If you have a website you need visitors and traffic. How do you get more free traffic?

Search engines like Google send a lot of traffic to your sites. The only way to get found your website on search engines is to submit your site. Every search engine provides tools to submit your website to their search database or index.

Google is ruling search engine market share with over 90%. So you should inform Google about your website and pages through Google Webmaster Tools or Search Console.

What is Google Webmaster Tools?

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) or Google Search Console provides a set of tools for your website to enhance search traffic, performance and user experience. It’s mostly used by webmaster's to optimize their website for search engines.

You can tweak your website design for mobile or desktop based on the reports from Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Search Console allows you to communicate with Google and configure many settings like sitemaps, internal links, external links, indexing and so on.

How do I get started with GWT?

Google Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console is free for everyone. You can join to Google Search Console https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en from your free Google account.

Once you logged into Google Search Console, you need to add your website to a property.

Click on “Add a Property” and enter your website address.

Then Google asks ownership verification of your website. It’s a good security measure to prevent unauthorized access to your website.

The Google Search Console provides multiple ways to authorize website ownership.

1. Download HTML page with Google code, upload to your root folder and then verify.
2. Add a DNS record to your domain configuration.
3. Add Meta Tag to your home page and then open website.
4. Ownership verification through Google Analytics if you have on your website.

Once your website verified, you can access other tools in Google Search Console.

Major sections in Google Search Console

Whenever you log in to Google Search Console you will be presented with a list of your website properties.

Click on website property and you’ll be redirected to Dashboard on that website.

Here are a few details about each section under Google Search Console

Messages

Here you will see messages sent by Google about your websites like errors, guidelines, and others.

Search Appearance

This section helps you how your website may appear in Google search results. Also learn more about the content structure, HTML elements, Rich Cards, and Snippets. You can make changes to the elements to enhance search results.

Search Traffic

This is a very powerful section where you may track your website visitors, clicks, queries and conversion ratios (CTR) over a period of time.

Search traffic data is very important to grow your website. You can also check internal links and backlinks to your website.

Google Index

Here Google shows how it’s indexing your website. It’ll show index status, URL’s blocked and removed from Google search index.

Crawl Stats

We suggest you check this section before working on in any other section in Google Search Console. Here you’ll submit your website pages through XML sitemaps and robots.txt files.

XML sitemaps help you to tell Google what pages it should include in search results and how frequently it should scan and index your site.

Security Issues

If your website is having pages related to malware, phishing, and hacked content, it will report here to take an action.

Website security is very important and you should not ignore this section whenever you check Google Search Console.

Web Tools

Google provides a lot of other tools to modify your website. You can find one very interesting tool under “Other resources” called PageSpeed Insights.

Use PageSpeed Insights to find out web page speeds on desktop or mobile or any devices.

You can use PageSpeed Insights recommendations to improve your website.

Conclusion

Google Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console is an indispensable tool for webmaster's to increase their website traffic through Google search engine.

If you don’t use it already for your website, then get familiar with it and start using it.

FastWebHost can help you in integrating your website with Google Search Console.

Hope this article helps you to start working on Google Search Console.

You’ve been spending time building your website, creating amazing content and driving visitors through social media. But you’re not making a lot of money. What gives? What are all your visitors up to?

So you fire up google analytics to take a look and you see something like this in the audience tab.

That explains why all that traffic isn’t getting you any revenue. So what do you do about it?

Do you actually have a high bounce rate

Bounce rates vary greatly by what kind of site you’re running. The average website sees about 40% bounce rate.

That’s still pretty high and we’ve worked with a number of websites who have a bounce rate in single digits. So if you’d like to do something about your bounce rate, read on.

What causes a high bounce rate

Spam Traffic

The bounce not be from the traffic you’ve been driving. Your website is frequently crawled by bots - automated computer programs. These can come from a lot of places. Google’s bots crawls your site to read your content and decide where to rank you. Some other bot, made by spammy website owners, are looking for content to scrape. A lot of this bot activity is picked up by Google analytics and can skew your numbers. That’s because a bot can scan your website in less than a second, so it looks like a bounce.

In the example below, you can see that certain sources have a very high bounce rate. These are not real visitors and the high numbers have skewed the site average.

The Fix

To get to the real data you’ll need to identify and filter out the spam traffic.

Broken links

If you’ve been around for a while, chances are you’ve got a few outdated links that no longer work. You might have posted these links somewhere, such as other blogs or in old emails and these links might still be driving traffic.

Since this link is not connected to a page, the visitors will see a 404 page.

There’s nothing on that page so the visitor has no need to stick around. They’ll leave almost right away and you’ll see that as a bounce. It’s common if you’ve moved to a new domain or did an overhaul of the site.

This kind of issue can occur if you moved your website to a new domain or did an overhaul of the site that included changing some of your URLs

The Fix

First, you’ll need to retain visitors who land on a 404 page. Start by customizing the 404 page and making it more in line with your brand. Here’s a great example from Lego

Next add a search bar and some links to pages that visitors are most likely to visit, such as your home page or store.

The ultimate goal though is to remove the broken links altogether. You can use  Broken Link Check need to find the broken links on your website.

The real challenge though is finding broken external links – links from other places that lead to your site, on a page that’s no longer active. To do that, setup Google Search Console to get a list of links that Google experienced errors with on their crawls.

You can then either contact the website owner and ask them to setup the correct link, or setup a 301 redirect that takes the incorrect URL to the right page. Visitors end up on the page they’re looking for without ever knowing the difference.

Slow loading times

If your website is slow people will leave. It’s really that simple. Wherever they came from, whatever they’re after, your visitors know there’s probably an alternative somewhere on a faster website.

Most people won’t wait longer than 2 seconds for your site to load.

The Fix

You’ll need to speed up your website. The fastest way is to get a better hosting provider.

You can get a little more speed out of your host by eliminating big images and other large files, but at the end of the day the speed of your website depends on how fast the server is.

We offer a really fast hosting package that only costs $1 a month.

Too many pop-ups and ads

We get it. You need these to generate revenue. We use them too. BUT you might want tone it down a little.  68% of people say they’d gladly block a site from search for having pop-ups and the ad technique has a 73% disapproval rating in surveys. People just won’t spend a lot of time on a site where they keep getting bombarded by ads.

This doesn’t mean you have to remove all your ads, just make them less intrusive and don’t distract visitors from the real reason they’re on the website. Google is also taking steps against websites with intrusive ads by affecting their search rankings, and will be building an adblocker into chrome soon.

The Fix

You need to find new ways of displaying your ads and popups. Do some A/B tests to see what people respond to best.

Autoplay videos

Similar to ads, autoplay videos are just obnoxious. It’s far easier to close to page entirely than try to find a way to shut the video off. 82% of users will close a page because of an autoplay video. They’re intrusive and they contribute to a bad user experience.

The Fix

Make a great thumbnail, write a great headline, include an obvious play button and turn off the autoplay. People who want to see your video will hit play themselves, when they feel like it. This way you won’t lose all the people who don’t want to see it before they get a chance to look at anything else on your website.

Content that’s different from what they expected

If people arrived on your website expecting one thing, only to see something else, they’ll leave.

The Fix

Review all your ppc copy and meta tags to make sure it matches with the page.

Bad web design

On average people spend 5 hours a day on their phones. 1/3rd of all shopping is done with mobile devices. If your website is not mobile optimized, you’re creating bad user experience. Bounce rates are 40% higher on mobile than they are on desktop.

The Fix

Get a web developer to give your site a makeover as soon as you can.

Your content’s no good.

Bad spelling? Bad formatting? Bad writing?

For whatever reason, if your visitors don’t like your content, they’ll just leave, and nothing you can do is going to change that. Not short of writing better content that is.

The Fix

Create better content. Take time to edit over everything you’ve created and only publish high quality content that you’re really proud of.

Remember it’s not visitors that make revenue, it’s subscribers. A regular visitor is worth far more than a visitor that came to your site for 5 seconds. Figure out what’s going on and lower your bounce rate today.

This is the fourth part of a series of guides on how to succeed with blogging. This guide was written by the team at FastWebHost.com who have helped thousands of blogs setup and achieve success over the last 10 years.

So far we’ve shown you how to build your blog, how to grow your blog’s followers, and how to  make money from your blog. By now you’ve realized it all comes down to how well you create your content - whether it’s writing words or taking photos or singing songs. That’s what we’re here for today.

To have great content on your website you need to do 2 things on a regular basis:

1. Create stellar content
2. Measure results and do a content audit

Creating Content

1. Understand your readers

You need to understand who your readers are and what they want in life. All good blogs are focused on certain topics or areas of life. That’s why travel blogs may talk about the foods of different localities, but won’t really talk about cooking or foods as a standalone subject.

More importantly, there are probably plenty of blogs on the subject you choose to work with, but your readers come to you for a specific reason. You need to understand that reason, the emotions behind it, and target your content towards those emotions.

Not sure where to start? Ask your readers what general topics they’d like to see more of. Then plug the topics and keywords into google trends and buzzsumo to see what’s trending.

2. Work through lists

Jot down ideas on your phone when inspiration strikes and keep a list of topics you can work on. Don’t worry about how you’ll flesh them out, that’s for later.

Once those ideas have a chance to marinate, you can start working on them. You should always try to take a unique stance on the topic - say something different, or try to say it in a different way.

If you ever run out of ideas, remember that most ideas work well with multiple types of content. Expand on a part of something you’ve written about before, or turn your list article into an infographic.

3. Be consistent

Once you’ve figured out what your audience likes you need to be consistent with it. Deliver what they want on a regular basis, but don’t rush. Remember, there’ at least 10 other people who are doing what you’re doing. Your audience comes to you for your style and quality. It’s perfectly fine if you publish only once every month.

The trick is to stay engaged with your readers in the meantime. Show them sneak peaks or work in progress on social media. You can even let them have a little control over the production process by asking for feedback on Facebook or twitter.

4. Team Up

Invite guest bloggers to contribute to your blog. They can write a complete piece which you can publish. They can collaborate on a piece with you by joining you for an interview or discussion. Or they can simply contribute a few thoughts to a piece you’re working on.

This helps bring more fresh perspectives and unique angles to a post. You can also use this to argue multiple sides of an idea for your readers.

Auditing Content

Once you start, there’s an impulse to just keep moving forward and create new content. But you need to stop once in awhile and go over what’s been done. You should do an audit at least once a year, or more depending on how often you publish.

An audit will show you what worked best, what didn’t and what can be re-purposed. You can also identify old content people are still reading, and update them.

1. Make a List of Your Content

Start by making a list of everything you’ve published. Get them all onto a spreadsheet and categorize them by what they are, what they’re about, and what they’re meant to achieve.

2. Decide on Metrics

Next you decide on what you want to measure. Each of your pieces of content would have a different objective, and so you would probably want to measure a different metric for each. In general though, some metrics tend to be useful for all kinds of content. Things like page views, time on page, bounce rate, goal conversion, and social shares are always useful metrics to have.

3. Review Analytics

We love Google Analytics. It’s free to use and can be used to get both an overview and in-depth look at your content’s performance. You might also want to look at analytics from your social media. If you’re using any other 3rd party analytics, you should record their results in your spreadsheet too.

Once that’s done, you need to divide your content into 3 lists - ones that are doing well, ones that are doing ok and can be improved, and ones that have never done very well.

4. Decide What to Do

For content that’s doing well: See what they have in common. There must be a reason they do better than the others. These audits are a great way to figure out your formula for success. Then figure out how you can make it better either by improving the content itself or finding new ways to reach more people with it. Or example, turn your best videos into info graphics so you can share them on Pinterest. See if there are ideas or points within the content pieces that can be fleshed out into their own posts.

For content that has potential: Figure out why they’re not doing better. Low click rate on social media could mean a poor title or feature image. High bounce rate could mean the opening paragraphs aren’t entertaining enough. Or it just might not be the right fit for your audience. Once you figure it out you can improve them.

For content that’s no good: You’ve got two choices here. You can try improving them, or you could just remove them altogether. It might feel wasteful to remove content you worked hard on, but in some cases it’s the best choice. Maybe the post is no longer accurate, or your views have changed and you no longer support this idea. Let it go and move on.

5. Create a Plan for Future Content

All of this should help you figure out what works better and what doesn’t. It should help you figure out your formula for creating better content. At this final stage of the audit you reflect on what you’ve seen and condense it into a clear plan and guidelines for future content, so that next year’s audit goes smoothly.

So that’s that. Now you know how to write better content, and that means you’ll be able to get more readers and more revenue from those readers. If you don’t have a blog yet, there’s no time like the present to start. Get over to our WordPress page and pick a domain name and you’re good to go.

This is the third part of a series of guides on how to succeed with blogging. This guide was written by the team at FastWebHost.com who have helped thousands of blogs setup and achieve success over the last 10 years.

In part 1 of this series we’ve covered how to build your blog, and how to create pages and posts. In part 2  we showed you how to grow your blog’s followers.

Today we’ll look at how to make money from your blog.

There are 5 general ways to make money from a blog:

1. Sell something
2. Show ads
3. Make recommendations
4. Have patreons
5. Indirect income

First things first

The first and most important rule is of course to have a readership you can make money from. That’s why creating valuable content, and getting a regular following essential. All the ways of making money are pointless if you don’t have anyone to make it from.

Sell Something

There are 2 broad categories of something you can sell - physical products and digital products.

On the physical side, you could sell books, speaking events, or training/coaching programs. You could also use your blog to sell handmade goods, or manufactured private label merchandise. There are a number of services available online (such as Amazon FBA) that will help make selling easy. The downside is creating or sourcing these products will take a lot of time and money, and returns and shipping could be a hassle. In some cases you might need to maintain inventory.

If inventory troubles other you, you can look into digital products, such as ebooks, ecourses, a members area or paid subscription to your blog, and downloadables (such as audio or video clips). This puts you in full control of your product and pricing. You can also pivot quickly because there’s no question of inventory. Digital products have high profit margin - they might be expensive to develop, but they are not expensive to maintain and deliver to your customers. However, because you’re the one creating the product yourself, there will be some technical challenges and steep learning curve. Or you can outsource the creation to one or more freelancers, and incur some more expenses in the process.

You might also sell your services - your time and expertise. If you’ve got a good following then it’s clear that you’re a good writer or artist or designer, or videographer, or cook even. Why not rent out your time? There’s little to no inventory required, little to no startup costs, and you can be up and running within the hour. The trouble is, since you trade your time for money, you can only grow as big as your time allows. You’ll also face the occasional client who pays late (or doesn’t pay at all).

Show Ads

Others pay you to put their name, product or message in front of your audience. This can be simple banner ads on your blog, sponsored posts (where you mention that a post was sponsored by someone), or underwritten posts (where you introduce someone else who writes the post for your audience, promoting his products in the process).

Most of these are easy to setup and you maintain full control of the process. However, ad revenue is quite low. You’ll need a huge amount of traffic to get a decent income. For example, adsense, which is the biggest ad network there is, pays out an average of $1 per 1,000 ad impressions. Most people don’t like ads, so you’ll be losing a few to a lot of visitors, depending on how you choose to display ads. And finally different devices, browsers and ad blockers can interfere with ads displaying, which means you might end up making even less than the $1/1000 visitors.

Recommend Products

The technical term for this is affiliate marketing. You earn a commission every time your visitors buy a product or service you recommend. There are thousands of products and retailers to partner with, the most popular being Amazon Affiliates. You can earn passively from your posts as long as your visitors keep listening to your advice. You don’t have to worry about creating products, supporting customers, or any of the technical complexity of selling your own products or services.

Patreons

The final, direct way to make money from your blog is to accept donations. You produce all your content on your own time and publish them for free. If someone wants to help support you they do so through donations. It’s not begging. You’re essentially letting people pay whatever they want for your content, even if the amount is $0. There are 2 ways to do this - by having a donate paypal (or stripe) button on your website, or by signing up for Patreon.

In some cases this may be a bit like the subscription service we described above. Some bloggers may offer exclusive experiences or behind-the-scenes content to their backers to entice them to donate.

Indirect income

You don’t have to make income directly from your blog though. If you offer services, a blog is a good way to establish yourself as a thought leader. If you were already and author, it’s a good way to help people get a taste of your writing. While you may not make much, or any money from of your blog, you mind end up making more because of your blog.

Final Tips

So, to sum up, here are all the ways bloggers can make money:

This is the second part of a series of guides on how to succeed with blogging. This guide was written by the team at FastWebHost.com who have helped thousands of blogs setup and achieve success over the last 10 years.

How to Grow your Blog Readership

In part 1 of this series (link) we’ve covered how to build your blog, and how to create pages and posts. Today we’ll show you how you can get more people to start reading those posts and pages on a regular basis.

There are 2 general ways to grow your readership - the organic or natural approach where people find your blog, and the paid approach where you pay someone to help them find your blog. We’ll go over both.

The Natural Way

Search Traffic

Quick! You need to learn to fold a shirt the fastest way. What do you do? You googled it didn’t you? Some of you also searched for it on youtube, but most of you googled it.

Search is the core of the internet. Anytime someone wants to learn something new, it starts with a search. So if you’d like to be known for something, you need to make sure you’re showing up in searches.

We call this optimizing for SEO, and we’ve got a lot of resources on this here: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/cat/search-engine-optimization/

Word of Mouth

The other natural ways for people to find out about you is if someone told them about it. That’s the social aspect of blogging, or word of mouth.

So how do you get more word of mouth traffic? Get on social media. People are already on social media, and they will see it. Your current readers and followers will see the update on their news feeds and click to come to your blog. Some will share the post with their own personal networks.

To get shares you have to do more than just post the link in a status update though. Each platform is different, so you’ll need to optimize your post for each.

For example, we’ve found the most effective way to share on Facebook is with a commentary or a related thought that brings people in and makes them want to learn more. On Pinterest a more descriptive image and tags are far more important.

Be Interesting

Now in order for people to share your content and show it to their friends it has to be one thing above all else: I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T-I-N-G

There are 3 ways to achieve that in a blog.

Exciting Titles and Feature Images

The title is the first thing people see and yes we do judge a blog post by it’s title. A boring title means no one will click it to read the whole thing, while an exciting title will. The same applies to your feature image - the one that shows up in your archives and your social media shares.

Here’s a great example:

See that? Great title and great image. The number of social shares in the corner is an added boost.

The title is the last thing you should write. Finish the entire post, then come back to write a title. Think about how you can make it more engaging so the readers are compelled to click.

Be Useful

Interesting content gets shared more often, but the most shares come from practically useful content.

It makes sense. The latest celebrity gossip is fun and all, but if you’re going to take the effort to share something it’s likely to be something that others in your network will find useful.

So how do you become more useful?

1. Give people an exact solution to a problem, not 50 different things they might try
2. Give detailed actionable steps they can follow, and stay away from theoretical stuff (unless theory is the point of your blog)
3. Provide lots of examples and case studies to prove your points
4. Show exact numbers wherever possible. Lose 20 pounds in 60 days, not lose weight fast.

Exciting People

Again, people are reading your blog because they care about what you think. Now some people don’t care about what you think, but what if someone they cared about did? Or what if you were writing about someone they cared about.

Here are some ways to get exciting people on your blog.

1. Interview someone important in your field, which is what Mixergy does for small businesses
2. Guest blog on a different bloggers site, such as George Minton’s article on Photododo
3. Analyze something someone famous said or did

When Elon Musk said he was reading Twelve Against the Gods, it sold out on amazon within a day, and prices of used books jumped up from $.99 to $99.99. Clearly, we care about what important people think. This presents a great opportunity for you to get in on the action and drive traffic to your blog.

Exciting perspectives

Everyone’s already written everything about the latest iPhone, and the latest Elon Musk book. Adding your voice to the noise is just that - noise.

If you’d like to stand out you need to say something no one else is saying. Take a unique stand on an issue, or voice your opinions differently.

Have a unique way of saying things. For example Oliver Emberton likes illustrating his points, while Mark Manson enjoys swearing at them, and David Wong mostly makes fun of them.

The important thing is to have a solid stand on a topic that people care about, and expressing it with style and force.

The Paid Way

The Paid way of getting traffic is easy. Post to social media and boost your posts. Add to a content aggregator and pay them to spread it around.

The trouble is, you might get some readers this way, but you won’t keep them for very long. And if you can’t hang on to them then what’s the point?

That’s why you need to start getting readers the natural way, and only use the paid way to amplify your reach.

Back to Work

And now you know how to write better blog posts and get more regular readers. Now it’s time to get back to writing again.

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Next up on the How to Succeed with Blogging series: How to make money from your blog.