Landing pages are powerful tools usually made with one goal in mind – to make a conversion. These types of pages have the purpose of getting the viewers to focus on one specific objective and encourage them to take action by offering them a concrete solution – before they have a chance to click away. The final goal is usually to make a profit by turning casual visitors into actual, paying customers or clients, or reach whatever other business bottom line. So, no matter if you offer a digital or physical product, a webinar, a free demo of any sort, or something else entirely, you should consider using a landing page to achieve your marketing-oriented goals.

Now, as in many other cases of content marketing, the basis of every converting landing page is a persuasive and well-written copy. Namely, if the copy you produce doesn’t manage to incite users to take the desired action, this can be detrimental to your conversion rate.

Of course, the design of your landing page matters a great deal, too. Using appropriate images and colors, adding your logo, emphasizing your headline and CTA – all this serves to enhance the visual identity of your brand and highlight the copy itself. The design and the page copy are inherently connected, so making sure that they work well together is vital for the success of your conversions.

This time around, however, we’ve decided to focus on the ways in which you can take care of the landing page copy in particular. So without further ado, here are some useful writing tips that will help you generate a compelling and actionable copy for your landing page and skyrocket your conversions:

Do Not Use AI

It’s a bit awkward having to stress this, but a surprising amount of copywriters and content editors rely a bit too much on AI chatbots and other tools for writing website copy. Ever since the big breakthrough of ChatGPT in 2022, starting the so-called “AI boom” we’ve been witnessing a surge in writing assistants like Jasper, Gemini, Copy.ai, Writesonic and others, most of which appear or promise to be useful in writing landing page and other web copy.

AI tools can be good for some purposes: for instance, there are several ways in which bloggers can use and benefit from AI, from research to proofreading and beyond. AI can be used for generating text to video, and they can make solid chatbot plugins for WordPress. There’s a lot you can do with AI tools but writing landing page copy is not one of them. Or, at least, it really shouldn’t be.

The landing page is an extremely important asset for conversion, brand identity, SEO and UX. It’s your crucial piece of material for reaching your target audiences and getting them to perform the desired action. It’s also vital for expanding the reach, for establishing trust and sending a clear and unique message. You definitely don’t want to entrust this sensitive and important task to a tool that starts every piece with “In today’s digital landscape…”

The main thing about using AI tools like ChatGPT successfully is to feed them the right prompts. However, even with the right prompts, they are highly likely to output extremely generic content, phrases that have been repeated so many times they are no longer perceived as messages, and unbacked claims. Since they’re pretty widely used, people are already getting a hang of what their copy sounds like, so it’s fairly easy to recognize that something has been written by AI. And if your landing page sounds and looks like it’s been AI-generated, what sort of impression is that supposed to make on the visitors? Not a very good one, for sure.

So, however tempted you get, do not use AI for your landing page copy. Just put in some effort and write your own and we promise it will be a thousand times better than anything a run-of-the-mill piece of AI could ever write.

Create an Attention-Grabbing Headline

As in many other types of online copy, headline is the key element of your landing page that can make or break your conversions. Since your headline is often the only thing the visitors will truly focus on when viewing a landing page, it can also be your only selling point. After all, the headline should represent your main message, in a way, which is all the more reason to take extra care when creating it.

While there are numerous ways in which you can generate a captivating headline (as well as many headline analyzer tools that can help you out), there are some general rules you should stick to for the best possible results. These include:

Of course, you can (and should, for that matter) also add a subheadline right underneath that will further support your headline’s main message. Here you can offer any additional info related to your offer. You can explain in more detail what the service or product does, as well list any other reason (or reasons) why they should use it in the first place.

Emphasize the Benefits in Your Copy

While it’s totally okay to mention the final “solution” your products or services may bring to users, we advise you to put extra focus on the actual benefits instead. What we mean by this is that people usually know what “solution” is. Therefore, if you ask us, you should focus on creating a landing page copy that is all about offering a strong value proposition to potential customers.

The best way to do this is to list and describe the benefits of your product or service clearly and explain exactly how they are valuable to your customers. Say that you’re offering food products meant to help people lose weight in a healthy way. The “solution” in this case would be “food products that help people lose weight”, but you can also emphasize all (or most) of the benefits of using your product. For example, you can mention that it will reduce the risk of getting certain diseases, help them get better sleep, get more energy, boost their immune system, and so on.

There are also multiple ways in which you can list the benefits of your offer. For example, you can include them by using quotes from your satisfied customers (more on that later), insert one of the most important benefits into your headline (like we mentioned in the beginning), and so on. You can even use a bulleted list if you want to be as concise as possible while providing all the important info at the same time – which brings us to our next point.

Be Concise

The truth is, people have no time to read every piece of content they find on the web in full detail – and the same applies to your landing pages. Most people want to get to the information fast, which is why many of them engage in so-called speed reading, or even scanning of the text to find its most important bits. For this reason, it’s always important to create scannable content, no matter if you’re writing for a blog post or a landing page copy.

The general rule of thumb would be to use clear, concise sentences when crafting the copy of your landing page. Try describing your product or service, as well as its benefits using fewer words that are easy to understand in general. If you want, you can also achieve this using the above-mentioned bulleted lists, for example.

Alternatively, you can mention only the most essential features of your product or service and then mention them more than once throughout your landing page (in your headline, in the CTA, etc.). By doing this, you ensure that the “scanners” don’t miss out on the important bits of your offer without throwing them off with too much info either.

Include Testimonials

When it comes to converting landing page copy, sometimes there’s no better way to present your offer than to let the customers do the talking. We suggest using customer testimonials in your landing page copy as they can help contribute to the credibility and value of your offer. This way, you have a chance to mention the most important aspects of your products and services while being genuine at the same time.

Testimonials, which are rather easy to add, especially if you use a testimonials plugin, can be presented in a form of a video or textual quote. They can come from your social media networks (like Twitter or Instagram), comments on your blog posts, and any other online interactions. You can place them as the centerpiece of your landing page (they can even be a part of your headline), below your headline and subheadline, or even at the bottom – your choices are practically limitless.

Add a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)

A Call to Action (or CTA) is a key element of every copy that has a goal to convert. A solid CTA helps ease the customer journey and contains a clear message that indicates what step you want them to take next. In fact, we’d go as far as to say that all your copy should be made with this message in mind, as making conversions is the main reason why you created a landing page in the first place. Do you want your visitors to buy a product from you, download an e-book, use your service, or simply want them to learn more about what you have to offer? Take your ultimate goal into consideration, and then create an actionable CTA in accordance with that.

Speaking of a converting call to action, you mustn’t forget to focus on the copy of the CTA button itself either. Namely, CTA buttons are among the first things that visitors notice when glancing upon a page, so make sure they contain a verb that suggests immediate action and clearly lets visitors know what you want them to do (like buy, download, etc.). You should also try creating a sense of urgency and encourage users to really click on that button by adding a word like “now” next to your action verb. Finally, don’t forget to design your CTA button in a way that will make it instantly visible on your page, as this can largely contribute to your conversions as well.

Use the Power of Statistics to Your Advantage

When it comes to creating a convincing landing page, numbers can make all the difference. We suggest that you provide statistics related to your offer, but do so in a way that will best resonate with your audience. Say that you have an environmentally-friendly product or service, for example. Instead of offering a percentage of reduced carbon emissions that can be achieved by using it, you can be even more specific by displaying the number of trees people can save if they use your products instead. By giving a more vivid mental description and combining it with a clear number, you can make your offer more relatable and can really inspire them to make a purchase.

Write for Humans

Maybe you’d think that this goes without saying, but some marketers actually forget this simple rule – write your landing page copy for humans, and not for machines. What we mean by that is that you should try and keep the tone in your copy as natural-sounding as possible. You can achieve this by avoiding any overly complicated language and aiming to write as you speak in your everyday life. Also, try using shorter sentences and don’t hesitate to throw in casual phrasing here and there. Using a conversational tone rather than a robotic one will definitely resonate better with your visitors and thus has the real potential to raise your conversions.

Conclusion

The goal behind every successful landing page is to lead the visitors and encourage them to take action in order to boost conversions and increase sales. And to do all that, producing a captivating landing page copy is crucial. So, go ahead – make sure to generate some killer headlines, properly emphasize the benefits of your offer, be as concise as possible, and don’t forget to include a clearly noticeable and actionable CTA. If you follow these principles, you will have much greater chances of turning those visitors into customers and making profit.

So you are a blogger and you have been at it for some time. You have spent precious time and effort thinking your content through. You have been publishing high-quality, polished content consistently, and visitors have started to flock to your website. What’s next? Well, you may be wondering if there is a way to make money blogging. And if you are, you’ve come to the right place.

The first thing you need to remember is this: there are no hard and fast rules. If there were, everybody would be making a living blogging, and we know from experience that it doesn’t happen. So we are not going to give you an ironclad checklist. Think of this list more as a toolbox, and use whichever tools seem the most appropriate to you. After all, food blogs and review blogs (to name but two) are not going to benefit from the same monetization strategy equally.

Here’s what we’ll be talking about:

The Direct Route: Paywalls and Donations

It is often said that the direct route is the best: if you want money from your blogging, you should ask for it. This section discusses the more straightforward ways of getting paid for your hard work.

Paywalls

The obvious way to monetize quality content is to sell it. The way to do it is to set up a paywall for your WordPress content. Paywalls are pretty straightforward: you pay or you don’t get to access the content.

The thing about them, though, is that visitors expect value for money: a lot of great online content is free, so asking for money will build up expectations. If people are paying for your content, they expect you to deliver, and to deliver exclusive, original, quality content.

Another downside of a paywall is that it will likely slow your website’s growth. A lot of your readers might get frustrated with a paywall, however little you charge, and just leave.

Bear this in mind though: keeping at least some of your new content free will keep your visitors coming. You don’t need to hide the entirety of your content behind a paywall – use the free stuff to hook them.

Donations and Tip Jars

If a paywall is not right for your website, though, perhaps you could solicit voluntary donations from your visitors. Appeal to their better nature in a way that is consistent with your brand, install a donations plugin or a tip jar plugin, and let your visitors show their appreciation of your fine work.

Advertising: How to Get Ahead

Advertising is a more circuitous approach to earning money from blogging. Here we will discuss some of the methods and best practices for online advertising.

Sponsored Posts and Reviews

The most direct way of earning money through advertising on your blog is probably to sell your blogging space. There may be a seller of service or product which might appeal to your visitors. If you are an authority in a certain niche, you may reach out to them, or they might reach out to you with an offer.

This goes double if you are running a review blog: a book review blogger might get free copies of books, a film review blogger might get invited to press screenings, while a cosmetics blogger might be sent samples, but that‘s more about saving money at best. If your blog has any clout, though, your unbiased opinion might be valued on its own, and you may get paid for an honest review.

You might also be offered money to write a positive or even negative review, but you should be very careful about that: your visitors might see through a disingenuous review and just stop coming. You might end up damaging your reputation and, ultimately, your bottom line.

You may also be wondering what to do if they don‘t reach out. The answer is simple: you may reach out to them. A simple, politely-worded email supplied with relevant statistics (visitor data, social media following, and the like) might get your foot in the door.

Be mindful of any advertising law which may apply: depending on your jurisdiction, this form of sponsorship might be forbidden or restricted, liable to compulsory disclaimers or similar limitations.

Ad Space

Another way you could earn money through advertising is very directly placing your ads on your website. There are several services which facilitate this, the most popular of which is Google Adsense. The advantage of using Google Adsense or a similar intermediary is that you don‘t have to do a great deal at all: simply designate some space on your website for ads and let others do all the work.

There are two distinct disadvantages to this: you get very little control over the kind of ads which appear on your website, for one, and the amount of money you earn is limited.

There is, however, another route to earning money through ads: sell ads directly. You could do it the hard way, setting up the banners and links yourself, or you could install an ad management plugin and make your life a whole lot easier.

You can choose between several payment models: a simple flat rate for hosting an ad on your website, a CPC (cost-per-click) model, where you earn money for each click, or a CPM (cost per thousand impressions), where you earn money per thousand of views for each ad. If you are going the direct route, you have the most options, but you have to do your own price negotiation, invoicing, and control, while if you are using a plugin, you will be limited by the plugin‘s capabilities.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the practice of recommending a product or service to your visitors and linking to it using tracking links, which let the seller know where their shoppers come from. By referring your visitors to sellers, you can earn a commission. There is a lot to learn about even the very basics of affiliate marketing before you start: the concept itself is simple, but the practice is, as usual, more complicated.

However, if you are new to this practice, you may be tempted to overdo it. If the product or service you are recommending is not consistent with your website style, you may appear like a shill rather than a blogger making a recommendation. Make sure your visitors know you are an affiliate, and concentrate on the products or services you use or would generally have no problem recommending.

Selling Goods: Books and Merch

Once you have made a name for yourself, your visitors might want to own a piece of you. In this section, we will walk you through some of the ways you might indulge them.

Setting Up Shop

You could earn money selling both physical and digital goods, but in each case you will need to set up an online store. The software we heartily endorse is WooCommerce: a comprehensive webstore solution with a fully functional free version. If that‘s the route you want to take, bear in mind that setting up WooCommerce will take some time and effort.

And then you need to think about possible tweaks which your store might need, such as getting your WooCommerce SEO right, creating enticing product images, integration with Facebook or Instagram shopping, to make the best possible use of your social following… The list goes on. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to make your WooCommerce store suit your brand and style.

Merch

Merch is not only a way for you to earn money, it is also a way for your visitors to show appreciation for your work, it is also a way for them to publicize being your fan, and potentially driving more of their friends and acquaintances your way.

You could go the easy way, and just slap your logo on some generic, no-name products: t-shirts, mugs, key chains, or you could invest some time and/or money in design and come up with cool branded products people would gladly use anyway – take it from this proud wearer of a Welcome to Night Vale necktie.

Either way, design is hard and prototyping may be expensive. You could try knocking out mockups and putting the issue to a vote by your visitors. That way, they get the merch they want, and you get more visitor engagement.

eBooks and Books

If you have created a lot of content which can be organized into a book, perhaps you can sell publishing rights for it. After all, this is how Allie Brosh (Hyperbole and a Half) and David Wong (Pointless Waste of Time, Cracked) got on people‘s bookshelves with Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened and John Dies at the End and This Book is Full of Spiders, respectively.

Book publishing is a whole different kettle of fish when compared to blogging, though, and the exact circumstances vary wildly from country to country, so we can‘t go into specifics here. If you are willing to sell an ebook of your blog posts yourself, though, there is an easy way to convert a blog into an ebook.

Selling Services: You Are Your Flagship Product

Your skills and knowledge may be of use to others, and they may be willing to pay for them. This section discusses some of the ways in which that can happen.

Guest Blogging

If you have succeeded in establishing yourself as an authority on a certain topic or a certain niche, you may be paid by other blogs and even mainstream media to produce guest posts for them. This goes double if you have a distinct style and may also have ancillary effects: other blogs‘ readers will learn about you and your blog, and you will have earned yourself some new visitors.

Freelance Services

An ancillary way to earn money is to sell your knowledge, expertise, and know-how in your field. Even if it‘s an informal field, some corporations and even individuals may be interested in your input as a proofreader or a fact-checker, or possibly long-term, as a coach or a consultant on a regular basis.

The best thing about this is that it requires very little investment, if any: simply set up a contact page (whether using the in-built solution your theme might have or by installing a contact form plugin), outline the kind of services you offer, and keep working on your public profile as a knowledgeable person.

Online Courses

There‘s a good chance some people will want to learn how to be successful bloggers themselves, and this is where you can go a little meta: you could set up an online course on blogging in general, or blogging in your particular area of interest.

There’s a lot to be said about creating an online course, and this is not the place to go into specifics. We will say that in order to make a convincing online course or workshop, you need to come up with a professional-looking lesson plan and a way to organize it: a learning management system, or LMS. Make sure your courses are informative, well organized, and professionally produced.

Webinars

While similar to an online course, a webinar is a live online event. Your visitors might want access to a lecture by you, or a panel of all the contributors to your blog and you can set up a payment avenue to it. Those visitors who appreciate direct contact might be willing to pay for it, but a webinar audience typically expects some level of interaction.

There are plenty of webinar tools for you to choose from, but if you are not prepared to at least field some questions from your audience, maybe they are not a good fit for you.

Being a Pundit

Similarly, if you are viewed as an expert, even unofficially, by the online community at large, you may be approached to appear in other media: on radio, television, and podcasts, or invited to contribute an article to a newspaper.

You could also leverage your online following to get public speaking jobs: conferences, especially conferences which specialize in your areas of interest, may need speakers and lecturers.

Bear one thing in mind, though: about everybody thinks that, if they can talk, they can also speak, and about everybody is wrong about that. Speaking in public, be it for the media or at conferences, is much harder.

In order to even get these gigs, not only do you need to be knowledgeable and available, you also need to be personable, good at networking, and at least a decent speaker.

How Long Does It Take to Make Money Blogging?

A common mistake that a lot of people make is thinking blogging can immediately substitute a “real” job. Sure, blogging can be a real job, a full-time one, but that’s not something you can expect to happen overnight. So, if you’re thinking of starting blogging for a living, make sure to keep your day job, too, at least in the beginning.

A common mistake that a lot of people make is thinking blogging can immediately substitute a “real” job. Sure, blogging can be a real job, a full-time one, but that’s not something you can expect to happen overnight. So, if you’re thinking of starting blogging for a living, make sure to keep your day job, too, at least in the beginning.

Some bloggers prefer to wait until they have a considerable audience to start selling products or services. This is logical thinking, but you may also want to consider selling something small and relatively cheap to the audience you already have. Experiment with that a bit and, if nothing, you’ll at least save yourself from the pressure of having to reach a certain target number before you start selling. Plus, it will be a good way to test not just your product but your website, too, and to tweak it as needed.

How to Create a Blog That Earns Money?

The quality of your writing, your services and whatever you’re selling is important. It’s also important to develop a good and strong ad strategy or find the right affiliate partners. But don’t think for a second that the way your blog is structured, laid out, organized and designed doesn’t matter.

If you’re using WordPress to power your blog, your best bet is probably to get one of the specialized premium blogging themes. Why is this important? Well, you want your blog to work well and to look appealing to your visitors, don’t you? You want your pages to be readable, user-friendly, and uncluttered, with cleverly displayed taxonomies (categories and tags), related posts, social media links, and everything else. You may also want to have an elegant way to display author info, add contact forms, terms and conditions, and everything else. Well, all the best WordPress themes come equipped with all these functionalities, and, ideally, are designed in a way that supports your blogging style.

Now, if you’re only just starting and working on a budget, there are some excellent free themes you can use that can fare just fine against the premium ones. The Qi Theme, for instance, is a wonderfully designed and feature-rich theme with plenty of free demos designed specifically for blogging. With a well-designed, lightweight and practical theme (and a couple of plugins for extra functionality), you can easily set up a blog that your visitors will enjoy returning to, and spending a dollar or two while they’re there.

In Conclusion

As you can see, there is no shortage of paths money can take to find its way to a consistent, popular blogger. Some of these methods, such as ads and tip jars, can be used by anyone, while others, such as webinars and other paid gigs, depend on your blogging clout: your blog needs to be popular and influential for you to make them work. It‘s the getting there that‘s the hardest bit, though, with staying there probably being the second hardest. Still, we feel we have provided you with a substantial toolkit which will help you make money blogging no matter the size of your operation and your following.

What does your local ma-and-pa store have in common with a high-end e-commerce website? Both can use search engines to drum up business. For the online store, the good-old search engine optimization is there to make sure it appears as close as possible to the top of the first page of search results. And the ma-and-pa store can use local SEO to increase sales.

For many, however, this thing called local SEO is still a bit of a mystery. Search engines have been working on localized query results for over fifteen years, but the local SEO field has only recently started to blow up. Now, it’s slowly becoming the norm for any type of business that offers services in a certain geographical area.

In this article, we’ll show you:

What Is Local SEO?

In the simplest terms, local search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your business’ online assets so that it ranks well in search results that answer a query with a local component. When someone is looking for a hairdresser in the area where you have a salon, you want your business name to be the first thing they see. Local SEO should help with that.

The thing that makes this kind of searching so important is the fact that it’s highly effective at bringing people through the door of brick-and-mortar businesses. One of the reasons is because people who search for things locally tend to present qualified traffic.

A lot of searches for local things happen from mobile devices, and they don’t always include a geographic term as much as the term “near me.” So, you have people who are probably on the go, looking for nearby shops that sell things that they want. It would be hard to find a stronger indicator of purchase intent than that.

The numbers might vary, but most would say that at least seven out of ten local searches end with an in-store visit. That’s the power of local search and the reason why, ever since Google’s 2014 Pigeon update, which focused on improving local search results, businesses have increasingly been relying on local optimization.

How Does It Work?

Local search results work a bit differently than regular search results. The way they are presented might vary slightly between different search engines, but there are certain similarities you can notice.

For example, the results are grouped in a pack that appears at the top of the results page. Google’s users will see three results underneath a map showing the business’ location. Bing’s users will see the same, but with five results.

Here’s how it looks on the respective search engines for the search terms “hairdresser near me” and “hairdresser nearby.”

These aren’t the only results the user can get. Businesses should work towards appearing in this “snack pack” of search results because it increases their visibility, but they can still appear in the results when the viewer presses “view all” or “see more results.”

This time, the map becomes bigger, and there are more results visible. Click on one of the results will show a plethora of information about the business in question. This information includes name, ratings, address, working hours, contact information, website address, images, and user reviews.

From your end, local search results work in a way that has you register your business with the search engine’s business directory of the equivalent and then provide as much information about it as possible.

That’s the short version, at least, because providing all that information includes getting users to review your business, have it listed on business directories, and do lots of other optimization stuff. For starters, however, let’s see how you can claim your business in the search engine’s business service.

Claiming Your Business Listing on Search Engines

This type of search engine optimization works without a website because it relies on the search engines’ business listing type of service. You can think about it almost like a social network for businesses where everything revolves around creating a good profile.

For Google, this service is called Google My Business. For Bing, it’s called Bing Places for Business. Either way, your local SEO journey starts with claiming your business there. Here’s how you can do it on Google.

Go to google.com/business, and click on the Manage Now button.

You’ll be asked to find and manage your business. If this is the first time you’re making the profile, you can go ahead and click on the blue hyperlink that says “Add your business to Google.”

The next couple of steps will guide you through providing the necessary information for creating a listing. First, you’ll be asked to provide the name of your business. Next, you’ll be able to choose the category your business belongs to, whether you want to add a physical location or not, the address, the location on the map, optional phone number, and website, and that’s it! You might be asked to verify your business. That should be enough to get your website online – but you shouldn’t do it just yet.

Before you decide to go online, you should go to Google My Business and check out the Info option in the dashboard. It will list all the information available about your business.

Among the information you can add, you’ll find highlights, accessibility options, amenities, business descriptions, and photos. Some of the options you can find here are the same ones you can choose from the dashboard. For example, you can choose Photos from the dashboard and there you’ll be able to add photos including a cover photo, logo, photos of the interior and exterior of your business, and even your team members.

The bottom line is that you should check out all of these options and fill them out with as much information as you can. Every bit of information you can add here matters a lot. Once you’ve finished, you’ll be able to get your listing online. That’s great news, but that won’t be nearly enough.

Claim Your Business Wherever It’s Possible

Your next step should be, of course, to go through the same process on Bing Places for Business. It doesn’t matter if you think that no one uses Bing – the whole idea is to have your business information appear in as many online directories as possible, and you can consider Bing Places for Business as one.

From there, you can head over to real online directories such as Foursquare and Apple Maps, and claim your business in those places, too. Next, you’ll want to head to Yelp and other review websites and claim your business there as well. Every place where your business name appears with your business’ information is a citation, and the more of these you have, the better. Plus, it will make it easier for people to find you.

Does your business use social media? No? Well, what are you waiting for? It’s possible to create a Facebook Business Page, just as it’s possible to create a listing on other networks such as Twitter or LinkedIn. Make the most out of these. If you don’t plan to use them, at least provide the relevant information and keep it up to date.

Handle Reviews

You want your website to have reviews. Google will use its reviews, but any review your business can have online will count. You should run a campaign for people who’ve used your business to leave reviews.

A campaign doesn’t have to be as complex as it sounds – you can simply print out a QR code linking to your website’s listing on a review website, put it somewhere near the cash register, and just ask people to leave a review if they have the time.

You might want to skip asking people who don’t look like they would give a decent review – this might be cheating a bit, but it’s really important to have as many good reviews as possible. Of course, consistently providing a good user experience might be the best way to ensure that the reviews you get are good. If you do get a bad review, you should reply to it. It’s review management 101, so make sure you follow all of the best practices.

Just so you know, your ideal review should be well-written and positive. It should also contain keywords and references to your business’ location.

Optimize Your Website

When you’re optimizing your website for local search – or building it from scratch to rank it for local search results – you don’t do things too differently from when you’re optimizing or building a regular website. You’ll still create a homepage, add metadata, and research keywords – you’ll just do it so that they include local terms or queries people in your area might have. Let’s see some examples where you should focus your attention.

The Homepage

When a visitor comes to your homepage, it shouldn’t take them more than a couple of seconds to figure out who you are, what you have to offer, and where you’re located. Google’s crawler isn’t exactly the regular website visitor, but you should still provide them the same information.

Your homepage has tags and meta descriptions that should be edited to include terms that can identify your business’ location. That can be, for example, the name of the city. In a big city, it can also be the name of the part of the city where the business is located. If it helps Google understand which area the business is located in, it could go in the homepage’s tags and descriptions.

Metadata

If you’re updating the title tags and metadata on your homepage, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do it on every other page you have on your website. The data might differ from one page to another, but the general rule is the same for all of it.

Good SEO practices state that you should have keywords in the metadata. For local optimization, you should ensure that you also include terms that denote your business’ location – the name of the city, county, neighborhood, whatever you want to focus on.

Keywords

You will, of course, have to research relevant keywords for your website – whether you plan to optimize it for local search or not. However, if you’re researching locally-relevant keywords, you’ll have to research with a twist.

While you’re using Google AdWords, Ahrefs, Google autocomplete, and even Craigslist to find out what words people are using to search for stuff, make sure that you always focus on searches that happen on a local level. So, either narrow down the search to a specific geographic area, if your resource allows it, or include a toponym of your choice in the keywords you’re looking for.

Content

The content you create for your website should always include the keywords that are relevant to the area where your business is located or where you offer a service or sell a product. You can achieve this, for example, by including plenty of local geographical terms in the content.

However, if you want to create good local content, and catch the eye of someone who’d want to maybe link to it, you might want to adopt another strategy. Instead of creating content you optimize for local search by using local keywords, you should create locally relevant content. Find topics that matter to the people who live in the area and cover them in your content.

Website Structure

As a business owner, you don’t have to limit yourself to a single area. Sure, proximity is one of the key factors for appearing in the snack pack of search results, but that has nothing to do with how you do your business. If you’re a plumber in a big city, you don’t have to focus on providing a service in a two-mile radius around your location. You’ll venture to other parts of the town, too.

The trick is to have a separate page for every part of the city where you can go – whether it’s a borough, a neighborhood, or however the city is divided. Then optimize the page specifically with keywords and metadata for that specific sub-location.

Add the LocalBusiness Schema

Using LocalBusiness schema, you can make sure that a search engine has the right understanding of all the elements on your page and that it knows how to display them so that people can read them. This is what you get by using schema markup on your website, and it can be incredibly helpful to users.

The LocalBusiness schema contains the properties that are relevant to local businesses. Google will require you to add only a handful such as an URL, physical address, and name of the business. You can also include anything from geographic coordinates to menus, working hours, contact information, and reviews. If you’re not sure how to get started with it, Google has made a tool to help with that, as well as a tool to test your page after you’ve added the code you’ve created with the markup helper.

Consider Local SEO Tools

A lot of processes in setting up local search engine optimization can be streamlined with the right tools.

For instance, Yoast has a handy Local SEO plugin designed to help brands reach more local customers. The basic Yoast plugin doesn’t have these specific features out of the box, but if you combine it with a specialized plugin, it can help you grow your local customer base quickly. The plugin organizes the data that’s relevant for local visibility on Google, such as business name, address, opening hours etc, by using Schema markup. This sort of structured data sends direct information to Google and it does so for each of your pages – not just your contact page. The plugin also takes care of the technical SEO and helps you optimize Google listings for all your locations, in case you have more than one.

When it comes to local SEO, keywords are particularly important. Now, you can do keyword research by yourself and follow the keyword density guidelines, but you can also consider using SEO Keyword Hound, a tool designed for optimizing your keywords. You can use it for competitor analysis, create keyword lists and track their performance through crucial metrics like impressions, clicks, CTR, etc. The best thing about this plugin is that it suggests a range of keywords to target in order to maximize your reach and visibility. The plugin itself is not designed specifically for local SEO but if you use location as part of your keywords and instruct the plugin to include it, it will work just like any specialized local SEO solution.

If you’re on a budget, there’s a great free plugin that can help your local SEO. Five Star Business Profile & Schema creates a detailed business card with all your information and structures it in Schema. You can add the business card as a Gutenberg block or a shortcode anywhere you like, and the plugin will make sure Schema is applied so that Google can pick up the information.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

When you’re optimizing a website for local SEO, you should understand that some circumstances will be out of your hands. The proximity of the searcher, for example, is a strong ranking factor and you have no control over it whatsoever.

But the things you can do, you should do diligently. Fill out as many listings for your website as possible. Always be on the lookout for comments, and ready to reply. And make sure that you produce content the locals would find interesting.

Content is surely one of the best tools you have in your toolset as a WordPress website administrator. There are just so many different things you can do with it – improve your website’s performance in search engines, attract visitors in content marketing, or even use it as a placeholder during theme or plugin development. You can also bring the level of personalization of your website to a whole new level, and that’s the exact thing you’d do with WordPress dynamic content.

Still, you could be forgiven for not knowing what dynamic content is, let alone why it matters to a WordPress website and what are some of the ways to implement it. Even at a time when personalization is a term routinely used in mainstream conversations, dynamic content can still sound a bit strange.

That’s why we’re here right now – to clear things up, and make sure that you walk away from this article knowing a whole lot more about dynamic content than you knew when you started reading it. So sit back and get ready to learn:

What Is Dynamic Content?

You probably understand what’s the difference between something static and something dynamic. Static things don’t move, and they don’t change. Dynamic things can move, and they can change. When it comes to content, however, the dynamic qualities are more concerned with specific types of change than with movement. Dynamic content is a type of content that adapts to the person viewing it or their actions.

Dynamic content, or website elements that are built on the same principles, is fairly easy to come across online. You can use conditional logic for your website menu to make sure that only users who are logged in can see certain pages in the website navigation. It’s also customary to use conditional logic when creating forms, to display appropriate form fields based on previous choices and answers. That’s the gist of dynamics, the way it’s used when talking about WordPress dynamic content.

You should also know that elements that exhibit movement don’t necessarily qualify for the label “dynamic.” A carousel containing blog posts, for example, might be interactive in the sense that users can browse it. It won’t be dynamic, however, until its contents – the blog posts it displays – are altered by visitors’ actions or preferences. If the carousel displays blog posts that match the keywords contained in the visitors’ last search on your website, for example, you’ll have a dynamic carousel.

The places where you can see dynamic content include:

Dynamic content relies on certain traits and conditions to change what it’s displaying and to whom. Some of the traits that can be used in dynamic content creation include geographic location, age, interests, and preferences. As for the conditions, behavior is always a good choice – anything from the products in the cart to the type of browser they’re using can be used in dynamic content display.

What Are the Benefits of Using Dynamic Content?

The main benefit of using dynamic content on your WordPress website is that it aids greatly in website personalization. Using dynamic content, you can make sure that you’re serving your users just the kind of content they’d like to see – whether it’s an article that would appeal to them, a product that matches their interest, or a service you offer only in their neighborhood.

The applications of this type of content, as well as the possible ways it affects your website and its success, are many. You can, for example, use dynamic content on a landing page, and set it to show different content to people who are located in different locations. This can be extremely useful if you want to point out store locations in their area, for example.

You can use dynamic content to drive more sales on your website in several ways. One is to demonstrate to existing customers that you know them well and that you’re willing to make using your website even easier and more pleasant through custom recommendations or even just small things like displaying greeting messages that call the user by their name. This way, dynamic content improves customer retention, and a loyal customer is a spending customer.

For blogs, dynamic content can ensure that the visitor gets recommended the content that’s most relevant to them. This practice can improve a host of metrics, including time spent on site, decrease bounce rates, and overall make your blog much more appealing to your monetization partner.

How to Add Dynamic Content in WordPress

Now that you know what dynamic content is, and why it’s such a great idea to have it on your website, let’s see how you can go about creating dynamic content in WordPress. Right off the bat, you should know that you’ll have to use a plugin if you want to add dynamic content to your WordPress website. While there are some dynamic blocks in WordPress, they are only dynamic in the sense that their contents can update without having to reload the page.

One of the most common choices for creating dynamic content is Elementor, a popular website builder for WordPress. Elementor is great because it integrates well with other popular dynamic content plugins such as Toolset. You will, however, have to consider getting the pro version of Elementor, as it’s the one that will serve your purposes best if you want to create dynamic content.

You can also just use Toolset for its own Gutenberg blocks – the conditional block, for example, lets you display contents based on user role or the status of a custom field. JetEngine is another plugin that helps with dynamic content – it works with or without Elementor, and it provides decent dynamic content options. You can use its dynamic functions, tags, and visibility to create anything from profile pages to listings. If you want to get conditional with the content on your website, then the If-So Dynamic Content Personalization plugin is the perfect choice for you, as it lets you set conditions as triggers for displaying a different version of content – dynamic content at its finest.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

The internet has long been a very crowded place, which means that you can never have enough tools to look for new website visitors or make the existing ones stay for longer and come back again. Dynamic content, and the level of personalization it can bring to your website, can help you with both. You’ll just need to invest the time to set it all up, but once you do, you just might be thanking yourself for making that choice.

The key to attracting the right type of audience to your website or blog lies not only in writing high-quality posts, but also in making sure that every piece of content you create has a suitable, catchy, and powerful title. After all, more often than not, the title is the first thing people see when it comes to your content. Therefore, if your titles aren’t attractive enough for people to click on your articles, then all the hard work you put into writing the actual content will be in vain. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to master the art of producing catchy titles. While many people resort to using headline analyzer tools for help, there are also other things and techniques you can do on your own to improve the quality of your headlines – and this is exactly where power words come into play.

Therefore, we are going to use this opportunity to talk more about what power words are and how they can benefit your site. In addition, we are going to mention some of the most commonly used types of power words in content marketing in general – regardless of a specific niche or industry you might be in. Without further ado, here goes:

What Are Power Words?

Simply put, power words represent meaningful and carefully-chosen words (or sometimes entire phrases) used to elicit different types of responses, or rather, different emotions out of those reading them. These emotions can range from anything like happiness, curiosity, and motivation all the way to fear, sadness, and even anger.

Generally speaking, these words are meant to get people to take a certain action such as clicking on an article, subscribing to a newsletter, buying a product, or subscribing to a service. As such, power words can be used in all spheres of digital marketing, including social media, email marketing, and of course, content marketing as a whole.

What Are the Benefits of Using Power Words?

Due to their ability to influence the way users act, it’s safe to say that there are many benefits to using power words in your content marketing strategy. This includes using power words in your titles (or headlines) as well as in other areas of content marketing.

For example, captivating email subjects have a huge potential to boost email open rates, while previously mentioned headlines can greatly improve your traffic and increase click-through rates in SERPs. A compelling call-to-action on a landing page can help motivate a user to become your customer. This can do wonders for your conversions and ultimately, only lead to more sales. In short, not only can power words allow you to have better rankings on Google and boost your SEO in general, but they can also bring you more clients and allow you to have bigger profit in the long run.

It is precisely due to all these reasons that copywriters and other marketers use the reach and influence of power words to encourage people to do what they want them to.

Different Types of Power Words

Now, there are many different ways in which you can classify power words. But for this article, we’ve created a list of five different types of power words you should look into or at least be aware of, regardless of your business type and your marketing end goal. Each type serves to provoke a specific kind of emotion from the person viewing them, which is exactly what we took into account while categorizing them.

Encouragement Words

Sometimes, all people need is a little push to make them go forward – and some words of encouragement can do wonders when it comes to influencing how they feel and behave. Encouraging words can help people feel better, they can get them to feel inspired and even drive them to take a specific action. Here are some of the most noteworthy encouragement power words you can use in your headlines:

A headline example that features encouragement words:

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Trust Words

As their name suggests, these power words evoke trust in people. Trust words should make people feel like they can rely on you and believe in things you say and should allow them to feel secure if they get involved with anything that your business offers – be it a product, a service, or even a simple how-to article. Use some of these words in your headlines to make your audience (or potential customers) trust you more:

A title example featuring trust words:

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Fear Words

Fear is undoubtedly one of the most powerful emotions there is. It is precisely why plenty of news channels incorporate many fear words into their reports. They do this to ensure that your attention is effectively drawn to their news and that you don’t miss out on any significant updates in the future.

Here are some fear words you can use that can evoke strong emotions in people:

Here’s an example of a fear word when used in a title:

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Anger Words

You’d be surprised how effective anger can be when used in a positive and inspiring way. If implemented properly, this powerful emotion can do a whole lot of good – inspire people to advocate for a worthy cause, like contribute to a charity or do anything else that has a goal of seeing a positive change in our society or environment. Here are some power words you can use to ignite anger and inspire your audience to take a certain action:

Here’s an example:

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Curiosity Words

Curiosity is a natural impulse that many humans have. When intrigued, people simply can’t resist the need to find out more about a specific subject – and some words and phrases can get your audience to do just that.

Check them out:

An example of a title with a curiosity phrase:

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Wrapping Things Up

Whether your end goal is to get people to click on that Buy button, or if you simply want to get more traffic and gain brand authority in your field, power words can help you go a long way. They can make people feel certain emotions, help trigger their curiosity, and eventually, encourage them to take a specific action. There are tons of different types of words and word classifications you can use for any goal, and the list of power words and phrases we’ve mentioned above is far from the ultimate one. Still, we think that these should be more than enough for a good head-start. And if you plan to find words that would be more fitting with your brand’s tone and overall business goals, we suggest that you look into online dictionaries like Thesaurus or Synonym.com for more inspiration.

In 2024, just a couple of short years away, it will be the porcelain anniversary of the year when Google first overtook Yahoo as the most used search engine in the world. What has happened since then is the history every Google user has had a role in shaping, and that in turn shaped lives, fortunes, and whole industries. No one is more keenly aware of this than publishers and website owners, and for them, terms such as “keyword clustering” are one in the line of things they had to adapt or adjust to.

And what a line it is. Over the years, Google’s been in the business of coming up with widely popular products and services like there’s no tomorrow. Third-party developers have helped, too. You can use Google Analytics for your website, for example, or monetize it with Google AdSense. Integrating features such as Google Translate, or even Google Search, are also options.

As for playing well with Google, techniques such as optimizing the site for Core Web Vitals are a possibility, but so are endless things you can do with keywords. From researching keywords to avoiding keyword cannibalization and even ranking for misspelled keywords – there are so many things you can do to improve your website’s performance on Google. Keyword clustering is one of them.

In this article, we’ll cover the topics related to it, including:

What Is Keyword Clustering

At its very core, keyword clustering is nothing more than pooling together similar keywords into groups. The keywords that are grouped usually have something in common – they form a cluster that shares a certain theme or topic. Such a group of keywords should signal to search engines that the page containing them could be a good answer for a search query.

Another way of explaining keyword clustering would be to say that it’s a process of grouping keywords according to the search intent they represent.

Whenever someone uses a search engine, they want to achieve something. Over the years, search engines – and Google especially – have become better at understanding what that intent is and serving the results that match it. In the process, they’ve moved on from looking at a couple of specific keywords to creating a more holistic understanding of the text. Keyword clustering takes that fact into account and lets you target all those keywords simultaneously.

Why Does Keyword Clustering Matter

Keyword clustering isn’t the easiest or quickest way to include keywords into your website’s search engine optimization. It’s much easier to simply find a small number of keywords and hyper-focus the efforts on them. However, you might be disappointed with the results you get if you choose the quick and easy approach to keywords.

Using keyword clustering as part of your content creation and optimization strategy might be the more resource-intensive choice, but it’s also the more rewarding one. Some of the benefits you can get from using keyword clustering include:

Keyword clustering, as you can see, can give you as much as you want to take from it. Whether you want to use it just to improve your keyword game, or to restructure your whole website and make it more intuitive and topic-centric, it’s completely up to you. What’s important is that keyword clustering gives you that choice, which is something that can’t be said for the simpler approach to keywords.

Also, you should keep in mind that this approach to keywords is more in line with the way search engines have been evolving. The old way of doing keyword optimization, with focusing on just a few of them, is on its way out. Using keyword clusters and employing them in the creation of topic clusters and pillar pages are the new best practices.

How to Create Keyword Clusters

Now that you know what keyword clusters are and why they should matter, let’s see how you would go about creating a few of them. Later on, we’ll also delve into some of the ways you can put the keyword clusters you come up with to good use. First, we’ll need to talk about creating them, and that starts with keyword research.

Create a List of Keywords

Because keyword clustering is an advanced keyword operation, prepare to gather a larger number of keywords. Just how many will depend on the industry, the topics, and access to research tools. You shouldn’t be surprised if the number goes into the thousands.

Instead of using any one of the tools you regularly use to research keywords, consider using all of them. You can:

Chances are you won’t have too much trouble coming up with a very long list of keywords. There are lots of different tools you can use – any research tool or SEO tool you have access to might be of use for you at this phase. So gather all of your keywords and keyphrases, organize them, and get ready for the real work to begin.

So let’s say that the base keyword you want to find clusters for is “peanut butter.” Putting it through all those tools will give you a sizable list of related keywords. Here’s how Google’s Keyword Planner does it.

Most of them will let you download a table containing the keywords and the applicable data. Gather all the tables and get ready to do some merging and editing.

Sort Keywords into Groups

When it comes to sorting keywords into groups, there are two approaches – doing it manually or using different tools for it. As you might guess, manual sorting and analysis are the more labor-intensive of the two.

If you decide to go down this route, your goal would be to make a list of keywords and group them into clusters. This being SEO, you’ll want to make sure that your clusters:

You’ll probably want to merge all the keyword files you have into a single one. Next, you need to identify keyword modifiers around which you can form a cluster. Within the peanut butter search results, we noticed that some terms repeat more than once – terms like “keto” and “health.” We built clusters around the instances that included those terms, and copied them into a separate file.

Whether you’ll go through one term at a time and assign it to a cluster or use the magic of spreadsheets and math to find the best possible combinations of the most commonly used terms is up to you. If you don’t want to deal with the math, the tools that can help you include:

You should know that these tools often come with a price tag. However, the hours of work they can save you means that it’s very likely that they’ll pay off. Alternatively, you can also use the Keyword Planner’s Grouped view to get some ideas for keyword groupings. This tool works best during the research phase, however.

Topic Clusters and Other Ways to Use Keyword Groups

When you have identified the keywords clusters that answer the questions your audience likes to ask the most, you can start devising the content plan around those clusters. You’ll probably notice that some clusters have things in common and could be further grouped into topic clusters.

You can use that hierarchy to create a structure for your website. In the middle of every topic cluster, you can place a piece of pillar content – often a long and exceptionally produced piece of content that can target a shocking amount of keywords and phrases. That piece of content is surrounded by smaller satellite pieces of content – usually blog posts – you can use to focus more on certain topics, build up internal linking, and generally explore the various aspects of the topic.

The great thing about keyword clusters is that it’s very likely to give you ideas for content you never knew you needed. You should also note that keyword clusters don’t have to be used only for content. Since the Keyword Planner allows easy keyword grouping, it’s pretty obvious what’s Google Ads’ opinion on using keyword groups to get paid traffic. If you plan to create a new ad campaign, consider using keyword groupings for it.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

When it comes to using keywords to get better placement in search engine results, keyword clustering is the way to go. Keyword clusters and topic clusters are much more likely to provide you with decent search engine performance, granted that you do the keyword grouping right. So whether you choose to do it manually, with limited help from the SEO tools you already use, or using special research and grouping tools, make sure you’re happy with the results and get ready to implement them in your content or PPC marketing strategy.

Back in the day when the phrase “content is king” was coined, it’s hard to believe that people were aware of just how big this thing we call content would become. Still, with time, we’ve seen the definition of content expand to include everything from the posts you liked on Instagram, to your favorite podcast or that show you binge-watched over the weekend. Content is everywhere, and everything either is or has the potential to become, content. Everyone is a content creator, too, and this proliferation of user-generated content hasn’t escaped the attention of marketers. And so, user-generated content marketing came into being.

If you’re looking to dive into this exciting subsection of content marketing and learn how to benefit from user-generated content in an effective yet responsible way, you’re in the right place. We’ll try to cover as much ground as possible in this article, helping you get all the information you need about user-generated content.

So stick around, and get ready to learn:

What Is User Generated Content?

At its simplest, user-generated content is the content created by regular folks – not brands, publishers, or professional creators – that gets released online, usually on social media. When you log in to your favorite social networks, all the things you see your friends, family, and other people you follow create, can fall under the umbrella of user-generated content. If you shop at an online store and notice they use testimonials, or even if you check out the Yelp reviews embedded on a restaurant’s site, you’re looking at user-generated content.

Usually, user-generated content comes in two main forms – visual and textual. The visual content users generate includes photos, videos, vlogs, even graphics and images designed by users. The textual content are all the testimonials, reviews, comments, and even social media posts created by users. Users can create audio content, too, and it can still count as user-generated content, but you’ll have a tough time finding it.

In the broadest sense, any content that’s created by people who are users rather than publishers or professional content creators is user-generated. If you view it as a publisher, business, or brand owner, user-generated content is only the content that can serve a purpose for your brand or business. The way content marketing usually works is that the entity partaking in it creates the content. When they decide to use content created by unaffiliated third parties, content marketing morphs into user-generated content marketing.

Why Include User-Generated Content into a Marketing Strategy?

One of the main reasons why marketers, or anyone engaging in marketing for that matter, need to create marketing strategies is to ensure the purposefulness and effectiveness of every activity. Marketing requires resources, be they time, money, or labor, and you should know what you stand to gain before you choose to use any single technique, channel, or production method, in your campaign.

It’s not that hard to see the reasons to include user-generated content in a marketing strategy. It has an obvious unique selling point as it removes the burden of content creation from you. The savings from not having to invest resources into content can be all the reason you need to give user-generated content a place in your strategy. But user-generated content has more to offer. Lots more.

A Great Kind of Social Proof

There’s nothing like content created by regular people to give other regular people both the permission and reassurance to do something. The fact of the matter is that people trust other people, and they seek out examples and opinions before they decide on an action such as buying a product or subscribing to a service.

Social proof is one of the key concepts in the multidisciplinary field of neuromarketing, which aims to explain the unconscious drivers behind our economic decisions. While in the analog age people would rely on the ones in their nearest vicinity for social proof, in the digital age the circle of possible influences is much broader. This is why content such as testimonials and product and service reviews are so valuable – they have the power to affect purchase decisions.

An Air of Authenticity

Professionally produced brand content will always look a bit fake, no matter how much you try to make sure it doesn’t. It will look staged because, frankly, it often is. It needs to be, too – it’s much better to have content that reeks of over-production than content that looks like it was under-produced.

With user-generated content, people don’t expect the same level of production quality. We’re fine with seeing the content we’d be able to produce ourselves – that’s a huge part of the charm. It’s what makes user-generated content authentic, and one of the few marketing methods that can impart some of that authenticity onto the brand.

Boost to Loyalty and Engagement

On its own, the content people create for their social networks does not affect how they see your brand. That changes when you decide to use the content for your business or your brand. At that point, you engage with the user who created the content, give them acknowledgement for the content they create and increase the reach of their content.

The use of user-generated content sends plenty of signals to all of the other users. These signals work together to boost your trustworthiness, but also to inspire loyalty in users who will appreciate the fact that you feature other users’ content. If you launch a campaign to encourage people’s content-generating efforts, you can also expect them to engage with your business more.

A Myriad of Possible Applications

User-generated content integrates easily into all sorts of different campaigns. It lends itself to achieving all sorts of goals, and it works well with the latest eCommerce trends and methods. It’s just versatile and malleable.

You can, for example, put user-generated content to serve in social shopping. If you connected Instagram to WooCommerce, this can come in handy for you. On the other hand, you can create a content-generating contest that increases your business’ reach. You can do all of that just to foster a community around your product or service.

How to Find User-Generated Content

User-generated content is everywhere. Social media is brimming with it, as are video hosting platforms, all sorts of message boards, review websites, and comment sections. Having too many choices isn’t always a good thing – you can have a hard time finding a good place to start picking them over, and even then, you can be seduced into mindless scrolling by the sense that there’s always a better piece of content out there, waiting for you.

If you want to be effective at finding user-generated content, you need to approach the search strategically. You should know what to look for where, as well as how to entice people to do some of the work for you and send in submissions. Here are a couple of things you might try.

Look at Social Media for Brand-Appropriate Content

You can’t avoid looking at social media for brand-appropriate user-generated content, but you can make sure that you look in the right places, using the right tools. Identifying people who are loyal to your brand and have had some interactions with it already will give you a solid pool of user-generated content creators to look through.

You could also use hashtags to find specific content that matches your needs. Better yet, employ a branded hashtag to make the process even quicker and easier. Just remember that casting a wide net might give you the most results to search from, but it will also eat up most of your time. Strive towards balance.

Check With Your Employees

Some employees might be brand ambassadors in the waiting. Others might not even have a presence on social networks. You should identify the former and consider leaving the latter be, unless having a social media presence is in the job description.

Using content created by employees as user-generated content is a great way to humanize your business. At the very least, you can consider using their favorite content for the “meet the team” page on your website.

Launch a Content-Generating Campaign

Why not create a campaign to let your fans or customers know that you’re looking for user-generated content? These campaigns are often fun, have the potential to become viral, and they’re incredibly cost-effective.

Social media is perfect for content-generating campaigns, and it gives you plenty of awesome tools to help you out. You can, for example, center a campaign around a branded hashtag, an image filter, or an even more elaborate tool users can use in content creation. Because you set the rules, campaigns can also help you gain control over the type of content that’s sent your way.

Scour Comment Sections and Review Websites

Even if you’re not a huge fan of comments and you’ve decided to disable them on your website, you can still have more than a few venues where you can look for reviews, testimonials, or other similar user-created content.

First things first, however – you need to make sure that you claim your business on Yelp, Google My Business, and the like. You can also create a list of sites likely to contain user activity that could relate to you, such as message boards or social media groups. From there, it’s just a matter of time or your willingness to dig before you come across something usable.

Leave the Door Open for Submissions

Sure, you can enable comments. But how about enabling comments with images, instead? It might mean a little extra work for your website’s admin, but it can prove to be a valuable source of user-created content.

Having an open-door policy when it comes to submissions is great, but you must make sure to advertise it and create the proper submission channels. Whether it’s email, instant messages, or a form on your website, you can simply set it and forget it – until the content starts coming in.

How to Integrate User-Generated Content in Your Strategy

So, you have all the user-generated content you can ever need – now what? You can just start posting the content like there’s no tomorrow, flooding all of your channels with it, dole out the content like it’s free, which in the case of user-generated content – it probably is.

You can also approach your treasure trove of cost-effective marketing content with a bit more forethought and spend it rationally. Either way, you’ll need to find the right way to integrate the content into your strategy.

Share the Content on Your Social Platforms

The most obvious way to integrate user-generated content into your content marketing efforts would be to simply share the content on channels. You can either use the network’s share functionality or simply repost content. Before you do so, make sure to:

Keep these tips in mind and have a good legal adviser to ensure you don’t break any copyright regulations. Then again, that’s advice you should heed whenever dealing with other people’s content.

Repurpose the Content for Your Advertising Materials

Whether you want to display the content on live events, make it the center of your next advertising campaign, or use it on your website, user-generated content can be just the right spice for otherwise bland assets.

Again, you should really make sure you have permission to use the content in the specific way you plan to use it. Testimonials might not come with tricky legalities, but images do – you might end up having to purchase the rights to display an image if you want to use it widely.

Make the User-Generated Content Shoppable

Social commerce is a trend, so why not bank on it? Since user-generated content is great for nudging people towards deciding to buy whatever you’re selling, why not make it easy to purchase what they want at that exact moment?

You can do that with user-generated content. Again, you should be sure that you have your back covered legally when using third-party content to sell products so directly.

Best Practices, Tips, and Challenges

Like with any other marketing strategy or activity, user-generated content is easier to mess up than do right. Still, this shouldn’t discourage you – it just means you have to learn about the best practices, common issues, and tips.

Always Take Care of the Legal Side

We’ve said it before, and we don’t mind repeating it – make sure you clear the rights for any piece of content that requires it. You can work with legal counsels to that end, or use software to help you out, it doesn’t matter – just make sure you have the legal right you need before posting any content.

Asking for permission is mandatory, and any request for credits has to be fulfilled if you plan to release the content. Those two are the very basic forms of courtesy, and they might not cover you completely.

Go in Knowing What You’re Looking For

Trying to find a piece of content without knowing what you’re looking for is like going shopping without a list – sure you can find what you wanted, but you might come home with plenty of things you didn’t want. Only in the case of user-generated content, the price you pay isn’t money. It’s time.

Let the Audience in on It, Too

When you know what kind of content you need, you should also let the people following you on social media know. If you have any guidelines that could help them have their content featured on your site or social channels, make sure to point them out clearly.

Work Towards Turning Customers into Brand Advocates

People who will spread the word about your brand diligently and effectively are incredibly valuable to you, as they can set the fires of word-to-mouth and help your business immeasurably. You can use user-generated content to develop a relationship with the most dedicated fans who wouldn’t mind becoming brand advocates.

Consider Building a Community

A content-generating campaign can have a beneficial side-effect in allowing you to sow the seeds of a community around your brands. It’s up to you to decide how much you want to invest into it, but you should strongly consider it as communities have plenty of benefits.

Have a Plan in Place for Dry Spells

There’ll be times when good user-generated content is hard to come by. You might want to have a campaign as your ace in the sleeve for that situation. Collaborations or even periods of rest are good alternatives during dry spells.

Use Channel Appropriate Practices

Every channel has the things that make it special, and it’s these things that can give you a hard time because every channel will have its specific practices. So whether it’s going live on Facebook or making sure the user-generated content you post on Instagram meets your channel’s visual theme and style – don’t forget to honor the channel-specific practices.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

User-generated content is an incredibly beneficial type of content you can easily integrate into your overall marketing strategy. Many of the biggest brands choose to do so because the benefits are clear – from the low cost to the community-building, and serving as social proof.

Still, you have to make sure that you play by the rules and use the content you get from users well. So always ask before you take, and never say “no” to providing full credit. Be prepared to seek additional legal advice if needed. The content you take, make sure you to the best possible use, from using it on appropriate channels to using it for an appropriate purpose.

Your website traffic most likely comes from fans of your content: people who’ve heard of your website, visited it, liked the kind of content you are hosting, and keep turning up for more. All you need to do is provide them with more to keep them coming.

But you don’t need to keep creating content from scratch to keep your blog fresh. You could invest in repurposing some of your old content, and this is what this article is all about. But why repurpose your content? And what is reusable content in the first place? We will be answering these questions before we get into the meat of the matter. If you feel you already know all you need to know about reusable content in general, please scroll right down to the section which piques your interest.

Here’s what we’ll be talking about:

Why Repurpose Your Content

The first reason why you should repurpose your content is time: while content drives people to your website, content creation takes time, and repurposing some of your older material means you’ve done part of the job in advance.

However, saving time is not the only advantage of repurposing your older content. You can improve your website’s SEO by optimizing older content for different keywords, you can reach more people by packaging, presenting and distributing your content differently, and, finally, you will be reinforcing your website’s authority with search engines and your brand authority with visitors.

Find Your Most Popular and Your Evergreen Content

Not all of your old content is fit for a new purpose, though, so the first step towards repurposing your content is to find the content you can use. This will likely be your evergreen content – the content which stays relevant for a long time – and your most popular content – the kind of content which keeps attracting visitors long after it had been published, or which had a large number of visitors when it was published.

And while there is a lot to be said about creating evergreen content (which you can learn from the article linked above), determining which of your content is the most popular is easy in comparison: simply use an analytics tool and get your stats.

Make Lists

The most obvious thing you can do to repurpose your reusable content is to organize it into lists. As you create content, you will need to organize it better in order to access it, and the way to do it is using categories and tags. Use these to bring some of your older content to your visitors’ attention.

While you can display your most popular tags or your most popular posts as a widget, you could also make use of your well-organized content to create a particular kind of article: the listicle. With or without the use of tags, you can sort your content into related topics, write about them, and link to the articles themselves.

Are you running a food blog, for instance? Why not create list articles based around a theme or an ingredient or season? A good example would be something like Top 10 Vegetarian Barbecue Recipes, or 5 One-Pot Dishes to Keep You Warm. For a fashion blog, you could be directing your visitors to Top 10 Summer Dresses of 2021, or maybe 5 Worst Fashion Don’ts We Actually Used to Like. A film review website could present a list of best films of the previous decade, a shop blog might compile a list of top sellers. The list of potential lists goes on.

Consider Old Blog Posts a Source for Other Posts

Rereading some of your earlier content may spark ideas for new posts. Maybe you have changed your mind about an important topic and want to debate the past you, or maybe the circumstances have changed and new technological or political realities (for instance) require a fresh look. This way, your old content can be seen in a new light, while also providing you with the opportunity to reuse old research, saving time and effort.

Find New Ways of Presenting Data

Text posts are all well and good, but perhaps there are ways of presenting some of them in a different, more visual way. If you have already conducted quantitative research before writing an article, why not present the data itself as part of an infographic? The infographic can become its own post, and also more likely to be shared on social media.

The same goes for their more boring cousins, the instructographics, only they do more than just present data using colourful and striking visualization techniques: they offer visual aids to how-tos. You can use these visuals to accompany your tutorials or posts, or you can use them as special posts or images to share on social media.

You should also bear in mind that social media are more than just Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (though these are perhaps the most influential): for best results, optimize your graphics for Pinterest, and consider creating slideshows and posting them on Slideshare.

Refresh Older Posts

As we have already mentioned, there is an advantage to having done a lot of research beforehand: you can update one of your older posts with new data, if such data has been published, or bring it up to date by introducing more or newer images and changing the layout of the article, perhaps by splitting a longer post into multiple pages or making improvements to its structure.

Repost Older Posts on Social Media

The fact that your post has been online for some time does not mean that all of its potential readers are aware of it. So long as it is relevant or topical you can bring it to the attention of your social following by reposting it. Your social following changes from time to time, after all: you may have gained new social followers who might appreciate an older post. Just figure out a good time to post on social media.

You can also use a large blog post to break it up into more social media-friendly chunks and repost the best bits of your older content that way.

Use Testimonials on Social Media

The content you post does not even need to come from you or your contributors: your visitors may have already provided you with some. You can use visitor testimonials to set up a testimonials widget for your website or you can use your visitors’ comments as testimonials on your social media accounts.

This way, your social followers will see what your frequent readers have found interesting, useful or funny about a post of yours they read – testimonials make for great peer recommendations.

Use Comments to Create an FAQ

Just as described above, your visitors may have provided you with some useful content, even if they didn’t find your website completely to their liking. You can use their inquiries, comments, and reviews to address and inform your website design and content creation strategy, but if you see a problem or issue persists, you could use it to create an FAQ section for your website. This way, you can use what at first appears to be a problem to your advantage.

Email Older Posts

If you have created an email newsletter, you can use your older posts as part of its content, and even include links to related posts or the original post itself. One significant advantage of feeding your older, but relevant content to your newsletter subscribers is that you give them an additional opportunity to read your post without negatively affecting your SEO through duplicate content.

Create Interactive Quizzes

One of the ways you can increase the time your visitors spend on your website and improve their user experience is to introduce an interactive feature. Using a WordPress Quiz Plugin, you can create a simple (or complex) interactive quiz to entertain and engage your visitors – and all the information they need for a top score is already contained within your older posts. Accompany a link to each on the answers page, and interested readers will have an easy time learning more.

Create an Ebook

Not all your visitors might be interested in accessing your content in blog form, especially if they have issues with poor internet connections. You can furnish them with an ebook of your best content, or even content selected according to a theme or topic.

Create a Podcast or Video

We understand it is easy to suggest you create a whole different avenue of distributing your content, but, to be fair, creating a podcast or shooting and producing video is probably more accessible now than it had ever been. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to make a podcast or a video series look and sound professional, and professional software isn’t cheap (though free podcasting plugins and free video editing software do exist), but you have one thing going for you: a selection of well-researched topics.

Use Podcast Transcripts as Posts

Looking at the previous section in reverse, there is a way to reuse your podcasts or video as text posts. Whether you do your transcription yourself or you employ a transcription service, there is a wealth of quality textual content to be gained. Your podcast transcript posts can then form part of years’ best lists, ebooks and other forms of repurposed content.

Repurpose Your Videos for Instagram and TikTok

In case you have ventured into video production, you may end up with a lot of long-form content. Sure, that’s great for YouTube, but many online video consumers stick to short-form content on Instagram and TikTok. Sure, it’s very hard to provide comprehensive information on complex issues within the timeframes TikTok and Instagram video-watchers are used to, but that makes them great for trailers and soundbites. If you can provide your TikTok and Instagram followers with interesting and exciting short videos, you improve our brand’s presence and authority, and some of them are bound to find their way to your website for the full versions of your content.

Offer Guest Contributions

Finally, if you have established yourself as an authority on a topic, you may be asked to write a guest post – or you may even reach out to another website offering cooperation. Your name alone and the author description of “Editor of So-And-So.com”, for instance, may drive visitors to your website, but, with permission of your new host, you can also link to some choice pieces in your guest posts yourself.

In Conclusion

As you can see, there is a broad gamut of ways your existing content may be reusable. Some of them require only a little effort, others, such as podcasting and video, may even require material investment. Either way, you should not neglect a way of making the most of your content if you can make it work for you.

When creating a website, we typically focus on content strategy, design, and all those things that directly influence the website’s success. Creating legal pages for websites  is usually not so exciting but demands just as much attention. It’s easy to fall into the trap of considering legal pages as a pure formality, and this trap can lead to serious problems. Sloppy legal pages are like a time bomb on your website, you would be surprised how easily you can end up with a lawsuit or worse just because you were not informed about the rules.

In this article, we will go through all the must-have legal pages for any kind of WordPress website. Before we dive into the topic, let’s just make sure you understand why these pages are so important.

Stay tuned to learn more about:

Why You Need to Have Legal Pages on Your Website

The simplest answer to why you need legal pages on your WordPress website is – to avoid costly lawsuits and hefty fines. However unlikely it may seem to you that you could end up in court for something you publish or fail to publish on your website, it is a real possibility and nowadays not even a rare case.

Generally speaking, the things you need to take into serious consideration are compliance with the law, your personal liability for the content you share, the protection of your intellectual rights, user privacy, and your website rules. There are certain types of legal pages for websites that help prevent legal breaches in these fields and/or help you mitigate the consequences of breaches.

For example, let’s say you are sharing weight loss tips on your website. You don’t want to get sued by someone who feels deceived because following your advice did not help them lose any weight. This kind of situation can be avoided simply by having a legal disclaimer. Another scenario may include someone exploiting your content on another website under their name without any consequences unless you have a proper Copyright Information page in place.

Some legal pages, like a Privacy Policy page, for example, are mandatory. Although not all legal pages are required by the law, most of them are necessary if you want to protect yourself from unfounded accusations, plagiarism, and similar types of issues.

Privacy Policy Page

The Privacy Policy page is required by the law in many countries. This policy addresses the issue of personal information protection and it is closely linked to the GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation that is applied in the EU with the aim to provide more effective personal data protection for the EU citizens. It is highly recommended to loom into the relationship between WordPress and GDPR to understand better how important it really is. A privacy policy informs your users about the kind of personal information you are collecting on your website as well as about how you are going to use the collected information. The logic behind this policy is that if a person shares their name, email address, credit card number, and similar personal information, they have the right to know how that information is going to be used and in what circumstances are you allowed to disclose it to third parties.

If you run a small blog or a website that does not imply too much interaction with visitors, you may believe that your website doesn’t collect personal information to an extent that could possibly cause a problem. That is a dangerously misleading belief as regardless of your website’s size and scope, the fact is every type of website collects plenty of personal information about its users through newsletter subscription, sales, SEO tools, Google Analytics, and in many other common ways.

While WordPress does come with a privacy policy draft that you can customize and use, the best advice anyone can give you is to consult a lawyer. Still, not everyone can afford a lawyer, and if you put in an effort and learn a bit more about the privacy policy and law on personal data protection, you have a fair chance of creating a good-enough privacy policy all by yourself.

There are many helpful resources that cover details about adding privacy policy to WordPress as well as what it should include. It is also a good idea to check how this page looks on other similar websites. Never copy it though. Resorting to some of the WordPress privacy policy generators is also a good solution in some cases, but always make sure you are well acquainted with what your privacy policy implies.

One very important factor to always keep in mind is that the laws are constantly being updated, so you should be aware of every change and ready to update your Privacy Policy accordingly.

Terms & Conditions Page

The terms of use or terms and conditions are your website rules and their main purpose is to protect your published content, your business, your rights, and obligations, as well as your users and the content they may post on your site.

The terms of use precisely define what your users can and can’t expect of you and what is expected of them. This document includes all the rules your users must accept if they want to continue using your website, services you provide through the website or to buy products on your website. Put in a bit more legal context, terms of use represent a contract between you and your users that defines the respective rights of the contracting parties.

Unlike the privacy policy that is absolutely mandatory and required by law for every website to have, the terms of use are not mandatory in a legal sense. But, in many countries, it is required by law to provide relevant information about your website (service, products, purpose) to users/consumers. The type of information you are typically obliged to disclose includes your business name and title, email address and other contact info, relevant product/service info, and similar. This is especially important if you are running an online store as the law on consumer protection also prescribes the obligation to inform and provide necessary information about your products/services through the site.

The issues that are often covered by the terms of use include permissions for using specific materials on your website, your right to terminate anyone’s use of your site, right to restrict spamming and distribution of abusive content, define intended age of your users, refund policy, and similar issues. You can include anything you find important for lawful and proper use of your website.

It is important to understand that just having terms of use on your website doesn’t have to make them legally binding. To make terms of use legally binding, you need to be very careful with the language you use and make the terms as precise and transparent as possible. The moment when these rules become legally binding is the moment your user accepts them. That is why you have to publish them on your website in the form of a clickwrap or browsewrap contract. A clickwrap contract involves the active participation of a user who is prompted to click the I Agree/I Accept button to continue using your website. The browsewrap contract implies that the user agrees to the terms and conditions simply by continuing to use the site.

Disclaimer Page

Although a variety of disclaimers can be included in the Terms of Use, it is very practical to have a separate Disclaimer page. The purpose of the disclaimer is to limit your liability by informing the users that all the content you share on your website does not constitute professional advice of any kind so that you can’t be held responsible for any consequences that may arise from someone relying on any information on your website. The logic behind the disclaimer is that you can not be held responsible for what your users decide to do with the information that you share on your website. If, for example, you share your experience of leaving your everyday job and earning money as an Oriflame Consultant and someone tries to follow your steps, but without the results you achieved, the disclaimer is what protects you in case that person sues you for not achieving the same results as you. Similar applies to cases where your consumer suffers from injury while using your products or products you recommend and to similar scenarios.

Although there are plenty of disclaimer templates to use, it is best to tailor it to match your specific niche and be as precise as possible. If, for example, you are running a health blog, you may need a medical disclaimer that could state that the information you share is not a replacement for therapy or medical advice of any kind. In case you are earning money from your website in whatever way, the Disclaimer page is the place to let your users know that.

Apart from the fact that a disclaimer can protect you from undesired sues and allegations, it can also significantly help you foster an honest and transparent relationship with your users.

Affiliate Disclaimer Page

The affiliate disclosure can be included within the Disclaimer page, but if a large part of your website is about affiliate marketing, it is better to have a separate Affiliate Disclosure or Affiliate Disclaimer page. This is the page where you disclose that you are promoting specific affiliate products. It should also be explained that you get a certain amount of money as a commission each time someone buys the affiliate product following the links on your website, and clearly state that the price of the product is in no way influenced by this. All the sponsorships, brand ambassador arrangements, affiliate relationships need to be disclosed in this way as the Law on Consumer Protection prescribes it in many countries. The purpose of this page is primarily to protect the consumer, but it nevertheless protects you too.

Copyright Information Page

There is no way to prevent anyone from copying your content, but there is a way to protect yourself if someone does it. That is essentially the purpose of the copyright notice. A copyright notice clearly states that all the content on your website including texts, images, logos, products, etc. is considered your intellectual property, which means it is protected by copyright and can’t be stolen, copied, reproduced, or misused in any way without legal consequences.

In case you want to allow some type of your content to be copied or used in some other way, this is also the place to state that and explain in which circumstances and under which conditions you allow such handling of your content. Though technically it can not prevent anyone from copying or stealing the content, a copyright notice with clearly stated legal consequences of content theft and misuse could prompt someone who intended to do such a thing to rethink their intention.

Comment Policy Page

The comment policy can be contained on the Terms and Conditions page. But, if your website implies a lot of interaction with your users, it is highly recommendable to have a separate Comment Policy page. This policy is very important as it sets the tone of the overall communication style that you want to foster on your website and therefore has a lot of impact on your brand image and identity.

You use the comment policy to regulate the kind of comments that are allowed on the website, as well as the kind of comments that are not desirable. You also have the freedom to decide and inform your users about the type of comments that will not be tolerated at all and the type of comments that can be deleted. Moreover, you can decide who is allowed to delete comments on your website, whether it is possible to place appeals for deleted comments, and so on. This policy gives you the chance to declare what kind of communication you expect from your users in a very precise and direct manner.

Children’s Online Privacy Protection Policy Page

In many countries, special attention is placed on laws that regulate children’s online safety. One such law is the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act or COPPA, whose purpose is to protect the privacy and personally-identifying information of children under the age of 13. This law prescribes rules on the use of data from and about children up to 13 years old and gives parents the ability to supervise and ban or approve some of the information their kids share. If your website’s target audience is kids, you need to be aware of the similar laws and regulations in your country and have an adequate policy up and running on your website. In this type of policy, you should clearly state the age limit that is required for the use of your website, explain how your website should be used, notify that parental consent is necessary for the website use, and also mention related restrictions.

Cookies Policy Page

You must have noticed how each time you visit a new website a popup is displayed asking you to accept cookies. Explained in an extremely simple way, web cookies are tiny pieces of data created by a web server and placed in the user’s device while she or he is browsing your website. If this sounds like cookies may have something to do with the privacy policy, that’s because they do, as a wide variety of personal information can be acquired through cookies. Naturally, you have to inform your users about that. The cookies policy is often included in the Privacy Policy page, but having a separate Cookies Policy page allows you to inform your users in a more structured manner. In some countries, this policy is required by the law on every website.

The information your cookies policy needs to include is about the kind of cookies you use on your website, the kind of data they collect, their purpose, how long they will be stored in the user’s browser as well as with whom the information collected through cookies can be shared and similar.

Refund and Returns Policy Page

In case you are selling any kind of products on your website, you are going to need a Refund Policy page too. This policy is often included on the Terms and Conditions page, but having it on a separate page makes it more easily accessible for customers and helps you establish a more trustworthy relationship.

In some countries, mostly in Europe, it is mandatory to offer refunds, and in some, it is up to you to decide. Whatever your decision is, you have to have it clearly stated in your refund and returns policy.

The Refund and Returns Policy page should include a time limit for accepting returns, who covers the return shipping expenses, what happens in case the goods are damaged, what is the time limit for processing returns, do you offer a refund in cash or in goods and similar details. Of course, it is in your interest to add as many details as possible so that both you and the customer know exactly what to expect in related situations.

How to Create Legal Pages

There are tons of both premium and free policy generators and templates, but the best advice is to always at least consult a lawyer unless you can hire one to craft all the necessary policies for you. If you can’t afford a professional, make sure to get thorough information on the details your policies need to include. It is absolutely unacceptable and very risky too, to just copy a policy from a similar website. However generic these pages may seem to you, they contain important information that needs to be taken seriously. If you decide to go for templates, either free or premium, make sure to adjust them to fit your needs.

In Conclusion

Establishing a trustful relationship with your users is one of the most important goals, no matter what type of website you run. Having neat and professionally crafted legal pages increases your credibility as a brand and makes your users feel safe, which is an absolute prerequisite for the success of any kind of blog or site. Apart from having these pages, another thing you can do to support trust is to make these pages visible and easily accessible by placing links to legal pages in your footer, sidebar, or anywhere you find adequate.

Whether you’re running a multi-author blog with a built-in WordPress user role system or you’re writing all your articles yourself, there are always ways in which you can put more effort and ensure the top-notch quality of your content. And setting up a minimum word count on your WordPress posts is a great way to do exactly that, and then some.

A minimum word count can:

And so, if you set up a minimum WordPress word count on your posts, you will push yourself (and/or your blogging staff) to work on those articles longer. By doing so, you will ensure that your content is more thorough in general and that it meets the high-quality standards needed to gain the recognition it deserves both from the readers and from the search engines.

This time around, we will show you how you can easily set a minimum word count on your WordPress site with the help of two different plugins. One will allow you to do this automatically, and you can use the other to set the minimum word count manually.

Setting a Minimum Word Count in WordPress With the PublishPress Checklists Plugin

The first plugin we will be using for these purposes is called PublishPress Checklists. Basically, this plugin will let you set certain tasks that you (or other authors on your blog) have to complete before your content can be published. Some of the options you can add with this plugin include the ability to set a minimum or a maximum WordPress word count, require the use of a featured image, get authors to use a certain number of categories or tags, and so on.

There is also a pro version of the PublishPress Checklists plugin available that comes with some additional features, such as the ability to set standards for your WooCommerce products. That being said, we will be using the free version of the plugin as it has all the features needed to set up a minimum word count on your articles.

After installing the plugin and activating it, head to the Checklists page located in your WordPress admin dashboard. Then, make sure to configure the option called “Number of words in content”.

Here, you should click on a dropdown from which you will be able to pick three different options – Disabled, Required, or Recommended.

Selecting Recommended will allow you to publish articles despite not meeting the minimum word count while selecting the Required makes sure that the minimum word count you set is obligatory to be able to publish a post. Therefore, you should choose the Required option.

You can also specify user roles in case you wish to make any exceptions to the minimum word count rule. To do this, just choose the option under the text that says “Who can ignore the task” and pick a user role.

Finally, you can specify the minimum word count number under the Options column (in the Min field).

Don’t forget to hit the Save Changes button (located at the bottom) once you’re done with configuring your options.

Once you’re done, you can head to Posts >> Add New to create your blog post. If your post doesn’t have the minimum number of words required, you will receive a warning message once you hit Publish.

After you write the minimum required number of words to your post, the message will disappear and you will be able to publish your post.

Setting a Minimum Word Count in WordPress Manually Using the Code Snippets Plugin

If you know how to code and prefer to set a minimum WordPress word count on your posts manually, you can always do this by adding a code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file. However, directly altering your theme files in this way always carries a certain risk of accidentally breaking your site. To avoid this, there is a plugin called Code Snippets that will provide you with an easier and safer way to add custom code to your WordPress site and set a minimum word count on your posts with ease.

After you install and activate the Code Snippets plugin, you need to access Snippets >> Add New located in your admin dashboard and insert the title for your snippet.

Then, you simply need to add this code into the Code field:

function minWord($content)
{
global $post;
$content = $post->post_content;
if (str_word_count($content) < 300)
wp_die( __('Error: your post doesn’t meet the minimum word count. It needs to be longer than 300 words.') );
}
add_action('publish_post', 'minWord');

You can change the minimum number of words from 300 to any other number you prefer and even modify the custom error message. Just be sure to edit the number in both places within the code.

Once you insert your code snippet into the Code area, you should hit the Save Changes and Activate button and you’ll be all set. Now, you will receive an error once you attempt to publish your post if it contains the number of words lower than the one you specified in your code snippet:

Conclusion

Aside from helping you explore your topics in more detail and offering more value to those reading your content, longer posts tend to generally do better in search rankings. Therefore, by setting a minimum word count on your articles, you will only help ensure a better quality of your posts and increase your chances of driving more valuable traffic to your blog. If you’re looking for an easy way to set up the minimum word count on your posts while also adjusting your settings for different user roles, we recommend using the PublishPress Checklists plugin for this task. On the other hand, if you know how to code, the Code Snippets plugin may be perfect for you as it allows you to easily and safely insert a code snippet without having to modify your theme’s files. Either way, just make sure to carefully follow the instructions we provided above, and you’ll have this useful feature set up on your WordPress blog in no time.