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

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

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

Do you actually have a high bounce rate

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

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

What causes a high bounce rate

Spam Traffic

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

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

The Fix

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

Broken links

If you’ve been around for a while, chances are you’ve got a few outdated links that no longer work.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

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

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

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

The Fix

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

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

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

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

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

Slow loading times

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

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

The Fix

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

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

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

Too many pop-ups and ads

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

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

The Fix

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

Autoplay videos

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

The Fix

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

Content that’s different from what they expected

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

The Fix

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

Bad web design

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

The Fix

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

Your content’s no good.

Bad spelling? Bad formatting? Bad writing?

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

The Fix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First things first

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

Sell Something

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

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

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

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

Show Ads

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

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

Recommend Products

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

Patreons

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

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

Indirect income

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

Final Tips

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

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

How to Grow your Blog Readership

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

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

The Natural Way

Search Traffic

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

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

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

Word of Mouth

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

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

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

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

Be Interesting

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

There are 3 ways to achieve that in a blog.

Exciting Titles and Feature Images

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

Here’s a great example:

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

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

Be Useful

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

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

So how do you become more useful?

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

Exciting People

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

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

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

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

Exciting perspectives

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

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

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

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

The Paid Way

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

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

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

Back to Work

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

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

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

Why Start a Blog

If you’re reading this then it’s safe to assume that you have an end goal - a reason why you want to start your blog.

Identity: Domain and hosting

Some of you love to write and love it just as much if people could read your writing. Some of you have heard tales of people raking in millions with their blogs and want to try your hand at the game. Some of you need to establish yourself as a thought leader, to help your other brands grow.

We wrote this guide with the goal of helping all of you.

What is Success

Before we begin, we’d like to go over what a successful blog looks like. For the purpose of this guide we’re defining success as one or more of the following measurable results:

• A lot of readers with positive sentiment
• A lot of subscribers who read your work regularly
• A lot of people who follow your advice or recommendations (such as clicking your links)

For this guide, we won’t be treating facebook likes and youtube subscribers as success. That, grasshopper, is a guide for another time.

Now let’s get started.

How To Make A Blog

Here’s a checklist:

1. Pick a platform
2. Get your name and space on the internet
3. Design your blog
4. Configure your functions
5. Write, shoot, record
6. Repeat

Structure: Blogging Platforms

There are plenty of platforms you can start blogging on - medium, tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger… the list goes on. We won’t debate the pros and cons of every one of them here. Instead we’ll just show you this:

The long and short of it is 72 million people, more than half of all bloggers use Wordpress because:

• It’s free, including a huge number of addons you’ll need (more on this later)
• It’s really easy
• It’s secure
• It’s highly customizable

So that’s what your blog is built with. Now we look at where.

Identity: Domain and hosting

You need to self host. Forget all about free blogging platforms. You need to OWN your own blogging space.

Just imagine if Huffington Post ($14,000,000 in revenue per month) started as huffingtonpost.freeblogs.com instead of huffingtonpost.com.

No, you need your own name (domain) and your own space (hosting). Start by picking out a hosting package from http://fastwebhost.com/web-hosting.html, and you can get the domain at the same time. Most domains go for $2 to $15 per year, while hosting starts at $1/month.

Alright, now we design your blog

Design: Themes and Customization

First install Wordpress. The easiest way is with the Softalicious installer. Here’s a detailed, step by step guide on how to use it :https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/Wordpress-softaculous-installation/ 

Alright, you’ve got Wordpress. Now we need to design it.

Once installed, you’ll get an email with an that shares an admin url (typically www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin) and login information.  Start by logging in. You’ll see a dashboard or admin panel that looks something like this:

The core design of your website is based on the “theme” it’s running. So to change your design you change the theme. Here’s how: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/install-Wordpress-themes/ 

Visit your blog once you’ve installed and activated your theme and you’ll see the new design in place.

You can further customize it to match your needs. Start by uploading your logo or setting your blog’s name from the customize tab under appearance. You can also find a large number of settings in the customize tab including widgets and menu items. We’ve gone over a few here: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/customize-Wordpress-themes/ 

Functionality: Plugins

In some cases you might need more functionality, like a calendar of live events or a way for people to sign up to your RSS. The easiest solution is to install a “plugin”, a program that adds this functionality to your site. You can learn more about how to do this here: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/install-Wordpress-plugins/ 

Content: Posts and pages

Pages are static “one-off” content such as your about page, privacy policy, etc. Posts are where you publish most of your content. They’re the entries for your blog. They are also different in a few functional ways

• Posts are timely, they get archived in a chronological order. Pages are timeless, they get archived in whatever order you specify.
• Posts can be categorized by subject areas. Pages are hierarchical.
• Posts are included in RSS feed; Pages are not.
• Pages can have different structures and templates; all posts have the same structure

Now let’s show you how to add and edit these posts and pages.

• Create a WordPress Post
• Add images, videos or other multimedia to WordPress Posts
• Categorize posts 
• Display posts from a single (or more) category on a particular page
• Manage comments on your blog

And Again

That’s it. Now you have a blog, on your own domain name, and know how to create content. Now you start publishing.

Next up on the How to Succeed with Blogging series: How to Grow Your Blog’s Readership.

Be it your booming online business or your client’s, web hosting needs can be complex depending on the content you have along with the growth of visitors/website traffic. It is a reminder to you that you need to beef up your web server.  The list here consolidates major hosting plans that you can consider for stepping up the game.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared hosting is what it is. The website is hosted on a server shared by other websites, which also means shared costs. However, there’s a risk involved - another popular site might affect the performance of your own site.

Sharing a super server at a very low price can be a great way to go for new businesses since the initial traffic would not be much.

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller hosting is a shared hosting service with extra tools to help you resell hosting space. They have some incredible technical control and billing software for invoicing clients and all; such as, free website templates, technical support from the hosting company and private name servers.

If your business is to sell web hosting, then this is what you are looking for.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

In virtual private servers, you share one physical server but it seems like multiple, separate servers. This is the beginning to getting your own dedicated server where each VPS shares hardware resources while being allocated with a dedicated part of the computing resources. Your hosting neighbors will not be interfering anymore, and it’s cheaper than a dedicated server.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress is popular, and it’s not going anywhere. As a web building platform, many web hosting servers are what is known as, “Managed WordPress Hosting”. It will keep your WordPress installation updated which in turn will protect your site from security threats from hackers. Not as inexpensive as shared web hosting, this is still a good option for both startups and giants.

Dedicated Web Server

When you have a dedicated server, it basically means you have one whole physical server to yourself from the hosting company. No need to worry about other websites and traffic management. If you are confident that your business has adequate growing traffic and revenue to afford the highest level of server available, then go for your own machine along with a dedicated system administrator to maintain technical aspects.