To shed light on all those issues that slow down your website, we invited Stavros Papadakis to lay out his process for speeding up slow websites.

What Makes Your Website Slow?

You should definitely check my previous post with 16 ways to speed up your WordPress website.

Although this post provided a quick checklist with the best tweaks to optimize the loading time of your WordPress website, there are still many issues that can slow down your website.

If you have enabled compression on your htaccess file, combined CSS files, moved Javascript files to the footer but you are still not happy with the loading time of your site, then check these 18 common issues that slow down your website.

1. Super-heavy websites

There is no doubt that a 3MB page making 180 HTTP requests is going to be slower than a 1MB site with 60 HTTP requests.

Do you want to optimize the loading time of your site?

One of the best ways to do that is by minimizing the size of each page of your site.

Although you can optimize your images, combine CSS files, minify Javascript files and apply many front-end optimization tweaks, having a 3MB site is going to make your site slow and the users of your site unhappy.

21MBs are a huge load for your server and your browser.

While you are designing or redesigning your site, you should do your best to load only what you need and nothing more.

In others words, you should always ask yourself:

Do I really need 8 big images at my slideshow at homepage?

Do I have to display 20 portfolio items at homepage?

Should I show 12 testimonials of happy users at homepage or 3 testimonials will do the trick as well?

Loading all these data makes your site look nice but your site will be slower as well due to all these data.

Do you want to have a slow loading site? If not, then minimize the data loaded per page of your website.

2. Non-optimized images

Do you know that 80% of the time that it takes to load a website is controlled by the front-end structure?

This is an amazing fact of web performance optimization.

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Focus on that.

You can try to optimize your database or PHP code but if you ignore this fact of paramount importance, then your website will be slow.

A 460KB PNG file can become 90KB by optimizing it.

If you have 10 non-optimized images at your site, then you may add 2-3 MBs of extra page load.

If you do not optimize your images, then the loading time of your site can be severely affected.

The good news is that most of the JPG and PNG images can become 40% or even up to 80% smaller without losing image quality by optimizing them using Photoshop, ImageOptim or a third-party tool such as Kraken.

3. Excessive usage of ads

Google Adsense and other similar services can be an extra source of income for you but they can also slow down your site.

A website that loads ads in header, to the right sidebar, in the body of the post and at the bottom of the page using 2 or 3 different ad services, is going to be much slower than a website with only 1 ad in the right sidebar or in the body of the post.

Not only are the ads annoying for most of the users but they will slow down your site as well.

Please check the following screenshot from a client’s website.

Do you really need all these annoying ads?

Believe it or not, there are 4 different ads in it, one ad at the top of the screenshot, the video which is an ad, an ad to the right sidebar and another ad at the bottom of the page! Needless to say, those ads are annoying for most of the users and slow down the loading time of your site as well.

To sum it up, ads should always be used with caution. As long as an ad does not generate money, it should be removed.

4. Wrong dimensions for your images

You should not scale images in HTML, you should resize a large image and use the resized image instead.

For instance, let’s assume that you have an image that it is 1200px x 600px and you want to use a “smaller” version of it e.g. 400px x 200px.

In that case, do not use the original image and scale it down by changing width and height dimensions in HTML.

You must create a new thumbnail image by resizing the original image from 1200px x 600px to 400px x 200px and use the new image which is smaller and will load faster.

I have come across many sites that used to load a 256 x 256 facebook image of 150KB instead of a 32 x 32 facebook icon of 2KB!

5. Pointless redirects

I have one quick quiz for you.

Which one of the following images loads faster, A, B, C or D?

A. http://www.domain.com/image.jpg
B. http://domain.com/image.jpg
C. https://www.domain.com/image.jpg
D. https://domain.com/image.jpg

Did you choose A? Wrong.
Did you choose B? Wrong.
Did you choose C? Wrong.
Did you choose D? Wrong again!

The right answer is that it depends on your site!

If your site is https://www.domain.com, then by calling the non-HTTPS version of the image (http://www.domain.com/image.jpg), there will be an extra redirect from http://www.domain.com/image.jpg to https://www.domain.com/image.jpg by the browser in order to load the image.

If you are using the non-www version for your site (http://domain.com/), then you should always use the non-www version for your images as well (e.g. http://domain.com/image.jpg instead of http://www.domain.com/image.jpg).

Browsers do not like this kind of pointless redirects.

Pointless redirects will slow down your site

By using relative URLs for your files (e.g. <img src=”/image.jpg” />), you can easily get rid of this common issue that slows down the loading time of your site.

6. Wrong server location

If the traffic of your site is mainly from USA or UK, then your site should be hosted by a hosting company located in USA or UK respectively.

The closer the server is to the visitors of your site, the faster your website will be.

Needless to say, if you get traffic from all over the world, then I highly recommend you to use a Content Delivery Network or CloudFlare so that images, CSS and Javascript files are loaded from a server closer to each user’s location.

7. Dodgy shared hosting plans

No one wants to pay $$$ for hosting a site but serving a WooCommerce site with 40 active plugins or a Magento site with 5000 products via a shared hosting plan that costs $5 per month is a recipe for disaster.

You should always invest in a good hosting company to get the best loading time for your site.

If your site is unavailable or slow, then you may save a few dollars per month by using a shared hosting plan but you will lose much more by losing your clients (a user that visits a slow loading site will not revisit this site).

If you have a heavy WordPress site using Woocommerce or many active plugins, then I highly recommend WP Engine and FlyWheel (affiliate links).

You should not expect to get 200.000 unique visits per month to upgrade to a VPS, this will never happen while you are hosting your site on the same overloaded server with hundreds of sites on it.

8. Excessive usage of social media scripts

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc) scripts add a DNS lookup, a set of Javascript files and a few images as well whenever they are added in a page.

Although many of those sharing options should be available at the end of your posts so that your users can easily share your posts, it does not make sense to load all those sharing options at every single page.

What’s the point of loading those social media icons in every single page e.g. at the contact page or at your category pages?

Showing 5 different social media counts for each post on homepage or category pages adds a lot of load to your site. How important is it to show counts on these pages? Do you need to show Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus and LinkedIn as well?

Too many social media scripts can kill the performance of your site

Would you be best of just showing 1 or 2 that perform well for you? If you don’t get many shares, is there much point showing any at all?

You should always think twice before adding any social media options in a page of your site.

9. Wrong file type for your images

If you need transparency for your images then you cannot avoid the PNG file type BUT if you do not need transparency, you should never save your images as PNG files because they are much bigger in filesize so much slower than JPG images.

Minimize or even eliminate any heavy GIF files because they can drastically slow down the loading time of your site.

You should also try to avoid saving images with text as content because it can be a time-consuming process to edit the text on images and generated images are much heavier as well.

Use JPG as your default. It’s the smallest and fastest loading file type for most of the files.

10. Not taking advantage of dedicated services

There is a big number of popular services that can reduce the load of your server.

Do you have videos on your site? You should use Youtube, Wistia or Vimeo.

Do you have many comments on your site? You should use Disqus, IntenseDebate or
Discourse.

Do you use jQuery, jQuery UI, AngularJS or Mootools? You should load them via the Google hosted libraries.

Do you use WordPress and display popular posts? You should use Jetpack which does that automatically for you.

You can also use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve your images from it instead of your site.

If your site is getting significant traffic and you load many images and videos, the loading time of your site can be optimized drastically by balancing your site’s workload with the above-mentioned tricks.

11. 404 errors

If you try to load a file which does not exist or the browser cannot find then the loading time of your site will be affected by this 404 HTTP error.

You should always check for any 404 errors during the rendering of your pages in order to achieve the fastest loading time. You can do that either by checking the generated waterfall of your site using Webpagetest and GTMetrix or by using the network tab of browsers such as Chrome and Firefox.

If Webpagetest shows any red lines on the waterfall then you should immediately troubleshoot and fix those 404 errors.

404 Errors Can Ruin Loading Time

This kind of errors can really ruin the loading time of your website especially if you serve your site via a shared hosting plan.

12. Not caching your site

Every content management systems (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento) uses a database in order to save a big set of data on it.

Although this is great for managing your site, it also means that it adds extra load on your server in order to generate each page every time it is requested.

You can solve this problem by using caching.

If you use WordPress, then you can either use a caching plugin such as
W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache or ZenCache or use a managed server hosting company such as WP Engine and FlyWheel (affiliate links) which take care of caching.

Needless to say, Joomla, Drupal and Magento offer caching options as well which can help a lot by providing cached versions of your site for consequent site visitors instead of generating each page over and over again.

Caching your pages can drastically speed up your site

Caching is a no-brainer for any database-driven website. Even a 10-minute caching period can optimize the loading time of your website drastically.

13. Hundreds of HTTP requests

Every CSS file, Javascript file or image loaded on your site is a HTTP request. The more HTTP requests your site has, the slower your site will be.

Although you can try to combine CSS and Javascript files, to inline CSS files and to use CSS sprites for small images, if you implement those tweaks and you still have 150 HTTP requests, then you should obviously try to declutter your site by removing content from it.

246 HTTP requests will slow down your site no matter how optimized it is

I know it is tempting to display a lot of content in each page of your site but please keep in mind that “less is more” so try not to load so many images or scripts.

14. Bad server configuration

If you are on a shared hosting plan, it is quite common that they do their best to serve as many sites per server as possible.

They usually do that by disabling features such as compression and KeepAlive among others.

Enabling HTTP Keep-Alive allows the same TCP connection to send and receive multiple HTTP requests, thus reducing the latency for subsequent requests.

Compression reduces the size of files sent from your server to increase the speed to which they are transferred to the browser.

If you are on a shared hosting plan and your hosting company has disabled compression and Keep-Alive, then you should switch hosting company as soon as possible.

Keep-Alive and compression should be enabled on your server

15. CSS imports

CSS imports are a nice way to import CSS files on the top of a new CSS file e.g. importing a CSS reset file but it adds additional delays during the loading of a web page as well.

You should avoid CSS imports, whenever possible.

16. Loading unnecessary files on each page

You should load CSS and Javascript files only when they are required on a page of your site.

For instance, if a specific Javascript file is needed only on a single page, in that case, you should load that Javascript file only at this URL instead of loading it on every single page of your site.

If you do not follow this simple rule, then you can end up loading 30 CSS and 40 Javascript files on a page which needs only 3 CSS and 4 Javascript files so you are making 63 extra HTTP requests and adding many hundreds of kilobytes on the page size.

17. Loading heavy files on the background

Many sites used to load big background images which are hardly visible.

Do you really need a 500KB image loaded on the background? You should try to use CSS3, whenever feasible or use a background color instead.

It is also a bad practice to load sound files on the background while your site is loading.

Most of those techniques are slowing down your site and should be avoided.

18. Not using an expert

My goal was to give you enough information to get started fixing the slow loading pages of your site.

Optimizing the loading time of your site is a win-win situation for you and everybody who visits your website. Faster sites means higher conversions, better search engine rankings and a more enjoyable user experience.

It’s best to hire an expert when you want a job done well.

Amateurs can follow best practices but do not know where to begin.

An expert will fix the actual problems that slow down your site.

Whenever an amateur does not know the real problems of your website, they will recommend a pointless temporary solution such as moving hosts, changing theme, installing a different caching plugin or even switching CMS.

Many of my clients have wasted their time and money on amateurs who had just installed a caching plugin without fixing the actual problems of their site.

You should always keep in mind that each website is unique so different speed optimization tweaks have to be applied per site.

To sum it up, optimizing the loading time of your site should always be done by an expert who will perform the speed optimization tweaks with surgical precision.

Imagine how happy your users will be to see super fast loading times!

If you want to hire me, I’m happy to help you. See my portfolio and contact me on AwesomeWeb today!

The post 18 Things Making Your Website Slow appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Daniel Cid has spent well over a decade securing people’s websites, so they don’t have to. The Founder/CTO of Sucuri specializes in intrusion detection, log analysis (log-based intrusion detection), web-based malware research and secure development.

He’s known for creating the free open sourced OSSEC HIDS (Intrusion detection system) and founding Sucuri. He’s also the co-writer of the Host-Based Intrusion Detection book.

Here’s Why You Should Listen to Daniel:

• Sucuri defends against 33M+ monthly attacks.
• Protects more than 250k+ of his clients websites per month.
• He’s fixed several security holes for IncomeDiary and monitors our sites.

What are the most common rookie mistakes website owners make when it comes to keeping their sites secure?

The most common mistake is that they underestimate their risk and the importance of security. In fact, security is the last thing in their mind when pushing a new site live.

We hear this all the time:

“Why would anyone try to hack me?”

“That would never happen to me.”

This lack of appreciation and understanding of their risk when they put something online, leads to bad security practices that only change when they actually get hacked or attacked in some way.

Before we used Sucuri, some of our sites had a lot of downtime due to viruses/malware/hackers etc. Then we got Sucuri and it stopped happening. What is it that Sucuri does that works so well, that other software and plugins don’t do?

Security is the core of what we do as a business. We think, live, and breathe it daily. When you pour that much energy into any one thing you have the opportunity to identify and address a number of problems.

We invest heavily in security; this includes hiring some of the brightest minds around the world to build out our research, response and remediation teams. We’re united in the one ideal that website owners should be able to operate online safely against those trying to destroy what they’ve built. This level of focus allows us to stay ahead of the threats. It’s the devotion to being the best at website security that is our biggest differentiator, and in my opinion what makes us so effective.

We are a company owned and operated by security professionals first and foremost, not by marketing, sales or even developers. This keeps us true to our values and ensures that everything we build is addressing a real website security problem.

Your company is a leader in website security, when people are told they can’t do something, they want to do it even more. How often do hackers take on the challenge of taking your site down and what measures do you have in place to prevent it?

We are attacked very often and I won’t go into technical details around what we do to protect ourselves.

However, I can talk about our thought process when thinking about security: it comes down to keeping things simple. Complexity is securities worst enemy; complex things break in complex ways. We always break our systems down into simple, manageable solutions that are isolated and work independently (a concept known as Functional Isolation).

We also operate under these assumptions:

• That someone else is reading our emails.
• That our private content will be shared publicly someday.
• That our data will be lost.
• That our servers will be compromised.
• That our software has security bugs that we do not know about, yet.
• That someone is trying to hack us right now.
• That someone, smarter than us, is trying to hack us. 

It may sound paranoid, but it guides our security decisions.

Once you think about them, you will understand why we encrypt and backup our data. Why we remove old content that is not in use anymore. Why we use multiple layers of security (Defense in Depth). Why we use a WAF to protect our sites. Why we monitor our logs. Why we restrict our employee’s access to internal systems. Why we set up honey traps for attackers. Why none of our servers talk to each other. Why we use multiple hosting providers. The biggest thing we do is place security first before convenience; it’s often the very opposite for most organizations, convenience often trumps security.

It is all about reducing our risk and increasing the chances of us detecting and blocking an attack before it can do any damage.

Most of the time sites go offline it’s because they have been hacked. Every second your website is offline, it’s losing money. What is the very first thing you should do to get your site back online if this happens?

Breath. Calm yourself down. Don’t panic or do something crazy.

Once you’re calm, it’s amazing how much clearer things become. I honestly recommend talking to an expert in the security field to help you out. My company, Sucuri, focuses on website remediation and cleanup, but there are other people that can help as well. Unless you are a hard-core developer or a security professional, do not try to do it yourself. This isn’t meant to be a shameless plug, but the reality. Security, contrary to popular belief, is not a Do It Yourself (DIY) project; we have to learn to leverage professionals in their respective fields, there is a reason they exist.

A business owner wants nothing to do with their security issues; they want to focus on running their business. A website that is infected can cost you a lot, a website that stays infected or continues to get reinfected can be catastrophic.    

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu with some of the team at the Sucuri 2014 Team Meeting. Exercising the mind & body.

Time machines are real, you travel 5 years into the future. What new website security problems do you see happening?

The core security problems will still be the same: Someone will still be trying to hack you, profit from your work or take you down. 

That has been the constant for years and won’t change. What also won’t change is that the bad guys will keep trying to exploit the easiest path. If your application is secure against SQL injection (SQLi), they will move on to Cross Site Scripting (XSS). Once the website is safe from XSS vulnerabilities, they will move to brute forcing or phishing. If all that fails, they may try to take your down via a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

You use live chat on your site. So do we. How has it effect sales and support? Does is provide a positive return on investment?

One of our big focus these days is trying to humanize security. How can we humanize if we don’t have real people engaging directly with website owners? That’s where things like chat and phone come into play. It provides a mechanism for our new and existing clients to engage with us.

It also allows us to touch and hear directly from our clients, in the moment they are the most vulnerable: hacked, infected or under attack. That gives them assurance that we are here for them and working on a solution. And it also allows us to listen to their needs and make sure we are addressing their needs.

What has been your biggest set back and what did you learn from it?

So many setbacks, that it is hard to pick one.

In fact, I think that running a business is like a rollercoaster; it has many ups and downs. You have to keep going though, you can’t allow yourself to be distracted from your focus. Some clients will be upset some days, sometimes most days. It’s hard to ignore the squeaky wheel.

Employees will mess things up; growing pains are a natural piece of the puzzle. Yes, your servers will crash; your networks will get congested. You’ll likely underestimate the impact of social media, and it’s impacts; all of a sudden everyone has an opinion. Remember though, the fact that you have these problems is a good thing; I’d be more concerned if you didn’t.

The key to it all of this though is to continue to learn and push your own boundaries. Improve and don’t allow yourself to make the same mistakes over and over.  Repeated mistakes will kill your company.

Sucuri is one of the most important services we rely on, what are the 3 most important services & tools that your business relies on?

We are a remote and distributed company, with employees in over 19 countries; communication and tracking services are the ones we rely on the most. I would say Hipchat, BitBucket and Jira are the three most critical for us in our day to day operations.

What advice would you give to other developers thinking about creating their own SaaS business?

You have to be able to solve at least one problem that you users (clients) are having. People will buy from you to get that problem solved.   That’s how we started. People needed to get their site cleaned from malware and that’s all we did. That allowed us to learn our customers and their needs, before expanding our services and offerings. 

If you try to do too much to start at once, you will likely not do any of them well. It is better to start with a bicycle, than with half of a car that won’t start.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given?

Never stop learning. Work Hard. Do more than what is expected from you. Persist.

Thanks a lot for the brilliant insights Daniel…

If your website gets hacked, it will cost you a lot more than Sucuri will. Time, energy, and emotions are expended when you’re websites are compromised, we’re not just talking about finances. Great security means more profits and peace of mind.  

-Team IncomeDiary

The post Daniel Cid Interview – Defending 250,000 Websites From Hackers Every Month appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Irina Weber from SERanking.com is here today, to enlighten us as to which tools are the most productive and best organized to help you succeed as a blogger.

Irina and her team have tested many tools of top productivity and blogging experts and have a good idea of what top performers in the blogging world are using to get through the day in a highly productive manner.

Here’s an awesome list of SEO tools that can simplify and supercharge your blogging efforts…

25 SEO Tools For Better Search Engine Rankings

#25. BuzzSumo

Content Curator

BuzzSumo is a fantastic tool that allows you to search widely shared content through social networks, gather all data about the content, define top influential content curators in your niche and collect statistics about all of them into Excel spreadsheets. It’s easy to use: just type a word and it will show you all the most popular posts on the web based on that particular keyword.

buzzsumo.com

#24. SEMRush

SERP Tracking

SEMRush is a great tool that tells you a lot about not only your own website but your competitors search engine rankings too. The most interesting information they share is what keywords a website ranks for. This information is useful because, you can see what posts don’t rank at all and which rank well but could be improved.

Semrush.com

#23. SE Ranking

Website Rank Checker

SE Ranking allows you to monitor website rank in search engines and any target regions. It provides advanced keyword analysis, website audits, competitors’ website checking, online marketing plans with an easy way to get White Label reports.

seranking.com

#22. Portent

Content Idea Generator

If you’re looking for good ideas and titles to write epic content, just enter a keyword and you’ll get a list of catchy potential titles for your next article.

portent.com

#21. Google Docs

Content Creation & Editing

This is a great tool where you can write and store content and check for any grammar and spelling mistakes. For more advanced features, you can easily change the HTML or CSS of the document and even collaborate with other people, in case you need some help.

docs.google.com

#20. Piktochart

Infographic Design App

Nowadays infographics are the best way to cover visual and interesting information on your site and attract your target audience. It is quite expensive to order infographics, but Piktochart will help you to create your own for free. Pie charts and graphs can also be pretty to attract user’s attention.

We’ve found it to be a great addition to the professional looking landing pages that you can create with OptimizePress.

piktochart.com

#19. ScreenPresso

Screen Capture Tool

Screenpresso can improve your screen capture experience. Right now with ScreenPresso, screenshots can look natural and eye-catching. Their powerful built-in editor allows you to grab an image or video of what you see on your computer screen, add effects, and share with anyone.

screenpresso.com

#18. Doodle

Task Scheduler

Doodle makes your blogging simple and more organized. Using a content calendar will help you to figure out how often and when you should schedule your blog posts. The tool facilitates the content process and gets rid of excess distractions.

doodle.com

#17. Dropbox

Filesharing

It is one of the most popular tools to store things like images, pdf files, and Word Docs between mobile devices and computers. You can keep your files secure wherever you go. Dropbox is easy to use; Simply save your files, add them to the tool and sync them with a supported app.

dropbox.com

#16. Windows Live Writer

Blog Editor

The tool simplifies the writing and editing of all blog posts. It is one of the most famous blog editors on the Windows platform. You can easily edit blog posts, images, videos, etc. You can also add additional features with lots of useful plugins.

windows.microsoft.com/ru-ru/windows-live

#15. Ping-O-Matic

Pinging Service

It is one of the best pinging services to let search engines know about your new posts. You can choose different services that you want to ping. All services are regularly updated, so make sure you take advantage of the most useful ones. 

pingomatic.com

#14. Keyword Planner

Keyword Research

Keyword Planner is the best tool to find and discover keywords in order to optimize your content, build up successful marketing campaigns, gather metrics about websites and get an estimate of search queries for target keywords. You can monitor and export your competitor’s keywords for better website performance. A lot of useful tools are built-in so the Keyword Planner can help you to create paid Ad words campaigns easily.

adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

#13. Toggl

Time Tracking Tool

A super simple time tracking tool, that helps you stay on track. It lets you create tasks, click the Start/Stop button, check out how the task is going and how much time you spent on it. It works online and offline and easily syncs to the cloud when you’ve reached the internet. It is quite an indispensible tool for bloggers who need to keep track of writing, editing and researching tasks.

toggl.com

#12. Grammarly

Grammar Checker

The tool makes your writing better by finding and fixing grammar mistakes. It checks different mistakes for sentence structure, style, grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. It is a perfect match for a newbie and you don’t need to have any special editing skills.

grammarly.com

#11. Canva

Simple Graphic Design

It is the most-used image software and it’s because Canva allows you to create fancy and awesome images with a wide range of different templates for social media, website interface, fonts and more.

canva.com

#10. Mention

Media Monitor

It is a great real-time media monitoring tool. Mention is a great alternative to Google Alerts. It lets you track the keywords and mentions about your website, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral content. Using Mention you can also collaborate with your employees; share alerts, assign tasks, get them involved in the discussion and keep track of your competitor’s actions.

en.mention.com

#9. MailChimp

Email Marketing Solution

MailChimp is a great email marketing tool that helps send emails to a list of your users, create great email campaigns, manage all of your subscribers, share them on social media and integrate with any web services you use. It is easy to get automated campaigns every day that deliver all new posts you write. It is integrated with Google Analytics for better business insight.

mailchimp.com

#8. Buffer

Social Media Manager

When you publish a blog post, you can easily set up a schedule with Buffer. It will help you share different posts via social networks with custom images and titles. This is the greatest social media app, and it really makes it easy to update all of your social statuses.

bufferapp.com

#7. KeePass

Password Management

KeePass is a free and easy-to use password management tool. All passwords are stored in your own database with a master password to lock/unlock the database. The tool is available for iOS, Android, Mac OS X and Linux.

keepass.info

#6. Moz Toolbar

On Page SEO Metrics

Moz Toolbar is a great and powerful tool that provides access to all important SEO metrics, allows you to explore page elements, displays PR and domain rank, shows social metrics, and analyzes page overplay.

moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

#5. Screaming Frog

SEO Spider Tool & Crawler Software

Screaming Frog allows you to explore all onsite SEO. It is a good tool to use when reviewing medium and large websites. All key on page SEO elements (headline, meta tags, URL, interlinking, duplicate pages, redirect, etc) are exported to Excel. It is useful to check out all SEO recommendations that you use for better onsite SEO optimization.

screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider

#4. Rapportive

Displays Email Contact Information

Rapportive is a free Gmail add-on that displays everything about your contact’s (Twitter, FB, LinkedIn) on your inbox. It is easy to contact them without leaving gmail. You can follow them on Twitter and even friend them on Facebook. You can stay in one place, grow your social network and establish good relationships with people all the while, staying on top of emails. 

rapportive.com

#3. Copyscape

Plagiarism Detection 

Copyscape is the best plagiarism detection software that lets you find out who used your content and create an auto RSS blog with an RSS feed. You can try it free or use the premium version of this service.

copyscape.com

#2. WorkExaminer

Online Employee Monitoring

If you run a lot of projects, you probably need to hire workers to complete certain tasks. In order to increase employees’ productivity, you should always control their daily activities, working hours, etc. WorkExaminer is an excellent employee monitoring tool for effective website performance.

workexaminer.com

#1. Ahrefs

Site Explorer & Backlink Checker

Ahrefs is a powerful online backlink checker and site explorer tool that is very easy to understand at a glance. Ahrefs has a suite of useful tools like keyword analysis, domain comparison, batch analysis and competition analysis. It is perfectly designed for web masters and website owners that want to save money and get the most out of their business. Due to its rich functionality and a wide range of toolsets, it is poised to be a large player on the market.

ahrefs.com

We’ve had the privilege to check out many of these tools. As you’ve already figured out, blogging is a hard world to break in. With the right tools, you are sure to improve your chances of success on your blogging journey.

As of now, you’ve got a good arsenal of tools to make your blog ready for best of times.

Now it’s your turn to share your favorite blogging tools. We’re always happy to discover more about the tools that are out of there and currently working for you!

Read more: ‘9 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Search Engine Traffic’

The post 25 Best SEO Tools For Successful Blogging appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Starting with just Brian, his brother Scott and a couple of contractors, they have grown SamCart to a team of 15 and they are helping over 5,000 small businesses sell more of their stuff online.

Below, I will outline some of the best ways using SamCart has increased our conversions and why it’s our online shopping cart of choice!

10 Ways SamCart Will Increase Your Checkout Page Conversions

#1. Templates Library of High Converting Themes

We know a robust template library is super important for any business marketing online. While it is still in the early stages, SamCart features a template library of high converting checkout and upsell designs.

Each of their templates is hand designed by marketing professionals with years of experience in online sales and a great understanding of what sells in today’s online environment.

One awesome benefit of this is that as our customers use the various templates, we are able to see what works and doesn’t as they push traffic and conversions through the pages.

Basically, the more users and sales we move through SamCart, the more data we can gather on what’s working and what isn’t, and the better the product will become.

#2. One Click Upsells

One of the biggest differences between SamCart and other checkout services is they offer something that no one else in the market does. One click upsells. What this means, is that after visitors have checked out on their first product, they can be presented with a series of upsell products that take a single click to buy and do not require any additional information.

One of their brands (Get 10,000 Fans) uses these upsells to turn $10.00 report sales into an average $50.00 in sales per customer. They do this by offering a smaller $10.00 product on the front end, and then upsell a more expensive product or two that compliment the needs the first product filled.

#3. Variable Elements

The majority of the elements on their checkout pages and upsells are customizable. What this means for you as a user is that it is incredibly easy to set up high impact split tests, as we’ll discuss in the next point.

#4. Split Testing

Proper split testing is a critical piece in optimizing a funnel.

Most successful digital marketers split test every single thing that they can. And now you can split test your checkout cart and upsells. SamCart supports split testing on both your checkout pages, and your upsell funnels. 

What this means for your business, is that if you are wondering, “Will a $97.00 product convert differently than a $197.00 product?”, you can split test the funnels. Meaning, half of your traffic will flow through one upsell process, while the other half uses another. One powerful insight we found from this was that our $97.00 upsell had the exact same conversion rate as the same product at $197.00. This nearly doubled our customer value.

#5. Mobile Responsive

As many of you know, mobile traffic has been becoming a bigger and bigger part of your web traffic over the last 10 years. While this is great in that people are accessing you more frequently, from more places, it comes with its own set of challenges. The primary challenge, is that many websites and in particular, checkout options, do not play well with mobile devices.

Where SamCart addresses this is that all of our checkout and upsell funnels are mobile optimized. You will never lose sales because someone is trying to act quickly on an email offer they just received on their mobile. They are routinely seeing their customers improve overall conversion rates by 10-30% by having mobile ready checkouts.

#6. Quick Page Loads

Attention spans are shorter than ever. That’s why they prioritize a quick page load experience. What this does for your users is that it makes movement through the funnel as smooth as possible. We don’t want people getting distracted waiting for things to load. We want to make the most of the excitement we generate!

If page load time is an issue for you, I also highly recommend you check out MaxCDN.

#7. Branded Checkout Page Experience

Users who make it to a checkout page are sometimes presented with a page that looks nothing like what they have been experiencing up to this point with your brand. This can be a little bit jarring, and risks sucking a bit of the excitement out of them that you have worked so hard to maintain throughout your advertising campaign and funnel.

Where SamCart can help with this is that every one of their landing page templates is customizable, and designed to convert. No more generic carts, now your shopping cart can be as much a part of your marketing strategy as every other piece.

#8. Guarantees

Every SamCart checkout page comes with a section to post whatever guarantee you may have. This helps give your future customers a sense of security because if you are willing to refund them or have a similar guarantee, you are willing to stand behind your product.

Here’s a good article explaining the power of guarantees on conversion rate. 

#9. Bonus Section

As we in the digital marketing space know, having the right bonuses with your products can make or break an offer. That’s why the SamCart checkout pages are built with this specifically in mind. We want you to be building value for your customers from the the very first exposure, all the way through their purchase.

Each checkout page comes with a prominent section dedicated to reiterating your offers. Just think about a possible customer sitting in your checkout on the fence. Oftentimes, a reminder of what a great product and offer they are getting can be enough to get them to click that final submit button.

#10. Safety and Security

Rarely does a day pass without hearing about a company getting hacked, or losing their customer’s data. We know this is a big issue for online businesses like yours, so we made sure that security, and visibility of said security were a big part of the design. Every cart is SSL encrypted, meaning your customer’s data will be safe, and you will be able to confidently run your business.

SamCart has our vote. If you’re a digital marketer who sells products online, you’ll absolutely want to install SamCart sooner rather than later and you can get instant access by clicking here.

The post 10 Ways SamCart Will Increase Your Checkout Page Conversions appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out or if you already have 100,000’s of people visiting your site, I find that most sites are forgetting at least a few of these tips, when it comes to creating the best websites possible.

My Top Tips For Creating and Running Successful Websites

1. Your website should load quickly. (Because Google and users loves it!) Watch out for memory intensive plugins or conflicting plugins etc. Here are 16 ways to increase website speed.

2. Security from hackers is important. I lost my first big site because I didn’t have any. More embarrassingly I didn’t have a Back Up! Fortunately these days, most hosts will do automatic backups for you (although I believe you should always keep a fairly up to-date back-up of your site offline also) Additionally never pick a web host that hasn’t got 24/7 live support. When things go BAD, you will want their help. Since we added Sucuri website security to our website over 2 years ago, we haven’t had any problems. I highly recommend that you get it.

3. Always use a .com and unless there really is no alternative don’t use a DASH / Hyphen in between words in a domain name.

4. Build an email list from day one. Go get Popup Domination.

5. Websites do break! Sometimes for what will appear to be no reason, pages will stop displaying as they should or even links will get messed up. This often is caused by a conflict with one of the plugins we use. With regards to internal and external links becoming broken, I recommend you use Broken Link Checker.

6. Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest. Pick one and dominate it, stop sucking at all 3. Or alternatively hire someone to look after your social media and make them responsible for the outcome.

7. Have a plan for your business (website) – I mean a bricks and mortar business without a business plan is pretty silly! Why should it be any different for your website? Have a plan for the coming month, 3 month, 6 months, 12 months! Where do you see you and your website 5 years from now? Do you have an exit plan? Do you have a revenue plan?

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

~ Benjamin Franklin

8. If you focus on one traffic source, you are missing out. Google, Social Media, Email Marketing, Podcasts, Videos, Affiliates, Info Graphics & Linkbait are all important.

9. Consistency is key when publishing content. Daily, Weekly, Monthly, you choose how often to post and stick to it. (Gee, I am not always great at following this Rule myself – but really it is essential!)

“It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It’s what we do consistently.”

~ Anthony Robbins

10. Make it easy for people to contact you. What is more, be open to some criticism or less than positive comments about your website. Sure some comments will come from generally negative people but my overall experience is that people want to help. For example I have received 100’s of emails from people notifying me of bugs and spelling errors.

11. The early bird catch’s the worm, a saying you’re probably heard often before. Take for example someone who bought Business.com in 1997 was able to sell it for $7.5 million 2 years later. OK, perhaps you can’t do that everyday but don’t think this is an isolated case, opportunities are all around us. Take for example Twitter.com – the first few marketers who got on it were able to take advantage of it before new rules came into place to slow you down from adding people. When you see a opportunities, take it!

12. Never retaliate to comments or emails. People will disagree with you and you might even think they are dumb, but they are entitled to their opinion. Frankly we don’t have the time or energy to prove them wrong. It’s also not so important that you need to waste your life trying to prove yourself right and someone else wrong.

This is one of my fathers favorite quotes – not everyone will get it first time, but think about it!

“Do you want to be Right or do you want to be Happy”

13. Ask! You can get a lot of things by just asking. When I was 18, I caught Glandular Fever in Ghana and spent a horrific week in hospital in Ghana before returning to England and spending a week in hospital here in the UK. I had to rest for months after that and decided I had nothing better to do then ask people to do interviews for Retireat21. I spent days emailing hundreds of top internet entrepreneurs for interviews. Three of the top 100 websites in the world came back to me and said they would do an interview, plus over 50 other successful CEO’s and entrepreneurs.

14. Regularly ask yourself – If in 10 years (or in one day, 6 months. I year, 5 years)  you were to look back at your actions today what would you have changed? Do that. From my good friend Craig Ballantyne

15. These days there is an increasing trend that the people who make the most cash online, buy a high percentage of their traffic (pay for advertisements). Basically they have learned additional skills based on lead generation and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). If you are not also learning these skills, you are missing out. I now include bought traffic in my online promotions.

16. Top list articles still bring me 80% of my traffic, although it only took 20% of my time to create them.

17. In my experience, it’s easier to start a day productively then end it productively. (Well… so far today I’ve done nothing, I guess I will try harder tomorrow..)

18. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – in particular with how you monetize your website.

So often, people have only one or two methods of monetizing a website such as banner advertising. But advertisers come and go and no month is ever the same. Diversify your income with different methods such as affiliate marketing, email marketing, coaching, ebooks etc! And with affiliate marketing, promote multiple offers.

Also, don’t presume what you are doing right now, will be working in years to come. Keep innovating & educating.

Nothing is for sure in life or business, just because something has worked today, it doesn’t mean it will work again tomorrow. This applies to marketing, selling, traffic, advertisers. There really are No Guarantees – the only Guarantee you can rely on when it all comes down to it, is yourself!

19. Surround yourself with successful people. Retireat21, IncomeDiary & PopUp Domination all came from ‘hanging out’ with other like minded people.

20. Always have a written and signed agreement with your partners / Joint Ventures. People will rip you off for less money then you would imagine. Greed is a crazy thing. Read: 11 Essential Lessons From Going Into Business With People

21. What you Focus on is what you get – so if you want money, FOCUS on it! Always be aware of who owes you money, check that the payments you expect to receive are arriving in your bank account (Paypal account) at the correct time. If you still get paid by a cheque – bank it straight away and don’t leave it hanging around for days.

22. Don’t be afraid of highly competitive niche! The reason they are competitive is because there is money in that niche!

23. When negotiating, often it is more powerful to say nothing. I find that people don’t like silence and will want to say something, often lowering the price.

24. Keep moving forward. Don’t give up – The biggest difference between success and failure is not giving up.

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time”

~ Thomas Edison

“The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views a mistake.”

~ Nelson Boswell

Read more: ‘9 Best Ways To Increase Sales On Your Website’

The post 24 Rules I Follow When Creating Successful Websites appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

In spite of the thousands of hacking incidences that take place online each day, few people seem concerned about blog security. Do not think that your blog is immune to such attacks.

Well, hacking is not the only practice you should be worried about while working online. Content theft is possibly a huge problem, particularly in the world of blogging where uniqueness is the hallmark of quality.

While Google and the other search engines create algorithms to identify the origin of certain content, it is still not fun when you discover that people copied your content and pasted it on dozens of other blogs out there.

Since WordPress is a popular tool for setting up blogs, it can easily draw the attention of hackers. You can find the latest threats right here and you will understand what I mean.

Fortunately, you can take a number of measures to nip such security threats in the bud. This post will highlight 10 effective ways you should use now to make your blog more secure.

1. Secure the login

You may have noticed that admin is the default username on your WordPress blog. All hackers know it as well. So, change this one as soon as yesterday. Besides, use Captcha for the user login as a means of protection from the brute fore attack.

To implement Captcha, you can use the BWS Plugins. You will find the Captcha plugin useful in controlling against spam as well.

2. Do not advertise the version of your WordPress blog to the world

Typically, WordPress sites normally publish a version number, which makes it easier for visitors to know whether you are operating on an obsolete, non-patched edition of WordPress.

Exposing the version number of your WordPress site will make it vulnerable to security threats and attacks. While you can take off the WordPress version from your web page, you need to make an additional change: go to your WordPress installation directory and delete that readme.html file from the directory since it also advertises the version of your WordPress site to the world.

A number of WordPress themes contain login links to give you easy access to a login page. You do not need to reveal your login page in a manner that will invite everyone including hackers, to access it.

Therefore, if you have a theme with a login link, you should remove it. If you cannot remove it, consider changing the theme.

3. Automatically back up your blog

With regular backups, you can easily recover from even the deadliest hacks. In fact, at a click, you can restore the entire site.

Besides, before you make any significant changes to your site like upgrading the WordPress version or installing a new plugin, ensure you make a back up. The Better WP Security plugin, you can schedule back functions and enhance security for your blog.

4. Add the password authentication to your WP-admin folder

If you want to keep hackers away from your blog, make it hard for them to break in through your login page. To achieve this, add the password protection to your “WP-admin” folder. This will ensure that anyone accessing this folder will need to type in the correct password and username (aside from the user login).

The simplest way to add the password authentication is through the CPanel. Simply log in to your CPanel and then select this option – ‘Password Protect directories.’

5. Add links to guard against copy/paste

You do not require any complex tools to steal web content. It is as easy as copying the article and pasting it in another place. Besides, you don’t even need to bother about the formatting because that will be copied too!

Way too convenient for the content thieves, right?

Well, recently I started using a great service, known as Tynt. While Tynt won’t disable the copying of your content, it adds an attribution URL to your blog anytime someone copies content from your blog.

The result will look like this – copied content+ read more at www.example.com.

Well, you might say that most content thieves will just delete that link though chances are most of them won’t even realize it! I mean, most of them simply copy, paste and then publish.

After installing Tynt, you’ll receive stats on the number of copy commands that occurred on your site in addition to the most copied posts. Moreover, this tool will help you know how many links you have generated from the read more links.

6. Setup Your Own Google Authorship

Whenever there is duplicate content, search engines may decide which content deserves a lower ranking by finding out the one that was published earlier.

However, that isn’t always sufficient, especially if a person whose blog has a higher ranking steals your content. In such a scenario, the stolen content might continue to receive more link juice.

It is here that Google authorship comes in handy. If your authorship is confirmed, there’s less likelihood for your content to rank lower than similar content stolen and posted on another site.

To setup your Google authorship, you should follow the following steps:

1. Sign up for a Google+ account.
2. In your profile settings, you will find “Contributor to”
3. You should add the link to your own blog there
4. Install the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast
5. Now go to users  then to your profile
6. Move down to the contact info
7. Add the profile link of your Google+ account

For more detailed instructions on setting up Google authorship in WordPress, go here.

7. Disable hotlinking

When someone copies your article, chances are he will also copy images   within the article. After the thief publishes your post on his or her blog, the image URLs will actually point to your server.

Consequently, your hosting will receive additional load thus lowering your blog’s performance. The direct copying of images from someone’s blog is called hotlinking.

The good news is there is a way to help you avoid all these headaches and the solution is CloudFlare.

Well, CloudFlare is simply a great content delivery network. This tool improves the loading times and to achieve this, it caches the content, collects information about the location of the visitors and then sends the cached data right from the local server.

The above functionality and the fact that it’s free (though you may find more premium features), makes CloudFlare a must have for any serious blogger.

However, in our case, we need the “hotlink protection” checkbox, which you can get from your profile at CloudFlare. You simply need to turn it on in order to stop the hotlinking issue.

You simply need to click on the “Security Settings” and then scroll down to the “Hotlink protection” and just click on the “ON” button.

8. Install trusted plugins only

Hackers can easily access your blog through the plugins you install. When you install a plugin, you make it possible for one to access core files found in your WordPress installation. This is why you need to be cautious when installing any plugin to your blog.

Below are four major considerations you should do before you install any plugin

i. Ensure it features in the plugins directory on WordPress.org

If you cannot find the plugin in this directory, chances are it is either not legitimate or it is premium. Do not hesitate once there’s a download option for it in this directory.

ii. Check the rating

Look at the star rating that users have given to the plugin as well as the distribution of votes. If the plugin has more one-star ratings than it has five-star ratings, chances are there could be a security concern.

iii. The number of downloads

Try to look for a popular plugin. You can tell this from the number of downloads under each plugin. Bad plugins hardly generate thousands of downloads because moderators would remove them in no time.

iv. Check out the third-party reviews

As aforementioned, premium plugins do not feature in the directory, making it hard for you to establish their legitimacy. So, when considering such plugins, find out more from the reviews of those who’ve used it.

You can also visit the CodeCanyon directory, which features premium plugins and you can find out whether the plugin is legit and safe to use.

9. Install the two security plugins

You can install two powerful security plugins that will keep hackers running from your blog. These are:

a. Wordfence

This security plugin has awesome features: it limits the login attempts, scans the themes and plugins against your WordPress repository versions for changes; scans the comments for phishing URL’s and malware, and checks out for any outdated plugins. Wordfence is a great plugin that you can get free.

b. Limit Login Attempts

With this plugin, you can keep threats off of your WordPress login page. It enables you to restrict the number of times that users (based on the IP address or cookie) can unsuccessfully try to log in into your own blog.

10. Install a Firewall

Finally, to protect your blog against hacking and other security attempts, you should install OSE Firewall, the creation of Open Source Excellence.

This firewall has a built-in scanner that will scan your blog for any malicious codes. Besides, it has a new anti-spam feature that will keep your blog spam free.

 Conclusion

You can follow the above steps to protect your WordPress-powered blog against unsolicited access and also to keep content thieves at bay (although I am yet to find a sure-fire tool that can stop content theft from my blog).

Now, I’m curious to know the ways you guys use to secure your blogs. Do you use other security plugins or other methods not on this list? Kindly take a minute and share something in the comments!

The post 10 Ways To Improve Blog Security (so that you don’t get hacked) appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

The point of that post was two-fold. One, to interact with you on an individual level. Two, to better understand how I can help you with your website right now.

All of your struggles seem to fall into one of six categories: setting up your website, creating content, getting traffic, converting traffic, making money, or remaining true to foundations of internet success.

With that, here are 33 common online struggles and my best advice for handling each.

Setting up Your Website

Most of you seemed to have your sites set up, self-hosted, and otherwise running properly, which is great. There are still a few common problems that I saw.

1. Who is this site for and why does it exist?

If the homepage doesn’t answer this question immediately, people are likely to leave.  Communicate this with your logo, tagline, header area, or featured area.

Michael answers these two questions with his 5-word tagline, “How Pros Make Money Online.”

2. Creating a Custom Blog Design

If you haven’t at least upgraded to a premium theme, I would start there. Spend $50-$100 and your site will look drastically better. Michael started Income Diary with a $70 WooThemes template. Within a few months, he paid someone to update it.

Custom blog designs start at $1,000 and run up to $100,000 or more.

3. Cleaning Up the Blog Design

If you have a logo or an opt-in box, make sure it matches the colors in the design. If you include post images, make sure they’re all exactly the same size (here it’s 345 pixels by 180 pixels). If you start adding widgets to the sidebar/footer, make sure you can answer the question, “how does this improve the site for my readers?”

Simply using colors that match is a great start. You can find matching color schemes with ColorSchemeGenerator.com.

 4. Blog Excerpts vs. Full Articles

All major news sites and big-time blogs, with the exception of a few, feature post excerpts on the homepage. They do this to make their content more consumable and to help people find what they’re looking for. Plus, it makes the scroll bar smaller.

To enable homepage post excerpts within WordPress, put the Read More tag at the end of your excerpt.

Some premium themes automatically create and show post excerpts on your blog page.

5. Choosing from a Sea of Plugins

Before you start adding every five-star plugin that might improve your site, you need to understand that plugins are little pieces of software. Once you install more than 5-10 of them, there’s a good chance that they’ll conflict with one another, which could crash your site.

The only plugins that are absolutely necessary are Akismet, Google XML Sitemaps, Contact Forms, and WordPress SEO by Yoast (unless your theme has SEO options built-in).

Creating Content

After getting your site set up, the next step is writing content. All of us can improve on this.

6. Writing Well

Writing is like painting. Anyone can pick up a paintbrush and make a few strokes, but it’s immediately obvious when you can’t do it well.

Simply writing content without spelling or grammar mistakes doesn’t make it good.

If you don’t have a command of the English language, you have three options: become a better at writing in English, hire a writer, or write in your native language. Even those of us who speak primarily English need to work on this, a lot.

7. Creating Exceptional Content

Exceptional content talks about things that people are actually interested in. It educates and entertains. Most importantly, it uniquely solves a problem.

If you tell me that your content is exceptional, yet you’re not seeing the results, your content isn’t exceptional.

8. Crafting Headlines

The headline is the most important part of your post. If it’s bad, no one will notice it, click it, or read it.

To write better headlines, make sure they are keyword-focused, benefit-driven, and power-word ridden. In the eight hours I spent on your sites, I saw less than a handful of good headlines.

9. Writing Audience-Focused Content

People expect blogs to be flooded with useful information that benefits the audience more than it documents the blogger’s life.

If you want to build an audience, focus on the audience.

10. Finding Motivation to Write Consistently

When you put a lot of work into something and don’t experience results right away, it’s demoralizing. You question why you’re doing all of this if no one is paying attention.

Two things. One, you’re definitely doing something wrong and you just need to figure out how to fix it. Two, this is the internet’s way of filtering the good from the bad. If it was easy, everyone would do it.

The people who find success online, without exception, dedicate years to figuring out the internet before they finally crack the formula.

11. Writing with a Busy Schedule

I’ll admit I haven’t found a good solution for this either. The posts I write here take 6-8 hours. If you have a full-time job, an attention-hungry kid, and a literally hungry family, I know it’s hard to find the time to write even once a week.

You have three options. One, write higher quality, less often. Two, find (probably hire) someone to create content for you. Three, find a way to accept and filter user-generated content.

12. User-Generated Content

If you can figure out how to accept user-generated content and maintain a high-level of quality, you’re golden.

Again, two things. One, tell your users exactly what you want them to submit. Two, make the submission process as smooth as possible.

If you use a good contact form plugin, you can create a form that saves their submission as a draft in your “Posts” section of WordPress.

Getting Traffic

Getting traffic was the most common struggle online. Over half of you mentioned that you wanted more traffic.

13. Ranking for the Right Keywords

If you want your site to rank for the right keywords, you need to create exceptional content for that keyword. Either that, or you’re going to be paying for traffic.

14. Building Backlinks

I’ve been running blogs since 2008 and I’ve never implemented a formal link-building campaign. Yet, between my two largest sites, I get 18,500 search visits per month which accounts for 56% of my traffic.

Backlinks are important, but not as important as creating exceptional content. Links come naturally.

I think the larger problem is that people would rather focus on building backlinks than creating exceptional content.

15. Optimizing Blog Posts

None of you mentioned that you struggle with optimizing blog posts, but I saw that this was an underlying problem to why you’re not getting traffic.

To help you with that, here are 10 SEO Blog Post Publishing Steps that Most Bloggers Forget and 10 Blog Post Marketing Steps to Take Immediately After You Publish.

16. Encouraging People to Share Your Content

If you’re not creating content worth sharing, people aren’t going to share it.

Again, it all comes back to creating exceptional content. If you’re doing that, they’ll find a way to share it.

17. Boosting Page Views by Keeping People on Your Site

To boost engagement, get people to consume as much of your content as possible. If I read seven blog posts on any one site, then I’ll probably become a regular reader.

To increase the likelihood of somebody staying on your site, add a Related Posts area to your blog post footer. For this, I use the Similar Posts plugin.

Converting Traffic

Once you get people to your site, focus on encouraging them to do something. It could be to subscribe, to buy, or even just to comment.

18. Creating an Opt-In Bonus

To create your opt-in bonus, the first step is figuring out what readers want. If they have a specific set of problems that you can help them with, write an ebook, create a video series, or set up an auto-responder.

The software-as-a-service equivalent is a free trial. Very few sites find success without first giving something away for free.

19. Getting More Email Subscribers

The first step in getting more email subscribers is to give them a great reason to subscribe, oftentimes with an opt-in bonus.

Once you have a compelling reason for getting someone to subscribe, then it’s as simple as constantly reminding them to do so in a way that communicates the benefit of subscribing.

20. Positioning Your Opt-Ins

The most popular places to put opt-ins are in the header, at the top of the sidebar, at the bottom of the post, and in the footer. Of course, Popup Domination works so well because it makes the opt-in front-and-center.

One location that IncomeDiary.com used to utilize and is beginning to pick up steam on other sites is above the content and sidebars on the homepage.

21. Designing Your Opt-Ins

Using the Aweber/MailChimp-generated opt-in templates is a good start, but they don’t fit in with the rest of your design. It looks sloppy and makes people think that your bonus/newsletter is subpar.

If you know HTML and CSS, you can strip out the auto-generated styling and style them however you want. Explaining this in more detail is outside the scope of this article, but if you need help, drop a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

22. Building a Community

Building a community is a process that starts with earning one reader at a time. Get someone to read one post. Then another, and another, and another. They’ll subscribe, open your emails, leave comments, and share your stuff.

Then someone else will come along and the two of them will start recognizing each other in the comments. Then another will come, and another, and another.

But it starts with one reader reading one post and thinking, “That was worth my time. What else is here?”

Making Money

If you’re doing everything right up to this point, it’s time to cash in, but in a way that doesn’t detract from the work you’ve already done.

23. Ethics of Making Money Online

It’s not wrong to start forming a business around helping people with their problems. That’s what businesses do.

If you’re not making money nor independently wealthy, then the only way your blog can be sustainable is if you start selling things to your audience.

I understand the hesitancy to start making money online because it feels like you’re exploiting the very people that you’re trying to help. The best way to overcome this hesitancy is to only sell them things that they need.

The more niche your audience, the more easily you’ll be able to recommend products and show ads that’ll fit their needs.

24. Making Ads More Relevant

Click-through rates depend on the relevancy of the ads.

If you have a news-based or humor-based site that appeals to everyone, it’s going to be difficult to serve them relevant ads. If you focus on building an audience of a specific type of person, you won’t get as much traffic, but advertisers will pay more for that traffic because it’s targeted.

25. Positioning Ads to Increase Clicks

I’m not a fan of trying to trick people into clicking your ads. It’s a short-term game that’s not worth playing.

But if your ads are relevant enough to actually help people, then put them in the same places you would put your opt-ins (header, top sidebar, bottom post, footer).

26. Focusing on Affiliate Sales

Quick rule: Don’t recommend something that you haven’t used and benefited from using yourself.

Let’s say that you’re building an audience of people like you. If a product helps you, it’ll help them. If it has an affiliate program, sign up and recommend it. You can create full-scale reviews or simply drop it into your posts and emails when it’s relevant.

Recommend a mix of products with and without affiliate programs. That’ll show people that you’re there to help, not just to make a buck.

27. Coming up with Product Ideas

Ask your audience what they want.

Organize information into an ebook. Develop software that helps you and package it to help them. Launch a premium course to help them individually.

The neat thing about building an audience first is that they’ll tell you what they want and you have a platform to sell it.

28. Sales Page Strategy

The rules here are constantly being rewritten.

If you create something that people need and you effectively communicate the reasons why they need it, they will buy it. If they don’t buy it, you made a mistake on one of those first two things.

Foundations of Success Online

In terms of building a website, getting traffic, converting traffic, and making money, success is simply a matter of doing the right things in the right order. It’s easy once you know how to do it.

The more challenging part is getting the fundamentals right. If you don’t do these five things, you will struggle at every other level.

29. Help People Solve Problems

If your website doesn’t help specific people solve specific problems, it’s not going to get the attention that it deserves. And even if it does, it’s going to be difficult to sell things to those people.

30. Be Unique in a Crowded Internet

Most sites are average.

If you want to stick out, be different. If you want to be remarkable, be memorable. If you want to make waves, create something that you’re proud to show to your real-life friends.

Too many of us have template-y designs, generic logos, auto-generated opt-ins, and regurgitated content.

Be unique.

31. Get Past the Desire for Anonymity

I know that many of you choose to be anonymous because the internet makes that possible. Maybe it lets you be more honest with your advice. Or maybe you justify it with, “this site isn’t about me.”

But it’s like walking into a sales meeting with a mask on. Sure, it’ll be interesting for a few minutes, but if you never take the mask off, they’re going to walk out.

People buy from people they know, like, and trust.

32. Avoid Paralysis from the Pursuit for Perfection

One month on the design, two on the logo, a few months of market research, and many, many months crafting an amazing opt-in bonus. Now, just a few weeks to write the first five blog posts and bam! Site’s live.

Nobody comes.

I know, the gradient in the nav menu is all wrong. Just a few weeks to fix that. Might as well re-work the footer too. Another month goes by.

Nobody comes.

Maybe something’s wrong with my color scheme…

A year later. You cracked the 1,000 uniques mark in the 11^th month, but your site never picked up steam like you planned for it to.

Just get your site up, track data, and adjust your site based on feedback. Then, never stop improving.

33. Stick with One Project

Results are going to take longer than you expect, especially if you’re just getting started online.

If you move around from shiny object to shiny object every three months, none of your projects are going to get the attention that they need.

Like I said, if you have the fundamentals right, it’s only a matter of doing the other 28 things in this list. It’ll take time, more time than you want it to, but it will happen.

The Last Word

I learned a lot about you all last week. What you struggle with. What you’re doing well. What you can improve. And I hope this post shed some light on your common struggles.

For us to continue serving you, we need you to continue telling us how we can help.

I appreciate the, “Awesome post, Nick! Way to go. You’re so smart (and handsome)” comments. I really do.

But I’d like more of you to challenge my thoughts. Give me feedback that’s scary to give. Tell me, “Nick, this concept is good in theory, but I’m really struggling to implement it because…”

As always, I’m looking forward to your comment.

Photo by kirstinmckee

The post 33 Answers To Common Struggles New Bloggers Have appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

 1. How To Optimize Your WordPress Website For Mobile

You’re probably missing out on quite a few readers, and you’ll miss out on more if you don’t go mobile with your blog. In January 2012, nearly 9% of all global pageviews were from a mobile device. This number is expected to keep growing, to the point where in 2015 the pageviews from mobile devices will outgrow the pageviews from laptops and personal computers. Upgrade your site to have a mobile version!

The easiest way to do this is through the free plugin WP Touch. Once installed, you edit some settings, create a few icons or use stock icons, reformat some pages if necessary, and you have a beautiful mobile site that looks and functions like an app! Now if someone opens your blog (let’s say from an email, or from a Facebook link) on their phone, they’ll actually be able to consume your content easily, as well as comment on it and share it, rather than zooming in and out in frustration trying to navigate your site.

If you want to take things to the next level, upgrade to the premium version WP Touch Pro, which has some additional options to customize even further.

A lot of newer themes are also mobile friendly (responsive), meaning they already have a mobile version built in, so you don’t have to worry about it. So if you’re thinking about changing themes, keep this in mind while doing your research.

Upgrade your site to mobile and be better prepared for the future.

2. Speed Up Your WordPress Website

Viper Video QuickTags

If you have ever embedded a video, you know that you need to use HTML code to make it happen. Make your life easier and save time by utilizing the Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin.

After installing the plugin and adjusting a few settings, you will have the ability to copy and paste the video link and embed videos with the click of a button. The plugin is super simple to use and gives you the option to embed more than one video at once!

Check out the activation details below:

1. Viper’s Video Quicktags will show up on your Dashboard Menu under “settings”
2. Uncheck everything under “Show Editor Button” except for YouTube
4. This will create a button when you add a page/post
5. Click on the new button above the WYSIWG visual page editor
6. Paste the direct URL to your video and edit the size by opening the accordion below
7. Click okay and this will populate a shortcode into the post box
8. Click on update and check out your super slick videos once you refresh the page!

Mission accomplished in a quarter of the time and you didn’t even have time to think about it before the video was embedded and sized.

Faster Image Insert

Embedding images into a page requires a couple of steps. You need to click on the media button and this opens a light box. Once you upload the image, you can edit the size and insert into the page or post.

The process is slow because a lightbox has to load in between every image that is added. It’s easy to imagine why waiting for a lightbox to open in between inserting each image can get pretty annoying, and not to mention time-consuming. This is where Faster Image Insert comes in.

Faster Image Insert allows you to upload images much faster because it adds a meta box (no more lightbox) right below the WYSIWYG visual editor. You can insert multiple galleries or images at once, including NextGen Galleries, which is pretty awesome. You can also change title/captions on a mass scale with a single click.

It appears right below your post, whether in visual or HTML:

3. WordPress Plugins To Improve Search Engine Rankings

All In One SEO Pack

This plugin is a must have for anyone interested in getting search engine traffic. It is great for both the beginner and the advanced user. The plugin is intuitive and includes features like automatic optimization of your titles for search engines and meta tags. This is a plug and play plugin, which means that it is effective as soon as it is activated.

Advanced users are able to fine tune just about any setting, such as the ability to override any title and set any meta description and meta keywords you want. This is going to increase your SEO presence drastically, which will definitely help you increase your sites traffic.

Google XML Sitemaps

In order for your site’s pages and posts to be found in Google’s search engines, they need to be indexed/stored in Google’s massive database of websites and other web content.

There are many ways to get indexed faster by Google such as Tweeting your new page or post but using this plugin makes the process simpler.

Each time you create a new post or page, the plugin will update your site’s XML sitemap (which the search engines use to index your site) and automatically let the search engines know about the update. The benefit here is obvious. Get the plugin asap and start sending your message to a larger audience.

SEO Pressor

SEO Pressor takes the SEO within your blog posts to a new level. It allows you to write for a specific keyword, and measures your post white you write for how effectively you are writing for that keyword. It even gives you an overall score along the way. Here’s a screenshot of what it does:

4. How To Uncrash Your Site! (for plugin issues)

Steps to Uncrashing Your Site

This is one of the easiest problems to fix, yet I still notice a ton of forums being bombarded with questions like “I Installed a plugin and my site crashed!! I need a developer ASAP!”

Take a deep breath, regain your composure and listen to me. Even though the issue may appear to be fatal, it is actually one of the simplest issues to fix.

Here are the 5 easy steps to uncrash your site:

1. Login to your FTP Client
2. Find the Plugin Folder in your Directory
3. Sort Plugins by “Last Modified”
4. Select the Plugin in Question
5. Delete the Plugin
Once Plugin is deleted, it will no longer show up or crash your site. You can thank me after you calm down!

5. Plugins to Make Affiliate Marketing Easier

Pretty Link

Say you have an affiliate link: www.domain.com/longconfusingmess

Let’s also say you have a domain called: www.incomediary.com

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could customize the link and still get credit for the referral? Wouldn’t it also be valuable if you could track both the total number of clicks as well as the total number of unique clicks to monitor performance – regardless of if the link is in your email, WordPress site, or anywhere else?

Pretty Link allows you to do both. The process is super simple and it creates a ton of value. Here is an example:

Before Pretty Link: www.hostgator.com/longconfusinglink
After Pretty Link: IncomeDiary.com/hostgator

In addition, it tracks both total and unique clicks and displays the respective numbers in the plugins options. Pretty damn awesome.

It also makes it easy for you to remember all your affiliate links in case you ever need them on the fly while chatting with someone. This alone has easily hundreds of extra dollars in my pocket .

Amazon Associate Filter Plugin

Amazon is one of the largest and most well known internet companies in the world. It would only make sense that the Amazon Associate Program is one of the best affiliate programs, aS they offer a massive number of product categories, which is great for Niche sites that are unable to find relatable affiliate programs.

Amazon makes it very simple to integrate the program with your current site. If you don’t have an account, I highly suggest that you head over to the site and sign up.

The Amazon Associate Filter is a great time saving plugin for Amazon affiliates. It automatically will change any links to the amazon website to your affiliate link without revealing it to the reader. Say goodbye to being slowed down by finding and pasting your affiliate link into your page or post. Amazon Associate Filter is a must have plugin for any Amazon Affiliates!

6. WordPress Contact Form Plugins

When you first logged into WordPress you may or may not have notice that there is no page or theme option to add a contact form to your site. Contact forms allow visitors to contact you with questions, complaints, suggestions, etc.

Here’s some good news: You have options! I introduce you to three here, but use Google to find more information. You may even discover a brand new plugin that makes Gravity Forms look like childs play. Don’t spend too much time, but definitely check out a link or two.

Contact Form 7 (Flexible)

If you value simplicity and flexibility, Contact Form 7 is a great option. It allows you to design the form, email, and even lets you manage multiple contact forms. In addition, it supports many features including AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, file uploading, and more.

Contact Me

In addition to providing you with a neat and flexible contact form, this plugin allows you to have a floating contact me/us floating button on the side of your site on every page, like this:

It’s a nice call to action, especially if you provide any services or are looking for leads to get in touch with you. While the plugin itself is free, to remove the Contact Me branding and get more options, you do have to upgrade to the premium version.

Gravity Forms (Premium)

If you prefer a premium contact form that includes an intuitive user interface and the works in terms of options, then Gravity Forms is the best option for you. While the plugin costs a little bit of money, the time it saves you and the improvement in quality is well worth it, especially if you are building multiple forms.

7. Make Your Site Neater and brand more visible!

Favicon! – plugin and creation tool

A Favicon is the little image that shows up on your browser’s tabs when browsing your site and can really help brand your site. It may be a small image, but has potential to be a significant part of your branding effectiveness.

An awesome site for Favicons is: www.favicon.cc. You can even draw a custom Favicon but I don’t recommend this because it has proven to be less effective – unless you’re great with design. You can also upload an image and turn it into a Favicon, or find tons of free favicons that might match your brand.

Plugin: All in One Favicon

All in One Favicon uses the favicon you created and displays it on the browser tab for the public. You can create both front end (what the viewer see’s) and back end (what you see in your dashboard). If you don’t have a favicon, you are missing out on an opportunity to brand your site.

Logo – cooltext.com

While creating a custom logo in Photoshop or Illustrator is great – a lot of new bloggers don’t have the skills, time, or money to do so. You can actually create a unique text based logo in minute using this cool tool. It’s a lot better than having a plain text header on the top of your site!

Enter: CoolText.com to save the day (or at least a few minutes). They offer a ton of customization options which makes the experience much more personal.

You can choose from a boatload of fonts, effects, colors, sizes and file types. I promise that you can create very professional logos as long as you make sure to explore ALL of the options first. The best part is – it’s all free!

8. WordPress Plugins For Increasing Website Speed

Get A Caching plugin

I’m sure you have been on a blog or even corporate site that feels as if it is taking forever to load. Why would you want someone to have the same, annoying experience? A slow site can have devastating effects on site traffic, but thankfully there is a plugin to make it easy to speed your site up.

There is a solid selection of Caching Plugins on the web. The most popular ones are W3 TOTAL CACHE and WP SUPER CACHE, but don’t let this stop you from researching and trying out other programs.

A caching plugin is valuable because it saves your page the first time that a visitor visits it.It then will used this saved information to automatically load the page based on the information. It will also automatically re-cache your site if any content changes!

One less thing to worry about.

Some tips: One of the simplest ways to speed up a slow site is to be sure to deactivate all of the plugins that you are not currently using on your site. We recommend a lot of plugins here and I know this may appear to contradictory, but it’s important not to go overboard! Deactivate unimportant plugins, especially those that work on the outside of your site vs. the admin panel, and you will see the difference in speed.

Decrease Image Sizes before Uploading – Some people just upload images and then resize them using the WordPress (HTML) image editor. Try to avoid this when you can. Go into Photoshop, Save For Web and Devices, and resize the images to your desired dimensions. That way you get smaller file sizes, which load faster, and speed up your site, sometimes very significantly.

9. Get Social!

You work hard putting great content on your blog. Make sure it’s easy for people to share and discuss so you get more traffic, credibility, and user engagement.

Sharing

I recommend using the Digg Digg plugin. It’s the quickest, simplest, and neatest way to get all your social media sharing buttons on your posts.

If you want to look cool, use the floating option (like you see to your left). There are a ton of sharing options, and which ones you use depends on the nature of your content.

I recommend including at least: Facebook Like, Facebook Share, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The rest is up to you.

Comments

I STRONGLY recommend Facebook comments. They will get you more comments (people are so familiar with Facebook comments already, it’s more natural for them to Like and

Comment via Facebook than through the WordPress commenting system), they will reduce your spam comments, and they will ultimately get you a lot more social links back to your site, so more traffic! Make sure you make the settings such that it automatically posts the comment on Facebook unless the commenter disables it.

The other social commenting option is Disqus. It’s also a free plugin which allows people to comment through social profiles, but since people are usually logged into Facebook when surfing the web.

Facebook comments will likely get you more traction than Disqus.

10. Improve Branding On Your WordPress Website

Make sure you brand yourself in your posts and your comments on others blogs!

Start by completing the profile in Users > My Profile with your complete bio, and include this bio on the bottom of your posts (this is usually just a theme option). Your bio helps people connect with you and makes them want to learn more about you. They’re not just reading your content – they’re reading you!

Next – and this is very important – head over to Gravatar.com and create your Gravatar. This is like your profile image on the Internet. You should add all the email addresses you use in WordPress sites, whether on your own site or any you might guest blog on. Add a cool image of you that people will remember (for example, see my Parrot picture in Aruba below!).

If you made a WordPress.com account at some point, you might already have a Gravatar and not know it. Try logging into Gravatar.com with your WordPress.com details before making yourself a new account, to make sure you can get the username you want and your primary email address.

Save Your Self Some Time, Energy, and Money

Do you think some of the tools and tricks in this post will save you some time and create more money for you with your blog? When applied, of course they will.

This is just a small list. You can literally become a total WordPress master – and save yourself a LOT of time, energy, and money by taking this course: Make WordPress Easy. It’s not only the best course on WordPress – it’s also extremely entertaining to watch. Enjoy it!

I hope this list helped you out a lot. If you have any questions about any of these, or have any additional tips, please comment below!

The post 10 WordPress Tools Guaranteed To Boost Your Results and Productivity appeared first on How To Make Money Online.