Year: 2020

Talking Niche Blogging with Casey Palmer

Niche blogger Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad

When I hear the words “Canadian dad,” I immediately think of Casey Palmer, and that's an attestation to the brand building that Casey has done over the years. I reached out to Casey to talk about niche blogging because his journey towards finding clarity with his site hasn't been a straight path. In my humble opinion, it's much better to interview those who has learned and overcome than it is to talk to those who struck gold with the first swing.

Besides that, Casey is one of the foremost voices of the Toronto Bloggers Collective, a community that I cofounded in 2018 along with three other incredible content creators. He's a thoughtful voice in the blogging space, and a voice that I'm honoured to feature because I know that his ambition in blogging comes from the right place, and that he goes about things the right way.

Jeremy wrote an in-depth guide on what it means to start a niche blog in today's day and age, and I think this interview serves as the perfect compliment to that article.

Without further adieu, my good friend and respected colleague, Casey Palmer.

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Breaking Down WordPress Blogging Hosts You May Wish to Consider

Hosting is often one of the most widely talked about items when it comes to blogging as it is crucial to your (and your readers') experience when on your site.

You often don't think about it, but every website on the internet takes up file space- generally on the order of 10s to 100s of gigabytes. This has to exist on a piece of hardware somewhere in the world (often multiple times over for redundancy). A host often manages this equipment (or has contracts with those who do) and does all the work necessary to ensure your site can be found at its respective domain. So when you opened up this link, everything that was required to deliver the page you're seeing to your computer screen is likely a function of our host.

We're not going to bore you with the details on how all that happens, but suffice it to say that hosting is one of the most important things every blogger must have because, well, your site simply wouldn't exist without it!

In this guide, we want to break down some of the biggest considerations you should look for in a host, and then give a few recommendations that may be helpful for all budgets.

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Talking Web Accessibility with George Zamfir

George-Zamfir-web-accessibility

When we mention a topic on This Week in Blogging, we like to make sure that we're providing expert opinions to go along with it. In a recent edition featuring web accessibility news, we tapped George Zamfir on the shoulder as he has made this his primary focus!

In this brief interview, we discussed the finer notes of web accessibility with George and why you should care about it in running your blog.

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The Best WordPress Plugins – Speed and Function First

How to Get a Fast Website with Wordpress Plugins

One of the reasons we love blogging on WordPress so much is that the content management system is open source. Want a new theme? There are hundreds if not thousands of developers out there with a product. In the mood for a plugin upgrade? Tens of thousands exist.

While we love this flexibility to always be on the lookout for the next best thing, you can often be met with decision paralysis on what is best for you and why.

To help with that, we wanted to share our list of preferred WordPress plugins that we use and love. As we have prioritized site speed on all of our sites, we are also pretty happy with the below for being lightweight and letting our sites run lightning-fast (but we also have tip our hats to our host, BigScoots, for a bit of that too)!

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Entry Requirements for Popular Blog Advertising Networks

When it comes to blog advertising networks, there are many options to choose from. But not every ad network is created equal, and neither are their requirements for entry.

In this one, we wanted to summarize a few of the most popular networks out there for bloggers, and share a few of the key details you need to know for each of them when it comes to applying.

But first off, we want to talk about your earnings potential when running ads.

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How to See What Keywords Other Sites Rank For with Keysearch

There are a number of novel ways to use the keyword research tool, Keysearch, to improve your SEO game. But sometimes one of the hardest parts of doing research is coming up with keyword ideas in the first place.

One of my favorites features of Keysearch (especially for my local blog where I compete with our tourist office, many local magazines, and news outlets), is that Keysearch actually lets you look at the keywords for any site on the internet- not just your own! This presents a number of opportunities where you can quite literally peer into other sites, find keywords they rank for, and get new ideas on what you may be able to target yourself.

In this guide, I'm going to share a step-by-step process of how you can do just that.

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Changing Policies at Mediavine – An Interview with Amber Bracegirdle

The big news for June 2020 is that Mediavine is changing their minimum session requirement for new bloggers from 25,000 to 50,000 per month. They're also removing their unofficial policy to accept sites as low as 10,000 sessions as well, which caused quite the commotion in the blogging world as many bloggers rushed to create second, niche sites to combat traffic drops due to the coronavirus and associated recession.

We reached out to Mediavine and spoke with Amber Bracegirdle, Mediavine's Chief Brand Officer and Co-Founder, to talk about the changes. We discussed what it means for existing publishers and future publishers, and how Mediavine strives to maintain the quality we all know and love within their network!

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How to Read WebPageTest Results and Improve Your Blog’s Speed

One of our favorite services to look at our blog's site speed is WebPageTest. This free service provides a wealth of data about your site and really lets you dive down into the individual components that make your blog tick.

In running a test, we know that the amount of data returned in this one can cause information overload. To help, we put together this guide featuring some of the most important elements we look at when optimizing our blogs, what they mean, and potential fixes that you can implement on your own blog for speed improvement!

Note: All website owners can run a test on WebPageTest and analyze results, but some of our recommendations below are targeted purely towards WordPress users.

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Using Your Blog as a Platform for Change – An Interview with Carol Cain

We started This Week in Blogging with the idea that it was our duty to cover what was happening in the blogging world week by week. During this past week, of course, we've seen the meteoric rise of the Black Lives Matter movement – a movement that we at This Week in Blogging fervently support.

As we began to write about the movement in this week's newsletter, as well as the coverage of the BLM movement, it quickly became apparent that our voices, as two white males, weren't the ones that needed to be heard at this particular moment. In short, it was easy for us both to recognize that there are so many individuals, particularly bloggers of color, that could speak to how this movement connects to blogging at large better than either of us could.

We are committed to using our platform to highlight that which needs to be highlighted, and understand that sometimes that simply means making space for the right voices to be heard.

In light of that, we reached out to Carol Cain, an award-winning blogger and founder of Girl Gone Travel, as well as Cofounder of Brave World Media to discuss how bloggers can use their platforms to promote positive change in the world.

We're grateful to Carol for taking time to so thoroughly and thoughtfully answer our questions, and we're honoured to use This Week in Blogging to share her thoughts and comments.

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What Does it Mean to Start a Niche Blog in 2023?

For many years, blogging experts have been screaming “niche down, niche down” to encourage those looking to launch a new site to claim ownership of topics where they can shine as experts.

This was done for many reasons, with the biggest simply being that the internet is running out of space. I'm serious. Gone are the days where you can start a general blog, put a little effort in, and succeed. Today blogging is an organized industry, with established best practices, and successful blogs covering nearly every topic there is- often multiple times over.

To translate, this means that competition is fierce. Niching down is a way to stand out amongst the sea of bloggers and allows you to have a clear topical advantage right from the start.

If you're looking to start a niche site in 2023 (or even overhaul your existing site), this guide highlights the important points you must consider.

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