Search Engine and Referral Traffic – Which converts better ?

There are three main sources of traffic to your blog and you need the three. However, in this post, I will dwell more on two. Here are the three, to begin with;

1 – > Search engine traffic
2 – > Referral traffic
3 – > Direct Traffic

Search engine traffic is of course traffic from search engines. I’ll cover some more tips to get more of this traffic below

Direct traffic is traffic from direct visits to your blog – this happens when someone types your domain name in the address bar. Some people consider traffic from bookmarks, links in ebooks and emails as direct traffic. Continue reading

How to build a list for your blog and earn trust from subscribers!

Building a list for your blog is one of the first things you have to start doing as soon as you start your blog. I know this is not always the case because of the confusion and lack of accurate knowledge that’s often experienced by many starters.

One thing is to build the list and another is to maintain it. At both ends, it’s always a hard nut  to crack. If you’ve never started a list before or you are not happy with what’s happening with your current list, I might have suggestions that will clear the dust and set things right.

I want to discuss in this part the things you need to build a list and how to use your list effectively as a blogger so you don’t loose subscribers so quick. But first, here are two things you get from your list; Continue reading

Free Stock photos for your blog

Stock photos are photos that are available for immediate use. They are cost effective alternative to hiring a photographer to go out and shoot the photos.

If we had to go out and hire a photographer for every blog post, that will be a handsome load of work on our shoulders. So an alternative is to visit a website and download already existing and related pictures for out articles.

There are almost unlimited number of stock photo websites out there offering both free and paid options. Generally, the difference is in terms of size and resolution.  But before I give you a short list of some of the stock photo sites I use, we are going to see some important points. Continue reading

The 5 Most Important Pages On Your Blog!

Do you know the most important blog pages you need on your blog? If your old blog is meant to generate income or if you are about creating a new money making blog, there are quite a good number of pages you can create to give out specific information. While these pages are all important, 5 of theme are more crucial. These are more strategic in helping you generate more income and earning more trust for you from your community.

Before I move any further, this is part 10 in the series of creating a blog that makes money. If you missed out the first 9 parts in the series, you may want to check them out. Continue reading

WordPress Performance and speed optimization tricks that work!

Optimizing your blog for fast loading speed and high performance is a must in WordPress. Of course, that doesn’t mean every other site is left out.

As long as search engines and human readers are involved, high speed and usability are top priorities. Generally, if your blog takes over 2 seconds to load, this is considered slow. 3 seconds and above is very slow. With the mad rush for plugins, your new blog which should normally load under 1 second will soon be graded “very slow”. That’s why I highly recommend being so selective when installing new plugins is concerned.

This blog (at the moment of writing this post) takes less than 1 second to load and it’s graded 99% by Google PageSpeed. There are actually 13 active plugins, 7 of which are listed and recommended in this post Continue reading

Top 7 essential Plugins for new WordPress blogs

Today, I want to talk about the most essential plugins for new WordPress blogs. Plugins are good for their purposes but the more you get them on your blog, the more the chances of running into trouble.

NB: This is Part VIII in the series to create a money making blog. If you missed the previous parts, click here to go to the table of contents.

Why some plugins are bad!

Before I show you my most essential plugins for new WordPress blogs, let’s see why we have to apply a huge degree of caution why adding plugins to our blogs:

• Some poorly coded plugins can break your blog. Some get incompatible with your server configuration and may crash the server.
• Some plugins have some monitoring scripts to gather some critical information from your blog and submit to some remote location, exposing your blog to security dangers.
• Some poorly written plugins have weaknesses that can be exploited by hacker to bring down your blog.
• Some plugins make your blog very heavy and that’s bad for search engines and human friendliness.
• Some plugins are too unnecessarily complicated. Their authors have not clew what it means to be user friendly.
• Some plugins can just be so annoying and will keep kicking your visitors away with popups.
• Some will not want to cohabit with others and this may cause you a whole lot of uncertainties. Continue reading