Happy New Course Day! Who’s excited?!
Today’s course is all about making your blog your own. Yep, I’m talking about branding! Can I get a woop woop?!
New Course: Branding Basics for Bloggers
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Whether you're brand new to food blogging or a seasoned pro, we're here to help you with proven tips and strategies for growing your blog. Here on the Food Blogger Pro blog, you'll learn about building traffic, food blog SEO, social media tips, and more. Keep an eye out for a new post every week!
New Course: HTML Basics for Bloggers
Happy New Course day! I’m super excited about this month’s new course. It’s brought to you by Yours Truly, and is going to be just the thing for all of you who run away screaming whenever anyone mentions “code.”
What could this course be? HTML Basics for Bloggers, of course!
Learning how to finagle with my website was one of the reasons I really loved blogging when I first started. It was so fun to figure out what everything meant, make changes, screw up occasionally (okay, a lot), and eventually learn what it all meant. But that was me… and I know that for a lot of you, the word “HTML” makes the hair raise up on the back of your neck.
New Course: Styling for Food Photography
It’s time to celebrate! Two reasons (from least to most important):
- Google just released its iPhone keyboard app, Gboard
- We have a new course on food styling!
Most of you probably aren’t as excited as I am about the new keyboard. It’s kind of lame how excited I am about it. It’s a keyboard, Raquel. Come on.
But, I think we can all agree on this: this new food styling course is super duper exciting. Let’s dive in!
If you’ve been taking photos for a while now, feel all set up with your camera, know how to use your artificial (or natural) lighting, and have a closet full of props, yet you feel like something is still missing… you’re at the right place.
Food styling is where all those individual elements come together to make a beautiful, well-rounded photograph that really jumps off the screen.
New Course: Understanding Ads
It’s time for a new course!! Woot woot!
This shiny new course is all about understanding ads. When you’re a new blogger (or one who’s just never gotten into using ads before), getting ads on your website can seem really confusing and difficult.
Terms like CPC, RMP, programmatic and viewability can leave you feeling jumbled before you even get to the part where you install the code on your website. It’s frustrating, to say the least!
In this course, Bjork takes a birds-eye look at what ads are and how you can use them on your website. He goes over all those confusing terms and explains them in words a regular person can understand. And then he shows how you can set up an "ad waterfall" on your website to make sure your ad slots are always getting filled.
New Course: Time Management
It’s new course day! And I can’t tell you how excited I am about today’s course because it is immediately applicable to problems that I am having right now.
Bjork didn’t even know this, but yesterday I had a bit of a meltdown because I was feeling like I just didn’t have enough time. Between sleeping (I need 8 hours), walking the dog 2–3 times per day, going to the gym, my “day job,” and feeding myself, I felt like I just didn’t have any time at all for my side projects.
So according to Bjork’s advice in this course, I’m going to hire someone to start feeding me so that I don’t have to do that myself.
Just kidding.
But really, finding enough time to do all of your things is hard enough. And when you finally do have some time to work on your food blog, it can be really easy to inadvertently waste some of that time doing other things that don’t matter as much.
New Course: Asana
It’s new course day! Woot woot!
I am so excited about this new course because I know it will be so helpful to those of you who feel strapped for time and overwhelmed (um, everyone?!).
Here at Food Blogger Pro, we use a tool called Asana to keep on top of all the things we have to do. And as you guys know, we try to keep things fresh around here, so we generally have A LOT to keep track of. So, we looked for a system that would connect all of us, yet let each of us manage our own tasks individually. And Asana was the answer!
But then, I realized that I could use Asana for my own personal stuff, and it got a lot cooler. I now use Asana for planning my editorial calendar for my blog, planning when I need to schedule out all my social media posts, and keeping track of things that I want to put in my "back pocket" – the things that I want to do some day but don’t have the time for right now.
A Sweet Pea Chef: A Food Blogger Pro Case Study
We recently received an email from long-time FBP members Dustin and Lacey Baier with a PDF blog post draft that Dustin wanted to share with us. In the email, he said,
"I was starting to write a post for A Sweet Pea Chef that was based off Food Blogger Pro – kind of a success story post. In part, because of the recent success we have seen and, in part, to be a good affiliate piece for Food Blogger Pro. Then I realized that, if I was in your shoes, I might want to use something like this as a case study on Food Blogger Pro or Pinch Of Yum."
Welp, we were definitely interested. We love to think that we help people here at Food Blogger Pro, but there’s nothing like hearing from bloggers who have found success through hard work, determination, and a tiny bit of help from FBP.
New Course: MailChimp
You guys!! This is so crazy. I just made a course here on Food Blogger Pro. Whattt!!!
I know you all are used to Bjork’s slow, steady, and confident voice as he guides you through the terrifying and confusing world that is starting a food blog, and Lindsay’s teacher-esque tone as she helps you find your ground with social media and photography.
So if you’re totally weirded out by listening to me talk during this course – so am I! But I hope you’re okay with it. I really enjoyed making this course, and I really hope you learn something from it.
Ok, so enough of that. What the heck is this course all about? Well, let me tell you:
MailChimp!
How to Show Conversions by Source in Google Analytics
If you’re thinking about getting serious with your food blog, then you should probably have some goals. As with everything else in life, goals help keep your blog on track and keep you moving forward. However, just having a goal often isn’t good enough. In order to make sure you meet your goals, you need to be able to track them.
Once you have your goals set up, you can look at all sorts of stats about them in your Analytics dashboard. From the total number of completions to the conversion rate (i.e. the percentage of people who completed the goal on your website), there is no shortage of information.
However, one thing that’s not super easy to visualize on a daily basis is what your conversion rate looks like from different sources. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to set up a GA dashboard to view your goal conversion rate by source.
How to Eliminate Google Analytics Spam
There has been quite a bit of chatter on the Food Blogger Pro Forum lately regarding Google Analytics and traffic spam. In fact, if I search "spam" in FBP I see 9 posts just in the month of May regarding spam referrals in Google Analytics. That’s a ton!
Because of the general concern regarding spam traffic in Google Analytics, I thought it would be helpful to do some digging and find out more about this spam traffic, what it means for your blog, and what you can do about it.
So what is spam in Google Analytics? Read on to find out!