NichePursuits.com - I Just Invested in a Hosting Company...

Iridium Hosting, SEO tips found from auditing 1000s of niche blogs, an exclusive deal on content for Niche Pursuits subscribers, a showdown of very popular marketing platforms, and more...

Today's email is sponsored by:

At the beginning of the year, I announced that I was looking to invest in a few companies that were related to the digital marketing space.

Well, I'm happy to announce that a couple months ago, I officially invested in Iridium Hosting!

Not only is Iridium a managed WordPress hosting service that gets blazing fast speeds, but Iridium separately offers WordPress maintanence services.

In other words, if you want to speed up your site, pass Core Web Vitals, fix WordPress bugs, keep plugins updated and secure, and any other Wordpress fix, the team at Iridium can do that with their maintenance plans.

I wanted to see how good Iridium maintenance plans were, so I tested it out on Niche Pursuits.

First, I was getting some display ads added to my site, but I was concerned the recommended setup might be slowing down my site.

I asked Dustin, founder of Iridium and main point of contact for customers, to look at my setup.

Sure enough, he found some technical issues from the display ads that were indeed slowing down my site. Things with my limited technical knowledge I wouldn't have noticed.

So, instead of a slower site, that was failing core web vitals:

I got a faster site:

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Notice that my cumulative layout shift was not passing with some of the initial setup. But when I brought Dustin from Iridium in, he was able to diagnose what was going on, make some tweaks to optimize all my plugins, and get my performance score back to 100%.

These are the kinds of simple fixes that the Iridium WordPress Maintanance Plans offer here.​

Have a WordPress headache that you want an expert to fix? Want to just have someone updating, maintaning, and doing one-off fixes as you need them, then I'd recommend checking out Iridium.

How Iridium Fixed My Email Deliverability...

One more quick story on how Iridium helped me out.

I have a unique email setup. I sent emails to my list through an email service provider (ConvertKit), and had no issues there. But I also answer one off emails, support, etc directly (not on ConvertKit).

I asked Dustin at Iridium to do a full email deliverability analysis, because I had noticed some customers mentioned that my one-off emails were ending up in junk folders.

Turns out I had some issues!

Dustin was able to dive into my existing hosting setup and noticed some technical tweaks needed.

Here's some things he did:

• Removed DNS entries at Cloudflare that were leaking your web server IP allowing bypass Cloudflare security. (Yikes!)
• Edited your DMARC record because it was missing a ; in the content of the record.
• Added all of your sending sources to your SPF record. This was what improved your score most.

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Maybe you know how to do all those things, but I've been at this for 15 years and wouldn't have known how to diagnose or fix those issues.

As a result, emails being sent from NichePursuits.com are now landing in more inboxes and passing all email tests.

This is huge for my business.

If you want Irdium to dive in an analyze (or even just set up) your domain emails and the deliverability, you can check out the Email Configuaration Audit Service Here.

Or if you sign up for the Iridium Monthly WordPress "Manage" Plan, the email configuration is included.

And of course, you are also welcome to check out the dedicated WordPress Hosting services here.

Get blazing fast WordPress hosting, that is secure, and managed by a true expert.

To say the least, I'm thrilled to now be a minority investor in Iridium Hosting!

Thanks for allowing me to share this quick business update...

How To Get More Organic Traffic to Food and Lifestyle Blogs

Today's guest on the Niche Pursuits podcast is a food and lifestyle blog specialist.

His name is Casey Markee and over the years he's audited 1000s of sites in the food and lifestyle niche. And today, he's here to share a curated list of the dos and don'ts critical for driving organic traffic in this niche and others.

While he is a niche specialist for food blogs - much of what he covers will also apply just as well to most hobby, lifestyle niches.

Some of the topics discussed include:

• How Casey got into SEO and the Food & Lifestyle space
• What makes the niche so competitive
• The area of focus when doing audits
• The difference in SEO based on the niche
• What the successful food bloggers are doing
• Social media importance (examples included)
• Paid vs. free plugins
• What the readers dislike
• Can recipe cards rank in Google carousel without any other content?
• Structure of a recipe post
• SEO tips for a blog post
• Sidebars
• Recipe cards and the difference between recipe content
• Monetization methods
• Optimizing for mobile
• Thoughts on Yoast and Rank Math concerning Schema
• Plus, much more!

It's a wide-ranging discussion and even gets into E-A-T and its importance for the niche and thus other hobby niches as well.

This is great stuff you won't want to miss.

​Check out the full podcast here​

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Builderall vs Clickfunnels: Which Is Best For Your Marketing Needs?

Digital marketing is how your business will reach more customers to grow. And no matter what industry you are in or how big your company is, it's important to have marketing techniques that separate you from the competition. The problem is, piecing together all the skills and tools yourself is time-consuming and unrealistic.

That's why we made a comparison of Builderall vs ClickFunnels. You'll learn about two of the most popular digital marketing tools. We will break down the features of each tool, discuss the pricing, and help you decide which tool is better suited for your business.

​Check it out here​

Zirtual Review: A Great Place To Find a VA or Should You Try Elsewhere?

Zirtual is a top-notch provider of virtual assistants for professionals, entrepreneurs, and small teams. The software has excellent functionality and is both inexpensive and simple to use. The interface is superb, and you can customize it to suit your needs.

There is one major and quite inexplicable drawback. You pay for a certain number of hours per month, but if you don’t use them, they expire - no rollover to the next month. So is it worth it? Or are there better options? Find out in our review!

​Get the review​

Thanks again for reading,

Spencer