STARTING YOUR OWN BLOG!
Find post content on blogging right here! Our blogging resources page is a new addition to the website. Stay tuned for more great content coming your way in the coming days and weeks.

5 Tips to Create a Pinterest Strategy
When I started blogging a year ago—I had zero clues about Pinterest (or blogging for that matter)! But it didn’t take me long to discover, I not only needed to get a clue about Pinterest—I needed a strategy for using it effectively! Truth be told, I still find Pinterest to be a bit of an…

New Blogger to Do List Before Publishing a Blog Post
Before publishing a blog post there’s a number of things that are going through your head. Then…you hit the publish button AND the bottom drops out. You realize that 10 different things still hadn’t been done. You know who you are (me!). I’ll walk you through some of the key learnings I’ve had blogging and…

How to Build an Email List From Scratch
So you’ve got your blog up and running! Now you’re probably thinking about some of the other actions you could take to be a success with this blogging thing. One of those actions is an email subscriber list. But how do you build an email list from scratch? You’ll find all kinds of information out…

Best WordPress Plugins for New Blogs
So you’ve got your new blog up and running – the hosting service is set up, the blogging platform has been selected, and you’ve chosen a beautiful theme for your site! Now it’s time to add your own touches and adapt the site to your needs. Customizing a website for most of us can be…

Pinterest Friendly Blog Posts – 7 Simple Steps to Drive More Traffic!
Traffic to your website comes in many fashions. Probably the most prominent for many bloggers is social media. Our latest website gets 70% of its traffic from social media (Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). A whopping 55% comes from Pinterest and that number is growing by the week. Many bloggers claim that a stunning 90%…

How to Choose a WordPress Theme – 10 Insightful Tips!
Starting a blog involves many important decisions before you ever type a single word. Each of those decisions require a certain degree of contentment as you’ll being living with them as you launch and brand your new blog. You have to choose a domain name, determine how your new blog will be hosted on the…

6 Amazingly Effective Facebook Ad Targeting Tips
Advertising costs can be a frustrating part of starting a new blog. A key component that drives advertising cost is the target audience you select. By making some minor tweaks to who your Facebook ad targeting, you’d be surprised at the increased conversion rate you can achieve and equally drive down advertising costs. In this…

Choosing the Best Blogging Platform
Are you ready to start your own blog? Maybe you’ve already made that decision and you’re on to the next step. Now your trying to figure out how to make this blog thing go live! You’ve come to the right place. This post is part two in a four-part series on how to start a…

How to Start a Blog Today – The Ultimate Guide
Follow along on a five-part series of posts on how to start a blog. The first post in the series focuses on 3 simple steps to get your blog off the ground – choosing your web hosting service, determining your domain name, and setting up a SSL certificate. Start a Blog | Post Series How…

5 Steps to Implementing a Facebook Ads Strategy
Starting out your new blog can be daunting on many fronts. So many things to learn as you put your toe into the water and test out this blogging passion you’ve long been putting off. Now you’re all in, and it’s time to put your hard-earned dollars behind this new project. But how much money…

"YOU CAN'T USE UP CREATIVITY. THE MORE YOU USE THE MORE YOU HAVE." -- MAYA ANGELOU
BLOGGING RESOURCES
Building and maintaining a website takes time. As we launch our blog (JENMERCKLING.COM) and build the website, join us for the journey and learn with us along the way. I'll share the key learnings that we make as we strive to create a user friendly website that is functional, intuitive, and engaging for the user! My biggest ask--share your ideas, your questions, and your comments. I'm eager to make this communication a two-way street for the "technical" side of blogging. We can all learn from each other!
Design Tools
Seriously, there are so many tools available when it comes to designing your website. There are also a lot of opinions on how to do it as well. I'll share my key learnings and thought processes with you!
Advertising
Budgets for promoting your blog can be limited in the early going. I'll share ideas that gave us the best ROI as we launched our blog and also talk about our advertising goals.
Favorite Plugins
Thank goodness for those plugins! There are some real time saving plugins that have saved me days building our blog. I'll share them here and walk you through how we used them on our site.
SEO
Optimizing your blog for traffic is a critical early step to success. I'll provide some ideas around how we approach SEO to successfully launch our new blog!
Social Media
The majoritiy of website traffic now comes by way of social media referrals. Here's some tactics we've implemented, along with the results we've obtained!
Monetization
A question that's on every bloggers mind, "How do I monetize this blog?" There's an evolution to this process as you build a new blog. I'll share our ideas here!
BLOG STATISTICS
Check out some of the latest blog statistics for month 6 (February 2018) of our blog, JENMERCKLING.COM! We will update this section frequently to provide snapshots of monthly data from our blog ranging from pageviews, social media traffic (Pinterest), and blog income reports.

OUR PINTEREST PROFILE
February 2018 Average daily saves 95; Average daily people saving 91

PEOPLE WE REACH
February 2018 Average monthly viewers 687,295; Average monthly engaged 19,647

ACTIVITY FROM OUR DOMAIN
February 2018 Average daily clicks 193; Average daily visitors 190

MONTHLY PAGEVIEWS
February 2018 pageview data from our blog (Google Analytics) JENMERCKLING.COM