Irene

Useful Facts about Website Traffic and Audience

September 8, 2023 By Irene

Website traffic refers to the number of people who visit a website. This visit can come from various sources namely:

Organic search – through the search engines; and it can based on keywords used in search.

Direct search – when a url is specifically typed into google search bar, and

Referrals – visitors coming from other websites, social media, and paid ads.

On the other hand, website audience refers to a particular group of people who visit a website, the length of time they stayed, and how they engaged with the site. Their characteristics like age, location, interest, gender can all be measured.

After studying your audience it is also possible to segment them based on what they did on the site.

What factors contribute to Website Traffic

As we’ve learnt earlier, the on page SEO factors we put in place when writing our post all contribute to helping visitors find our sites. For example

Using keywords at vantage places in blog posts;
Writing high quality content;
Provision for sharing posts on social media;
Engagement on social media;
People linking back to the site.

How Important is Website Traffic Monitoring?

Customising a site for SEO helps understand a site’s performance. You can check dates, time and frequency of visitors. Also checked is the time of stay on the site, known as bounce rate. Such analysis is also needed when you run ads for offers on your site. There are free and also paid tools for this purpose. These tools check organic traffic as well as traffic from other sources like social media.

If you want to go for such a tool make sure it has all the features you need.

Free Traffic Feed Tools

An example is the free Live Traffic Feed also known as Feedjit tool. It actually shows a visitor’s location, time of visit and the page visited. It can be added to a site through adding html code pasted manually into the site’s theme or html window. A plugin version can also be used I stead.

Feedjit is a real time traffic checker, that is very simple to set up and use. It can help in decision making and improve content creation as it states exactly where visitors land on a website.

There are several real time traffic checkers, both free and paid to check out.

Other Benefits of the Free Traffic Checker Tool

It helps in deciding what improvements to make to the site. For example instead of deleting a page, you may decide to leave a page intact if you see people landing on it.

Products can also be introduced for the benefit of visitors.

Not everyone likes to see a live traffic feed on his site. However if you decide to use it, learn how to customise and set it properly and make the most of it.

Heat Map Tools

An alternative to using a live traffic feed is to use a heat map. It is a tool that shows data in the form of a map or diagram. The individual values are represented by various colours. It is possible to understand user experience just by looking at the map, with a key showing what the various colours stand for. It shows where visitors are on your site using spotted sightings.

User behaviour analysis

The objective of using these tools is to find and determine who the actual audience of your website are, by analysing their behaviours, target and engage with returning visitors while providing them with valuable information, and products.

General factors that help in Audience Targeting

Website themes must be mobile friendly to aid user experience. This means blog pages must be easy to access on mobile first and then the design is used for desktop.

Statistica – “…58.99% of all web traffic was accessed through mobile phones.”

Social media share buttons that enable sharing of your posts on social media must be installed. Your presence on social is also desirable so visitors can move from blog to social and vice versa

Website content can be localised to suit your geographic location. Terms, language, names and telephone numbers used in the location are needed for this.

Segmentation of audience based on what they showed interest in also is necessary for follow up with exact needs

After getting some traffic you’ll want to increase it in order to get more targeted audience. That will be the subject of another post.

I think you now know the difference between website traffic and website audience. this should help you what to focus on or not.

If you’ve enjoyed this post, please leave me a comment, like and share it.

How to write an Engaging Blog Post – 9 Practical Tips

July 5, 2023 By Irene

Starting a blog and continuous posting is essential as we are in a time of the world where most people make searches online. Search is made for businesses, ideas, direction, information of all kinds. When you read a blog post, it is somebody’s knowledge and ideas that he has put down for your consumption, giving you the knowledge or information you are looking for.

1.Goals for blogging

A person must have a goal for setting up a website or a blog. Here are a few reasons for setting up a blog:

To motivate and inspire.
Educate and inform
Personal development
Clarity of mind
Form a group
Earn an income
Show expertise

A blog brings you in touch with an audience interested in what you have to say; and for a business, it may be to generate leads. A blogger can generate revenue or just get pleasure from doing something you love in new ways. This reduces boredom, you get to learn new things, acquire new skills, and become more useful in other endeavours of life. Connection is made with many others which may not be possible with an offline endeavour.

2.Blog topics for Beginners

Most people will say they don’t know what to write about or what to say. But sit still and think of it! After which you’ll realise all the things you know that you’ve been telling or teaching people, motivation, step by step insights, petty talk, are all aspects of blogging. The only thing is to bring that knowledge online in whatever form you choose.

Listed hereunder, are categories of blog topics:

Lifestyle – memoirs, personal, health, food;
Education – career, marketing, entertainment, sports;
Arts and culture – painting, poetry, story telling, photography etc.
Reviews – book, personality, product, news etc.
Entertainment – comedy, film.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Please let me know which category your niche belongs to in the comments section..

3.How to find your niche on Social Media

After thinking through your audience you’ll have to search for them online. This means signing up to various social media platforms too. When I put a simple term into twitter ‘interested in cuisine’, the first search result was an image talking about people visiting Japan, which comes with sightseeing and naturally tasting their food. Right away you have more search terms like a geographic area, sightseeing, and food – three keywords in all. Make the same search on facebook and you’ll find different results like utensils, domestic cookware, recipes, etc. It is possible that going to other sites will reveal more terms you can use. You can also put the search term directly into Google. Write down what you’d like to say to them topic by topic.

4.Blog topics for Beginners

Most people will say they don’t know what to write about or what to say. But sit still and think of it! After which you’ll realise that all the things you know, and you’ve been telling or teaching people, like motivation, step by step insights, petty talk, are all aspects of blogging. The only thing is to bring that knowledge online in whatever form you choose.

Listed hereunder, are categories of blog topics:

Lifestyle – memoirs, personal, health, food;
Education – career, marketing, entertainment, sports;
Arts and culture – painting, poetry, story telling, photography etc.
Reviews – book, personality, product, news etc.
Entertainment – comedy, film.

This is by no means complete. If yours is not in the list, please let me know in the comments section.

5.You can write about one or more of anything that interests you. For example,

places visited,
people met,
foods taken,
interesting events,
photography.
your business
religious articles

6.Blogging means different things to different people. When you heard about blogging what came to mind? Young people talking about fashion, entertainment, sports, gossip, food etc? These are all good blogging topics. Additionally, I’ve listed some more below:

moms i.e people with children,
crafts,
cuisine,
brewing medicines,
electricals,
ebooks – old books repurposed because of the sheer value they offer to prevent them from extinction,
pets,
travels etc
your career,
Daily activities

Some more examples are:

places visited,
people met,
foods taken,
interesting events,
photography.
your business
religious articles

Blogging can make a business visible, increase conversions and revenue etc. Create a space in your normal schedule and start writing, or making videos if that’s what you want.

7.Blog post Template

A blog or website must have a layout that can be easily followed by visitors. Blog posts must also be arranged in a way that makes them easy to find. This also means the writer must have a style or format that he uses all the time. This kind of template can be used for all your posts. Using a template is advantageous because it makes writing faster, saves time as the formula is already there for you to follow, is easier, and makes you more efficient. This should however not limit new additions and improvements that can be made with time.

A blog post template can be made up of the following:

Research/review new plus existing knowledge,
Outline /draft heading and subheadings, listicle, how-to guide, comparison;
Outline – opening sentence or paragraph, a voice/writing style, body of post, new information, solution, and conclusion;
Images/videos
Authority or knowledge of subject;
Consider income opportunities – call to action;
Edit;
Publish /promote
Practice, rinse and repeat

What style would you like to use in your writing? Have you noticed the same style in some websites and on social media? Would you want to write like a journalist or write reviews or comparison posts? Are you going to write about the same things from your own angle? Go for what resonates with you. No matter the topic, write about it naturally, that is not to copy anyone’s writing word for word.

8.Benefits of blogging

If blogging or websites were not important, people would not visit them all the time. We know people read blogs to be entertained, get news, compare product prices, search for new information, etc. A way to keep the audience or readers engaged is to sometimes write clear and concise information with some humour.

9.Tools to Improve your writing

Google docs, sheets, slide presentation
Word doc, excel, powerpoint
ABC or spelling check to check spelling and grammar, or
Grammarly or alternatives

Do you remember searching social media? Promote your post there.

Have you enjoyed or benefited from this post? If yes, please leave me a comment and share.

Is website traffic Important? How to get and maintain it.

February 27, 2023 By Irene

This post has been updated at at February 2023.

Website traffic is the visits to a website by people. It is related to the search terms people use to get there. It shows how popular a site is or how much people see of it that is its visibility. It shows that a site is visible enough for people to see it.

Most website traffic comes from search engines using keywords to help find sites.

Factors that aid in getting free traffic to a site

On-page SEO factors already put in place on your website aid in getting traffic.
Writing in-depth content consistently on your chosen topic
Promoting content both online and offline
Build backlinks through links and comments on your site and forums

Metrics used by search engines include

The length of time a person stayed on a site
What he did there whether a purchase or pages visited

Companies that use adverts for traffic measure the following among others:

Cost per impression
Cost per click
Conversion rate

How to measure website traffic

Tools like Google Search Console (GSC), and Google Analytics (GA) can be used to access the traffic a site has received over a period.

These metrics can be studied so as to know

the most-visited parts of a site and where visitors are coming from geographically,
whether from social sites,
mobile device or desktop.
also know the exact post landed on by visitors, and
the keywords they used to get there.

You can then use these factors to improve performance and also check security problems.

How to get traffic to a website fast

One of the best ways to get quick traffic is by using paid ads. Google or Bing ads, constructed with direct search terms ensure people using those terms land on the site. This also applies to using paid ads on social media sites.

However, traffic can be obtained quickly depending on the niche in question and the method of promoting the site.

Good traffic – Organic traffic that results from SEO or direct visits from social media through blog promotion is all considered good traffic. This comes from well-written content. Adequate internal and external links must be in place.

Bad traffic, like visits from bots, can damage a site’s authority. Some purported sites that sell traffic may just send bots your way.

Things that affect website traffic adversely are

Bad site structure,
Non optimisation for SEO,
Slow server, and
Non-mobile-friendly theme.

Strategy to increase traffic to your website

Getting quality free traffic takes time when SEO is used, though it can work well and is usually the best;
You should aim at getting the right people to visit your site, build relationships and make them repeat visitors, and generate leads as a result; in your dashboard
Install WordPress plugins that show your traffic stats’;
There is the need to also promote the site through engagement with others on the topic and sharing links on social media sites;
Also, make offline promotions;
Consistency in using what experience you have gained in your efforts to gain traffic to your website.

Now you know how to get traffic to your website and the factors to measure for improving your site’s performance. If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment and share it.

Blog Post Checklist: Things to do before you hit publish

January 25, 2021 By Irene

Have you finished writing your blog post, edited, and want to publish it? Go over it once more before hitting publish. This is necessary because it is quite easy to overlook a few essential things. Sometimes you do get exhausted just by doing the keyword search, writing an optimised post, making an image, formatting etc. that you quickly want to hit publish. But wait a minute, that will not be the best thing to do. There is no rush to get people to read an incomplete post. Of course, we are not talking about perfection here; but at least it should be without some basic faults.

The thing to look out for before you publish your post is to make sure it is SEO optimised, so that the post can be crawled by the search engines for higher ranking and more traffic.

Blog Post Editing

Before you write the post select the necessary keywords using Google or a keyword research tool and use them in the body of the post, the heading (H1) and subheadings, namely H2 and H3 etc.

Write a great blog post title also using keywords.
The paragraphs should be of reasonable length. 300 words recommended for each paragraph. This improves readability. Helps visitors who have little time to stay on the site.

The main Keywords should be in the first line of the first paragraph of the post.

Re-arrange paragraphs to follow an understandable sequence.
Use a bulleted list to highlight items where possible.
Try to make the post lengthy, putting in all the necessary facts or enough of it. 500-2000 words post is acceptable.
Check the grammar and spelling in the post. Link to Grammarly or other grammar check tool
The last paragraph should mention one or two of the main points.

Add a call to action (CTA) in the post and at the end so visitors know what to do. A CTA is any action you ask visitors to take.
Add tags and categories that organise posts together.

Make sure you have placed it under the appropriate category.

Proofread again check spelling mistakes.

Check for SEO.

7. Inside the Yoast SEO plugin, use the main heading as the focus keyword

Write a helpful ‘meta description’ using some of the main keywords. The meta description will be shown under the post title in the search results.

Check readability and grammar inside the Yoast SEO plugin.

Check the URL or permalink noting keywords and if there is the need to shorten it, do so.

8. Add a blog post image.

Give the image an alt tag and title so it is optimised for SEO.
It should be placed in the middle, left, or right as has been done for all other posts on your blog. Images should be relevant and as descriptive as possible.

Link the new post to another post on the blog. This is internal linking and gives older articles new links. It also boosts SEO.

You can also link from old posts to newer ones.

Link each post to a related external website.
Videos can also be added to a post. This helps to increase the rate of engagement .

Learn how to embed videos in WordPress.

When you get used to doing this every time you write a post, it becomes the natural thing to do. You can create a checklist for that purpose to use as a reference.

After writing the draft, leave it for a day or some hours. When you come back to it, your mind will be refreshed or cleared, to see amendments you omitted in the first time draft .

If you have not been using a blog post checklist, it is time to start doing so.

Did you enjoy this post? If you did, please leave a comment and share it.

How to start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

January 14, 2021 By Irene

In this post, I give some background information on how to start Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is where you promote and sell a product for a company or owner of the product for a share of the revenue generated. Sometimes you may have an interest in the product because you

have used it, and seen its value;
can also sell goods you have not used;
can also produce the product and market it as a creator and marketer. Or have others promote the product for you too.

Parties involved in Affiliate Marketing

There are several parties involved in affiliate marketing, namely;

The Merchant – the one that creates the product – can be a large company like Adidas; or an individual owning a small business.

The Network – is the intermediary that puts together all the products and handles the affiliates and payments, like Amazon. Product owners make the product, link up with networks who then acts act as an intermediary between them, and the affiliate. (sellers) Affiliates can have access to several products from one network.

Affiliates are also known as Publishers by some sites.

The Customer – is the buyer.

How does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate Marketing works with the Network giving affiliates a unique link to merge with product images on their websites and other channels. This way, the product is advertised for visitors to see.

Affiliates are expected to make known to the consumers their participation as an affiliate for a product. This is where disclosure is revealed. A tracking system works in the background to effect delivery and payment.

Steps to Join an Affiliate Company and Succeed as an Affiliate

You need to look at reviews about the affiliate company you want to use. Then register with them. They track the links to know what items were purchased or even viewed.
Make reviews of products, the right way, to enable you to make sales easily.
Find a medium or think through how to get your links to your chosen audience. It could be through a blog/website or through video on a YouTube channel, to name a few.
Create the content and reviews about the products.
Go through questions people are asking on your niche (interest or product) and use keyword research to
Start writing answers on them through posts on your blog.
Get free products from producers or purchase some for the purpose.

In writing a product review, you establish trust with the customer. A product review template enables the consistent and quick generation of reviews.

Niche affiliate marketing

With niche affiliate marketing, you can have what is known as a niche affiliate blog. Focus is on one product or a set of products in a related category that are reviewed in blog posts. You can replicate this method for an offline side hustle; your creativity comes in a great deal here. This can also be termed as building your brand. The products you offer can be so focussed that it helps to find your site. We can relate to this, as there are particular sites we choose to visit only because of what is offered and the way it is done. We get our problems solved by visiting certain websites. In the same way, setting up a niche site should solve problems for others.

Best affiliate Marketing Programmes

You can be an affiliate for anything from

Courses,
Hosting,
WordPress themes,
eBooks (downloadable products),
Physical products,
Software.

Affiliate marketing opportunities abound online, the most popular one being Amazon. To find them, make a search in Google for say children’s’ toys (niche) + affiliate programme. This is a very focused niche, as it is only one item related to children that have been chosen. You can also search, based on something you’ve’ used and would like to write reviews about it for the benefit of others.

Affiliate marketing average income – depends on the company, product, and type of affiliate programme being used. One product when promoted well can generate a lot of income.

How to create an affiliate website

Anything you have learnt about creating a website can be applied to an affiliate website. You may just have to look round to see how others have done it for you to decide. It may also lead you to your choice of a website theme. Some WordPress themes are set up for product images or shops.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

The ease of entry into Affiliate Marketing is one benefit most people like about it. You may have to set up a website with some content on it before some networks will allow you to be a publisher.

Affiliate marketing is considered passive income. Once the process is set up properly, it generates earnings on its own. This kind of online marketing requires some knowledge and training. Like any online business, it is necessary to attract visitors to the site through SEO using keywords. Also, study other sites to learn their strategies. Most people fail because they give up too early and don’t take the time to put in their best efforts.

Wealthy Affiliate teaches affiliate marketing in four steps providing the necessary tools to help you succeed. The steps are to

Find a niche;
Set up a website. Find a product.
Register with affiliate progs provided as part of the training;
Use keywords to write product reviews;
Earn.

Here’s what some members have to say:

Visitors gain trust as they are helped by your content that offers the value they need.

You now have an idea of how to start Affiliate Marketing. Did you enjoy this post and learn something new? If you did, leave me a comment and please share it.

Keyword Research and Analysis for SEO – A Marketing Strategy

December 18, 2020 By Irene

What is Keyword Research Analysis?

The need for a site to rank high in the search engines has enabled keyword research and its analysis to continue to remain with marketers. Hence, they are always on the lookout for the search terms people use to enable them better answer questions to meet others’ needs through their content or posts.

The intent behind the search terms people put into the search engines has also not ceased to be important.

Let us say you have in mind to write on a particular topic and its subtopics. Put that search term into Google or Yahoo and Bing, Amazon, and in the case of video, YouTube. The results that come up in relation to those terms, may reveal related searches being made on your topic. You can then use these search results to write your posts etc. and/or to provide searchers with the required service, information, or product.

There is also the need to devise a keyword research process to use.

Steps to perform Keyword Research

The first step used in the keyword search is brainstorming; then some of the words are put into the Google search bar. These are known as seed terms.

From this, come search results pages. These can also be put into the search bar one after the other for more search results and more resultant keywords.

So, for your post, you can use various variations of the same term or phrase throughout the post.

The various types of Keywords

Keywords are of various types namely:

Short tail – 1 or 2 words
Medium tail – 1 to 3-word terms, and
long tail – made up of four or more words.

You can generate long-tail keywords by adding more words to a search phrase. For example, put into Google search a three-word phrase. Give it some seconds to load and note the results that come up. Add some more words to the phrase and see the results that come up. You can see that with a little effort more keywords can be obtained from the initial seed keyword you imputed. The next thing is to analyse the keywords to see how best to use them in your post.

A post should be written in such a way that the words flow naturally within the text and should be relevant to what is being written about. This is where latent semantic keywords come in.

The use of Latent Semantic Keywords (LSI)

These are the related words that give meaning to the keywords already used. Use the latent semantic keyword tool for this purpose.

Sometimes you may want more information on the keyword chosen, like the number of searches a month, traffic potential, etc. Another free tool you can use is the Google Keyword Planner.

Google keyword planner has now been incorporated into the Google Adwords tool. You will need your Google account to access the Google ads account. Follow the prompts

to set up an Adwords campaign.
Go through the steps and create a hypothetical campaign.
Then select a billing method, time zone, and currency.

Create Account without a Campaign – Google Adwords

Alternatively, it can be accessed without setting up an Adwords campaign. Look for the ‘create an account without a campaign’ option.

You do this by readjusting your browser to full screen for that option. Click on it and submit.

Next, click on tools and settings then Planning < Keyword planner.

Inside the tool, select ‘discover new keywords’. Type in a keyword and add some related words to it. You also must specify the location and language you want to see the data from. You can add other locations in addition to your own. Click get results. The results will show more keywords based on what you specified together with their average monthly searches and competition. It can be downloaded into CSV form.

The other columns on ‘ad impressions’ and ‘bid range’ will be of interest if you want to run an ad.

Google Keyword Planner stopped showing exact match monthly volumes of keywords; It now shows broad or vague ranges. But you can filter to find out how much competition there is for the word. Look for ‘add a filter’ and click ‘competition’. This will bring up the options of the competition namely, high, low, or medium. Choose one and click apply. It is a very useful tool that you can explore further.

Why is keyword research important?

Keyword research is important as SEO writing has proven to be the best way of generating relevant content that meets searchers’ demand. It makes the search engines find your blog naturally.

With keyword research, you would know related terms being searched for.
Blog posts would grope in the dark, not answering peoples’ search queries.
Saves you time and energy from the limitations of brainstorming.

How long does it take to do keyword research?

The length of time taken to do keyword research depends

i. on the tool used, (i.e the option used – paid tools have all the features and some are faster). Secondly,

ii. the experience of the person doing the research. When you are starting out you tend to go after all keywords. Time spent searching is reduced when you learn the kind of search intent to use for your posts.

Note that you do not have to use all the tools nor the methods all the time. Depending on the metrics you want to find, you may use more tools or less. When you become quick at researching for search terms you’ll also use more tools or strategies in no time.

You can see that there are various ways and tools used in researching keywords and making analysis for SEO purposes.

Devising a strategy will hasten your search and post writing process. Just do what feels manageable for your purposes.

You have also seen the importance of analysing keywords after searching for them.

Did you enjoy this post? If you did, please leave a comment and also share it.