How to Choose the Best Products to Sell Online (Beginner’s Guide)

You want to make extra money on the side, so you looked into several online business ideas and decided that creating an online store is the way to go.

The next step is where beginners often struggle the most: choosing which products to sell on your online store.

In this ultimate guide, we will explain how to easily choose the best products to sell online by following our step by step process.

1. Basics of Choosing Products to Sell on Your Ecommerce Store

Before you start looking into products that you can sell, there are some basics that you need to keep in mind. Let’s look at some of the most important ones first.

1. Choosing Your Ecommerce Platform

First you need to choose a platform that you want to use to sell your products.

Choosing the right eCommerce platform is important because it would affect your choice of products and how you do business.

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform in the world. It is easy to use, and you can use it to sell all kind of products while accepting payments using multiple payment gateways. See our guide on how to start an online store to get started with WooCommerce.

However, WooCommerce is not the only platform out there. There are some great WooCommerce alternatives that could be better for you depending on what you are trying to sell.

If you lack technical skills and want a quicker way to build an online store, then you may want to look into Shopify. It is a fully hosted solution that takes care of all the technical stuff. The catch here is that you will be paying a little more, and your costs will grow as you make more sales.

For a side by side comparison, see our article on Shopify vs WooCommerce with the pros and cons of both platforms.

2. Shipping

Shipping has a huge impact on the success of an eCommerce store. A study conducted by Business Insider discovered that higher shipping costs are the #1 cause of all abandoned shopping carts online.

You would obviously want to select products that you can ship at lower costs or for free. If you only plan to sell digital products (music, video, software, ebook, etc), then you don’t have to worry about shipping because the products will be downloaded by customers online.

3. Inventory

Do you want to manage inventory and keep products stocked? For that, you will need storage space and inventory management through your eCommerce software. Keeping products in stock will increase your cost of business.

On the other hand, drop-shipping solves this problem. You can select products that are shipped directly by the manufacturer or supplier.

4. Price

You’ll need to find products where you can offer a competitive price to your customers. If the product you are selling is more expensive than your competitors, then obviously that would discourage many first time buyers.

2. Types of Products That You Can Sell Easily

There are many different kinds of products that you can sell in your online store. Let’s narrow them down into two major sections.

1. Commoditized Products

These are products that everyone needs and are sold by many small and large stores without any difference in quality. For example, everyday products like soap, detergent, cereal, and more.

These products are made by some of the largest brands in the retail industry and are available widely with little to no difference in price.

This makes it harder for you to compete with giants like Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc. They can offer those products at lower costs, free shipping, and other perks.

This rules out a large number of products for you.

2. Niche Products

These are products that are unique or hand-made, available in limited stocks, and from specific suppliers. Think of home-made soaps, novelty t-shirts, ceramics, gift items, software, and countless other products.

Since these products are not widely available, they give you a competitive advantage.

There are even unique platforms like Etsy stores where you can find small vendors who make beautiful products and would love to partner up with other stores.

You can also find suppliers abroad using websites like AliExpress or Alibaba.com. These suppliers can make those niche products to your specifications and deliver them to you.

Niche products are available in almost any product category imaginable. You’ll find tons of unique ideas as you do your product research.

This brings us to our next tip.

3. Doing Product Research On Your Own

Don’t use your best guess to select products you sell online. Back it up with data so that you know there is a demand for these products and customers are looking for them.

The first tool you are going to use for your research is Amazon.

It is the world’s largest eCommerce store with thousands of products. Luckily, it is also a treasure trove of free data that you can scrap and make your decisions.

Go through different product categories to find out top performing products in each category. Keep narrowing down your search to sub-categories to find targeted sub-niches of products.

Let’s suppose you wanted to sell kid’s toys, narrow down your search to very specific toy categories. This excludes popular products, and you get a very focused set of products as you filter through.

Switch to the ‘Bestsellers’ view to find the top performing products on Amazon under each category.

SEMRush is another great tool that you can use to gather data from competitors or any eCommerce store you want.

It shows you where those eCommerce stores are getting most of their traffic, which products they are promoting through paid advertisements, what are their most viewed products, and more.

It also shows your competitor’s product listing ads from Google. You can see their best performing product listing ads, keywords, and other data.

Here are some other tools you can use to gather product data from other websites.

• Ahrefs – A powerful competitor research tool that will show what’s popular on the websites of your competitors.
• AdPlexity – A popular eCommerce research tool that helps you collect eCommerce data from across the web, from competitors, or any other website.
• AmazeOwl – It is an Amazon product reseach tool available as a free desktop application.

4. Use Customer Personas to Find Product Ideas

A customer persona is a fictional profile of an ideal customer that you want to target. You create this profile by answering simple questions about an ideal buyer.

This is your target audience and personifying them helps you understand them better when you are doing product research.

If you have an existing store, then you can use eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics to build an ideal buyer persona.

If you are just starting out, then use your best guess to build a customer persona. This exercise helps you understand your customer’s needs, questions they may have, and what kind of products they would like to buy.

To learn more about buyer persona, see this guide on creating a concrete buyer persona with ready-made templates and examples.

5. Find Products You are Passionate About

As career advisors say, ‘Choose a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life’.

Similarly, choosing products that you are passionate about helps you sell them more effectively.

These could be products that you personally love and passionately recommend to your family and friends. These could be products related to a hobby or activity that you are passionate about.

Nothing drives more passion when you build something useful and want others to use it.

Following your passion allows you to look deeply into products and find ideas that offer real value to your customers.

We hope this article helped you learn how to choose the best products to sell online. You may also want to see our article on tips to grow your business online without spending a lot of money.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Choose the Best Products to Sell Online (Beginner’s Guide) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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13 of the Most Interesting Vue UI Component Libraries for 2019

In this post, we cover some of the most interesting Vue UI component libraries that you should look into in 2019. They will certainly come in handy if you have a Vue application in the works!

from CodeinWP http://bit.ly/2Gd3egr
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Shopify vs WooCommerce – Which is the Better Platform? (Comparison)

Are you thinking of starting an online store? Not sure whether you should use Shopify or WooCommerce?

Shopify and WooCommerce are the two top eCommerce platforms in the world each with their own pros and cons.

As a business owner, choosing the right eCommerce platform that fits your business needs is crucial for your success.

In this guide, we will show you a detailed comparison of Shopify vs WooCommerce. The goal is to break down their advantages and disadvantages to help you choose the best option for your eCommerce store.

Since this is a detailed comparison of Shopify vs WooCommerce, here’s a quick table of content:

• Overview: WooCommerce vs Shopify
• What to look for in your eCommerce platform?
• Cost comparison
• Ease of usse comparison
• Payment methods
• Add-Ons comparison
• Dropshipping comparison
• Scalability comparison
• Support options
• Conclusion: WooCommerce vs Shopify – Which is better?

Overview: Shopify vs WooCommerce

Before we start with our in-depth comparison of the two most popular eCommerce platforms on the web, it’s important that we cover the basics and highlight what makes these platform stand out.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that makes it easy for you to create an online store, accept payments, and manage your inventory all from a single platform without ever worrying about the technical aspects of managing a website such as web hosting, security, caching, etc.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin built for WordPress. It allows you to leverage the most powerful content management system (CMS) and use it to run an online store. Because of the open-source nature, you can customize every aspect of your store and easily build custom extensions.

The decision to choose between the two platforms depend entirely on your needs and skill level.

What to Look for in Your eCommerce Platform?

There are few things that you absolutely need to keep in mind when starting an online store. These key factors will help you decide which platform is better suited for your needs.

• Budget – The initial cost of starting a fully functional ecommerce store.
• Ease of use – It should be easy to use even for absolute beginners.
• Payment Methods – It should have support for multiple payment methods (e.g. PayPal, Stripe, other merchant processors).
• Integrations – Number of services and third party tools you can integrate to grow your business.
• Scalability – The platform should be able to scale as your business grows.

These are the very basic requirements that all online store owners must consider. However, depending on your needs, you may also want to look at other options like shipping, inventory management, invoicing, taxes, dropshipping, etc.

Our goal with this article is to take an in-depth look at how Shopify and WooCommerce stand on these basic requirements, and which one of them is best suited for your needs.

Cost: Shopify vs WooCommerce

Cost is often the most important consideration for eCommerce website owners. You need to evaluate the cost of getting started while also keeping in mind the variable costs for add-on services and software.

The true cost of using Shopify

Shopify makes it super easy to start your online store. Their basic plan starts at $29 per month, and you can upgrade to the Shopify plan for $79 or the Advanced Shopify plan for $299 per month.

Each of these plans includes domain name, SSL certificate, and web hosting.

The basic plan comes with enough features to set up a new online store. You can add unlimited products, 2 user accounts, unlimited file storage, and more.

However, this pricing doesn’t include third-party tools and add-ons that you will need to take your Shopify store to the next level. As your business grows, these costs will start adding up, and you’ll soon be paying a lot more than the basic plan.

Payments are another factor that affects your costs. Shopify offers their own Shopify Payments solution which costs 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction.

If you want to use third-party payment gateways or your own merchant account, then you will be charged a flat fee of 2.0% for all transactions. You can reduce this fee to 0.5% by using the Shopify Advanced plan which costs $299 per month.

These payment processing fees are fairly steep when using external payment gateways. However, if you’re just starting out and want to use the Shopify payment solution, then the fees are fairly comparable to popular platforms like Stripe and Braintree.

The true cost of using WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress.org (also known as self-hosted WordPress). It is open source and freely available as a WordPress plugin.

However, you’ll need a domain name, SSL Certificate, and a WordPress hosting account to start a WooCommerce store.

Typically, a domain name costs $14.99, SSL Certificate costs $69.99, and web hosting around $7.99 / month. This is not cheap, particularly when you are just starting out.

Thankfully, there are several hosting companies who are now offering specialized WooCommerce hosting plans which significantly reduces the cost.

Bluehost, an official WordPress and WooCommerce recommended hosting provider, has agreed to offer our users a free domain name, free SSL certificate, and a discount on web hosting.

This will help you start your online store for as low as $6.95 / month.

→ Click here to Claim this Exclusive Bluehost offer ←

As you can see, the cost of starting a basic WooCommerce store is significantly lower than Shopify. WooCommerce also doesn’t charge you a percentage fee of your transactions which is a very nice perk.

But the WooCommerce costs start adding up as you purchase paid extensions. Your hosting costs will also increase as your online store grows.

However, one clear advantage of using WooCommerce is that you can often find free alternatives to the paid extensions. You can also keep your costs in control by only purchasing the tools and plugins as you need them.

With the number of free themes and free add-ons available for WooCommerce, it’s definitely the winner when it comes to cost.

Winner: WooCommerce

Ease of Use: Shopify vs WooCommerce

Most users starting an online store are not web designers or developers. Even users who are familiar with basic concepts need a platform that is easy to use and gets out of their way.

Let’s see how Shopify and WooCommerce stack up in terms of user-friendliness.

Shopify – Ease of Use

Shopify is a fully hosted platform which means you don’t need to install, manage, or update any software. You also don’t need to worry about security, performance, backups, and compatibility issues.

As soon as you sign up, it helps you pick a design for your website. After that, they walk you through customization and then help you add products.

Shopify comes with an intuitive drag and drop interface. Managing your products, sales, and inventory inside Shopify is a breeze.

One downside of this guided, polished, and highly optimized user experience is that it limits your control. You can only use the design and development tools provided by Shopify or add-ons available in their marketplace.

However, this is not as bad as it sounds. For most users, the large selection of extensions and themes available in Shopify, is more than enough to get started and grow your online store.

WooCommerce – Ease of Use

WooCommerce is not a hosted platform like Shopify. This means you will need to install WooCommerce, manage updates, keep backups, and make sure that your website is secure. There are plenty of free and paid plugins that can automate most of these tasks for you.

WooCommerce is super flexible when it comes to customizations. You have full control of the whole platform. You can add any functionality imaginable to your website with the help of more than 55,000+ WordPress plugins.

However, there is no built-in drag & drop design builder. You can use one of the WordPress page builders like Beaver Builder, but it adds to your cost.

The biggest downside of the flexibility is that it comes with a learning curve and requires a more hands-on management of your website. You also have to signup for a merchant account or similar service like Stripe / PayPal.

While the WooCommerce guided setup wizard is helpful, it does not come close to the onboarding and ease of use of Shopify.

Winner: Shopify

Payment Methods: Shopify vs WooCommerce

There are many payment gateways that you can use to accept payments online. Some payment methods may not be suitable for you, and others may not be available to your customers.

This is why it’s important that the platform you choose offers multiple payment options. Let’s take a look at how Shopify and WooCommerce compare when it comes to payment integrations.

Payment Options in Shopify

Shopify offers plenty of payment options that you can use to receive payments from customers. It has its own payments solution called Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe) as well as all popular third-party payment gateways.

The problem is that Shopify charges an extra 2% fees on each transaction made through third party payment gateways. This is on top of the transaction fees charged by the payment gateway. You can reduce the fee to 0.5% by paying $299 per month for Advanced Shopify plan.

Shopify Payments has flat credit card fees, but no other transaction fees. Credit card rates start from 2.9% + 30¢ for the basic plan and get lower for other plans.

Payment Options in WooCommerce

WooCommerce offers PayPal and Stripe payments by default. It also supports all other popular payment service providers through add-ons.

For payment gateways, WooCommerce even has support for many regional and less popular payment services. Since there is no barrier to entry, any payments company can create add-ons for WooCommerce and provide support for it.

As a self-hosted platform, you are only charged transaction fees by your payment gateway or your bank. WooCommerce never charges you a % fee on your store transactions which is a major plus.

If choosing your own merchant account and using a third-party gateway is important for you, then you will save A LOT of money by using WooCommerce. But if you’re a small store and willing to use Shopify Payments which has the same credit card rates as Stripe / Paypal, then it makes no difference.

Winner: Tie

Integrations and Add-ons: Shopify vs WooCommerce

No matter how robust an e-commerce platform is, you’ll always need third-party tools and services to grow your store. For example, an email marketing software, lead generation tool, analytics tools, outreach services, etc.

Both Shopify and WooCommerce have a massive extensions directory, and they integrate with many third-party services.

Shopify Add-ons and Integrations

Shopify comes with a powerful API and an App Store where you can buy third-party add-ons for your Shopify store. They have hundreds of apps in the store covering every feature you’ll want to add to your store.

For lead generation, they have integrations with software like OptinMonster which helps you grow your email list and reduce cart abandonment. They have apps for SEO, product reviews, discounts, countdowns, and more.

Shopify’s app store contains both free and paid apps. Free apps are usually created by third-party services that have their own pricing, and the app only integrates your store to their APIs. Pricing for paid add-ons varies and most apps offer monthly subscriptions.

WooCommerce Add-ons and Integrations

WooCommerce is open source and built on top of WordPress. This gives you access to more than 55,000 free WordPress plugins and many more paid plugins.

You can use these add-ons to add payment gateways, lead generation, SEO, performance optimization, and almost any feature you can think of.

Due to the low barrier of entry, there are a lot more integrations and add-ons available for WooCommerce than Shopify. Almost all third-party tools and service providers have their own plugins to seamlessly integrate with your WooCommerce store.

You can also hire a developer to create an integration or plugin just for your own website. However it’s important to keep in mind that WooCommerce is a lot easier to customize. Having personally gone through the process of submitting a plugin for WordPress and submitting an app to the Shopify store, we can say that the process is extremely harder on Shopify vs WooCommerce.

Winner: WooCommerce

Shopify vs WooCommerce Dropshipping

Dropshipping is an online business where an eCommerce store doesn’t keep the products in stock. Instead, it fullfills order by purchasing products from vendors and then shipping them directly to the customers.

Due to its low overhead, dropshipping has become popular around the world. Many of our users asked us to compare WooCommerce vs Shopify for dropshipping and which one of them is better for a dropshipping business.

Dropshipping with Shopify

When building a dropshipping business, the front-end of your website will look just like any online store. Your users will be able to browse the products, add them to cart, and make payment, just like they would do on any other eCommerce store.

Depending on the vendors you choose, you will then have to place user’s order for shipping.

Shopify also has integration apps for several popular dropshipping marketplaces like AliExpress, Oberlo, Printify, and more. However, each of these product marketplaces has their own membership fees, shipping, and other charges that you need to keep in mind when building your dropshipping website with Shopify.

Dropshipping with WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a popular choice among dropshipping businesses. Mainly because WooCommerce allows you to install extensions that make order fulfillment a breeze.

You can easily find extensions that allow you to instantly import products, fulfill orders from your website, and more. You can even create your own eCommerce marketplace allowing other vendors to sell on your website.

Keep in mind, that your supplier and vendor may have minimum order requirements, membership fees, and other charges. You need to keep those in mind when adding products to your WooCommerce dropshipping store.

Winner: WooCommerce

Scalability and Growth: Shopify vs WooCommerce

You have probably heard the term “growth-pains” from various CEOs. As your business grows, you will need more resources to handle new challenges and goals.

Shopify and WooCommerce can both be scaled to handle large amount of traffic and orders, but they’re not created equal. Let’s take a look at how these two eCommerce platform compare when it comes to scalability.

Scalability on Shopify

Shopify handles the technical parts of your store which means you don’t ever have to worry about performance, security, and scalability. Once your business starts growing, you can simply upgrade your Shopify plans.

Their infrastructure can easily handle your growing business without you having to worry about downtimes, backups, updates, or security. They also offer enterprise services as part of the Shopify Plus plan.

This takes out the painful part of the growth, but it also adds to your cost of business. Your expenses will grow, and you’ll have to plan accordingly.

The good part is that your costs will be offset by you not having to hire / manage a technical team in-house.

Scalability on WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform which makes you responsible for maintaining updates, backups, and security of your website.

Your starter WooCommerce hosting plan would run out of resources as your store starts getting more traffic.

The good part is that you have plenty of options to manage growth as you are in full control of your website. Starting with better management of resources with caching to upgrading your hosting plan to more powerful servers.

Your WooCommerce hosting costs will increase, but you will have better control on resources, and you can make sure that you are not paying for resources that you don’t need. You can use a managed WordPress hosting provider like WP Engine or LiquidWeb to help scale your WooCommerce store.

Despite the control that WooCommerce offers, some business owners simply prefer a hassle-free solution.

Winner: Shopify

Support Options for WooCommerce vs Shopify

Both WooCommerce and Shopify are quite easy to use. However, sometimes you may need help to learn how to do something new on your store.

Let’s see how WooCommerce and Shopify handle support and what are your options to get help when needed.

Support Options on Shopify

Shopify is a fully hosted platform, which means they control the software and they are the ones who know their platform the best.

Shopify provides 24/7 support via live chat, phone, email, and Twitter. For users who want to fix things on their own, Shopify offers extensive documentation, how-to guides, knowledge base, video tutorials, and forums.

It also maintains a directory of Shopify Experts that you can hire if you need extra help or if you want to integrate a third-party solution.

Shopify doesn’t provide support for any third-party apps or themes that you are using.

Support Options for WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the world’s most popular eCommerce platform, which means there are tons of support options that you can utilize when needed.

The official website has extensive documentation, tutorials, and guides that allow you to help yourself. They also have support forums where you can get help from other WooCommerce users and experts.

WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform, which means your hosting provider is responsible for providing support for issues with your server.

For your WooCommerce theme and extensions, those developers are responsible for answering support questions regarding their products.

Due to its immense popularity, it is quite easier and often cheaper to find developers to help you fix issues with your WooCommerce store. You can find developers on freelancing websites to fix WooCommerce issues.

Winner: Shopify

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which is the Best eCommerce Platform?

Shopify and WooCommerce are both powerful platforms to start your eCommerce store. It truly comes down to your personal skills and preferences.

Shopify is a lot easier to use. It doesn’t require you to install anything, and you can get started quickly. Setting up payments is easier, and they have easy to understand pricing plans.

The disadvantage of Shopify is that you don’t have full control over everything. Your costs can go high with transaction fees, add-ons, and integrations. Your upgrade options are limited to select plans, and you cannot manage costs on a pay-as-you-grow basis.

WooCommerce is open source and gives you full control of your website. It costs a lot lower to start an online store with WooCommerce specially with these WooCommerce hosting companies.

The disadvantage is that you’ll have to maintain the software. It comes with a bit of learning curve. However, millions of beginners are already using it, and they get over the learning phase quite quickly.

If you are looking for a cost-effective solution, and you want to have full control of your online store, then WooCommerce is the best platform for you.

If you want something that’s completely hassle-free that has infinite scalability, then Shopify is the better platform for you.

We hope this article helped you compare pros and cons of Shopify vs WooCommerce. You may also want to see our guide on how to choose the best website builder.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Shopify vs WooCommerce – Which is the Better Platform? (Comparison) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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The Comprehensive Guide to Ace Google Featured Snippets in 2019

Want to ace Google featured snippet?

Wondering what is it? 🤔

This is a featured snippet:

While most bloggers, SEOs, and digital marketers continue to optimize their sites with technical SEO, improve the quality of their content, and build backlinks from every nook and corner of the internet, they frequently overlook what’s staring them right in the face: the opportunity to get into Position 0 – Google’s answer box or featured snippet, as we know it.

What is the featured snippet?

According to Google

When a user asks a question in Google Search, we might show a search result in a special featured snippet block at the top of the search results page. This featured snippet block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, plus a link to the page, the page title and URL. It looks as shown in the screenshot above.

So why are featured snippets (Google’s rich answer box)  so important, how can they bring you more traffic, and how do you get your pages to pop up in these results?

Let me and try and explain!

What You Need to Know About Featured Snippets

Let’s quickly run through a few facts about featured snippets. These will help you understand the importance of getting some for your site.

1. Around 13% of all Google queries return featured snippets at the top of the results.

2. About 97% of featured snippets answer users’ questions correctly (Source: Stone Temple).

3. You see four types of featured snippets in the SERPs:

• Paragraph (text)
• List (numbered or bulleted)
• Table
• Video (from YouTube)

4. Voice search borrows its answers almost exclusively from featured snippets. In fact, more than 85% of Paragraph snippets result in voice answers (Source: Moz).

5. Over 99% of featured snippets are awarded to URLs that already rank on page 1 of Google for the keyword in question. 31% of those rank #1.

6. Pages that rank #1 for a keyword and earn a featured snippet get 28% of all clicks (as opposed to 26% when there is no featured snippet). When another site appears in the featured snippet, the URL below at #1 gets only 19% of the clicks (Source: Ahrefs).

7. More than 85% of featured snippets are triggered by long-tail keywords that have a monthly search volume of less than 100.

8. Google shows multiple options within certain featured snippets, allowing you to refine your query to get a more specific answer.

9. Some queries also return multiple (I haven’t seen more than two) featured snippets.

How to Optimize For Featured Snippet Appearances

There are a few factors that will drastically increase your chances of getting featured snippets, everything else being constant. Here’s a no-nonsense checklist that gets right down to business.

1. Target keywords with questions. Queries that start with question words like “what” or “why” return a paragraph snippet more than 90% of the time. Overall, questions show a 480% increase in the percentage of keywords with featured snippets.

2. Content in the range of 40 to 50 words has the best chance of showing up in an answer box (in the case of paragraph snippets). For example, the snippet for “backlinks” shown at the start of the post is 51 words long.

3. Google tends to truncate lists with more than 8 items in the snippets, so create longer lists to entice users to click through to your site.

The same applies to tables too.

4. Use more visuals in your content. The top performers in a SEMrush study of featured snippets had an average of 12 images (with appropriate ALT text) in the content. While you’re at it, use landscape images with an aspect ratio of 4:3.

5. Try to turn pages already in the answer boxes into a “featured snippet hub,” i.e. those showing up in position 0 for more than 10 queries. This is more common and easier than you’d expect. I’ve seen quite a few pages get featured snippets for more than 2,000 keywords, so don’t hesitate to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

6. 83% of all sites with featured snippets run on HTTPS. If you’re still on HTTP, please stop what you’re doing and go move to HTTPS first.

7. Another “duh”-inducing finding: get your pages a minimum score of 95 on both the Google Mobile Friendly and Google Mobile Usability (requires Search Console access) tests.

8. Don’t try and hoard link juice. Pages that earn featured snippets for multiple queries tend to have 30 to 40 outgoing link citations in the content.

9. Make it simple for users to understand. Answers in featured snippets tend to have a Flesch-Kincaid readability level of 7^th grade or less (a minimum score of 70/100). You can check the readability of your text with the Hemingway Editor:

10. Increase your site authority. Earn more links from trusted domains in your niche. Here’s more on how to increase your domain authority.

11. Implement schema markup on your page using JSON-LD (the format recommended by Google). Explicitly indicating ratings, headlines and descriptions in this way make Google’s job a lot easier. Schema Pro plugin is an idle solution for WordPress powered websites.

12. The top sites that get “featured” all have one thing in common – they provide loads of information. Create a resources section in your site that includes a lot of “how-to” guides and question-answers. At the very least, maintain an active blog.

13. Break up each section of your blog posts into headings and sub-headings. Use as many H1 to H6 tags as required to clarify the structure and hierarchy of your articles. Read about heading tags SEO here.

14. Implement semantic HTML correctly to explicitly clarify the structure of the page to Googlebot. It enables Google to understand the role of each section or part of the page and focus on the primary content of the page as opposed to navigational and subsidiary elements and meta information.

15. Maximize social shares and on-page engagement such as comments. These correlate with increased visibility in snippets. Remember, however, that correlation is not causation. Here are 3 strategies that you could follow.

How to Find More Opportunities for Featured Snippets (Answer box)

Let me walk you through a couple of ways to land featured snippets for the keywords you’re targeting.

Approach #1: Find low hanging fruits

You can probably do this with any rank tracking tool of your choice, but I’m just showing you a way to do it with SEMrush. (Disclosure: the author works at SEMrush.) Fire up the Organic Research tool within your SEO toolkit.

Put in your domain name to see an overview of your traffic, keywords, ranking positions, and competitors.

Go to the Positions tab and apply these two filters:

1. Include rankings where you rank between 1 to 5.
2. Exclude SERPs where you already appear in the featured snippets.

And voila! You get a list of all keywords for which you’re ranking well but don’t appear in the featured snippets. Note that this might be because there are no featured snippets at all in the results, but hey, then you try to induce them.

If there’s another site grabbing the featured snippet for a keyword you like, simply emulate what they’re doing and do it better (by borrowing a few tips from the checklist in the previous section). Usually, a few formatting tweaks will do the trick.

For quicker wins, you could add a further level of filtering by including only keywords that contain question words like “what” or “how to.”

Approach #2: Hijack competitors’ featured snippets

Instead of your site, just feed a competitor’s domain into the Organic Research tool. This time, select just one filter: Include SERP Features with “Featured snippet” in them. Bam! You get a list of all keywords for which your competitor has grabbed featured snippets.

You could go one step further. Export this list and compare it with the common keywords that the Keyword Gap tool returns, to get a better idea of how you’re faring in the SERPs against that particular site.

Approach #3: Start with a seed keyword

I assume most of you who have a working knowledge of SEO and blogging will be good at keyword research and building endless lists of primary and secondary keywords. Again, you can do this with a combination of your favorite keyword research / rank tracking / SERP scraping tools, but I’m showing you how it works with SEMrush Keyword Magic.

Just enter a seed keyword into the box, choose the match type (or related keywords), include or exclude any terms you want, and check the “Featured Snippet” option in the “SERP Features” filter.

Now you have a list of keywords for which featured snippets are already showing up in the SERPs. Are you ranking for any?

Let’s retrace a few steps. How do you choose your “seed keyword” well in the first place?

Worry not.

The Topic Research tool has you covered. It will help you find search terms relevant to your industry, including long-tail key phrases people are googling and article headlines that are currently trending, and group keyword phrases in the form of mind maps or topical index cards. This way you can make quick decisions on the areas you’ll focus on next with your content.

How to Get, Keep and Track Featured Snippets That You Want

Until now, we discussed what featured snippets are, how to improve our chances of popping up in a few, and how to identify keywords that we’d do well to target. But hey, this post is about acing featured snippets, isn’t it?

So let’s combine all this information and see if there’s a way to snatch Position 0 for the keywords that you want from your competitors and retain them.

Enter the SEMrush Position Tracking tool. In order to set it up, you need to add the keywords that you want into the tracker. (You do have the option of manual entry or sourcing them from SEMrush or Google Analytics.)

As an example, I chose 45 keywords for which ShoutMeLoud.com is doing well in the Google rankings. Once it’s done gathering data, you’ll see pretty much every piece of featured snippet-related data for your keywords in one place.

This includes:

• Opportunities: keywords for which your domain doesn’t figure in the search results
• Already featured: keywords for which you currently have a featured snippet
• New: snippets that you didn’t feature in at the start of the selected period, but do now
• Lost: snippets that you had at the start of the selected period, but have lost since
• Estimated traffic potential: the amount of traffic you will gain if you succeed in getting into one of the snippets in the “opportunities” list

The opportunities are broken down into a detailed report:

All you need to do is analyze each of these one by one and go one up on them using the techniques outlined in the “How to Maximize Your Featured Snippet Appearances” section earlier in this post.

Simple? Yes. Easy? Nope.

It’s never easy being an ace.

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Over to You: Google SERP’s Featured Snippet

What you have now is a roadmap to try and get a featured snippet for as many of your top-10 keywords as possible. The road is long and winding. But you’ll get there eventually, if you follow these guidelines to optimize your site for Google answer box.

However, I don’t want you to stop there. Featured snippets is just one piece of SERP real estate that Google offers. Ideally you want a shack by the beach, a villa in the hills, and a penthouse in the city too. So keep looking around for ways to ace every SERP feature that crops up as Google search evolves.

For instance, right below the snippet for “backlinks” that we explored at the start of this post, you encounter another of Google’s gems – People also ask:

This is Google’s idea of clickbait – it has the potential to keep a searcher hooked on the same subject for a long time.

Wouldn’t you want to give them answers to all of these questions? And be a “featured snippet hub” in the process?

Good luck!

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The Comprehensive Guide to Ace Google Featured Snippets in 2019 is a post from ShoutMeLoud - Shouters Who Inspires

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How to Add Social Share Buttons in WordPress (Beginner’s Guide)

Do you want to add social share buttons in WordPress? Social media websites are where people spend a lot of their time on internet.

You can use social media to build user engagement and bring new users to your website. The simplest way to do this is by adding social sharing buttons to WordPress posts and pages.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily add social share buttons and display share counts in WordPress. We will cover couple of different ways to do this, so you can add social buttons above and below post content or make a floating share bar..

Why You Should Add Social Share Buttons in WordPress?

Social networking is one of the most popular online activities today. It is estimated that by the end of 2019, there will be around 2.77 billion social media users around the globe. (Source)

That’s why social media marketing is now a crucial part of any businesses’ growth strategy. If you want to reach more potential customers, then social media platforms are highly effective channels to communicate with them.

The problem is that when you share your content on your own social media profiles, tit only reaches a limited number of your own followers.

The best way to reach people who don’t follow your business on social media is by adding social sharing buttons to your WordPress site.

Social share buttons prompt your website visitors to share your content on their social media timeline. This allows your content to be seen by their friends and followers who can then add comments, like, and re-share it.

Adding social sharing buttons to your website can help you:

• Get more traffic to your website
• Increase your social media following
• Generate more leads and sales
• Build social proof and brand recognition

Having said that, let’s see how to easily add social share buttons in WordPress.

Adding Social Share Buttons in WordPress

For this tutorial, we’ll be using the Shared Counts plugin. It is the best WordPress social media plugin available on the market.

Using this plugin, you can easily add social share buttons in your WordPress posts and also display the share counts. The best part is that it is optimized for performance and doesn’t slow down your website.

Unlike other social sharing plugins, Shared Counts uses a unique caching method to have minimal impact on your website’s speed and performance.

The first thing you need to do is to install and activate the Shared Counts plugin. For detailed instructions, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After you’ve installed the plugin, you need to go to Settings » SharedCounts menu to configure plugin settings.

Next, you need to scroll down to the ‘Display’ section and choose the share buttons you want to display. By default, three buttons are selected (Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest).

You can click on the white area in the field to add additional share buttons that you want.

Next, you can choose the share button style from the dropdown menu labeled “Share Button Style”. Shared Counts plugin comes with 8 beautiful button styles.

After that, you’ll need to select the theme location where you want to display the social share buttons. You can choose from 3 options: Before Content, After Content, and Before and After Content.

Lastly, you need to select the supported post types. It has ‘post’ selected by default.

If you want to display share buttons on your pages and other post types, then you can check the box next to page option.

Don’t forget to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.

Once done, you can visit any post on your website to see the social sharing buttons in action. Here’s how our demo website looks with the ‘Classic’ button style on default Twenty Nineteen theme.

How to Display Social Share Counts in WordPress?

As the name suggests, Shared Counts plugin can also show your social share counts without slowing down your website.

To enable social share counts, you’ll need to go to the Shared Counts settings and set up the share count source.

On the Shared Counts settings window, you’ll see the ‘Share Counts’ settings at the top.

By default, you’ll see the None option selected for ‘Count Source’ which means that share counts are not being retrieved and displayed.

To show the social share counts, you can choose from two sources.

The SharedCount.com is the recommended option for the plugin. If you choose this option, the counts are retrieved from the SharedCount service API. It allows fetching all counts with only 2 API calls which is the best for performance.

If you choose the ‘Native’ option, share counts are retrieved from the respective social service, like Facebook API for Facebook counts, Pinterest API for Pin counts. This method can slow down your site because it will require multiple API calls.

We recommend choosing SharedCount.com as your count source. Next, you’ll see a field for SharedCount API key.

You can get the SharedCount API by signing up to for a free account on SharedCount.com website.

Enter your email address and a password. Then click Create Account.

The website will now send a confirmation link to your email address. You need to click the link to verify.

Once your email is verified, you need to log into your SharedCount account and navigate to your account at the top right side of the screen. There, you’ll see your email address and a dropdown icon next to it.

Next, you need to click the drop-down menu and select ‘Settings’. From here you’ll find your SharedCount API key.

You need to copy the API key and go back to your plugin’s settings page on your WordPress site. Now, go ahead and paste the API key in the ‘SharedCount API Key’ field.

Below that, you’ll see some other settings related to social share counts. You can review and change them if you like.

If you want to show the total counts, then you can check the box next to ‘Count Total Only’ option.

We also recommend checking the box to hide empty counts instead of displaying a zero (0).

Next, you will see a new ‘Total Counts’ field in the Display section. This allows you to show total share counts alongside your share buttons.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save changes’ button to store your settings.

You can now visit your website to see the social sharing buttons with share count for each blog post.

Adding Social Share Buttons on Selected Pages

Typpically social share buttons aren’t usually added to WordPress pages however sometimes you may want to enable them on some specific pages.

If so then, you can use the Shared Counts shortcode: [[shared_counts]].

You can add this shortcode anywhere on your website to display the share buttons.

To add shortcodes in WordPress, there is a shortcode block in the WordPress block editor.

You can simply add the block to your content area and then paste the Shared Counts shortcode.

Using the shortcode, you can add social share buttons really anywhere on your site.

Adding Floating Social Share Bar in WordPress

The Shared Counts plugin allows you to add social share buttons above content, below content, or both above and below content. These share buttons are static and not visible all the time.

Another popular way to display social sharing buttons is by adding a floating social sharing bar. It is a social sharing menu that sticks on users’ screens as they scroll down.

Unlike the standard sharing buttons, the floating social share bar will be seen the whole time a user reads your article. Making them more noticeable and helping you boost social sharing.

Some user experience experts argue that it makes your website look bad as it fills out the white space. However, if you can keep it clean, then it can be quite useful.

For the floating social share buttons, you need to install and activate the Sassy Social Share plugin.

Upon activation, the plugin will add a new menu item labeled ‘Sassy Social Share’ to your WordPress admin sidebar. Clicking on it will take you to the plugin’s settings page.

First, you need to choose an icon style. The plugin comes with square, rounded, and rectangle buttons. You can choose styles for both the floating social share bar and the standard share bar.

Next, you need to switch to the ‘Standard Interface’ tab. From here you can enable or disable the standard static social sharing buttons.

We recommend using either floating or static social buttons. Using both of them will be an overkill and may create a bad user experience.

Next, you need to switch to the ‘Floating Interface’ tab and check the box next to ‘Enable Floating sharing interface’ option.

After that, you need to choose the social media websites you want to display. You can add or remove buttons and rearrange them by simple drag and drop.

Once you are finished, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

You can now visit your website to see floating social share buttons in action. Here’s how it looked on our demo website.

We hope this article helped you learn how to add social share buttons in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to add social media icons to WordPress menus and how to add the social icons to the sidebar.

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