Nick Schäferhoff

Last updated on June 27, 2022, by Nick Schäferhoff 10 Comments

18 Proven Productivity Tips for Freelancers, Bloggers, & Entrepreneurs

In this post, I want to lay out the best productivity tips, tricks, and hacks for freelancers, bloggers, and entrepreneurs that I have learned over the years.

Being a self-employed freelance writer and online marketer for more than a decade, I have a lot of experience working on my own and making things happen. Doing so needs a lot of discipline and self motivation. However, I have also found that you can not get by on pure willpower alone. In the long run, trying to do so is likely to leave you frustrated and burned out.

During my career, I have tried out many different routines, tools, and techniques to keep myself productive. I have also read a great number of books and blog articles on that topic.

Below, I try to distill everything I know down to the very best productivity tips and hacks that keep me going as a freelance blogger and entrepreneur. They allow me to get things done without being stressed out all the time and hating my life. I hope they can do the same for you.

Last updated on March 25, 2022, by Nick Schäferhoff 4 Comments

How to Install Matomo in WordPress: The Ultimate Guide (2022)

There has never been a better time to learn how to install Matomo on your WordPress site. Recently, Austrian and French courts declared that the use of Google Analytics violates EU law because the service sends personal data, such as IP addresses, back to the US.

As a consequence, it is now illegal to use Google Analytics on websites based in those countries. Similar decisions are expected in other EU member states. Therefore, if your website is subject to the EU privacy laws (GDPR), this is definitely something you should look into. Otherwise, you risk hefty fines in the long run.

However, what about your web analytics? How are you supposed to make informed decisions about your site without having any insights into the behavior of your visitors?

Luckily, there are more privacy-friendly alternatives to Google Analytics. One of the most popular is Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) and in this tutorial, I want to go over why and how to install Matomo on your WordPress website. I will cover the features Matomo offers, contrast it with Google Analytics, and show different ways to use it in WordPress. The post will also cover how to import your existing Google Analytics data (so you don’t lose your site history), set up Matomo in a privacy-friendly way, and how to use it (including backups and updates).

Last updated on June 28, 2022, by Nick Schäferhoff 18 Comments

26 Key WordPress Skills You Need for a Successful Website (2022)

In this post, I want to talk about skills that will make you much more effective at running a WordPress-based website. These days, websites are super important assets for most businesses and running a successful WordPress site requires a lot of different abilities. That’s because it involves so many aspects, from site maintenance over optimization to marketing.

When running a site by yourself or with a very small team, you have to wear a lot of different hats to make things happen. It’s why huge publications have teams that each concentrate on different aspects of site management. If you are not at that point, you need to prioritize learning what is most important.

In order to help you do that, below you find a long list of essential WordPress skills. They are ordered by beginner, intermediate, and expert-level skills and are based on my own experience of working with WordPress for 10+ years. A lot of them come from mistakes that I have made myself and/or seen others and my clients make.

Last updated on March 28, 2022, by Nick Schäferhoff 23 Comments

6 Best (Free) SEO Plugins for WordPress (2022 Comparison)

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that, over the past months, I have published a series of in-depth reviews of WordPress SEO plugins. It started out with the question in mind “what is the best WordPress SEO plugin?”.

For years, my answer would have reflexively been Yoast SEO. It’s basically all I used at that point. However, after going through what else the WordPress sphere has to offer, that’s not necessarily the case anymore.

To find out which WordPress SEO plugin really deserves the title “of best”, in this post, I will pit Yoast SEO vs Rank Math, All-in-One SEO, SEOPress, Squirrly, and The SEO Framework. I will compare them on the grounds of setup, features, usability, and premium offers. You can also find links to the standalone review of each in case you want to learn even more.

Last updated on March 28, 2022, by Nick Schäferhoff No Comments (Yet)

SEOPress Plugin Review: A Deep Dive Into Every Feature (2021)

We have made it. This is the final entry of the WordPress SEO plugin review series. And in this last installment, I will review SEOPress.

In contrast to other entries in this series (Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, The SEO Framework, Squirrly SEO, Rank Math), the plugin user base is relatively small. At t the time of this writing, is has 100,000+ active installations.

However, those who use SEOPress seem to really love it: 95% of ratings are five stars. Let’s see what they are so excited about.

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