6 Ways to Speed Up Your Site

The load time of websites is one of the most important factors affecting its usability; most Internet users will just skip a site altogether if it fails to load within a couple of seconds. Below you will find the summary of the “Speed Up Your Site” series. Those are simple yet effective ways to make sure that your website is running fast. You can click on each point to read the article with comments from the readers.

1. Optimize Images: always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing software. Images represent the heavier load on virtually any website so make sure you are optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn to an online image optimizer. 

Blog Project: 30 Traffic Generation Tips

First of all a big “thank you” for every one who participated. As I said before the number of entries surprised me (and the quality as well, I will definitely apply some of those tips myself).

Now, without further delay, the 30 Traffic Generation Tips:

1. Sridhar Katakam

Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. A good way to keep the conversation going is to install a MyBlogLog widget and visit the blog of people visiting your site.

4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results.

If you are in that same situation, here is a simple strategy that will certainly increase your blog traffic and make you break the 1,000 daily page views mark. In fact, the strategy could be used even if your are already over that number but have reached a traffic plateau lately.

Just make sure to execute the 4 steps as planned and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally).

43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid

There are several lists of web design mistakes around the Internet. Most of them, however, are the “Most common” or “Top 10 mistakes.” Every time I crossed one of those lists I would think to myself: “Come on, there must be more than 10 mistakes…”. Then I decided to write down all the web design mistakes that would come into my head; within half an hour I had over thirty of them listed. Afterwards I did some research around the web and the list grew to 43 points.

The next step was to write a short description for each one, and the result is the collection of mistakes that you will find below. Some of the points are common sense, others are quite polemic. Most of them apply to any website though, whether we talk about a business entity or a blog. Enjoy!

1. The user must know what the site is about in seconds: attention is one the most valuable currencies on the Internet. If a visitor can not figure what your site is about in a couple of seconds, he will probably just go somewhere else. Your site must communicate why I should spend my time there, and FAST!

28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website

There are several lists with “ways to make money with a website” on the Internet, but none of them seem to be complete. That is why I decided to create this one. If you know a method that is not listed below, just let us know and we’ll update it.

28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website
AWT Blog Tips

What Is Bounce Rate?

Today I was going to write about why new websites can display very misleading bounce rates, but I realized I had never covered the bounce rate concept before, so I’ll stick to the basics today, and expand on the topic over the coming weeks.

If you already know the term, consider this post a refresher.

What Is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is a very important metric for website owners. It basically tells you what percentage of your visitors are “bouncing” away after landing on your site (e.g., they just visit one page and leave before clicking on to a second page inside your site). A bounce can occur for several reasons, including:

Keep your title tags short and pertinent

The title tag (the description that appears on the top of the browser) of your site is one of the most important factors determining the search engine results position (SERP).

There are two common mistakes, however, the people commit when creating the title tag. The first one is to use a single title, usually the blog name, for all the pages throughout the site. This must be avoided because the title of a page should match the content inside it.

Suppose you are using the title “John Doe’s Blog” on all the pages. Even if you have a post talking about “The New PlayStation 3″ the title tag for this post will be “John Doe’s Blog”, which is not very effective (because there is no match on the keywords). A much better title would be “The New PlayStation 3″, that is exactly equal to the post name rather than the blog name.

The second mistake that people commit is to include too many keywords on the title tag, hoping that search engines will take all of them into consideration. Have you ever seen a title like this: “Tech Blog – where you find resources for blogs, websites, technology, internet, applications, software, hardware, and pretty much everything else!”

This should also be avoided because search engines put a value on title keywords depending on the total number of keywords. The result is that the higher the number of keywords you have on the title the smaller the value that will be attributed to each one of them.

A good title tag, therefore, should be short (no more than 4 or 5 keywords) and pertinent to the content inside the page.

Update: You can find the actual code I use on the article “Optimal Title Tag for WordPress“.

When Should You Start Monetizing Your Blog?

“At what point in the progression of developing and managing your blog is it best to try to monetize?”

One AWTBlogTips reader asked this question in our recent survey. It might well be a question that you have too, if you’re hoping to make money from your blog.

And for most bloggers, the answer is sooner than you think!

In fact, it’s a good idea to put as much thought as you can into monetization before you even launch your blog.

If you want to make money, you need to see your blog as an integral part of a business, and you need a clear plan for how your business will make money.

You also need to think about how this will fit in with your blog.

It’s a good idea to set reader’s expectations from day one.

Even if you know you’re unlikely to make money in your first couple of months, make sure readers understand your blog isn’t just a hobby. (If you train them to think everything will be free forever, you may struggle to get their money when you do monetize!)

Depending on your monetization method, you might:

• Choose your blog theme to allow for the easy placement of ads.
• Focus on writing review posts with affiliate links in.
• Add a “Hire me” page to your blog to promote your services.
• Have a section about your upcoming ebook in your sidebar.

… and so on.

Of course, most bloggers accept they won’t make money from day one. You do need to get your blog online, write posts, and create something truly valuable for readers. But that doesn’t mean you need to wait to think about monetization until your blog’s been going for months (or even years).

If you haven’t launched your blog yet, make sure you spend some time thinking about how it will generate revenue for you. Advertising and affiliate links are popular and easy to get started with, but you might find it’s actually a lot faster to make money by offering a service or product.

If your blog is still quite new, make sure you prepare readers for any monetization that’s going to happen soon. For instance, you could throw in the occasional mention of the ebook you’re working on.

If your blog is well established, don’t hold back on monetizing because you’re afraid of readers’ reactions. You may get a bit of a backlash, but most readers will be accepting and even encouraging – especially if you monetize in a way that’s a win-win for you and for them.

Next week, I’ll be writing about ways to monetize a new blog, so stay tuned for that. If you’ve got any great tips or lessons learned, add them in the comments and I’ll pick some of the best to use in next week’s post.

How to Remove Broken Links From Your Website

Broken links are links on your website that point to pages that no longer exist. For instance, suppose you write a post linking to an article you found very interesting on another website. A couple of months down the road that website owner decided to delete the article, or to shut the website down completely. Your link will now be pointing to something that no longer exists, so it will be considered a broken link.

Why should you care about broken links?

First because it creates a bad experience for your visitors, as it’s pretty frustrating to click on a link expecting to find something there and get a 404 error.

Second, Google knows broken links are a bad experience for users, so it doesn’t like websites that contain too many broken links (i.e., it might reduce the search rankings of a page or website that has too many).

Now that you are convinced, here’s how to remove broken links from your website. Visit BrokenLinkCheck.com, put the URL of your website, and click on “Find broken links”. Depending on the size of your site you might need to wait some minutes.

If you want a more hardcore tool check out Xenu Link Sleuth (you’ll need to download and install this one though, so the above one is much easier to use).

Once the results are displayed go through each URL and remove the dead link. I suggest that whenever you delete a link you keep the anchor text there and add a “(Update: link no longer active)” message aside to it to let users know what happened there.

Repeat this process once a year or so to make sure your website will stay clean of broken links. Your visitors will thank you, and Google will reward you.

How Broad or Narrow Should Your Blog’s Niche Be?

One of the questions that’s come up a few times is how to select a niche, or how to fix problems with one. Usually, problems crop up because a niche is too broad or too narrow.

Is Your Niche Too Broad?

Here’s an example of too broad a niche … in fact, this blog doesn’t really have a niche at all:

My blog covers travel, health, personal development, Twitter, and watercolour painting.

While you might personally have a very wide range of interests, it’s not a good idea to combine these into one blog. Even if you have no intention of making money, you presumably want readers – and they’ll want a blog with a focus.

Fix it:

• Choose a core topic (or two or three closely related topics) to focus on. For instance, it might make sense to combine health and personal development.
• Write down what your blog is really about. You might find it’s useful to use bullet points here. Imagine you’re explaining your blog to a friend or a potential new reader.
• Use different outlets for your other interests. If you have a blog on personal development, with a slant towards health, there’s nothing stopping you writing guest posts about watercolour painting.

Is Your Niche Too Narrow?

A very narrow niche might sound like a good idea, but in practice, it can be very tough to get traffic and readers. A too-narrow niche is also a common cause of burnout: you simply run out of things to say, or lose interest.

It might look like this:

Best brushes for watercolour painting.

While that could make a great blog post or even a great series, it’s not going to be an easy topic for a whole blog.

In my experience, bloggers often choose a too-narrow niche not because they’re passionately interested in it but because they hope it’ll make money. The truth is that a slightly broader niche will usually serve you better.

Fix it:

• Move one step up from your current topic. From best brushes for watercolour painting, you might choose to blog about painting tools (brushes, canvases, etc) or you might blog about watercolour painting.
• Consider buying a new domain. Perhaps your current domain name restricts your topics too much, and it’s time to find a new one.
• Rethink how your blog makes money. Very niche sites are often monetised with affiliate marketing or ads. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you might find a broader niche is easier to monetise in other ways (e.g. by selling products or services).

What’s your blog’s niche? Do you think it’s too narrow or too broad? Let us know in the comments!

How Should You Monetize a New Blog?

You’ve got a new blog – maybe it’s been running for a few days or a few weeks. (Or perhaps you’re still in the planning stages.)
How should you monetize?
(And if you’re wondering whether it’s too soon, check out this post from last week where we looked at why you can and should monetize your blog right from day one.)

As I see it, there are two really good options for a brand new blog.

Option #1: Affiliate Links

Although affiliate marketing sometimes gets a bad rap, it’s a straightforward way to make money, and (done with integrity) it creates a win-win-win situation for you, your reader, and the product creator.

Many digital products (like ebooks, software and membership sites) offer an affiliate program, where you can sign up to earn commission on any sales you generate. If you own any digital products, look for an “Affiliates” section on their website, or contact the creator to ask if there’s an affiliate program. Often, you’ll get a 50% cut.

If you want to promote physical products, Amazon will give you a small percentage of sales – this could work out very well if you blog about laptops, cameras, phones, or anything else where readers are likely to buy high-priced products. If you mainly promote books and other low-priced products, though, it can take a long time to make any money like this.

Tip: Only promote products you own and like. Don’t sign up as an affiliate for a product you’ve never used – it could badly backfire if a reader buys on your recommendation. Always be honest when reviewing products, and let readers know any drawbacks.

Option #2: Services

Creating a product up-front is probably going to take more time than you have – but how about selling a service instead?

Hopefully, you have a few skills that relate to your niche. For instance, on my site Aliventures I blog about writing – and I could feasibly sell my services as a blogger, an editor, a proof-reader, a writing coach, and so on. (In fact, I’ve done all of these in my time.)

Don’t underestimate yourself here. Skills that may seem second-nature to you could be very valuable to someone else. Let’s say you’ve started ten blogs and you’re now great at installing WordPress, setting up plugins, tweaking themes, and so on. You could offer blog setup to people who aren’t so techy minded.

Tip: Offer your services for free to a few selected people, and get them to give you feedback so you can improve. Ask them for a testimonial that you can include on your website: this will be a big help in persuading potential customers that you’re reputable.

So why haven’t I mentioned one of the most popular options out there – running adverts on your site? Many new bloggers want to monetize using ads – but it’s rarely a good way to make money. You need a lot of traffic to make ads worthwhile, and while they can provide a nice extra stream of income, you’re unlikely to make a living from them.

(To give you an example here, it took me 11 months of blogging to get my first $100 from Google Adsense, and just a couple of months to make that much through freelance blogging.)

If you’ve been blogging for a while, tell us what monetization techniques worked best for you in the early days of your blog. And if you’ve got a new blog, or you’re about to get started, leave a comment to tell us how you’ll be monetizing.

Meta Tag Analyzer

Some time ago I wrote about the importance of having a short and pertinent title tag (you can read it here).

The title tag might be the most important factor on the header of a site, but all the other meta tags (description, keywords and author) should also be considered. They will not make a huge impact on your search ranking but every little help should be used to fine tune your blog.

Meta Tag Analyzer is a very helpful tool for understanding your meta tags. All you need to do is to type the address of your site and it will report the status of the page, the number of keywords, the relevancy of the title, the quality of the tags and much more. Check it out.