In 2022 alone, holiday sales reached nearly a trillion dollars, showing just how much excitement (and spending!) this season brings. With so many shoppers primed to find the best deals, the question is: Is your website ready? 

Prepping your site for Black Friday doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Whether you’re looking to increase online sales, showcase irresistible deals, or ensure a seamless shopping experience, Kadence has the tools to make it happen. 

We’ve put together a complete guide to help you get your site ready and make the most of this year’s shopping events. Let’s dive in.

Preparing your site

For most retailers and ecommerce sites, there is an influx of website traffic during the holiday season. You may have visitors returning for those sweet deals or gift ideas. Either way, you need to be ready to convert as many of those visitors into customers as possible. Here’s what you should do to get started. 

Test and analyze your site

The first step to preparing your website for Black Friday/Cyber Monday is ensuring it’s fast, efficient, and easy for users to navigate and find what they are looking for. 

Start by viewing your website in an incognito window. Browse through your site the way a customer would to see if the user experience is up to par. 

• Does each page load quickly? 
• When you click on each link, does it take the user to the right place? 
• Did you test your checkout process? A smooth seamless checkout is less likely to result in abandoned carts. 
• Is there a way to reduce the number of clicks to purchase to increase conversions? Only ask for the information you need to complete the transaction and make it clear what types of payment you accept to eliminate user frustration.

If you want to take it a step further, you could run a quick page speed test. Google has a great user-friendly tool that will test your website’s desktop and mobile speed. It’ll even provide recommendations for improvement! After reviewing the suggestions, try your best to improve any metrics flagged by the page speed insights tool.

NOTE: If you are going to optimize your site for speed, just don’t obsess over chasing a “perfect” score. It can be easy to get lost in the weeds of trying to tweak every little thing and can sometimes distract you from other more important tasks. Do what you can to improve the user experience overall, but leave enough time to complete all of the other steps in this article as well.

Next, look at your primary site navigation. Is it optimized for the holiday sales season? 

Make sure that holiday offers are prominent, including top-selling items or most searched products. For many brands, the main navigation may look different during the holiday season and may revert afterward. The goal is to create easy and obvious paths for users to interact with sale offers. 

Finally, pull it all together with a site optimization and caching tool. Solid Performance is a free tool that helps you serve a faster website, with optimization and caching. 

Secure your site 

Shoppers need to feel safe making a purchase on your site. Display trust badges, SSL (lock icon), and secure payment icons prominently.

A security plugin can make a huge difference and give you and shoppers peace of mind. Solid Security Pro has everything you need with features such as brute force protection, passwordless login, 2FA, and a real-time WordPress dashboard. And don’t forget to keep all of your WordPress plugins updated!

Layer your security best practices with trusted payment processors, and you’ll have one less worry this holiday season.  

Planning your promotions

Once your website is ready for holiday traffic and sales, you’ll want to create a promotion plan.  

Setting clear goals

Black Friday is a long-standing tradition dating to the early 20th century and has evolved to kick off the holiday shopping season. It’s become the first day in a weekend-long major shopping weekend, culminating with Cyber Monday for ecommerce.

You can track the success of these promotions and your sales season by setting sales targets, inventory limits, and customer acquisition goals. 

• Sales targets: What revenue do you need to hit to consider this a successful holiday season? Set an overall sales target and individual goals for sales people (if you have them). Break goals further into online and brick-and-mortar sales if you have both location types. 
• Inventory limits: At what level will you sell through inventory? Does that get you to sales goals? Avoid carrying inventory past the holiday season when you must sell it at a deep discount. There’s a little magic in carrying just the right amount of product that you will get better at over time. 
• Customer acquisition goals: You should try to generate sales from existing and new customers. For continued growth, the latter is vital. Set a number or percentage of new customers that you want to reach this year. 

With all customer segments and sales, consider pairing promotions with upsell and cross-selling opportunities to maximize cart value for each shopper. Small items, inventory you need to move, or deeply discounted products are quick and easy for shoppers to impulse-buy at checkout. 

Remember to use SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals in your planning so that you can track results and measure against prior years or efforts. 

Strategizing your offer types

Black Friday promos vary widely, and now is the time to think about what offers, discounts, or special things you may include for your online store. Pairing promotions with past customer testimonials can help turn a casual browser into a shopper. 

Popular options include:

• Deep discounts on specific items
• Doorbuster deals for limited hours
• Extended shopping hours for brick-and-mortar and extended sale windows online
• Social and cultural frenzy for specific, high-demand items to push on social media

Each different promotion should include unique calls to action that encourage immediate purchase by promotion type. Use microcopy for CTAs that’s more specific than “Shop” or “Buy” to encourage checkout. Consider phrasing that creates a sense of urgency, such as “Limited Inventory – Checkout Now.”

If you play your cards well, Black Friday can easily become your most financially successful day of the year.

Timing and countdown timers

Nothing helps convert a shopper like a sense of urgency. A countdown timer can provide this in an unobtrusive way, noting when a sale is about to begin or when a specific promotion might end. 

Countdowns build anticipation in advance of a sale, and enhance the sense of urgency to make a purchase when used on a product or landing page. 

The Kadence Countdown block is easy to configure and can create a sense of urgency to buy now since the deal is only available for a limited time.

Build your landing page

As you plan campaigns that lead to BFCM promotions, a landing page can be the most effective way to organize content and products designed for direct and quick conversions. 

A landing page is any page that your customer lands on when they find your site. Whether this be your home page, your shop page, or your BFCM promo page. A few key things that your landing page needs are inspiration, clarity, and mobile-first design.

• Inspiration: Use beautiful and trendy design styles that are eye-capturing and engaging. When a customer enters this page, they should be compelled to dive deeper into your site. Beautiful, clean design is key.
• Clarity: What are you selling? How will it benefit your customers? Be direct and have clear steps laid out. Don’t leave your customers guessing or you are sure to lose them.
• Mobile-first design: A large number of shoppers will hit your website and online sales from their phones. That experience has to be zippy as well. A fast theme, such as the Kadence Theme, can help. 

A few things to keep in mind as you design a landing page is to maintain visual branding and website design consistency so that the page looks and feels like it belongs to you, while streamlining content to be actionable and specific. (Consider choosing one key product to focus on.)

While every landing page might look a little different, the creation process is similar. Once you know what you want from a landing page, use Kadence Blocks to build a page within your WordPress website. 

Boosting sales with Kadence WP

Kadence WP has everything you need to create optimal landing pages that lead to holiday sales. Don’t forget that all of the best practices you use on your website as a while also apply to Black Friday/Cyber Monday landing pages and product promotion. 

Optimize your landing pages

After creating landing pages, optimize them! The most important thing you can do when creating BFCM landing pages is to stick to a single offer per landing page. 

Visual cues, copy, and direction should be clear and intentional. Don’t try to offer multiple options here. Having more than one offer could confuse users, while just one will help optimize the entire page. Any ads, social media posts, or links to the landing page should directly pertain to the content and offer on the page. 

Add social proof or testimonials to your landing page that support purchases, and consider a popup to help users complete the transaction. 

Finally, all CTAs on the landing page should lead toward the desired conversion. 

Enhance the ecommerce experience with Kadence Shop Kit

One of the most powerful things you can do for your business is create an online experience that is different from all the rest. Anyone can create a generic product page, but when a product page is intuitive and engaging, it stands out. 

Create custom product templates with Kadence Shop Kit to make your product pages really stand out. This is a game changer for WordPress WooCommerce sites. You can build out product pages that actually match your brand and engage with your audience. 

With Shop Kit, you can do so much more than create custom product templates. It also gives you the tools to create stunning product galleries, intuitive variation swatches, conditional cart banners, and tons more. Kadence Shop Kit makes developing engaging and immersive shopping experiences a breeze.

Don’t forget to use Product Badges to highlight key product details, such as low stock, on sale, or promoting special attributes. The feature gives you full control over the appearance and placement of badges, helping you enhance the shopping experience and improve product visibility in your store.

Create promotional blocks with Kadence Blocks 

You can help lead website visitors to promotional content and landing pages from within other parts of your website with sale banners, calls to action, and urgency indicators, too. 

These elements can help repeat customers gain familiarity with current promotions and offers and even lead to higher cart values!

Kadence Blocks allows you to use Hooked Elements to add content in different areas of a page, with unlimited customization options. This makes creating sitewide banners a breeze! Check it out for yourself with this live training video. 

Try conversion tools with Kadence Conversions 

In addition to promotional blocks, you can implement conversion tools throughout your website to help drive shoppers to key products. 

A simple reminder as a visitor moves through the website can help them find items that are most in demand or that drive your sales funnel.

Plus, shoppers are used to popups, announcements, and special offers. Those elements can sometimes convert when other opportunities do not. 

Kadence Conversions is a no-code WordPress block that lets you create all of these items with ease. Use it to increase sales, collect leads, and connect with visitors in more meaningful ways. Plus, it offers ready-made designs that you can drop in and use right away!

Promoting your Black Friday deals

What good is a sale if you don’t have customers? Spreading the word is everything when it comes to having a successful Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale.

Here are a few key questions to ask yourself when thinking about marketing your sale:

• What are you selling?
• What is your sale?
• Who is your target audience?

Once you know the answers to these questions, it’s time to get after it. Here are some marketing tactics to consider. 

Social media

Don’t downplay the power of social media. That’s where the people are, so you should be there too. Don’t just post about your sale; engage with your audience. Like, comment, DM – whatever it takes to create connection. 

People want to feel seen, like your sale was catered specifically for them. This is why it’s so important to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and speak to them like you would want to be spoken to.

Email

The other marketing tool that can be your most effective is email campaigns. An engaged email list is your power tool. 

The first step here is getting customers to open your email. When crafting your marketing email, you will want a powerful subject line. Based on conversion rate research, words like “just,” “wonderful,” and “upgrade” are the most effective when added to your subject line. 

Once the email is opened, engaging content, beautiful photos and enticing content is what will keep your audience engaged. Then, to finish it off you will want a killer call to action and be sure to have an obvious button that links directly to your shop or landing page.

Advertising 

Finally, consider adding online advertising to your promotional mix to help reach a targeted audience that’s most likely to engage with your brand or buy your product. 

Advertising tactics could include social media advertising, search engine ads, or even traditional media buys. The most important consideration for product advertising is meeting potential customers where they are and advertising on channels and platforms they are most likely to use.

Tracking and analyzing performance

Your Black Friday Cyber Monday work does not end with a customer purchase! One of your biggest marketing assets is tracking and analyzing performance to see if you met goals and what you can learn for future campaigns. The work you do after the sale will set the foundation for a better campaign in the future. 

Go back to the SMART goals you set for BFCM campaigns and compare them to actual results. 

• How do actual numbers compare to goals? 
• What was your overall return on investment for campaigns?
• What worked well?
• Where are areas of opportunity in the future?

Many of the numbers you need to create baseline reports are available in Google Analytics. This is a free tool that you can set up on your website if you don’t have it already. 

Take a little time to reflect on these metrics and start planning for next year. While results and numbers are fresh, it is a good time to create starter goals for future campaigns. 

Crush your sale goals with Kadence WP

We hope this is your best Black Friday Cyber Monday ever. By preparing your site for traffic early, planning campaigns with intentional goals, and setting a promotional plan, you can set the groundwork for a strong holiday sales season. 

Kadence can help. Kadence Shop Kit gives you the ability to customize your shop experience to drive sales, Kadence Conversions can help you create flows that lead on-site visitors to promotions, and Kadence Blocks has elements and tools that make building landing pages that much easier. 

Get the full bundle of Kadence products today to supercharge your website and holiday campaigns!

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introduction to the Kadence Beat Podcast
• 00:15 Meet Drew Griswold: Director of Outbound Marketing
• 01:13 Drew’s Journey into Advertising
• 02:25 The Pitfalls of Hiring an Agency
• 06:24 Understanding Advertising Metrics
• 12:35 When to Start a Paid Ad Campaign
• 15:33 Choosing the Right Ad Platform
• 19:11 Optimizing Landing Pages for Ads
• 22:28 The Importance of Blog Posts in Advertising
• 23:51 Defining Prospecting in Advertising
• 24:26 Understanding the Consideration Phase
• 24:41 The Power of Broad Audience Targeting
• 26:09 Choosing the Right Platform for Your Ads
• 26:52 The Importance of User-Generated Content
• 28:13 Exploring Pinterest Ads
• 30:08 Knowing Your Audience and Platform
• 32:04 The Value of Data in Advertising
• 33:22 Effective Ad Testing Strategies
• 38:40 Kadence’s Successful Ad Strategies
• 41:44 Final Tips and Resources for Advertising

Transcript

Katy: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode 38 of the Kadence Beat podcast. Today we are going to be talking with Drew Griswold. Drew is the director of outbound marketing for Stellar WP, which is our parent company at Kadence. And we’re just going to have a nice little chat about advertising. Um, so welcome Drew.

Drew: Awesome. Hey Katy. Hey Ben. Thanks for having me.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s going to be really fun. Drew, I’ll say this about you. I’ve met you in person once and You have to be one of the most fun people I’ve ever met in terms of like, just like really, really someone you want at anything you’re doing because you’re going to make it fun.

Uh, so I’m sure that today is going to be fun because It’s uh, so [00:01:00] fun to actually hang out with you.

Drew: Well, I appreciate that. That’s extremely kind. And also far too high of a bar to live up to in a podcast. But, uh, challenge accepted.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. This is going to be great. So So we’re talking about ads because you spend a lot of money on ads and have been doing ads for a long time.

Uh, why don’t you give us your, your story?

Drew: Yeah, absolutely. Um, advertising has become my full time job, which is interesting. If you would have told me that 10 years ago, I would have probably laughed at you. Uh, but the way that I got into online advertising and got into the position I’m at, that Stuller WP actually stems from, um, Previous to my working in WordPress and working at GiveWP, I owned a retail business.

It’s called Wander and Company. It’s an e commerce company. We did, we do music festivals all over the country and we’re not have an online store. We got to a point with our business, with Wander and Co where we were having a lot of success [00:02:00] with our online advertising. Um, I had hired this kid out of Las Vegas.

He was running our ads for us. It was when Facebook ads were kind of a money printing machine. Um, We were really, really doing well, but I had no idea how any of it worked. Um, and I foolishly, uh, in hindsight, foolishly decided that we were going to hire an agency to take over from this kid that we had hired to do our ads.

And it’s a really common story with lots of small businesses. There’s a lot of really kind of Scammy agencies out there that are just looking for people in this exact situation to kind of capitalize on and we ended up got We got taken to the cleaners like i’ll just be completely honest about it We burned tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars and Perpetually in a testing phase and all of these things and all of the things that we had built up over those years Building our e commerce business kind of got taken away in About three months by hiring this agency And out of frustration, pure and utter [00:03:00] frustration, I decided, uh, when I found out what was happening with this agency and how we were getting duped, that I was going to get Facebook Blueprint certified, and I was going to get to the bottom of this and get our progress back.

So I spent a weekend in my RV, because I was a full time RVer, just kind of huddled over my keyboard, learning everything that I could about, Facebook ads and Google ads and CPC advertising in general, um, became certified in those, you know, I had a little bit of experience up in that point, but I really didn’t know what was going on.

Um, so really just kind of threw myself into the deep end and did everything that I could to learn all of the things that I could to get out from underneath this agency, um, and then I started doing our own ads and we found really great success with it and I found out that I really enjoyed doing it. Um, Did that for a few years of my own business, and then when I got hired on it, give WP to be on their social media and events team.

Um, kind of just mentioned, though. Well, yeah, I’ve done some of this paid advertising stuff to like I’ve been doing [00:04:00] it for a few years. It’s really, really effective. Started doing the ads for give WP had really. Uh, really great success with that. And then when we were acquired and joined stellar, uh, extrapolating out some of those insights to all the other brands, uh, so now I’m managing all of the digital advertising for all of the stellar WP brands, which is awesome.

And it all started because of, uh, being frustrated with an agency that was making false promises, uh, which I have a feeling. For a lot of Kadence customers will be a refrain that they can kind of relate to, unfortunately.

Ben: So yeah, so I think getting into that a little bit because I think now everyone’s going to be like, Oh crap, am I getting burned by my agency?

Or people are going to be scared to go and get an agency. What specifically should people be looking out for? Or like, how did that How would you say you go about if someone’s like, I want to hire an agency to do this?

Drew: Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to, I don’t want to disparage agencies across the board, right?[00:05:00]

There’s a lot of really effective, really smart, really wonderful agencies out there that genuinely have folks best interest in minds but with the advent of the internet and some of these These agencies that are out there that don’t necessarily have the expertise to know what they were doing um, I think It’s really easy to look like a professional and with something like paid advertising, you’re always going to be able to find one metric that makes it look like you’re doing really good work when you’re not necessarily doing any work at all.

Um, the one I always fall back to his impressions, like impressions on the Internet don’t necessarily mean anything. It’s really easy. You could put a 5 ad on Facebook and get tens of thousands of impressions. Where did they go? Were they effective? It doesn’t matter. You got a lot of impressions, right? Um, but I think accountability is just a big thing.

If you have an agency that’s not willing to be transparent about what they are are doing, and they’re not willing to give you access to the accounts for you to poke around in your own free time, [00:06:00] that’s a huge red flag for me right off the bat. Right. Uh, but if you have an agency that’s willing to go through this process with you, they’re willing to dig into the account with you, show you exactly the changes that they’re making, uh, things like that.

Then. Chances are that you have a good one. So don’t let me disparage all agencies. Yeah, there are some really great ones out there.

Ben: Nice. And that also is really interesting about impressions. So do you want to go ahead and get into some of the like metrics?

Drew: Yeah, let’s do it. I dropped a big bomb in there right away.

Yeah. Like, uh, what are some of the golden metrics? This is something we’re going to talk about a little bit later. It’s like, what are some of the biggest tips that we could have for small businesses? And one of the biggest ones is picking, picking your success metrics. If you are really focused on being as efficient as possible with your advertising spend, you could use return on ad spend as a metric.

If you’re really focused on getting qualified traffic to your site, you could use clicks as a metric. Um, you could use, if you’re really looking to take [00:07:00] impressions away from your competitors, you could look at your lost impression share on Google. Um, there are no shortage of. Really complex statistics out there that’ll really specifically address whatever your felt need is But defining those metrics as you go into the process is a really important part of making sure that you find success Um, you know, so for something like givewp, for example, one of our stellar brands We’re really focused on lowering our customer acquisition cost And one of the best things about advertising is you could see exactly how much you spent and you could watch the entire customer journey of when they first clicked on an ad on Google and then they saw a Facebook ad and then they went to your website, they went through the consideration phase, they became a purchaser and you know exactly how much money of that part of the process that you sent.

Um, so for me, advertising represents one of the most efficient, effective metrics that you could really track is you’re seeing exactly what you’re spending and exactly what the outcomes are. I don’t know if I danced around your question there, [00:08:00] but there’s no shortage of metrics and it’s really going to be specific to the small business of what they’re looking to capture and what they’re trying to accomplish with their paid program.

Ben: And so generally if you’re, you know, I have a small business, my brother and I run, um, pinnacle foods where we sell freeze dried foods for backpacking gourmet style. And for that, if we wanted to get into paid ads, we’re probably going to be most interested in how much money do we have to spend to get someone who’s going to buy something on our website?

And. You quote that as, what exactly? What phrase did you use? I want to, I want to know how much money I’m spending. Oh, yeah. How I get that customer to be a paying customer.

Drew: Your customer acquisition cost. Terminology. One thing about paid ads is we love abbreviations. So your C A C or your CAC if you want to make it sounding.[00:09:00]

It’s also just fun to say CAC in meetings because it kind of confuses people, but uh, yeah So so but for someone like you with a small business It’s it’s all a matter of what your appetite is if you want to really make a focused effort on growing the e commerce portion of Your business. Yeah, you’re gonna have to spend a little bit of money But you’re gonna want to monitor that it doesn’t have to be a lot of money You can start at 5 a day.

You can start at 2 a day if you want to but But if you think it’s a reasonable expectation that you’re going to be able to acquire a customer for two dollars It’s probably going to be a longer learning curve and it’s going to be a longer road to get the data that you’d need So all the money does is get you more data and it lets you adapt to that data quicker So if you go in and spend a thousand dollars versus a hundred you’re gonna have ten times more data In theory, if you did everything right to make effective decisions, to make that money work well for you, if that makes sense.

Ben: And then in my case, obviously with Pinnacle Foods, you can come and spend, [00:10:00] uh, 15, or you can come and spend 200. Does that all get tracked? And is that part of the thing where I could say, like, I’m spending ads and I’m justifying the spend because of what revenue I make versus the customer acquisition price and what’s the, what’s that term called?

Drew: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It will be tracked whether you’re spending 50 cents or you’re spending 500, 000 And one thing I always caution people is before you get in advertising. It is really easy to accidentally spend a lot of money You could burn 5, 000 on youtube in 30 minutes if you’re not Really specific about how you’re setting things up and making sure that you have at least the baseline knowledge To be able to execute some of these things so always make sure that you You are knowledgeable with the platforms before you jump in too much.

And what was the metric you were looking for? The customer acquisition cost again?

Ben: yeah, so different from customer acquisition, like one, I’m saying I want to pay attention to how much it costs me to get a [00:11:00] customer. I don’t care what they spend. The other is how much revenue I get for how much ad spend.

So yeah,

Drew: lifetime value per yeah, like return on ad spend will be, you know, you could calculate lifetime customer value when you’re determining your return on ad spend. If you know that they’re going to renew, or they’re going to be repeat customers, or something like that, or if they’re on a subscription plan, you should absolutely calculate that with your return on ad spend, for sure.

Uh, ROAS is like the golden goose metric that a lot of advertisers have been chasing for, for lots of years, and that’s just, I spend one dollar, I make two dollars. That’s your return on ad spend. Um, and hopefully if you’re spending a dollar, you’re making at least a dollar. Right. Um, yeah, a lot of brands don’t, a lot of brands think that if you’re spending a dollar, you should be getting it back in impressions and brand awareness and things like that.

Um, but we already kind of touched on impressions and why I don’t think they actually mean anything. So, um, it’s like the, the story I always tell is like if a billboard on [00:12:00] I 94 in Milwaukee, where I’m from, right. Um, they’ll say that they get 500, 000 impressions a day. Right.

Well, there’s only 600, 000 people in Milwaukee.

I don’t think almost everybody’s driving by that billboard every day. But if they get a car driving to work and back from work, yeah, that’s an impression. Just a car passing by, that’s an impression. Doesn’t matter if they looked at the billboard. You have no way of knowing. So impressions have been a flawed metric for a long time.

So now I’m going to get agencies and billboard companies coming after me. Yeah, this is good. Exactly. Checking lots of boxes.

Ben: Nice.

Katy: So I have a question for you, Drew. Um, when should a small business decide to start a paid ad campaign?

Drew: I think the answer to that is yesterday. I think every business, I mean, a little bit biased here, right?

Because my entire career is based off of online advertising. But I don’t think there’s a business too small where advertising isn’t a benefit for them. Whether you’re your first day in business and you’re just trying to get [00:13:00] Uh, new followers or engagement on your social posts or something like that, that could be supported with paid advertising.

Or if you’re trying to test your new website and seeing how people perform to do conversion rate optimization, there is no business too small for online advertising. And there aren’t minimum spends with 99 percent of the relevant platforms out there. So if you want to start a Facebook ad for 2 a day, you absolutely can.

And all that’s going to do is give you more data to make informed decisions.

Katy: Well, then how do you know? What is the right type of ad to run? Like, even if you do have a small budget, cause you could. You could do a boost on Facebook. You could boost a post versus trying to, you know, optimize for conversions on, you know, sales pages or landing pages.

So like, how do you know which one is the best one so that you don’t waste money?

Drew: If you’re brand new. It’s going to depend on your goals as an organization. Um, if what, where you’re at in [00:14:00] your business development is going to be a big part of it, looking what your competitors are doing. One of the best things about Facebook ads is they have their ads library.

So you can go and look at every single ad that your competitors are running. Um, and you could glean a lot of insights from that. Say, oh, well, they’re not doing any video images. They’re doing all static images. Or they’re doing only text based ads. Um, you could glean a lot of best practices from that. Um, but really having a clear idea of what your goals are from the beginning of the program is going to let you know what’s going to be Your effective next steps.

If you know, and you have reasonable goals, that’s probably a good asterisk to put in there. It’s like everybody’s goal make 2 million. Right? Um, but having reasonable goals and keeping those success metrics in mind as you’re establishing your program. Um, that will dictate what direction you go. Uh, one of the difficulties of talking about something like this in such a short amount of time is it’s so broad.

There’s so many different directions. There’s so many different platforms. There’s so many different types of advertising. Uh, we can spend 10 hours just talking about one [00:15:00] specific little campaign type on Facebook ads. Um, so talking about it in generalities, I’m sorry if I give you general answers, but, um, it really is going to dictate, be dependent on what your strategy is and where you’re at as a business.

Ben: Okay, so because I have a business and I can get free advice. Oh, is that

Drew: pinnaclefoods. com? Pinnaclefoods,

Ben: yeah, dot co. So, yeah, how, like, in this situation, would you go, because we’re small, we don’t do any ads right now, would you go onto Facebook first? Where’s your first target of like, if you’re just getting into this, how do you determine that?

How should we determine that?

Drew: I would ask you, Ben, what is Pinnacle Foods goal right now? Is it to grow your e commerce business? Or is it to improve your, you know, organic website traction? Is it to just, you want cash right now? You want people to buy your product right now.

Ben: Okay. Yes, I want people to buy my product right now.

But that opens up a really big can of worms into like, [00:16:00] organic traffic. Are you suggesting that paid ads can improve Your organic traffic.

Drew: I, organic might not be the right word, but I am suggesting that we are in, we are living in an increasingly inorganic world. Uh, look at Google, type in, uh, freeze dried foods for hiking and see.

When the first organic search result comes up and see when, you know, you probably go through five ads before you get to that first organic search result. So organic is definitely not the right term there. Um, but it depends what type of intent you’re trying to capture. If you’re looking for diehard hikers that want an alternative food source and they know what they’re looking for, search is going to be your option.

Because they’re going to have really specific intent when they are searching for the terms that you’re going to bid on. If you’re just trying to get people to make impulse purchases and you’re like, I think people that hike would like this a lot. They’re not necessarily searching for it, but I think they’d really like it.

Then Facebook display, [00:17:00] advertising, uh, tick tock, some of those aspirational platforms where you could say, Hey, here’s the value that, that our brand provides, I think you’d like this. It’s more interruptive, uh, but the intent is going to be completely different on different platforms. So. Definitely, thank you for calling me out on my misspeaking by saying the word organic.

But I think you get the idea of what I’m saying.

Ben: Yes, okay, but yeah, so I think, like, in my case, there’s one situation where I could say, you know what, I really want those diehard backpackers who go ten times a year and they’re gonna spend a thousand bucks on freeze dried food a year, like, That’s, that’s my target.

I’m going to try to get those customers and I’m going to convince them on the fact that our quality is better. The, the, the taste is significantly better and they’re going to get way more nutrition out of the meals that they get from us versus our competitors. So I want that customer. I’m going for the like specific customer.

Whereas Facebook is going to [00:18:00] be more like, I think. I can hype this up enough that I’m going to get a lot of impulse buys from people that are even buying it as gifts for other people they know. Like, hey, do you know someone who likes to hunt or backpack or whatever? This is going to make their day and make their experience so much better.

Is that kind of how we’re talking about this?

Drew: Generally speaking, yes. Um, specifically now where Facebook, you know, Facebook used to be known for like lookalike audiences and they’re hyper targeting and you could go in and select really specific interest groups that you want to target. Uh, more and more lately, Facebook is favoring broad targeting and letting their algorithm do the work.

Whereas Google, you still have the opportunity to be really hyper targeted with keywords, and you could really capture specific intent, like people that, you know, lowest calorie, best tasting hiking foods. Um, so yeah, generally speaking, you’re exactly right. That’s kind of what I’m implying. And that was what?

Pinnaclefoods. co? Yeah, okay. You have to drop that in there one more time. [00:19:00]

Ben: Yeah, we, I mean, we’ve mentioned this on our podcast a lot, but I think it helps to give a real world example in terms of like how you would try to figure out

Drew: Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, as you’re, as you were saying that it’s, um, I know one of your questions that you had mentioned was, uh, landing pages.

If you do have search intent ads, you’re creating search ads, specifically make landing pages to show how much better you are than cliff bars or. Uh, not pinnaclefoods. com, um,

Ben: or whoever it is. Keep from naming our competition out loud. No, I think

Drew: we should call them all out. If I’m going down with big billboard, you need to go down with big freeze dried foods.

So, um, yeah, just kidding. Uh, but, but yeah, I mean, that’s a really good occasion for using specifically catered targeted landing pages where you can show how your product differentiates itself from a really specific competitor.

Ben: And you think it’s good practice to put that competitor’s nutrition [00:20:00] facts right next to ours and call that brand out and all of that on that search intent page?

Drew: I absolutely think so. As long as you’re being truthful, there’s nothing deceptive about listing nutritional facts. Hopefully. Hopefully there’s no funny business going on there, but, uh, yeah, I think as long as you’re being truthful and you’re following. You know, the letter of the law is using trademarks and things like that.

Um, then a hundred percent, it’s a really effective way to get consumers the information they’re looking for in an easily digestible manner. And that’s what it comes down to is if you’re just sharing information, Um, and allowing consumers to make their decision, then I think you’re doing it in a way that isn’t obtrusive, intrusive, it’s not offensive or things like that.

But I’m a big, big supporter of competitor landing pages, as long as they’re educational.

Ben: And so that backing up that is if I’m interested in search traffic. I should probably make a landing page. Is that right?

Drew: Generally [00:21:00] speaking. Yeah. I think that you have the ability with search traffic to take really, you know, hyper focused intent.

It would be silly to not let that intent land on a page that’s specifically catered to them. Um, you’re kind of just leaving a superpower on the table if you have this really Awesome keyword that you’re bidding on that, you know, you’re going to crush it on and then you drop them on your homepage and just let them run wild, um, putting them on a landing page lets you specifically control the customer journey.

You’re you’re giving them the exact information that you think that they’re looking for. Um, and allowing them to make a purchase really quickly and easily without navigating through, uh, necessarily all of the facets of your website, which brings me to my next comment, which is going to immediately contradict that, which is every page of your website should be optimized as a landing page, right?

If you’re thinking of your homepage, not as a landing page, uh, I personally think that you’re doing something wrong. You should [00:22:00] anticipate that a likely customer is going to land on that homepage and you want to make sure that you’re steering that customer journey to purchase as well. Um, even if it’s your homepage or your pricing page or a product specific page.

Um, so if you’re like, Oh, I really don’t want to, I really don’t want to send ad traffic to this page. I think you should look at what that page’s purpose is and make sure that you’re optimizing it. Because you should feel comfortable to send advertising traffic to any page on your website if it’s optimized.

Katy: Including blog posts?

Drew: including blog, especially blog posts, uh, with stellar WP, you know, you teed that one up for me. That was a softball WP. One of our favorite prospecting tools is blog posts. You have this really incredible content across all of our brands, um, adding some CTAs in there or adding some comparison CTAs pricing CTAs and making those blog posts ready for people.

Coming from advertisements so that they could easily become purchasers is one of our favorite tactics Which is why you’ll see a lot of you know Kadence blog posts in our [00:23:00] ads givewp uses a lot of blog posts in their ads tec Actually, I think every one of our brands uses our blog content as our primary source of prospecting Uh, advertising content.

So it just takes a little bit of tweaking. You want to make sure that there are CTAs in there so that it’s not just reading a post, but they’re reading a post that gives them the option to become a purchaser really easily or a demo or a free downloader. It doesn’t necessarily have to be purchased.

Katy: Yeah, and Drew just used two acronyms.

So I wanted to break those down. TEC is the events calendar. You know, we use that internal lingo sometimes. So the events calendar and then CTA is call to action for anyone who is like,

what’s a CTA? Like

Drew: I said, I speak in acronyms and it’s really annoying for all my co workers. Thank you for bringing me back to earth.

Yes.

Ben: Okay, and then you also brought up the idea of prospecting. How do you define prospecting as something when we’re talking about ads?

Drew: Yeah, so prospecting, uh, cold audiences, top of funnel. These are [00:24:00] all kind of, uh, parallel terms, right? Uh, prospecting is finding people that aren’t aware of your business, making them aware of your business so that you could send them down the funnel.

Um, prospecting is at the top of the funnel. It’s the widest audience. You want to make them aware. That’s your awareness phase. Once you get people aware of your product, you could kind of funnel them down to the middle of funnel, which is your, uh, Oh my gosh, I totally lost my train of thought.

Consideration phase, middle of funnel will be the consideration phase. So they’ve heard of your product. They’re considering it. They might not be ready to make a purchase. They need a nudge further down in the funnel, which is, you know, retargeting, making someone into a purchaser. So. The funnel is a term that is thrown around a lot by digital advertisers and marketers in general.

Prospecting is going to be that top source where you’re looking for brand new people who have never heard of your site before and you want them to be aware of your offerings.

Ben: Yeah, and the strategy behind that is [00:25:00] sometimes It’s going to take more than one touch to get someone to convert. And so if your entire strategy is around first interaction to conversion, it’s going to be a lot harder than first interaction to consideration phase.

So you’re just trying to move them along in that funnel. And that’s the idea there is you have a broad audience. Does, does that broadness also cheapen, like make it easier to buy the ads?

Drew: Sometimes. It depends. It depends. But it’s kind of an incredible at how effective broad audience targeting has become, uh, specifically talking about Facebook.

And tic tac. I mean, everybody that uses tic tac could say, well, my algorithm has got me figured out to a freaky point. Um, that’s just the consumer side. So the back end that they’re using for businesses is way freakier and way more effective. Um, but yeah, keeping it broad and letting the algorithm do the work.

I mean, these companies have spent billions of dollars producing effective advertising [00:26:00] machines. Um, you’d be kind of silly to try to subvert that. And not use some of that knowledge and expertise for sure.

Ben: Okay. So I’m convinced I need to go get onto to TikTok or Facebook and that would be Instagram and reels, right?

How much do I need to spend? And what do I need to come with? Is an image going to be okay? Or do I really need to show up there with a video?

Drew: It’s going to depend on your platform. If you’re going on Facebook, uh, we have found that static images outperform video most of the time when it comes to consideration.

Um, if you’re going to be on Instagram, you’re going to want motion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a video. It could be a GIF or GIF if you’re a monster. Um, don’t tell Cromwell I said that. Hello. And then if you’re going to be on TikTok, it has to be video. Static images just won’t move the needle on TikTok.

It has to be, uh, UGC, another abbreviation, user generated content. You want it to look not like an ad. You want [00:27:00] it to look organic. Um, you want it to look like with motion video.

Ben: Is that all those videos I see of people doing like a, holding a phone in front of them and like, Talking to it as if Absolutely.

Drew: And it works. That’s the beauty of it, is it works. The reason that so many of these videos seem so formulaic is because that formula has been working. Uh, another one of the really goofy ones that’s really surprising is Facebook ads that look like the Notes app on your phone. So it looks like you just wrote a note to yourself that says like the top five reasons I love Kadence.

And then you just list them out and you see the ad and you’re like, man, that’s really not compelling. And then you see how well they work. Um, and you’re like, oh, okay, that is compelling. Results are compelling. So it doesn’t necessarily, but when you see those trends, it’s, it’s because they, they generally work pretty well.

And user generated content is. Is one of the most high because you’re automatically starting with that level of trust. That’s really hard to establish. Um, just coming from a business that you’re like, Look at my ad. Look at my website. If you have a person telling [00:28:00] you about a business, it’s just a lot more impactful.

And you immediately have those trust factors baked into it. Even if it’s a stranger on the internet, that’s how weird us human beings are.

Katy: Drew, do you have any.

Drew: I do have a little bit of experience with Pinterest ads. It’s something that I’ve wanted to re approach. Um, when my retail business was at its peak of really crushing it and the online advertising, we started running Pinterest ads, and we always found that there were much higher CPCs or cost per click.

I’m going to try to define all of my abbreviations. The cost per click was a lot higher on Pinterest for us. But we were getting really qualified traffic and we found that the conversion rate was really good. We just didn’t really dive full on head first into it because we were so distracted by other things.

Uh, I’ve done it a bit. I know some people who’ve had incredible success on Pinterest ads. Uh, and the beauty of Pinterest ads is like some of the ones that we ran a while [00:29:00] ago are still out there gathering impressions. And every once in a while I’ll see, you know, Uh, a sale come through from Pinterest, even though we’ve done nothing there for five or six years.

Um, so it’s kind of interesting how Pinterest, it just, things can take on a life of their own that run in this little ecosystem that, that is so unique to anything outside of it. Um, so it’s really interesting. I wish I had more insightful things to say about Pinterest. I have a little bit of experience there, but it’s something I’m really interested in, in re approaching and trying again.

Katy: Yeah. One of the reasons I asked that question, because, you know, I have my own business as well. DIY dream site and DIYDreamSite.

Speaker 4: com DIYDreamSite.

Katy: com. I was also wondering like when should I, if I want to do advertising, I want to pick one platform to start with because I sell child themes and in all of those things that Are so visually appealing.

My initial inkling was to, if I was going to throw money at ads, either put it behind Pinterest ads or potentially like Facebook ads [00:30:00] versus. TikTok, I don’t think is, is the right place for that. So like, what’s the, how do you, how would you weigh out that decision?

Drew: I think that touches on a really, really important and great question, which is knowing your audience.

Um, if you know that diydreamsite. com, uh, you’re just going to keep plugging everybody’s websites. Um, if you know that your audience is on Pinterest and that they are visual and they are going to appreciate that visual aspect of it, And that’s exactly where you should be. Um, another thing about this is every one of these platforms has experts that are trained on that platform that are more than happy to get people up and running.

And it is in their best interest for you to have success. Like a lot of the times, yes, they’re going to say, spend more money, spend more money. Uh, of course they’re going to say that, but it is in their best interest that you have success on their platform. Pinterest has a specific, a particularly helpful subset.

I think they’re advertising experts were. More than helpful, uh, more so than the other platforms that I experience with. So I [00:31:00] would say absolutely reach out to them, and then all of these platforms have free tools for you to learn how to use them as well. So it’s really zero risk to go on there, start an account, talk to one of their experts, read the documentation, see how it’s set up, and if at the end of that process you think that you can be effective there, then give it a try.

Um, but I think knowing your target audience and knowing where they live, if you know that your people are on Pinterest, then that’s absolutely where you should be advertising. If you know they’re on Reddit, you should absolutely be doing Reddit ads. Um, if you know that they’re on TikTok, then give it a try.

Get Ben out there with the phone in front of them and get the TikTok ads going.

Katy: So what about The user who’s like, I tried advertising and it didn’t work for me because they maybe threw 500 at it and said they blew through their budget. It’s like going to the casino. You pull one slot machine, you lose all your money.

You’re like, well, I hate casinos. That’s where this is ineffective. You know, it’s kind of, kind of, sometimes it can feel like that. What would you say to that user? Who maybe has been burned [00:32:00] by ads in the past and um, yeah, what advice would you give them?

Drew: Yeah, I think the piece of advice i’d give there specific to that analogy is advertising is not gambling It shouldn’t be a lot of times It does feel like rolling the dice and trying to go viral and just because something doesn’t go viral does not mean that it’s not successful Every dollar that you spend on there is going to give you So much information.

Um, and if you’ve really failed on the advertising front and you’ve burned through money and you felt like you learned nothing, then I’d say, go re approach the data. And I bet you’ll find something that will give you insights into your customers experience, whether it’s like, wow, When I really dig down, our Facebook pixel says that 100 people added to cart, but only two purchased.

It’s like, okay, what are your shipping costs? What are you, what’s your checkout process like? Like, why are people getting to that point and then being turned off from the process? Then go in and try to incentivize that. retarget people that have added the cart and not purchased with the 10 percent off coupon [00:33:00] code.

Um, so if you’ve spent money on ads, you have not failed, you have gotten data. Um, what you do with that data, that is, that is going to be where the success comes. Right. Um, but there’s always going to be insights that could be gleaned from the spend no matter what. I love

Katy: that. That’s actually really helpful.

And then what about Um, testing. I think some people are scared to continue to, because it feels like burning money just to test and to get some data. So what’s your philosophy on testing different ads?

Drew: My philosophy is have a plan, like have a budget, have a plan and stick to it. Um, I was going to mention this later, but I’ll bring it up.

It’s like. Monitor daily, analyze, uh, or what was it? What was it I said earlier? It was monitor daily, uh, tweak weekly, right? So give, give your ads time to run, give them time to do their thing, but make sure that you’re going in with a plan. Don’t just say, well, I’m going to start this ad. I’ll check in on it in a few weeks because that’s [00:34:00] the easiest way you could possibly burn money.

Specifically set it, say I’m going to do a 10 day test. I’m going to spend 100. I’m going to spend 50 of it on prospecting, 50 on retargeting. Um, and then go in there, watch the ads do their thing, adjust it after 5, 6, 7 days when they’ve had time to go. Um, and then make your decisions based off of data and not off knee jerk reactions.

It’s really easy to look at your dashboard and refresh it every 5 minutes and be like, Oh man, we’ve already spent 20 and I’m not a millionaire yet. So this is a failure. I’m going to kill it. I’m going to stop. Stick to your plan. Um, and no going into that, that at the end of your plan, you’re going to have data that you could use to make decisions.

Uh, whether it’s kind of continue to advertise, scale up or pull back. Um, those are all valid options that you should be considering when you’re, when you’re looking to establish your program.

Katy: Yeah, that’s probably a good stance to take as well. When you’re just looking at your own website analytics. Like if you have the same philosophy on both, then you can start making data [00:35:00] driven decisions to move the needle in your business.

Drew: Yeah, but they don’t website

Katy: ads.

Drew: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’m on Facebook. They have what’s called the learning phase. A lot of people are really freaked out by the learning phase. Um, it’s not necessary. It doesn’t mean things aren’t effective until they get out of the learning phase. Like some people might imply.

Um, but it does take time. It does take data. For these algorithms to learn. You can’t just go in and say, make me money, please. Uh, you do have to give it input. You have to collect that data, you know, in a way, taking over the ads at give WP, we had already had multiple years of spending, um, where not necessarily the most effective spend.

That wasn’t as effective as it could have been, but I had the cheat code of starting off with a mountain of data. So being able to go in there and say, you know, well, let’s move this around. Let’s tweak this. Google already knew so much about our business at that point, and we had already spent X amount of dollars that it was relatively easy to go in there and steer it in the right direction once you have enough data.

So the data is really [00:36:00] like, that is, it’s not a failure if you’re learning, right? It’s not a failure if you’re collecting data and you can use that to make decisions.

Katy: Nice. Okay, I also have one other thought, and it’s, Somewhat related. So even if someone’s not ready to spend ads yet, do you think that it’s advantageous for them to put the Facebook pixel or the Pinterest tag on their website?

in order for them to start collecting like that user information so that when they are ready to run ads, they can do lookalike audiences. Like, is that a best practice that people should do on their website?

Drew: I a hundred percent of things. So, um, this is an unpopular thing. I know Facebook gets a lot of flack, especially Facebook ads and the Facebook pixel.

Uh, but absolutely the easiest, lowest hanging fruit for a lot of businesses that have a pixel that want to start advertising. Is retargeting finding those people like the example I said before that have added the cart, but they haven’t finished their purchase. That’s your easiest, lowest hanging fruit audience [00:37:00] that you’re ever going to get with advertising.

So that’s a really good starting point. If you just want like a lot of businesses just run 5 a day, Facebook. retargeting ads for people that visited their website that didn’t become a customer. And that could be a really effective advertising program if that’s what your appetite is, and it’s giving you the results that you’re looking for.

It doesn’t have to be, well, it’s only successful if we scale to 5, 000 a day and spend. That 5 a day retargeting, add to cart, no purchasers, can be really profitable. It could be really effective if you’re doing it right. Um, so absolutely.

Katy: That’s great.

Ben: Which we’ve, we’ve said all this without the, the main thing.

Like a lot of people are setting their sites earlier, you do need to get analytics completely set up to where you can track this stuff. Don’t run it without tracking, because that’s, uh, you’re not going to learn.

Drew: Absolutely. You definitely don’t want to be flying blind. You want to have as much information as you can [00:38:00] possibly gather, um, to make informed choices.

Uh, but there’s so many resources out there to get you established with analytics, to get you, The Facebook pixel make it really easy. A lot of our stellar products have Facebook integrations. Give WP has a free Facebook pixel integration, give WP. com. If we’re plugging URLs, might as well. But yeah, so there, there are a ton of resources that make it relatively easy.

There’s not a single thing that any one of these listeners is going to do that hasn’t been done and documented before on the internet. Um, so absolutely don’t be afraid to start and don’t be afraid to ask questions too.

Katy: Nice. Cool. Okay. I have a question. For Kadence specifically, what’s working now? Like give us, give us a little behind the scenes of our ad strategy.

Like give us a tip.

Drew: Yeah, I one of the things that’s working the best for Kadence right now is how to build a link tree alternative And I think when we wrote that blog post I’m not gonna speak on behalf of who [00:39:00] wrote it But I don’t think it was necessarily a big blog post that got a ton of attention but from an ads perspective It’s been one of our best hooking prospecting pieces that we have just showing people like hey You could really easily spin up a link tree alternative.

That’s not Um, not to get in trouble with Linktree now too, but, uh, that piece of prospecting has been really, really effective for us. Um, and then we split most of our advertising budget is allocated for prospecting and about 30 percent of it I’d say is for retargeting, uh, just from a Facebook perspective on Google.

It’s a whole different monster, a whole different approach for sure. Um, but Google, we’ve had a lot of success with performance max campaigns. Everybody has, um, performance max has been a really great and performance max, uh, is essentially using Google’s automated, uh, tools to, uh, you feed it a ton of assets and it’ll decide placements for you and it’ll decide the headlines that it wants for you and things like that.

Sounds scary, but it’s actually [00:40:00] really, really cool and really effective.

Katy: That’s awesome.

Ben: Is that how like periodically I’ll search for a product and Amazon will come up as like, it has the product title and the headline and stuff, but it actually doesn’t even take me to that product title. It takes me to like an Amazon search page.

Is that the kind of thing that Amazon’s doing where they’re just grabbing, it’s all like Google’s generating it for them.

Drew: Possibly, possibly. I mean, are you talking about like shopping ads where the product shows up at the top of your search feed?

Ben: No, I’m talking about like I, I like search for a product or something and am like My daughter’s not gonna listen to this.

I’m buying my daughter a mountain bike for her birthday. So I was searching for a mountain bike for a eight year old and Amazon had an ad for a certain type of bike I was looking at. But when I clicked on that, it actually just took me to an Amazon search and they don’t sell that bike or no sellers on Amazon have that bike.[00:41:00]

Drew: I think you’ve stumped me with that question. It sounds like the audience network that’s gotten a little bit funky. Um, Like 70 percent of the websites in the world or something like that. And sometimes audience network ads can get really bizarre. Um, but no, that’s interesting. That it takes you just to a generic Amazon search, and it doesn’t even have the product that was in the ad?

Ben: Yeah, the name. I mean, it had the name, but like, it implied that it would be there, but it didn’t have it.

Drew: Interesting. I think we should, uh, send a complaint to Amazon. Yeah. I think Jeff should tackle this one.

Katy: This has been so great of a conversation on ads. Do you have any other last minute tips that you want to share with our audience or pieces of advice?

Drew: Yeah, I think the three biggest takeaways for tips would be, you know, know your audience. That’s going to help you dictate what, where you want your placements to be, what platforms you should be on. Um, if [00:42:00] you know that you’re, You know, grandma’s knitting group isn’t going to be on TikTok, then don’t do TikTok ads, right?

It seems basic, but knowing your audience is one of the most important things when you’re making decisions on planning for an advertising program. Defining your goals is really important. If you know that impressions are a junk metric that you don’t want to necessarily take into account as you’re making your decisions, then don’t use that as one of your navigating reference points, right?

Um, so if you know it’s going to be clicks and traffic, then optimize for clicks and traffic. If it’s going to be purchases, make sure it’s all set up properly, but track purchases. Uh, there are thousands of different metrics that you could be tracking. Um, Of which there are a ton in Google and all the resources that you need to learn about all of these metrics are out there and free.

Uh, don’t let anyone charge you to learn these things. Um, so define your goals and metrics and have a plan for them. And then again, monitor daily, tweak weekly. Don’t make knee [00:43:00] jerk reaction decisions. You’re never going to give your ads time to breathe, to learn, to grow, if you’re killing them right away.

So let them run, let some data come in and make decisions on a little bit more elongated basis. If you want to really find success, those would probably be the big three, but also don’t be afraid to ask questions. There’s so many resources out there for everybody to get started doing this for free. All of my training came from Facebook Blueprint Certification.

Uh, Google has an online certification program that’s completely free for their advertising platforms. You can become a Microsoft Certified Ad Planner for free through, uh, Bing Ads. All of these things are gonna teach you more about different platforms, and all of them are gonna have different things that you could extrapolate out about digital advertising in general.

Um, but all the best resources that exist out there are free, and I’ll just keep saying that over and over again.

Speaker 4: Wow, that’s really cool. Foods

Drew: CO and diy. Dreams Strike Do com. . Uh, wandering. [00:44:00] Give

Katy: wp.

Drew: Yeah, give WP .

Katy: Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining us. We’re gonna have to have you back on, ’cause you have other side projects that you built with Kadence and Yeah.

We haven’t,

Ben: uh, pinged all your. You know, said all your domains either. So we have not scratched

Drew: the surface quite yet, but I will be happily rejoining if big billboard doesn’t blacklist me from.

Yeah.

Katy: Well, thanks again for joining us. And, um, we’ll see you guys next, next episode on the Kadence beat.

Drew: Thanks for having me.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Welcome to The Kadence Beat
• 00:24 Diving into SEO Basics
• 03:36 Content Strategy Insights
• 04:53 Understanding Google’s E-E-A-T Guidelines
• 06:28 Kadence’s SEO Audit Experience
• 08:18 Addressing Content Decay
• 13:52 Technical SEO Challenges and Solutions
• 15:42 Improving Core Web Vitals
• 20:22 Optimizing for Performance
• 27:05 Best Practices for Building Pages in Kadence
• 27:42 Optimizing DOM Size and Lazy Rendering
• 30:05 Importance of Author Pages and E-A-T
• 33:32 Image Optimization for Better Performance
• 35:44 Addressing Kadence Speed Concerns
• 43:04 Diversifying Traffic Sources Beyond SEO
• 48:26 Kadence Updates and New Features
• 51:11 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Hannah: Hi, welcome to episode 37 of the Kadence Beat. Thanks for being here. It’s summer and hot, but for some reason Ben looks like he’s cold. Uh, but we’re here.

Ben: I’m not cold. I’m comfortable. So it’s a difference there. This is like a comfortable.

Hannah: How are you doing, Katy?

Katy: I’m good. I’m excited. Today we’re going to be talking about SEO, right?

Hannah: All things SEO. I feel like SEO has been the only thing that’s been talked about lately because we recently at Kadence underwent a huge SEO audit from Ellipsis. And so, Yeah. It has been the talk of Kadence. So we were like, Oh, let’s just share this conversation a bit with our community. so yeah, Ben, where do you want to start?

Ben: Yeah, I think, um, that backstory is great. Just like, Hey, we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of like some technical audit that ellipsis did for us. Uh, and then always caveat with like, we are very much in process of like doing a lot of this stuff.
So we’re going to talk about things. If you come to our website, you’re going to be like, Oh, that’s not that great. We’re going to be like, yeah, we’re working on it. Um, cause we’re in process. Like all of our main pages are getting redone. Um, but we want to like, Put out there as the reasons why, and then just talk, like, have this as a moment to talk about SEO in general, which is like important for everyone that’s running a website.
Um, so like, I think kicking it off to like, what is your general take on what SEO is and like, what is it? Maybe a better way to put it is like coming from your expertise, Katy, how do you think about SEO when you’re doing stuff for clients or for yourself?

Katy: Yeah, there’s several aspects. There’s the on page SEO, which is when you’re thinking about the [00:02:00] site map and also the meta description and the page title and you know, the image alt text.
Like there’s all of those on page SEO aspects that we have direct control over it. But then there’s also writing the right articles and pages on your website as well to rank for specific keywords. And, um, so those are like the two main aspects that I think of when I think of SEO. And to me, so SEO can be a really big, hairy, scary topic to talk about, especially when you can get into like the technical side of things.
But I have eventually come to learn that my SEO strategies are more like best practices for what I do when I’m building a website. And also what I do when I’m writing a blog post that just become, this is the standard instead of what do I have to do to rank? So I don’t. It doesn’t feel as scary for me anymore, but I also am not like the one in charge of optimizing Core Web Vitals.
And so I have a limited, I have the marketer’s hat on more than I have like the, the developer’s hat on when I think about SEO.

Ben: Yeah. And I think it’s a good way to think about it. There’s like a very technical side of SEO, which is like all the optimizational stuff. And then there’s the like strategy side of like, I want to, Pete, to get traffic from, you know, customers who I can solve their problems.
And like, how do I make that connection of people who are looking for my solution? Maybe they don’t know that yet, but I have a solution for them and I want them to be able to find me. Um, so I think that initial part, like, let’s just briefly talk about from a content strategy side, one of the things that came up in this audit is that, and in conversations with ellipsis is that we want to be creating content.
And this is like, uh, their founders, like main thing he kept saying over and over and over again is. relentlessly useful. And I love that idea of like, okay, does this pass the relentlessly useful test? One of the things with AI and generative text and all of it is that like people can flood the internet now with content that is just content.
And so we have to combat that. One of the ways that it’s important to do that is to actually not fall trap to the like, let’s just turn this 300 word blog post into a thousand word blog post and fill it with content. A bunch of fluff, but like to actually be, to really own, like, this is what you need to know.
I have the authority and the, the, like, here’s like how I’m going to say that. And I think that’s really cool. And then I think it’s worth just mentioning that like, Google has put out guidelines for a number of years. They’ve recently updated it. Eat is the thing you’ll hear. It’s E E A T. And it stands for experience, um, expertise, authority, and trust.
And that when you’re like the guidelines for what you’re doing, this isn’t like a, a ranking factor. It’s actually, they have humans that check search results and determine whether or not the results are showing up that have this. And then they adjust their rankings. But the idea is that you’re presenting your content in a way that has that showing you have experience, you have expertise, you have the authority and then the trust to, to write about this.
Um, and that’s a key thing that you want to be thinking about, even when you’re creating the content and doing the content is like people want your real, true experience. They don’t want just the answer. which is, it’s just interesting. But like the reality is, is just the answer is what chat GPT is going to produce for anybody.
And you want to be writing content that says, you know, Hey, if you want to learn about, here’s, you know, this certain place to go or this certain thing to do, here’s my experience. And then this is my recommendation. And I think that goes a lot further. So for the affiliate bloggers out there, adding your experience and all of that can.
Mean a lot in terms of future ranking. Uh, and then, you know, for us, for like Kadence, like when we talk about search engine, uh, traffic, we get almost all of our traffic is brand related, meaning somebody has put Kadence in the search term because they’re looking for, they’re literally, they’re typing in Kadence blocks and we’re going to show up for that.
Um, and then. You know, what we’re trying to expand that organic search traffic is to try to get customers who are looking for solutions to a problem that we solve. Like I want to customize my WooCommerce product page. Hey, we have a solution for that. We need to connect someone who’s saying, how do I customize my WooCommerce product page with our solution, which we have the authority.
We have a plugin that does that. We have a lot of use cases and we have a lot of customers that are doing it. So we’re in that place of like, we have the experience, the authority. Hey, we know how to do this. We have the solution for you. We just need to create that content because right now that content doesn’t exist.
So we’re not ranked for that thing. And that’s the difference of like from a content and strategy perspective, we need to figure out how to connect somebody who’s, who, who we have the solution and we need to be able to like have the content that explains that it’s solution to them. Without them having to like randomly find us and dig through our product catalog to find Kadence shop kit, to then find that shop kit offers templating.
And then inside of templating, you can customize the product page to be whatever you want. You know? So that’s the like audit of like, how do we get that content to be there and readily available so that people can find it. Uh, Oh, you have this solution. It’s this product and we have

Katy: The audit definitely made us look at our content, um, first of all, there’s content decay. So blog posts that are no longer useful or relevant. That was an obvious one that came up, but then when we also looked at, Oh, there’s like traffic dips on key pages. Starting back a few months ago, for instance, we can go back and say, what changes did we make?
And then that’s also causing us to look at, okay, if we need to refresh this content and this page, then what is the user experience as well? So for, I would say, you know, I’m, I’m new to the team and it’s great, but also like coming in with a fresh new perspective on Kadence, it’s like, we’ve built a really fantastic business with, like you said, all the authority.
Um, we have, I feel like, the best community ever who rallies behind us and pushes us to be better. Um, but there’s also, like, we’ve just kind of piecemealed things together over time, and so this is a really great opportunity for us to say, okay, Where we are now is so much different than where we were several years ago.
And so what do we need to do to the content on key pages, as well as the user experience to conversion, um, and thinking through that from a, a new point of view, a new lens has been really productive and helpful and also kind of overwhelming because you’re like, wow, we have a lot of work to do. Um, But if you’re an established business and you haven’t done an SEO audit, highly encourage you to get one.
Um, but beyond that, even doing a self audit can be really valuable and take a look at, okay, if I was a brand new customer trying to interact with my brand for the very first time, what is weird? Where are the sticky points and how can I improve the page design as well as the content and core web vitals so that it’s a beautiful user experience overall.
Going back to the content that like it’s decaying content. I think it’s the, the word that you used Katy, like if you have, if you’re finding that People are searching for you and what they’re finding is your old content that’s actually not relevant anymore.

Hannah: What’s the best way to handle that? Like, do you go and just delete those posts or do you like refresh them? Like, what do you do with decaying content? And like, if it’s still getting traffic, is that not still good because traffic is traffic or do you not want that kind of traffic?

Katy: I would say it depends on. On a few things like we’ve had to go back to to ellipsis and be like, okay in this scenario What do you recommend that we do? um So I would say if it’s no longer relevant and it’s not getting any traffic just remove it from your site Although if it’s Got some good bones like don’t just delete it and then like lose that content forever I would encourage you if you are going to do an audit like move that to a google doc in case you want to Maybe finesse it later down the road or at least just change it to draft instead of published Um again, that’s for content that’s not ranking and also is just unhelpful and unuseful um, the other thing that If you have decaying content, like what can you do to improve it?
And because it’s easier to if you already have a page that’s ranking Let’s just say it’s on like the third or fourth page of google And that’s going to be a an easier lift to get that just by optimizing the post So it’s like a two page one then trying to rank a brand new article at times. It depends on the keyword.
There’s so many variables that go into that, but generally that can be true. So if you have content that’s maybe aging, meaning it was ranking, but it’s falling out of the rankings, you kind of just need to say, what do I need to do to be better? The other thing I like to do is look at the top 10 search results on Google for that specific keyword and ask them, or not ask them, but see, like where, where’s the gap in the market that our competitors are filling?
At the end of the day, Google wants you to be the best resource on the internet for the searchers query. So if you article is missing something, or you could go in and add your expertise or make it 20% better. Then I think that’s a net positive win for you, but it kind of all depends. Like there’s a lot of variables that go into it.
So. I would say you might want to talk to an SEO professional, especially if you, um, you know, don’t want to miss mess too much with your rankings, but that’s kind of my experience so far.

Ben: Yeah. I’ll add like we asked specifically like, Hey, if we change the content, at what point should you put a new publish date on it? Like this blog post was written three years ago, let’s say, and it’s still actually has a lot of relevant stuff and we’re gonna, you know, we’re going to update it. Should we republish it or leave it at that publish date? And their push, their general rule, and we’re giving generals here because everything does at some point come down to like your specific situation.
But their general rule is if you change a content by 20%, that should be a new publish date. Uh, and that’s based on Google’s recommendation. So in, you know, in some cases we change the publish date, can I put unquote republished content that was, okay, this is still good content. It’s relevant to us. We can speak to it with authority and expertise.
We’re just going to update it. to make it better and more relevant for today and doing that and then republishing it can be good for you. It still has the same URL so Google can still like see it as the same thing.

Katy: So what would you say are the biggest like indicators or like biggest opportunities for improvement based on Ellipsis’s audit of Kadence? Where were our weaknesses that we needed to improve?

Ben: I mean, there was a lot of things, right? Like the, the history of the Kadence website is, um, largely me, uh, throwing together things for, you know, over years and piecing things together. We also, at one point, each one of our products had its own sub site and we experimented with that for a little while. And then we brought it all back together into one site. So there was some technical debt that we had to deal with from a. redirect and like making sure that like this site that has been through a lot of changes was showing up correctly to Google in terms of, you know, one thing that we have to manage is a with over 200,000 topics.
So like, that’s just a ton of content that you’re indexing, uh, with Google and making sure that we clean up spam stuff that gets in there and all of that. So there was a lot of like technical things with redirects that we could immediately like fix and improve and moving our. Blog articles to [00:15:00] a, um, to using a blog slash the article title was important in terms of like getting the structure better, uh, so that Google could understand our website better.
Um, and so that was like a quick win. I think like, that’s like some of that technical stuff is where I’ve spent a good amount of time, but then there was also just the reality of like a lot of this, our main content, the content that should convert better. Needs to be updated. And that’s like a lot of what we’re working on.
Um, they did. So one thing that we addressed pretty well at this point, we’re, we’re almost fully there and that was. Our page speed, our Core Web Vitals. And so that took me down a deep dive of like, you know, how do we get passing Core Web Vitals for every single one of our pages? And if you’ve done any work with Core Web Vitals, you know, that it almost has nothing to do with your actual site speed or user experience, which is somewhat frustrating because Google seems to be using this as an indicator of how healthy your site is in some cases, and that is all like, There’s varying degrees of like how important it is to Google and not in, um, whether or not they pay that much attention to it.
But essentially your site can load very fast, but not past Cora vitals. Um, and because of the nature of what Cora vitals is looking for. Um, and there’s a bunch of recommendations in there. And like, I always try to, whenever I’m talking about Cora vitals with people, I’m always like, just. Be aware that like of the top 200 websites on the internet, they don’t pass Core Web Vitals, like it’s not the, like the only thing you should be paying attention to content is always King, uh, backlinks matter more in SEO than probably anything else in terms of ranking.
Uh, so like. Don’t get too lost in this, but we did. I went down the rabbit hole of like, I am going to get us passing Corb vitals on every single one of our pages. And what will this take? And in the end, I have some, some interesting findings. So one of the biggest things that was causing us to quote unquote, not pass Corb vitals is the fact that.
Is that we were using Google tag manager. So Google’s own product that they recommend you use, but they also ding you for massively if you use it in terms of core vitals. So why is that a thing? Yeah, we should, they should talk to each other over at Google. But, uh, if you use Google tag manager. It will cause, and you’re loading Google analytics or Google ads, Facebook, pixel, all that kind of stuff to do all of your ad tracking and stuff like that.
You will get a massive ding on your mobile, uh, performance scores with core vitals. And to the way around that for us, what ended up working really, really well is to use CloudFlare’s Zaraz, which is a tool that allows you to. Load all the things you would use Google tag manager for. So analytics, Facebook, Google ads, all that kind of stuff.
We can load that essentially in its own little like web app. So it doesn’t run on the user’s browser. But it still does all the same stuff that you need. And this allows the JavaScript work that needs to be done when you’re loading Google analytics and all that to not happen in the user’s browser. And so then your Corobytal speed scores improve.
Now just it’s like work to set up anything. And so we always say like, this is how to score a perfect. Cora vitals thing. This is not like everyone needs to go and do this today. Um, because again, like I said, it has almost no impact on the end users experience, especially given, uh, if your main customers are in the U S we all have generally very fast internet.
Uh, obviously if your main customers are in a place that generally has slower internet, like this is a lot bigger deal to you because it will, we’ll start to make a little bit. So that would be my, that was our first thing is we set up Zaraz and we’ve got that running on the Kadence website.
Obviously that was like making sure that everything flowed through as well. I ended up having to write a plugin to do all the WooCommerce tracking with Zaraz so that way we could pass all the conversion stuff along, uh, to Google analytics and ads and things like that. So, um, that’s something I’m going to plan on publish at some point.
Um, I haven’t yet, but. Uh, that’s something that’s going to go out into the wild, at some point as like a, a way to. To do that. So that’s

Katy: great. What’s the lift for other users to be able to do the same thing you just did?

Ben: So if you don’t have WooCommerce, the lift is very easy. Like it’s as easy as setting up Google tag manager.
You can set up Zaraz. If you do have WooCommerce and you want to have all that e commerce tracking, that’s where I needed the custom plugin. And that’s what. Yeah, someone would need to either add that code or wait for me to publish this, um, which we’ll do soon. Um, so that was one thing. Another thing that we were getting hit for is, optimizing unused CSS.
And this is solved very easily by using FlyingPress. I really highly recommend FlyingPress as an optimization plugin. Uh, you know, there’s a lot out there. There’s Um, uh, WP rocket there, you know, so many to name. I have, yeah, I’ve tried a lot of them. I found that flying press does the best job with CSS optimization and a couple of other things.
So that would be my recommendation there in, you know, running flying press to do that, solve that. The other thing is that we have a lot of logged in users on the Kadence website. So they come in, they log in for AI or for. And then they browse the site. And when I talk about Cora vitals, I’m not talking about like, if you run it on a blank screen, I’m talking about the data that Google collects to then assign your site, a Cora vital, which is based on real users.
Um, and that data showed worse than if you just ran the site. And essentially what that was is. Google watching a lot of logged in users hitting some of our main pages. And those weren’t page cache because we weren’t caching pages for logged in users. Now we have database caching and highly recommend using a good database object.
Uh, but for us enabling caching for logged in users on all of our key pages was a key way to improve the performance of the website in Google’s eyes, because Google doesn’t care if the user is logged in or not. They’re just looking at how long did it take that user to load this page. And so by doing that, we improved, uh, the performance quite a bit.
Another thing is, uh, lazy loading background images. So by default, browsers are going to lazy load because WordPress has this code already in to say, Hey, load all your images lazy, except for those first, um, top of page images. Uh, but background images don’t lazy load by default. And so flying press again has a great solution for this.
There’s a lot of them that do, uh, a lot of the performance plugins offer, lazy loading for background images. And then another thing is that you will often see, um, that you can get dinged for excessive Dom size. Uh, the actual real, this is always funny to me because like the Dom size that gets under that radar is like essentially the most, basic of websites.
Um, I think I looked into Google searches at one time and the search results do not pass there. They get dinged for excessive Dom size. So the standard there is very, um, again, this is Cora vitals. I could say all day long how much it’s like, this isn’t actually relevant, but it’s a thing and you got to pay attention to it, um, A great solution for lowering your DOM size is to make your pages smaller.
Obviously that doesn’t really work for everyone. Like you want to have more content on your page. You want to engage that user going down. And so Google recommends. Lazy rendering content, which is kind of like your typical experience you’d get on Facebook or whatever, and you scroll and more content loads as you’re going down the page, you can lazy render your content.
Um, I’m actually working on a way to do this in Kadence blocks. We’ll, or you can enable like, Hey, I want to load this row as lazy. So it doesn’t load on page load. Um, the reason I’m looking at doing at it is because. Flying press is a great solution for this. The only problem I ran into with their solution, which I really loved and I used in the Kadence site.
That’s how we’re, we’re passing core vitals. It’s like, I’m lazy loading the footer. I’m lazy loading a bunch of stuff where lazy loading, lazy rendering can get you is that JavaScript initialization happens on page load. And if you have a carousel, an accordion, anything that runs powered by Javascript, that initialization happens on page load.
So if you have an accordion on your page, right as the page loads, there’s a script that runs to say, Hey, where’s the accordion on this page? Finds it and then puts an event listener on it to essentially say, when this gets clicked, expand the accordion. If you lazy render that, Then that JavaScript code that says, Hey, where’s this accordion says there’s no accordion and it just moves on.
And then that accordion gets lazy rendered and now there’s no event listener on the buttons. And so then nothing happens when you click the buttons. So that’s just a simple scenario of like how lazy rendering can hurt you because the way that JavaScript works is it initializes when it does, it finds all the things that it needs to listen for.
So what we’re going to do with Kadence is add a lazy render function that allows you to lazy render rows, but then we will tell it when you render check to see in the case of the accordion, if there’s accordion here that we need to initialize, so we’ll add that logic into the javascript to make sure that it’s working.
Even if something is lazy rendered, it still gets initialized. Um, which will allow you to essentially say everything below the fold on my website can be lazy rendered. And then you get your DOM size down significantly because you’re lazy rendering the rest of it.

Katy: I’m going to ask a beginner question just for anyone who’s, who’s wondering what is DOM size?

Ben: So the DOM is essentially the HTML, the raw HTML that gets put on a page. And so if you look, if you right click on a website and click view source, you will see all the HTML that is there. And that’s your quote unquote DOM and how that gets interpreted by the browser is through the DOM tree and it’s a whole thing and you can get lost in that.
It’s extremely complex, but essentially what they’re saying is you have too much to load. And there’s ways you can optimize the DOM size without necessarily getting rid of content, meaning like text is technically not DOM. It’s the markup. It’s the actual markup that goes around everything. And so the less markup you use.
The lower your DOM size. So, there have been page builders that have gotten dinged for being excessive on DOM size, cause they add six, seven layers of divs between each text element and that can cause a performance issue.

Katy: Yeah. I was going to say, is there like a best practice on the way to build specific pages in Kadence?
Like. If you, you know, have a row layout that has another row layout that has, you know, a lot of different elements, let’s just say two columns where there’s text on the left and an accordion on the right, for instance, but you’ve got that second row layout, like when you start nesting a ton of items inside of each other, does that increase the DOM size?
And like, so are there like best practices on maybe users are just building their pages incorrectly. And that’s. Like a user error, or do you think it’s truly just optimization?

Ben: So it’s both right? Like, um, certainly if you just sit there and nest row and nest row and nest row and nest row, and then add content, like, and you have a whole lot of nested rows that are there for no reason, then you should optimize that and get rid of the ones that are there for no reason.
That said. People can get really, really lost in trying to save one or two divs by spending all this time trying to make a layout work where they really just need those divs to make the layout work, but they’re trying to make it work with funky CSS and things like that. So they want to lower their DOM size by, by two divs.
Um, and for that, I would say you’re probably approaching it wrong. You should probably look at lazy. Rendering versus trying to optimize to that point because, um, I think you’re thinking about it wrong at that point. Like, and there’s a big difference obviously between like Kadence, which is going to load like a row is two divs versus some of the page builder out there that was like you put in a row and you’re like 15 divs before you get to text, that’s a big difference.
. I think, say for some users who are like beginners. that they don’t have all of the technical knowledge. They’re just like thinking, what can I do? What with my limited knowledge, what can I do to make sure that I’m doing everything right to make sure the speed is where it needs to be.

Katy: And sometimes if that’s over your head, you just, you need to reach out to a professional who can help you with that. Type of the thing. Um, or use the right tools that are already set up in performant and things of that nature.
Ben: Yeah. I would say that like in general, you don’t want to get too low in the weeds on trying to optimize your DOM size by outside of content.
Now, certainly like people make ridiculously huge pages. That, um, are just really, really big and don’t need to be that big. You just need to, like, make your pages smaller because they need to be more concise and less lengthy. And at the same time, there’s times where you, it makes sense to have a really, really big page.
And that’s a great time to have a lazy render.

Hannah: Are you creating a plugin right now that allows lazy rendering? Is that what I think I’m hearing?

Ben: going to put it into Kadence Blocks. Yeah, it’ll be, it’ll be a setting in [00:30:00] the row layout block to lazy render that block. Yep.

Hannah: Cool. That’s awesome. Ben, I’m just curious what the biggest surprise was in this audit for you. Like, what was the thing that you’re like, Oh, wow, I didn’t realize that that was going to be, that that was hardiness.

Ben: Um, kind of think of what was a, I don’t know that there was too much of a surprise. I mean, this was a site that had never been audited. So I was kind of coming into it expecting like, you know, like we’re going to get a lot of things. Um, I thought like, I guess the biggest, the biggest surprise was the emphasis on authors inside of blog posts.
I think, and making our author pages more interesting and more engaging. I think that was a surprise. I just don’t, you know, like, I don’t think of that too much when I’m on a blog post to be like, who’s this author and why do they have credibility? But like Google is really paying attention to that. And that goes back to the whole concept of eat of like, Google really cares about the author really cares about showing your expertise.
Um, and so that was one of the things that we implemented on our blog now is that you’ll see like under each title, there’s the author name with a link to the author page that we’ve revamped that shows the author’s bio and stuff like that. And, uh, we now have that in the sidebar and in the footer. So there’s just this reiteration of like, here is somebody that you can trust.
That’s knowledgeable. That’s writing this post and here’s why. And, um, I think that was probably the biggest surprise in the thing of like, Oh, we ended up doing a bit of work to make that all work in our blog. I like how it looks now. I think it looks great and really does. Like to me it does make it feel like, Oh wow, this feels more legitimate, I guess.
And just more authoritative.

Katy: Yeah. I think for content creators, this is a great opportunity for them specifically to, I guess everyone who’s publishing online, not just content creators, but I know like, Especially if you’re like in a lifestyle niche or you’re like a blogger, some people are like, hi, I’m whatever your name is. And you know, I love Jesus and I love, I have two kids and I have a dog. And it’s like, none of that matters. You need to really talk about why someone. Should listen to you or read your content and, um, trying to make sure that you’re coming from it from an authoritative perspective and not just a, this is who I am type of a thing is a, is a huge improvement that they can make.
Plus, while we’re talking about these cool author pages, Kadence allows you with the Element Hook plugin to insert featured content on top of that author. Archive page where otherwise you wouldn’t be able to touch that because it’s a function of the theme. So if you really do want to customize that author page, we have the tools available.
Um, you’ve got to have a bundle, a Kadence bundle in order to access that feature. But in my opinion, that single feature alone is worth the upgrade. Um, there’s so much that you can do with the tool that allows you to improve your SEO as well, um, and have an impact on user experience and really insert content where.
You need it and where it’s strategically designed to convert or help the user build trust, things of that nature, where again, if you didn’t have the element hooks, you wouldn’t be able to insert your content onto those theme pages.

Hannah: She’s our marketer folks.

Ben: Yeah. And I, I, yeah, that was a cool one that we were able to like do and be like, Hey, we have the tools to do this.
Um, one more thing with page speed. Cause this one, I see this a lot. And what’s interesting is that like, um, liquid web, our parent company is doing a redesign right now. And I got pulled in to do some speed audit stuff. And. Uh, one of the things that gets people a lot is using PNG images, which are, um, a lot of times the default when you’re exporting out of Figma.
But I see them a lot. They don’t optimize well, unless they’re small, they really don’t optimize well. Um, you can use them for logos, usually. Okay. Especially single color logos, then you can optimize them. But when you’re talking about a, just a colored image. Even if it’s the same exact size, JPEG is going to be vastly superior.
And then on that note, WebP is even more superior than JPEG. So something to just pay attention to is image sizes can really ding you and can really cause. Performance problems, not just, not just core vitals, but just in general, people trying to see your site actual, like affects the end user. Make sure you optimize your images.
Um, more than just like getting an image option plugin and being like, yeah, optimize my images. It’s really about making good decisions about what format you need to use. Some people will use PNGs because they need to have transparency in the image. JPEG doesn’t allow transparency. So converting them to Web P and optimizing them and, and that can give you a significant improvement or page size and your performance.
Um, and that’s one that’s like really easy to mix, uh, to miss. If you’re just like moving through, uh, your content, you’re like, oh, I took a screenshot. A lot of times the default screenshot is a p and g. And so, um, optimizing those is key and optimizing, uh, the choosing the right thing before you upload is big deal.

Katy: Since we’re talking about speed and best practices, um, obviously image optimization is. It’s one of the biggest things that’s dragging it down. So I know we get a lot of comments in our Facebook group and stuff that’s like, my Kadence website is so slow. This is the Kadence problem.
Can you address that question or that we get quite often, like I have a Kadence website and it’s because of Kadence that this is so slow, but then people are uploading two megabyte images. For the hero section, for instance, and they don’t understand why it’s why it’s dragging them down. What are your thoughts on that?

Ben: Correct? Yeah, because just just to say like we also have people in our Facebook group We’re like I use Kadence and now all my site speeds are so good Like the the reality is is Kadence isn’t gonna make your site slow, but it’s not going to prevent you from making your site So you ultimately have control over the content of your website.
So we go back to like, if you make a massive site at a bunch of carousels and images and upload all those images and super high res that are uncompressed, that will equal a slow site. Doesn’t matter what theme you use, or if you used no theme at all and just grab the content that you put into the page, it’s still going to be a slow website.
So Kadence can do a lot to try to optimize where it can from a code perspective, in terms of like we. Preload CSS and load certain CSS later in the page load to prevent, um, you know, prevent, uh, you know, certain render blocking stuff. And there’s like things that we do and we only load CSS when it’s needed.
So if you’re not using our carousel, you know, gallery, Like we’re not going to load the JavaScript or the CSS for that, because we’re like, there’s smart stuff in there to say, like, we’re going to go performance first and load this stuff when it’s needed. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make a slow website.
Cause you, anyone can. And so image optimization is usually where people get stuck the most. And to just be clear too, like. You can’t just use a plugin later on down the road to optimize your images. So when you’re putting in a background image on a hero section. By default, it’s going to use the full size image that you picked.
Now we do offer a selector in there. So you can change the image to one of the other sizes that, uh, WordPress generates for you automatically. So you can use large and things like that, but the optimal is that you. Shows the image size that you wanted and you compressed that size because that’s actually going to give you significantly better results than if you just go and download an image, upload it and even change the size.
So, uh, a better way to explain this is this. If you take an optimized image that’s 2000 pixels wide. And you take an unoptimized image that’s 2, 000 pixels wide. The smaller version, the 1, 000 pixel version, is going to reflect that, even though it’s quote unquote optimized. So, you want to make sure that you’re bringing images that are optimized, uh, when you’re uploading to the site, and ideally using, you know, the right formats.
Um, And that goes a, a super long way in terms of, of optimization.

Katy: Yeah. And beyond images, it’s also like who you choose for hosting matters and a number of other things also, right?

Ben: Who you choose for hosting makes a significant difference. How you, uh, how you do page caching. I mean, essentially this day in the web, page caching is absolutely critical to a website.
So what that is, is essentially taking what the page renders out, saving the HTML and storing that HTML. So then the next time that that page loads, it doesn’t run through all the PHP and hit the server and have to do all the communication with the database. It can just hand that HTML file to the end user.
That is the difference between, I mean, does it like, it doesn’t matter how good your server is. You must have. page caching running on your site. Like that’s absolutely critical to getting a good speed score.
Some other things just were coming up on time, some things I’ll throw out there that were interesting that we did and just good, like, you know, reference points, we have hundreds of pages on the Kadence website, doing an audit of those pages and removing the ones that shouldn’t be indexed anymore from our site map.
Uh, that was another one that was like. So not only auditing all of our blog posts, but also looking at all the pages. We had random pages that were created for something sometime ages ago, still on our sitemap that we needed to just unindex or delete or unpublish. Um, making sure that we had fixed, did a 404 check and what, you know, what, on what blog posts, like we made the mistake on several blog posts two years ago.
To copy images from a Google drive into the content and never actually upload those images to the website. So then two years later, that Google drive is gone. Those images are gone. Now we have four or four errors on the, those blog posts. So that was another one. That’s like, those are the kinds of things you find in audit of like.
You don’t, not every day you go and look at a blog post from two years ago to see if the images are still there. But that was one that was like, Oh, we did that wrong. We uploaded those images straight from Google instead of actually moving them to the website. Um, so that was all really interesting. Uh, in terms of schema, we looked at.
Updating our schema to reflect an organization. So like right now the Kadence homepage says that it’s by Ben Rittner, which is not correct, right? That’s just the default that happens when you, I’m the author of the homepage. And so that’s another one where you want to update your, like paying attention to schema based on your actual website.
Like maybe it should be by you if you’re. Site is for you, but if it’s for an organization, it should be by that organization. So that’s where like the, some of the schema stuff of like just giving Google more and more information about your organization and making sure that it’s getting a clear picture of the authority that you should have.
Um, through schema and stuff like that. One thing in preparation for this podcast, we threw out a question on Facebook that came back, people asking to be able to turn off the micro data that the Kadence theme outputs for like, uh, the basic schema stuff inside of the H2O markup. There is a filter for that where you just use a code set of plugin to drop that filter in, but we will make it an option.
That was one thing that people were like, Hey, we’d love to see this as an option. That’s an easy win. So that’s something we can definitely do for those who don’t want that page schema in the page, but just to be clear, that is very different from SEO schema that is telling, uh, this search engine that this is the header or this is the footer of your website versus like.
Hey, this is the organization behind it. And all of the meta tags and things like that.

Katy: Nice. Hannah, we have another question as well. Do you want to read that question from the Facebook group also from Marcus?

Hannah: Yeah. Marcus wants to know now that the SEO landscape is changing faster than ever. Do you have ideas for diversifying traffic sources to become less dependent on Google slash SEO?
Katy, what are your ideas?

Katy: My ideas there, traffic, uh, diversification is always a win because you don’t want to build, something that, you know, you feel like the rug can be pulled out from underneath you. I feel like back in, I remember 2008. Early 2000s, uh, Facebook did this, like Facebook pages were all the rage and then Google changed or not Google, but Facebook changed their, um, rolled out ads and then everybody who had a Facebook page, like they’re.
The reach went down overnight and it crashed people’s businesses because of that. And I feel like that same is true right now for SEO with the introduction of AI into search results and the, all of the constant Google updates that are happening. Like this is a hard time to be in the space, especially if you’re only focused on, um, doing SEO.
So it’s a really good question. And I think diversifying traffic sources is great. The key thing to remember when you are diversifying traffic sources, Is to think about where your idle client is hanging out. So right now, if you got hit by Google and let’s just say that you are a home decor blog, Pinterest, if you’re not already on it is obviously a great traffic source for you, but if you have a mechanic website, then Pinterest probably is not going to be a The best, uh, traffic source for you.
So it really depends on where do you want to reach your idle clients? Um, Reddit is one that Ben may have a lot of opinions about. That’s a Google’s just in bed with, uh, Reddit. And so if you aren’t on Reddit and your idle clients are hanging out there, that’s a, an untapped, um, new strategy for SEO that you can, you can utilize.
Do you want to. Share any insights on Reddit.

Ben: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll just say that Reddit is in all of my search results right now. And it’s in all of everyone’s search results right now. Um, especially if you’re looking for anything that might have anything to do with a review or a question, uh, Google has. And it’s most recent updates just made Reddit like somehow the authority that gets put into everybody’s search results.
So take advantage of that while it’s there, you want to get some extra links to your website and you want to get some more exposure, go and involve yourself in the forums on Reddit. And I’m not saying. You will get banned very quickly if you go and just put a bunch of links up to your website. I’m saying go in and actually get engaged.
So you can almost be like, should I write a blog post this week? Or should I go and engage on 25 Reddit threads and all of that? Like do that builder, like actually become part of that community. Because investing in that community, similar to social media, it’s not a It’s not just a game you can play.
It’s like, I have to be intentional about being useful, about being engaging. Go and do that on Reddit and think about Reddit in that same way. And eventually you’ll have opportunities to link to yourself and all that. And that can be a really strong play right now, where, um, Google is so thinking that Reddit has like, All the authority on that.
What we’re kind of joking at is just, I, my personal opinion on Reddit is that it’s not a great authority on stuff and is annoying to use every single time I go to the website on my phone and ask me if I want to open up the app, which I don’t, and I keep telling it the same thing. I even have the app, but I just want to view it on my web browser and they don’t bother to, Remember that for me.
So it’s just annoying. Um, yeah.

Katy: well, who knows how long this will be a strategy that’s, you know, worth investing in, but that’s true about marketing. Like that is marketing, marketing landscape changes. And you know, now there’s threads to be on and you know, there’s a thousand social media channels and now there’s this Reddit thing.
You got to try and Pinterest and Google and. So if you’re feeling a little dizzy from all of the strategies that you have to implement, you’re not alone. And I think you just, if you are kind of struggling with that path of like, what traffic source do I go with? Pick one and go all in and do it well. Um, going back to being relentlessly useful.
I think that’s just kind of the motto that you should have in business, whether you’re serving your clients or whether you’re writing a blog post or whether you’re You know, trying to grow traffic on Pinterest or TOK, or you name it, just be relentlessly useful and think about serving your, your client.
That’s the other thing that we talked about in the pregame of this podcast when we were prepping is the fact that you should write for people. Like there are people who are interacting with your brand and not just trying to gain the algorithm so that you can be in the first place. You need to be writing for or humans, um, to serve humans.
And when you, I think personally, when you take a servant posture in your marketing, you’re going to win a lot more than getting so caught up and trying to hit that next speed score or try to get that ranking, and then you’re caring so much about the algorithms changing instead of serving your people. I think that.
That’s a trap. A lot of people fall into.

Hannah: Well, Ben, anything that the people need to know as far as Kadence updates?

Ben: Yeah, we’re working on some fun things right now. Um, obviously there’s still a lot of work and about advanced header and navigation and all of that, that is coming. We are really honing in on a really good flow for how you wizard for how you build that.
So it’s. Cause it’s, uh, we keep saying this about every block we build, but this is the most complex block we’ve ever built. And this one definitely is. So to help with that complexity, we’re working on good user flows to get into it. Um, but some fun things that, you know, we just did tool tips and stuff like that, but we’re releasing the ability to set the focus point on an image when you’re using a ratio size, which is cool.
So, uh, if you have a. You know, portrait image, and you want to set the focus on a face that’s near the top. That can be where the image outputs if you’ve got a square ratio, um, output. So there’s that. And, uh, we’re working on the ability to adjust column widths for, um, four or five, six column layouts and as well for tablet and mobile.
So that way you can finally have custom column widths on tablet and mobile that fit your content just perfectly. So that’s really fun. And then we’re also doing the ability to, uh, add custom SVGs as icons without having to go through, um, an icon font, uh, tool with icon moon, which we’ve used, we’ve had that tool for a while where you can go in and bring in a bunch of icons, we’re actually going to make it a lot easier to add a custom icon where you just upload an SVG and we convert that into an icon for you.
So. Um, those things are really coming in the next couple of weeks and really exciting.
Katy: Yeah, we’ve been doing a lot of quick wins and it’s been great to see implemented. I know just sometimes it’s just the smallest little thing that makes a big difference for the end user. So I’m pumped up about. All of those things, tool tips, the column width, um, even in our recent release, when we changed some of the post grid carousel updates in order for the image to stretch without writing code or to align the content in the middle, even, um, do the author pages as well, like for the, it’s only pull the author archive for that specific author.
So just everything that we’ve been doing, I’m, I’m so part of, I’m so glad to be a part of this team. Cause it feels like. Truly, it feels like the Kadence team and developers are listening to their users and not only listening, but implementing quickly. The things that they are, uh, wanting the most. So it’s fun to be a part of that team.

Ben: Yeah, we have a great team.

Hannah: Thanks for tuning in to episode 37 and good luck on all of your self audit journeys or broader than self. We hope this has been inspiring and insightful.

Katy: Yeah, let us know if you have any more questions or comments about SEO, drop them in our Facebook group.
We can chat more about that when we share this podcast.

Hannah: Yeah, definitely.

Katy: All right. That’s it for now.

Hannah: Bye!

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, creating engaging and high-quality website content is essential for businesses and individuals alike. However, the process of content creation can be time-consuming and challenging. Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI), a revolutionary tool that can significantly streamline your work and speed up the content creation process. 

In this blog post, we’ll explore leveraging AI to write website content faster and more efficiently. We’ll also dive into our newest tool, Kadence AI, our AI-powered Starter Templates, and discuss the ways that they are transforming website creation.

Using AI for Content Creation

At first glance, Artificial Intelligence can seem a little daunting. As AI systems become more sophisticated it can lead to a sense of unpredictability and loss of control. But in reality, we are finding that AI opens up a whole new world of creativity and possibility. Through advanced algorithms and machine learning, AI enables you to generate high-quality content across various domains, including writing, design, and multimedia production.

A common concern with AI is that it will sound like, well, AI, rather than sounding the way you sound. Thankfully, Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms can create compelling written content, mimicking human-like language and style. This means you can adjust the tone to match your brand and persona. 

AI-powered design tools automate graphic creation, ensuring visually appealing and customized visuals. Additionally, AI-driven platforms analyze user preferences and behaviors, providing insights that inform content strategies. 

This synergy between human creativity and AI capabilities not only accelerates the content creation process but also opens new outlets for dynamic and personalized content experiences. Ultimately, AI acts as a catalyst for unlocking creativity, enabling individuals to push boundaries and generate novel, imaginative outcomes.

Getting Over the Blank Page Syndrome

You know when you sit down to write a post and then … nothing? You find yourself staring at a blank page hoping that inspiration will somehow start falling from the sky. This is where AI comes in. The paralysis that often accompanies facing a blank document, unsure of how to begin, can be alleviated by leveraging AI tools. 

AI has the power to generate creative and coherent content based on prompts provided by users. By simply inputting a few initial words or ideas, individuals can jumpstart their writing process and find inspiration in AI-generated suggestions. 

This collaborative approach not only helps overcome the initial hurdle of starting a piece but encourages a dynamic interaction between human creativity and machine intelligence, resulting in more engaging and prolific writing experiences. 

AI enables content personalization on a granular level, allowing you to tailor your website content to individual users based on their preferences, location, and behavior. Personalized content not only enhances user experience but also increases engagement and conversion rates.

Like anything, if not used well AI can do you harm. There are lazy ways of generating AI content that feel spammy and unauthentic. But when used capably with real intention, it can escalate your content, improve your SEO, and ultimately bring your website to a whole new level. 

Kadence AI

By now you have probably heard that the long-awaited Kadence AI is officially live. We feel that this new tool is a true game changer when generating content and creating powerful and effective websites. 

While AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard help you generate written content, Kadence AI takes it a step further. With Kadence AI you can generate fully customized sections and even entire websites that are perfectly catered to your audience. 

With simple prompts and keywords, Kadence AI–with the power of Open AI–will generate beautifully customized content you can publish directly onto your websites. You can even change the tone and the feel of your message, ensuring that your content is perfectly directed at your target audience.

In a recent conversation with Zach Tirrel, GM at StellarWP, he stated that Kadence AI is like the “death of lorem ipsum.” 

Rather than throwing in dummy text and irrelevant stock photos, Kadence AI will generate full texts and images that fit beautifully into your brand. This can be a game changer when demoing a site to a potential client when they see real and meaningful content, rather than lorem ipsum.

Kadence AI Starter Templates

Taking things a step further, let’s dive into Kadence AI-powered Starter Templates. If you want to talk about powerful and effective tools for website creation, this one takes the cake. 

If you’ve been a Kadence user for the past several years, you’re probably familiar with our Starter Templates. These are no-code starter site templates you can use on a new website and then customize to make your own. With AI-powered Starter Templates, you can generate a full website that’s catered perfectly to your brand. 

This doesn’t just include images, fonts, and colors, but also written content all across the site. This new tool completely transforms the way we think about building websites. It’s so much more than just getting over the “blank page”. It allows you to completely build out a website that you will then be able to tweak and fully make your own with just a few clicks!

We created a step-by-step guide for you to see just how easy it is to create powerful and engaging websites with Kadence AI-powered Starter Templates.

Get Started With Kadence

If you’re not already using Kadence, now truly is the perfect time to get started. The release of Kadence AI is only the beginning of where we’re heading with tools for website creation. It’s an exciting time and we truly can’t wait for all that’s to come.

In the modern, oversaturated online world, simply having a great podcast isn’t enough to ensure long-term success and growth. Unfortunately, you can forget about going viral or enjoying a steady stream of new and returning listeners without a concrete marketing strategy.

Why? Because no matter how good your episodes are, you need to put time, money, and effort into getting that content in front of your audience regularly.

Now, operating in a multi-billion-dollar industry such as this one does mean that there’s enough of the proverbial pie to go around, but it also means that the competition is stiff.

Today, we are not talking about starting a podcast—today, we are talking about getting your podcast off the ground and hopefully into the stratosphere. To help you do that, we’ll be taking a look at the essential marketing and brand-building tactics you need to use to stand out in a competitive podcast industry.

Here’s what you need to do.

Personal Brands Take Center Stage

Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Jay Shetty—the list goes on and on, but the one thing that always stands out about a podcast is the name. The name of the host(s) whose personal brands speak louder than the noise in the industry is what truly separates their podcasts from the competition.

There’s a lot to be said about personal branding in general, about its influence on marketing and business growth as a whole. But when it comes to successful podcasts, there’s no better marketing than having a powerful personal brand—a name everyone knows even if they don’t listen to your podcast.

With that in mind, your first order of business is to start working on your personal brand. This means your image, your presentation, your tone of voice, your network, and of course, your reach.

Here’s a checklist:

• Define your online persona.
• Define your tone of voice.
• Create an image—podcasts are also visual, so make sure you present a memorable image.
• Start connecting with other podcasters and notable names in the industry.
• Join podcasting groups and relevant online communities in your niche.
• Start posting and commenting in those groups and communities regularly. 

You can expand your reach further by contributing to important websites in your niche and by hosting guest posts on your own site. This leads us to the next important point. 

Build a Beautiful and Intuitive Podcast Website

Most of your listeners will use dedicated podcast platforms or video platforms like YouTube to watch your episodes. While we will talk about those in a moment, remember that effective podcast marketing and brand-building start with a beautiful website.

Having a website for your podcast is the best way for people to find all of your episodes quickly, learn about the brand, engage with you, and disseminate your content across the web. In today’s saturated market, having a website for your podcast is non-negotiable.

One of the best and easiest ways to build your podcast website is with a podcast starter template that sets everything up for you so that you only need to upload your episodes. It’s customizable and easy to use, and most importantly—it’s fast.

The podcast starter template is optimized for speed and seamless viewing on all device formats. No matter if they’re listening on their mobile or desktop PC, your audience will get a seamless and enjoyable experience.

There are numerous built-in features for marketing and shareability, so be sure to check it out.

Complement Your Site with Podcast Aggregators

One of your top priorities should be to make your episodes, and your podcast brand as a whole, as discoverable as possible. 

To do this, you need to have a notable presence on all the relevant podcast platforms and aggregators. Any platform capable of hosting your podcast should be in your marketing strategy, and that includes visual platforms like YouTube if you’re also filming your episodes.

If you’re not filming your episodes and you’re just making audio recordings, start filming immediately. This will give you more exposure, and it will do wonders for your podcast marketing strategy as a whole, as more and more people watch podcasts instead of just listening in. Filming your show will also allow you to create social media content and viral videos.

The most popular podcast aggregators include:

• Google Play
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• YouTube and YouTube Music
• Deezer
• Podchaser
• TuneIn
• Pandora
• Overcast
• Downcast

You can automatically upload episodes to all of these podcast directories and any other by submitting your RSS feed to these platforms, which will automatically submit every new episode you put out. This is a great way to stay consistent and never miss uploading an episode.

Understanding the Most Relevant Marketing Platforms

When it comes to marketing outside the podcast directories and your own website, you need to think of ways you can make your episodes easily accessible to new audiences.

The best and most effective ways to do that are marketing and promotion via email, social media, influencers, and paid ads.

Putting resources into all of these is about effective content distribution, gaining visibility, and enough traffic so that the aggregators start promoting your episodes on their own. By getting people to click on your links and play your episodes, you can train the algorithms to promote you more over time. 

With that in mind:

• Send out emails about new episodes, with excerpts and CTAs.
• Post on your social profiles every day and share interesting details from your episodes.
• Engage with influencers and get them to talk about your podcast on their channels.
• Be more aggressive with sponsored ads, and get people to click on the links to boost your CTR and visibility.
• Consider advertising on podcast apps as well, to gain exposure and direct traffic to your episodes.

With social media, email, and advertising on your side, you will gain viewership over time.

Snippets Attract Audiences on Different Platforms

Always remember that effective marketing relies on your ability to create content that teases your audience, delivers value, and inspires shares and clicks.

When it comes to effective podcast marketing, you have a unique opportunity here to create highly engaging and shareable content in the form of snippets and reel-type videos. Taking short snippets from every episode where you present a problem or an interesting topic and then tease a solution is a great way to get people to engage with your posts and check out the entire episode.

The great part is that all the relevant social networks nowadays have a short video format, so you can post your snippets on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, even LinkedIn and beyond. 

Complemented by a good call to action and compelling descriptions and copy, you can make these short-form videos stand out and give your audiences something to think about. Most importantly, you can get people to share those videos with their own networks to give you more exposure. 

Learn from the Best Marketing Podcasters

Without a doubt, one of the most effective ways to grow your own podcast is to learn from the best marketing podcasts and to stay on top of the latest marketing trends in the industry. 

Some of the top marketing podcasts you can tune into include:

• This Old Marketing
• Everyone Hates Marketers
• Marketing School with Neil Patel & Eric Siu
• Marketing Growth Podcast
• Online Marketing Made Easy

There are many more you can check out, of course, and we would be remiss not to talk about our own Kadence Beat podcast that covers everything WordPress, strategy, and innovations in this space.

Building this podcast was one of the best ways for us to keep our audience in the loop about industry news, our products, and the evolving community as a whole. Most importantly, our podcast gives you real-time information you can use for your website, brand, and podcasting strategy. 

Leverage Your Guests’ Clout

Lastly, never underestimate the power and potential of your guests’ names and the audience that follows them across the online world. 

Your goal should be to host as many impactful guests on your podcast as possible, as early on as possible to gain exposure and potentially go viral. Guests can make or break your podcast, so you not only need to sign with big names—you have to make sure they’re reputable names.

What’s more, the people you host need to be truly relevant to your niche, so that you can meet audience expectations. Don’t hesitate to bring in controversial figures, but make sure to do your research beforehand.

Highly controversial guests can harm your brand, so you have to control what is being said and discussed on your podcast to maintain your reputation properly.

Over to You

Building a successful podcast takes time and persistence, but it also demands that you employ good marketing techniques that have helped others thrive in this space over the years. Keep in mind that the better the marketing, the higher the chances you’ll go viral at some point, after which you’ll be able to take your podcast to new heights of success very quickly.

Make sure to start implementing what you have learned here today, and always remember that consistency is the key to long-term success. Be consistent in delivering value-driven content, be consistent in bringing quality guests, and always be consistent in all your marketing channels.

Kadence’s user-friendly tools will help your podcast shine on your website. Get started today, and embark on an exciting podcasting adventure.

In today’s competitive business landscape, building brand awareness is more important than ever to ensure that your brand is top of mind for your target audience. It involves creating a strong and consistent brand identity, image, and voice that reaches out to potential customers. It also involves continually engaging with your audience to keep your brand at the forefront of their minds.

In this guide, we’ll explore the various strategies and tactics that you can use to build brand awareness for your business, and we’ll provide practical tips and examples to help you get started. Whether you’re a blogger, a site owner who’s starting out and looking to establish your brand in the market, or you’re an established business looking to boost your brand’s visibility, this guide has something for you.

Let’s get started with some basic understanding of brand awareness.

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness seems like a complex term. However, it is really quite simple. Can your current or potential customers recognize your product or business by name? This is the major question to be answered in figuring out brand awareness.

It is the extent to which a brand is recognized and remembered by potential customers. It is an important metric for businesses to track, as it reflects the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and the strength of their brand.

There are different levels of brand awareness, ranging from complete unfamiliarity with a brand to high levels of recognition and recall. A customer who has never heard of a brand has no brand awareness, while a customer who can easily recall the brand name and certain key elements of the brand (such as its logo or slogan) has high brand awareness.

Having strong brand awareness can be highly beneficial for your business. Why? Keep reading!

Why is Brand Awareness Important?

Brand awareness is important for your business because it can have a significant impact on your company’s success. Here are some key reasons why brand awareness is important for your business:

• It helps to establish trust and credibility with potential customers. When customers are familiar with your brand, they are more likely to trust it and consider it a credible source for the products or services they need.
• It drives your sales to high levels. Research has shown that 59% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from your brand when they are already familiar with it. This is especially true when customers are making a purchase decision for the first time or are trying out a new product or service.
• It can increase customer loyalty and retention. Customers who are familiar with and positively associated with a brand are more likely to continue doing business with that brand over time. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and retention for your business.
• It can differentiate a business from competitors. Strong brand awareness can help your business stand out in a crowded market, differentiating it from competitors and making it more memorable to potential customers.

In short, brand awareness is important because it helps your business establish a strong and positive reputation, attract and retain customers, and stand out in a competitive market. Building brand awareness is essential if you want to have a successful marketing strategy.

How to Measure Brand Awareness

There are several ways to measure brand awareness, depending on the specific goals and objectives of your business. Some common methods include:

1. Brand recall or recognition surveys. These surveys ask participants if they can recall or recognize a brand name or logo. This can be a good way to measure your overall brand awareness and compare awareness levels for different brands.
2. Online search data. By tracking the volume of searches for your brand name or related terms, you can get an idea of how aware people are of your brand.
3. Social media engagement. Engagement metrics, such as likes, comments and shares on social media platforms can provide insight into how aware people are of your brand and how interested they are in it.
4. Sales data. By tracking the sales volume or the percentage of new customers, you can get a sense of how effective your brand awareness efforts are at driving conversions.
5. Customer surveys. Asking customers directly about their awareness of your brand can provide valuable insights into how well your brand is resonating with its target audience.

It’s important to note that brand awareness can vary depending on the specific audience being measured. For example, your brand may have high awareness among one demographic group but low awareness among another. Therefore, it’s important to consider the target audience when measuring brand awareness carefully.

How to Build Brand Awareness

There are many ways to build brand awareness, and the specific strategies and tactics that are most effective will depend on the unique goals and characteristics of your business. Brand awareness can be thought of by like brand support. You want to be thinking of ways to support and make-known your brand across all platforms. Here are some general tips you can consider when building awareness for your brand:

1. Define your brand identity

The first step in building brand awareness is to have a clear understanding of what makes your brand unique and how you want it to be perceived by your target audience. This includes developing a brand mission statement, brand values, a brand voice, and visual elements such as a logo and color palette.

If you are a blogger, a personal brand website is an essential part of your brand identity. You can check this blog to learn how to build a personal brand website.

2. Consistently communicate your brand message

Once you have defined your brand identity, it’s important to consistently communicate your brand message and values through all of your marketing and communication channels. This includes your website, social media profiles, email marketing campaigns, and any other customer-facing materials.

3. Use content marketing to educate and engage your audience

Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content with the goal of attracting and keeping your desired audience. A business blog can be a great way to do this. This is one of the many reasons why you need a business blog.

This can be a powerful way to build brand awareness and establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

4. Utilize paid advertising

While organic reach on social media and search engines can be limited, paid advertising allows businesses to reach a larger audience more quickly. Platforms such as Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads can effectively build brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.

5. Partner with influencers and other businesses

Partnering with influencers or other businesses can help expose your brand to new audiences and establish credibility. For example, if you have a fashion brand, you could partner with a popular fashion blogger to promote your products. If you have a software company, you could offer a discount to customers who purchase your product through an affiliate website.

6. Engage with your audience

Building brand awareness is a process that takes time and effort. It’s important to continually engage with your audience and provide them with value, whether through social media interactions, email newsletters, or other forms of communication.

In summary, building brand awareness is an ongoing process that begins with defining your brand identity. There is no one-size-fits-all method for building brand awareness. However, by consistently promoting and communicating the values and message of your brand to the target audience, your brand awareness efforts can be successful.

You also need to develop a brand awareness strategy for successful brand awareness. But how do you do so? Let’s explore how you can create a brand awareness strategy that works best for you.

How to Create Your Brand Awareness Strategy

Creating a brand awareness strategy involves defining the specific goals and objectives that you want to achieve and identifying the tactics and activities that will help you reach those goals. Here are some steps to follow when creating your brand awareness strategy:

1. Define your target audience

The first step in creating a brand awareness strategy is identifying your target audience. This includes understanding their demographics, interests, and needs, as well as the channels and platforms they use to consume information.

For example, as a blogger, you need to determine which blog niche you intend to write about so as to understand the specific needs of your target audience.

2. Set clear goals and objectives

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can define specific goals and objectives for your brand awareness efforts. These goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

Examples of brand awareness goals might include increasing website traffic, growing social media followers, or increasing brand recognition among a specific demographic.

3. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs)

To track the effectiveness of your brand awareness efforts, you’ll need to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you measure progress toward your goals. This could include metrics such as website traffic, social media engagement, or sales data.

4. Develop a plan of action

Once you have defined your goals and KPIs, you can create a plan of action that outlines the specific tactics and activities that you will use to build brand awareness. This could include tactics such as content marketing, keyword research to rank your blog, paid advertising, influencer partnerships, or social media outreach.

5. Allocate resources

To execute your brand awareness strategy effectively, you’ll need to allocate the necessary resources, including a budget, time, and personnel. It’s important to be realistic about the resources that you have available and to allocate them in a way that is consistent with your goals and objectives.

6. Monitor and adjust your strategy

Building brand awareness is an ongoing process, and it’s important to monitor and adjust your strategy as needed regularly. This might involve adjusting your tactics or setting new goals as you learn more about what works and what doesn’t.

Overall, to create a successful brand awareness strategy, you need to define your audience, have clear goals, have a detailed plan of action, and monitor your strategy. This will set you on the right path to having more customers aware of your business.

Harness the Power of Connecting With Customers Through Powerful Brand Awareness

The ultimate goal of brand awareness efforts is to create a strong and positive image that will attract and retain customers and differentiate your business from competitors. We at Kadence can help you easily build great websites that help your business stand out.

We have numerous stunning starter templates which are fully customizable. What’s more, you don’t need any coding knowledge to build a great website for your business or blog.

We also have many extensions to help you define your brand identity. Kadence Shop Kit is an example of one. This extension helps you build better and more effective product pages than your competitors.

If you need to create popups or great sale banners that communicate your brand messages, the Kadence Conversions plugin can help you do just that. Thousands and thousands of companies trust us to help them build their personal brands. You may as well jump on board.

In conclusion, building brand awareness is an essential part of any successful marketing strategy. By establishing a clear and consistent brand identity, consistently communicating your brand message, and utilizing a variety of tactics and channels to reach your target audience, you can increase brand recognition and drive business growth. By following the steps outlined in this guide and using Kadence, you can effectively build brand awareness for your business and achieve your marketing goals.

Grow your Site with Kadence

A Kadence full bundle gives you everything you need to supercharge your site to take advantage of the latest web design trends.

You may be familiar with the power of social media marketing for growing your online business. However, many online business owners have a sound knowledge of assessing how their brands do on social media.

In this blog post, you will learn what social media metrics are and how to measure them.

What are Social Media Metrics?

Social media metrics are data that show how your brand is doing online. Social media metrics help you track the performance of the content you share on social media platforms.

These metrics, which complement website KPIs, measure all aspects of your social media strategy. For example, some indicate the number of impressions your content has made on the audience. Impressions are the number of people who interact with your posts.

Some indicators determine how many people like or share your posts on social media sites. The greater the number of likes and shares, the larger the audience that consumes your content.

Social media metrics are central to your social media strategy. With metrics, you can understand whether your social media strategy is working. You can use the feedback from these indicators to determine if there is a problem and take corrective steps. Doing this will help you avoid wasting funds on a social media marketing strategy that does not give you value for money.

The Importance of Social Media Metrics

For so many reasons, social media metrics are essential for your online business. One of those reasons is that they help you gauge whether or not you’re talking to the right audience. Social media is vast; therefore, it provides massive business marketing opportunities. However, getting the right audience determines whether a company succeeds in its social media marketing efforts. Social media metrics help business owners decide whether they are talking to the right audience on social media platforms.

Besides helping you determine whether you are conversing with the proper audience, social media metrics are essential for gauging the message. Effective marketing requires that the message resonate with the audience. You can use the metrics to evaluate whether the people who consume your content enjoy doing so.

Understanding and measuring social media metrics helps grow your business. You can use the metrics to determine the level of social proof your brand receives. When key influencers in an industry approve the content you share on social media, many other people will engage with the content as a form of conformity.

Social media metrics help business owners plan their marketing campaigns correctly. Advertising a brand on social media or any other platform costs money. You want to clearly understand the return before you spend money on marketing campaigns. Some social media metrics will tell you whether spending more money on a marketing campaign is worth it. If the return on marketing investment, or mROI, is low, stopping the campaign may be a good idea.

Social Media Metrics You Need to Track

Understanding which metrics to measure and how to go about it is crucial. Here are some of the primary social media metrics you should track.

Engagement

The engagement rate is one of the critical indicators of social media performance. Engagement means the number of times people read, comment, or share your social media posts. The higher the number of engagements, the better your marketing strategy on social media.

Measuring engagement is a complex process. Some people on social media may read or even share your comment but still not follow you. However, this may still contribute to your social sharing success. Social media analysts usually express engagement as a percentage. They calculate engagement percentage by adding the number of likes, shares, and comments for a post and dividing it by the total number of followers.

Website Traffic

Some businesses depend on website traffic for success. The owners of such businesses need to learn how to increase blog traffic from social media platforms. The higher the number of clicks from social media sites, the more successful the marketing effort is. Many social media analytics tools quickly show the number and sources of inbound traffic from social media platforms. They also provide tips on technical issues, like how to drive traffic to new blogs.

Video views

Videos are becoming immensely popular online forms of content. Companies are taking advantage of this trend by creating short, informative videos and uploading them on social media platforms.

Every social media network defines video views uniquely. For some sites, a view happens when a person watches the video for at least a few seconds. Others count a view when a person watches the entire video.
Regardless of how a social media site defines a view, figures about the number of people who watch videos are important for advertisers. You can use the numbers to decide which videos will help market the business.

Audience growth rate

The audience growth rate metric shows how you gain new followers on social media. A high rate of audience growth is suitable for online businesses. A considerable following provides you with an audience for sharing marketing content and converting it into paying clients.

Calculating the rate of growth of the audience is easy. You need to determine the number of new followers over a specific period. Divide this number by the total number of followers, then multiply it by one hundred to convert it into a percentage. The result will show the speed at which you grow your business on social media.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who take vital steps toward becoming paying clients. The conversion rate is critical for showing whether your organic or paid social media campaigns are working. If the conversion rates are dismally low, it may be time to reconsider the effort.

Click through rate

The clickthrough rate indicates the willingness of people who view your content on social media to follow links and get additional information. The links may lead to your company’s website, social media platforms, or digital resources. The clickthrough rate shows how much people trust you and are willing to follow the links and get additional details about your brand.

Cost per click

CPC is useful when running paid advertisements on social media platforms. This metric shows how much you need to pay for every person who clicks on your advertisements on social media. Every social media network has specific figures for cost per click; therefore, you don’t have to calculate this metric from scratch.

Tools for Tracking Social Media Metrics

There are hundreds of tools for tracking social media metrics. While many are free, others need a subscription to access them. Your choice of a social media metrics tracking tool depends on the nature of your business and your preferences.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that you can use to monitor social media metrics for your business. The tool collects and shows important data about web traffic to websites. You can use it to determine the percentage of traffic to your site from social media.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another premium tool for tracking social media metrics. The tool has advanced features that allow you to listen to different social media platforms, plan posts, and evaluate the performance of campaigns.

Hootsuite

Another great tool for monitoring social media metrics is Hootsuite. You can integrate it with other tools for maximum performance. Hootsuite allows you to track more than 200 social media metrics on its dashboard.

Sendible

Sendible allows you to monitor what people say about your brand on social media platforms. Its other notable feature relates to reporting capabilities. You can customize reports in various formats, including PDFs.

How to Create a Social Media Metrics Dashboard

A social media metrics dashboard is a portal that shows all the essential indicators of your social media campaigns in one place. You do not want to waste time tracking every metric on a different platform. It saves you lots of time if you can get all the information about your social media performance in one place.

A social media metrics dashboard helps owners of online businesses achieve two goals. The first is to ensure they consistently post stuff on their social media pages. The second objective is to manage their paid or organic marketing campaigns on social media networks.

A good social media metrics dashboard is necessary to succeed in online marketing. Many business owners need help creating an excellent social media metrics dashboard. Here are a few things to consider when creating a social media metrics dashboard.

• Set your goals.
• The objectives of measuring social media activity determines what to include in the dashboard. The objectives may be to gain brand awareness or increase conversion rates. Remember, having too many or few metrics is not a good idea. Focus on the metrics that make sense to your brand.
• Connect social media pages to the dashboard.
• Start monitoring the KPIs.
• Ensure you can see the KPIs of your social media activities on the dashboard. Start monitoring them to determine whether the social media marketing efforts are successful.
• Keep the dashboard neat.

A neat and simple dashboard will help you get information about metrics quickly. You can also visit the dashboard daily, weekly, or biweekly to monitor progress.

Wrapping Up

Measuring social media metrics gives you a clear picture of the performance of marketing campaigns. Some standard metrics include engagement rate, clickthrough, and cost per click. Others are web traffic, audience growth, and video views. You can monitor the metrics by using premium or free analytics tools.

Tracking metrics only gets you so far if you don’t have a powerful and effective website. The Kadence Theme is blazingly fast and our starter templates make it all-too-easy to create beautiful and engaging websites.

It’s that time of year, folks. We hope by now that your home smells like cinnamon and you’ve found yourself looking forward to watching Home Alone for the 100th time. This time of year is really the sweetest, and if you’re a business owner, there’s a whole other kind of sweet that this time of year brings: sales. According to the National Retail Federation, the 2022 holiday sales reached $936.6 billion in sales. This was an increase of 5.3% since the previous year. My point? People are spending money and we want to help you get on the receiving end of those sales.

We wrote up a little guide with some tips that we think can boost your sales and help you create lasting customers. Now’s the time to enhance your site and do all the necessary prep work so you can have an out-of-the-park Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

One thing to keep in mind with BFCM (Black Friday/Cyber Monday) is that the competition is high. You may be holding a killer sale, but so it the next person and you need a way to make yourself stand out. One way to do this is to have a beautiful landing page. A landing page is any page that your customer lands on when they find your site. Whether this be your homepage, your shop page, or your BFCM promo page. A few key things that your landing page needs are inspiration, clarity and speed.

Inspiration: Use beautiful and trendy design styles that are eye-capturing and engaging. When a customer enters this page they should be compelled to dive deeper into your site. Beautiful, clean design is key.

Clarity: What are you selling? How will it benefit your customers? Be direct and have clear steps laid out. Don’t leave your customers guessing or you are sure to lose them.

Speed: Your landing page needs to be optimized for speed. Lucky for you, Kadence theme is one of the fastest themes in WordPress history. But there’s a lot that plays into speed. We recommend doing a little page speed test to see where you currently stand.

Last year we hosted a live teardown with Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good. In this session we brought in landing page examples, specifically those geared toward Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and we discussed ways to enhance and improve these pages for a better conversion rate. Even if you attended this event last year, we highly recommend going back and watching again to get some invaluable refreshers as you prepare for the biggest sale of the year.

Enhance Your E-commerce Experience

Enhancing your e-commerce experience is so much about standing out. You’re in luck because Kadence has all the tools to help you do just that. With Kadence Shop Kit you have the ability to build beautiful custom product templates that are sure to bring your product pages to a whole new level. If you’re using WooCommerce, Kadence Shop Kit is a must-have tool! Create pages that match and engage with your brand, rather than a generic page that looks like everyone else’s.

With Shop Kit you can do so much more than create custom product templates. It also gives you the tools to create stunning product galleries, intuitive variation swatches, conditional cart banners, and tons more. Kadence Shop Kit makes developing engaging and immersive shopping experiences a breeze.

Spread the Word

What good is a sale if you don’t have customers? Spreading the word is everything when it comes to having a successful black Friday/cyber Monday. Social media and email campaigns are crucial for getting the word out. Here are a few key questions to be asking yourself when thinking about marketing your sale:

Once you know the answers to these questions, it’s time to get after it. The first thing I’ll say is don’t downplay the power of social media. That’s where the people are, so you should be there too. Don’t just post about your sale; engage with your audience. Like, comment, DM – whatever it takes to create connection. People want to feel seen, like your sale was catered specifically for them. This is why it’s so important to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and speak to them like you would want to be spoken to.

The other marketing tool that can be your most effective is email campaigns. Hopefully by now you have grown (or are growing) and engaged email list. This is your power tool. The first step here is getting customers to open your email. When crafting your marketing email, you will want a powerful subject line. Based on conversion rate research, words like “just”, “wonderful” and “upgrade” are the most effective when added to your subject line. Once the email is opened, engaging content, beautiful photos and enticing content is what will keep your audience engaged. Then, to finish it off you will want a killer call to action. Something like, “your life will be so much richer, so buy now!”. And be sure to have an obvious button that links directly to your shop page.

Drive Conversions

Once you’ve brought people to your website whether through social media, email campaigns or what-have-you, the next step is creating that conversion. At Kadence we have just the tool. Kadence Conversions is a no-code tool that makes it all too simple to add slide-ins, banners, and lightweight pop-ups that will catch the eye of your audience. The best part is that your page speed is not affected, so it won’t add bloat or slow down your site. It even comes with stunning drop-in designs for each conversion type, making it easy to implement this on your page. This is an incredible tool for grabbing attention for your Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale. 

Wrapping Up

It’s our goal at Kadence to see you create killer websites that you’re truly proud of. And in this case, we’re looking forward to helping you create a rockstar Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale that generates more revenue than you thought was possible.  That’s why Kadence provides all the tools you need to set your eCommerce site up for optimal success. 

If you’re not yet a Kadence Full Bundle user, there’s no time like the present! Get access to Kadence Conversions, Kadence Blocks Pro, Kadence Shop Kit and so much more! 

AI prompts can provide ideas of what to write based on your industry or niche and jumpstart your creative juices. Because we have no idea what fields each of you may be writing about, we’ve created a guide with 25 AI prompt examples and a formula so that you can adjust and apply them to your blog.

How to Use AI Prompt Examples for Blogging

Using AI-generated prompt examples for blogging can be a helpful way to overcome writer’s block, generate new ideas, and streamline your content creation process.

When thinking about AI tools for blogging, it’s important to use a tool that you know and trust. (Not all AI tools are created equal!)

Know your niche and target audience, and make sure to enter prompts that help you think about crafting content that will be right for them. Then you’ll want to think about the results. Which prompts can you expand on and really write about in a meaningful way?

How to Structure AI Prompt Examples for Your Blog

To create the best and most relevant content for your blog, you’ll want to go beyond the generic prompt and work toward results that will help you create unique content.

With that in mind, we recommend inserting information specific to your blog in the prompts. With the 25 AI prompt examples below, note the space to insert specific information into the prompt.

Now, here’s the thing to remember. AI is an imprecise science, and plenty of other people could be searching for similar prompts. You’ll want to massage this content to ensure you customize it to fit your blog best.

When structuring your prompts, place emphasis on your blog niche with as much custom information as possible. If, by some chance, the prompt doesn’t return any results, you can broaden and try again.

Pro tip: Add “outline” or “blog post outline” to your prompt ideas to get a bullet view of a topic idea. Otherwise, you might end up with a fully AI-generated story that’s not usable. If that doesn’t work with your prompt, after the initial answer is generated, follow up with “Create a blog post outline for this idea.”

25 AI Prompt Examples for Your Blog

AI prompts can help you plan a content calendar so creating posts for your blog is more worry-free. Here are 25 AI prompt examples you can use to jumpstart creative thinking for your blog.

1. Share a [topic of your blog] experience that taught you a valuable lesson or changed your perspective blog post outline.
2. What experts, influencers, or individuals have interesting stories in [topic of your blog] to interview for a blog post?
3. Curate a list of valuable resources, websites, tools, or apps for [topic of your blog].
4. Create a step-by-step guide for [topic of your blog] hobbies.
5. What are some controversial or trending topics in [topic of your blog]. Use those prompts to write about the topics you care most about.
6. Compile lists of top tools, resources, books, movies, or anything relevant to [topic of your blog].
7. Ideas for products, services, or books to review in [topic of your blog].
8. Teach your readers something new, whether it’s a cooking technique, a software trick, or a DIY project. Enter what you want to teach as an AI prompt to make sure you don’t miss any concepts or steps.
9. Create beginner-friendly content ideas for those new to [topic of your blog].
10. What are current trends in [topic of your blog]? Use those to provide new-based content and information.
11. What are some common questions and answers related to [topic of your blog]?
12. Use AI prompts to ask for information about books, movies, or documentaries related to your niche area.
13. What are some examples of a real-life case study or success story that showcases how someone achieved a specific goal in [topic of your blog]?
14. What are some blog post ideas that incorporate both [holiday or theme] and [topic of your blog]?
15. Provide a glimpse into your daily life, work process, or creative process. Ask AI to describe one of these things in generic terms to help you use that as a baseline to compare to your experiences and write about.
16. Summarize complex information or statistics in visually appealing infographics that relate to [topic of your blog].
17. Use AI to help find a list of guest bloggers to invite to contribute to your blog.
18. What are some common problems in [topic of your blog]? Then, pick out one of these problems and offer practical solutions.
19. Highlight local businesses, events, or places of interest in your area.
20. What are predictions about the future of [topic of your blog]?
21. How do you tell a funny story about [topic of your blog]?
22. What are some different products, services, strategies, or approaches that would be interesting to compare in [topic of your blog]?
23. What is the history of [topic of your blog]? You can drill this one down further with a date-based prompt about a certain period in history.
24. Create a quiz in [topic of your blog].
25. Give me an idea of a 30-day challenge that people can participate in [topic of your blog].

Build Your Best Blog Ever

Whether you are a seasoned writer or new to blogging, Kadence has the tools to help you design a great website with blocks and tools that are easy to use. Browse starter templates to get started and build new pages with drop-in-ready sections from the design library.

Get Started with Kadence

If you’ve been around the Kadence community you have probably heard whispers of Kadence AI. AI is proving to be an incredibly useful tool for all sorts of online content, from blog and social media posts, to creating entire sites. Which is why we have been heads-down working hard to get Kadence AI into your hands. As Kadence AI gets ready to launch, you’ll have new tools to help you build landing pages and even entire sites in minutes. Want to get on the waitlist? We’re launching soon.

A Kadence Bundle gives you everything you need to supercharge your website and have an engaging and successful blog.

With Kadence, getting up and running is a breeze. We have starter templates designed just for travel bloggers, making it all-too-simple to get started building your site.

Here, we’ll walk through everything you need to start your blog and how to build it with Kadence.

How to Start a Travel Blog

A blog can help you grow your personal or professional brand. Travel blogs are great for travel writers, influencers, and those who want to share their adventures with others.

But what do you need to start a travel blog? Keep reading!

While your itineraries are the foundation of the blog, not every adventure has to be exotic to make a great blog post. You can find a niche in a specific type of travel – domestic camping, for example, or have more ranging trips. Having a clear focus for your travel blog can help grow readers who are interested in what you are doing, from budget travel to luxury travel to family, food, or international trips.

You’ll want to name your blog something memorable that pertains to what you plan to write about, as well as buy a domain name (that’s the URL). Search for a domain name that reflects your niche and is easy to spell and remember. You may have to try multiple options to find one that’s available. Coming up with a name is no easy task. Tune into Episode 15 of the Kadence Beat Podcast to hear how Ben came up with the name Kadence.

Once you buy the domain, you can connect it to hosting for your blog. This is where you will launch your WordPress website and install Kadence to help you build it with ease.

Now, it’s time to customize your blog by picking colors, fonts, and layout options that match your brand and style. Think about the content you will display, and don’t go overboard with design elements. For a travel blog, photos or videos should have plenty of room to be showcased.

Add content that you’ve written about your travel experiences. It’s a good idea to have three to five pieces already complete when you launch your blog, so there’s some additional content there. Don’t forget to include high-quality photos and videos to make your content more capturing.

Take some time to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) so your blog posts are easy for search engines – and people – to find. Use relevant keywords and meta tags to improve your blog’s visibility in search results.

Create social media profiles for your blog on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Pinterest. (You don’t have to be on all the social media networks; pick the ones that are best for you.) Share content and engage with your audience to help grow a following for your travel blog.

After your blog is started, you can think about ways to help monetize it. That might include selling advertising, affiliate marketing relationships, selling guides, or sponsored posts. It’s also important that you understand rules and regulations related to blogging, such as disclosing sponsored content and adhering to copyright laws.

Then, set a publishing schedule to keep your readers engaged and returning for more content. Remember that blogging is a long game, and it can take time to build a successful blog. Be patient, stay persistent, and continually improve your content and strategies.

Travel blogging is a competitive space; having a unique voice and niche is crucial. Be authentic and passionate about your travels; that will resonate with your audience and help your blog grow over time.

Elements to Include on Your Travel Website

Knowing what to put on your travel blog website is a key part of helping it grow. Kadence has a solid set of tools that you can use to find success.

Shelley Marmor of Travel Mexico Solo switched her blog’s theme to Kadence and began finding greater success online. Through both affiliate marketing and a successful advertising network, Shelley’s business focuses solely on building effective sites with Kadence.

You can listen to her experiences and learn about her travel blogging model on Episode 26 of The Kadence Beat Podcast. (We definitely think you’ll come away inspired.)

Once you are ready to build your travel blog and have selected a starter template, it’s time to put all of the pieces together. Kadence has all of these tools ready for you to use. You can browse starter templates to pick the one that has the look and feel you desire for your travel blog.

Almost every good travel blog incorporates some common design elements:

• Homepage with an attractive header image or slider showcasing your travel adventures and a brief introduction to your blog so readers know what to expect.
• An “About Me” page introducing yourself and your travel background. This is a good place to share why you started the blog and where your passion for travel came from.
• Include a photo of yourself and a contact form.
• Organize your blog by destination, creating separate pages or categories for different places you’ve visited. It’s a good idea to provide detailed guides, maps, travel itineraries, and tips for each destination.
• Regularly publish informative and engaging blog posts about your travel experiences that include practical tips, recommendations, and personal anecdotes.
• Create a resources or tools page where you list useful travel-related resources, such as packing checklists, things you learned, things you’ll need, and more.
• Share honest reviews of accommodations, restaurants, transportation options, and attractions. Use a rating system to help readers understand your recommendations.
• Encourage readers to subscribe to an email newsletter for updates, travel tips, and exclusive content.
• Display social media icons and links to your profiles for readers to follow you on various platforms.
• Enable comments on your blog posts to encourage interaction with readers. Only turn on comments if you plan to monitor and engage with readers in this way.
• Include a search bar to help readers find specific content on your blog easily.
• Include a privacy policy, terms of use, and a disclosure policy, especially if you plan to monetize your blog or work with sponsors.
• Provide clear contact information for readers to get in touch with you, whether through a contact form or email address.

Get Started with Kadence

Your travel blog is just a few clicks away with Kadence. Once you have a blogging plan in mind, you can start sharing your adventures with the world.

Plus, Kadence has plenty of starter templates that make it easy for you to build the web presence that’s right for you. (We really love the Travel Blog template as a starting point.)

A Kadence full bundle gives you everything you need to supercharge your site.