Hello mate,

Have you ever been annoyed with some banks or government agencies?

​​We have a US business and presence in India. We’re now setting up in Dubai – global base, IP protection, flexibility for future expansion and tax planning being the main reasons.

And boy, it’s been ridiculously tough!

What was promised to be completed in a week, has already taken six months and we don’t even have a bank account yet.

I’m super frustrated with the level of professionalism and delays.

Navigate through one hurdle, and there is next. And next. And next…

I’m not sure where exactly I got this from. Whether from watching “Inside Bill’s Brain” on Netflix or reading a book. But it shifted something huge.

Problems and roadblocks are not bad. They are literally the stepping stones to success.

Yes. Think about that.

Solving one challenge after another gets you that many steps closer to your goal.

We will discuss SEO and many other things in this newsletter, but some more life altering ideas before that..

Subconscious beliefs keeping us from a life we want

There are things we assume to be true just because of the culture we live in. Truth can be completely opposite sometimes.

Here are eight subconscious behaviors that are keeping us from having a life we want.

Read them very carefully and try to correlate these with your life. There are some life changing ideas here.

1. We believe that creating our best possible life is a matter of deciding what we want and then going after it. But in reality, we are psychologically incapable of predicting what will make us happy.
2. We believe that success is somewhere to “arrive” at. If things are going according to our expectations we feel happy. In fact, success is the process of expanding and growing ourselves, not a milestone to reach.
3. We assume that when it comes to following our “gut instincts,” happiness is “good,” and fear and pain is “bad.” Reality is that we’re indifferent to things that don’t matter to us. If we are afraid of something, it means it’s something we really want, but are afraid of negative outcomes. Fear is an indicator of interest.
4. We needlessly create problems and crises in our lives because we’re afraid of actually living it.
5. If we want to change our lives, we have to change our beliefs. A belief is what we know to be true because experience has made it evident to us. If we want to change our beliefs, we need to go out and have experiences that make new beliefs real to us. Not the other way around.
6. We think “problems” are roadblocks to achieving what we want, when in reality, they are pathways.
7. We think our past defines us, and worse, we think that it is an unchangeable reality. Truth is – our perception of the past changes as we change.
8. Most negative emotional reactions are us identifying a disassociated aspect of ourselves. We love in others that which we love about ourselves. We hate in others that behavior which we hate about ourselves.

Adapted from Brianna Wiest’s essay, derived from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness

Keywords, keywords, keywords

If you’ve done any work on SEO, I’m sure you’ve wondered about keywords.

What are the right keywords? What keywords should I use in my blog posts to bring traffic? How do I rank on the first page of search engine results for a keyword I like?

Good questions.

No absolute answers.

Before we continue: when people refer to keywords in the SEO context, they’re referring to the words or phrases visitors type in a search engine. Having those keywords on your site are important because that’s how a search engine understands your content is a likely answer to what the visitor wanted to learn about.

Understanding intent behind keywords

There are “discovery” keywords – when someone is trying to learn more about something. The purpose is to find an answer. Discover some details.

Then there are “transaction” keywords – high intent words that indicate the visitor is likely to make a purchase or some sort of commitment.

Consider – “best college in USA” and “MIT admission process” and “MIT interview tip” and “MIT educational loan”.

If someone searches for these keywords, what could be their possible intent?

When you understand what the person wants to get done, you can address it more effectively in your writing. That will cause conversions and bottomline results.

Exploring keywords people are searching for

You can “guess” what people may be searching or you can find actual search usage data. Exploring keywords and topics around your niche can give you tremendous insights and ideas.

Use Google Keyword Planner. It’s targeted to people who’re showing ads to find out keywords they want their ads to show for. Keyword Planner is free, but requires creating a Google Ads account, entering your billing info and creating an ad campaign. You can pause the campaign – since you don’t want to spend money on ads yet. BTW, you’d also need to keep your account in Expert mode and not Smart mode.

I recommend this in-depth guide on how to use Google Keyword Planner tool.

Once you have it set up, I suggest exploring lots of different keywords around the area you specialize in.

Also try checking up keywords from some of your popular blog posts. Remember the work we did last week? Finding pageviews etc for all the content from our site and choosing what to do with each piece?

There are alternatives – KeywordTool, Hoth’s planner, Keyword suggestions from WordStream, UberSuggest and many more.

This week’s assignment

Explore these tools and try to gauge what your target audience is searching for.

Feel free to reply and ask your questions.

I’m excited about these new features in Email Subscribers

You probably know that we have three related plugins in the lead-capture / email marketing / on-site campaigns category. Icegram Engage is for opt-ins, popups and other campaigns you can run on your site. Email Subscribers is for email marketing. And Rainmaker is the quickest pre-made form plugin for WordPress.

These three plugins work with each other flawlessly. So you can use Engage to show hundreds of types of high converting subscription forms and then save them using Rainmaker or add them to a list in Email Subscribers etc.

But people have always asked for a popup from within Email Subscribers.

People have also wished for a drag and drop visual editor for a while.

Both are now possible!

You can now show subscription forms in a popup from within ES

This will help you grow your subscribers’ list easily. Simply enable the ‘Show in Popup’ option when you’re creating a subscription form within Email Subscribers. You can add a headline too and the popup will show wherever you add it’s shortcode.

Drag and drop visual editor

Now you can create newsletter templates in minutes. The free plugin has one column, two columns, text, button, image, email header and email footer blocks. The pro version adds 1:2 column, 2:1 column, divider, spacer, navigation bar, social icons, video and custom code blocks.

There are lots of things we will improve in the editor, but would love for you to try it and give us feedback.

How do you make featured images for your blog posts?

I’m assuming you’re using featured images in your blog posts.

Or at least – you like to have an image – but may not always use one since it’s hard to make one.

(If you don’t use featured images at all, I’d love to know why. Please reply and share!)

So – how do you create those featured images?

• Do you just take a stock photo from Pexels or other such collections?
• Do you have a graphic designer who takes care of them?
• Do you use Canva, Photoshop or another graphic app to design yourself?
• Anything else?

I find it challenging to create suitable images for each blog post. I’ve tried so many different ideas – and then settled on something simple.

Is it a struggle for you too?

Or maybe I’m the odd one…

Can you please reply to this email and let me know how you make featured images – and if it’s a problem for you too?

Thanks in advance.

A writing prompt

✍

Find a photo from a newspaper / website and without reading the article, create your own narrative of the image.

Lots of actionables in this email.

Schedule time to do your keyword research in the next 2-3 days.

Reply about featured images.

And sure, reply and ask any questions you may have.

Later,