust and reliability, making it a popular choice in branding. In conclusion, the strategic use of color schemes plays a pivotal role in website design, capable of influencing your audience’s feelings and behaviors and, ultimately, their interaction with your site.

Integrating multimedia thoughtfully

Multimedia integration is important in enriching the user experience on any website. Images, videos, and infographics are visually engaging and serve as tools for conveying complex information in a digestible manner. However, you want to incorporate them tactfully. It’s important to remember that each multimedia piece should add value to your content and align with the overall narrative of your site.

Images should be high-quality and relevant to the context. Optimizing images for faster load times is crucial, as slow-loading images can negatively impact the user experience and affect SEO. Conversely, videos can breathe life into your content, making it interactive and dynamic. However, for videos, avoid autoplay as it can be intrusive and annoying to users. Consider using video subtitles to make them accessible to all users, including those with audio impairments or those browsing without sound.

Infographics are brilliant at breaking down complex data into visually appealing and understandable pieces of information. They can help convey a lot of data in a small space and are more likely to be shared, enhancing your site’s visibility. When creating infographics, focus on a harmonious blend of data and design elements, ensuring the colors, fonts, and graphics align with your overall site aesthetics. Remember, multimedia isn’t just an accessory but a significant component in fostering a superior user experience in the digital world.

Consider this infographic by Visual Capitalist. Typically recalling tech company history is dry and repetitive, but you can spice things up with graphics as part of a well-designed infographic to give these stories life again.

Keep load times to a minimum

Page speed is critical to user experience and search engine optimization (SEO). It refers to the time a specific web page takes to load fully. Several factors influence page speed, including the number of media files on the page, installed themes and plugins, and coding and server-side scripts.

Slow-loading pages can increase bounce rates and create a negative perception of your brand. If you’ve ever sat there waiting for a blank page to load, you know firsthand how annoying this can be.

One way to gauge your page speed is using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. It measures page speed and provides suggestions for improvement. There are also two key metrics to be aware of: page load time and time to first byte (TTFB). Page load time is how long it takes for all the content on your page to load, while TTFB measures the time between a client’s request and the server’s response.

Google considers page speed a ranking factor, so optimizing your page speed can improve your website’s crawl rate and encourage Google to crawl more pages.

Here are nine practical ways to enhance your page loading speed:

1. Choose a performance-optimized hosting solution: The choice of hosting company and package can directly impact your site speed.
2. Compress and optimize images: Image size and format can significantly affect page load time. Make sure to optimize them appropriately. Have a look at this round-up post of must-have plugins.
3. Reduce redirects: Redirects can create additional HTTP requests and slow down your page speed.
4. Cache web pages: Caching can drastically reduce load time for returning visitors and provide a better user experience.
5. Enable browser caching: This allows static files to be stored in the visitor’s browser to load quicker upon subsequent visits.
6. Use asynchronous and defer loading for CSS and JavaScript files: This will prevent them from render blocking (slowing down) the rest of your page from loading.
7. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML: Minification can reduce the size of your code and the file’s download time.
8. Leverage a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN delivers your web content to people more quickly and efficiently based on their geographical location. Some hosting services provide this as part of their package already.
9. Eliminate unnecessary plugins: Plugins can clutter your website and slow performance.

You can also check your page speed on these websites

• Pingdom
• GTMetrix

Create mobile friendly pages

Since 2017, mobile traffic has surpassed desktop traffic, and it hasn’t slowed down since then. This highlights the importance of mobile-friendly website design.

Implementing a responsive layout, optimizing website speed, using subtle pop-up implementation, and incorporating viewport meta tags can enhance mobile user experience. A clutter-free design and compatibility with landscape and portrait orientations are also key.

If you have the resources, regular cross-device mobile testing ensures a consistent user experience across different screen sizes and device types. Emphasizing mobile-friendly design is essential for maintaining SEO rankings and catering to increasing mobile internet usage.

If you’re using a modern page builder, it will usually have mobile responsive designs built right into their templates.

Use white space effectively

White space, often called negative space, is not just an empty space on a website but a powerful design tool that can greatly enhance user experience. It’s important to note that white space is not always white – it can encompass any color, texture, pattern, or background image. Its primary function is to create a balance between design elements and effectively organize content for improved visual communication, ensuring a seamless flow of information to the user.

There are two main types of white space to consider in web design: micro and macro white space. Micro white space refers to the small gaps between design elements, such as text lines or buttons, which help to make the page appear organized and easy to digest.

On the other hand, macro white space is the larger expanse of space between major layout components, which can give the design a fresh, airy feel and help to emphasize certain elements. The effective use of both types of white space depends on various factors, including the nature of your content, your design style, user research, and the specific branding message you wish to convey.

Whether passive or active, white space is important to your website’s overall look and feel. Passive white space improves legibility, making content easier to read and understand, while active white space is more strategic, guiding focus and attention to certain design elements. It’s crucial to remember your design tone, branding, and where you want your audience to focus when determining how much and where to use white space. Done correctly, it can improve readability, elevate user experience, and significantly enhance the overall aesthetics of your design.

Time to Design

Creating an outstanding user experience in website design is an art that requires careful consideration and strategic implementation of various factors. Starting with a clear goal for your website sets the foundation for a design that meets your users’ needs.

Clean navigation and a logical structure pave the way for user-friendly browsing while maintaining design consistency, offers a seamless experience throughout your site. The strategic use of colors and fonts enhances engagement, and the thoughtful multimedia integration, and optimized load times, add value to your content.

Considering the increasing mobile traffic, designing mobile-friendly pages is essential to ensure accessibility. Lastly, effectively utilizing white space can significantly improve your site’s readability and overall aesthetics. Each of these elements, when executed correctly, contributes to an enhanced user experience that can set your website apart in the digital landscape.