In its initial days, adsense was every one’s favorite, as it made it easy for anyone and everyone to join and place ads on nearly any kind of website in any industry or niche. And the early bird people did make good money, infact a lot of money from it.

People would even go to the extent of manipulating or cheating adsense to make money for them. There were entire networks of people who would click on ads on each others’ websites just to generate more clicks which resulted in high earning.

People would even setup bots that would simply open a website and click ads from different ip addresses via proxies. What a scam it was. Nonetheless google was fully aware of how its platform was being abused by spammers to steal advertisers money.

However over time as technology improved, the engine behind adsense got smarter in identifying real vs fake traffic and clicks and with this, most of the bots and fake click strategies went out of business.

Today adsense controls the largest share of display marketing across all platforms including desktop pc, laptop and smartphones. You see the most popuplar smartphone os is android which comes from google itself.

Targeted Display Advertisement is the largest source of income for google itself. Though it sells other cloud services as well.

How much I made from Adsense

In the screenshot below you can see I made around USD 34882.42 in the period of 2020-Oct to 2022-May which is around 3 years. The problem is google will not allow me to see reports older than a certain date.

Adsense Earnings 2020 October to 2022 May

This particular account in total made around USD 87,961.69 in the period 2014-May – 2022-Dec. Thats about 8 years. Kind of funny. Averages out to USD 10,995 each year from adsense alone.

Afterwards I switched from Adsense to BuySellAds as it was offering me better better rpms. Adsense is click based but, buysellads is both click and impression based. So higher impressions meant higher earnings as well.

BuySellAds Earnings from 2021 Jan to 2023 Sep

The RPM Calculation

RPM is a very convenient calculation that gives an easy comparison between the earning potential of different ad networks. In my case the rpm metrics were roughly like this:

RPM of Google (Pageview RPM) = 1.99 = 2
RPM of BuySellAds (Pageview RPM) = 5.14

As we can see that buysellads is a clear winner over here. After switching to buysellads, i never looked back. The good news is that there are other ad networks that offer even better earnings like mediavine, ezoic and adthrive. However some of them have their own conditions on who they shall allow in the network. Blogs usually need to fulfill certain traffic criterias like traffic levels, geo-location etc.

I tried to join adthrive but was rejected twice because the percentage of USA traffic on my tech blog was lower than what they wanted.

Admedia Ad Network

Besides adsense and buysellads i tried few other ad networks. One was admedia, that i had used sometime in 2013-2015. It started quite well with rpms better than adsense, then suddenly the ad delivery was restricted on my website and the revenues dropped. So at some point i stopped using admedia.

Here is a screenshot of my overall earnings from admedia.com

Admedia Earnings 2013 to 2015

Adsense and Blogging

If you are into blogging chances are that at some point of time you have had tried using adsense ad units on your website or may be you are still using it. I used adsense since 2009 and then around 2016 i discontinued it in favor of other monetisation methods.

There are other ad networks that pay better than adsense for small publishers like bloggers. Some of these include BuySellAds Optimize, Mediavine, Adthrive, Ezoic etc. These are the ones that are newbie friendly with less stringent policies when it comes to accepting new blogs into their network.

However there still are big blogs that use adsense as the primary ad network on their websites.

There are a few things you need to understand about adsense.

1. To make lots of money with adsense, you need to have a lot of traffic. Yes a lot of traffic. In comparison affiliate websites with targetted traffic will be able to earn more with less traffic.

The reason is simple. Not everyone who visits you website will click an ad. And those who click an ad, there is not guarantee that they were shown a high paying ad. Ads rotate over time each time page is loaded somewhere in the world. So the ad that got clicked might be an ad that was having a low cpc bid from the advertiser. In that case the revenue share for the publisher will also be low.

Factors that affect adsense earnings

There are certain key factors that affect adsense earnings on blogs. Here is a brief overview:

Traffic Geo:

Traffic from different geographic locations generate different levels of ad revenues. If the traffic on your website comes from english speaking rich countries like usa, canada, australia then you will be able to earn more.

On the other hand if the traffic coming from countries with lower ad spendings, then the earnings will be lower as well. In general USA traffic is performs the best when it comes to ad revenue.

Here is a report from my adsense account showing the earnings country-wise along with other interesting metrics like rpm, pageviews and impressions.

Adsense Earnings Country Wise

USA highest earner: Note that country USA has an rpm of $19.05 which is amongst the highest ones. On the other hand countries like India have an rpm of $0.44. This roughly means that for the same amount of traffic received from both countries, the earnings from the US traffic would be 40x higher than that of india. This is significant.

If you are just starting out to develop a new blog you have take in consideration, what geographies shall you be targetting. If the average rpm for a given country is low, it does not necessarily mean that you can’t earn a good amount. It just means that you need a lot more pageviews.

Also note that the number of impressions is roughly 3 times the number of page views. This is simply because until sometime back google had a policy of allowing only 3 ad units per page. So when a page gets loaded it counts as 1 page impression, but if there are 3 ad units on the page, there will be 3 ad-unit Impressions

This leads to many ideas on how to increase adsense earnings. Firstly you can place more ad units if you have not done so already. Uptil a certain point, adding more ad units increases the average earning per visitor or your rpm.

Increase Pageviews for higher earnings

Also try increasing the pageviews on your site. With proper site structure and engaging content you can increase the pageview per visitor on your website. For instance if 1 visitor visits you site and reads a page and leaves your pageview per visitor would be just 1 which is the lowest it can go.

On the other hand if each visitor views 4-5 more pages on your website after landing, then you can get 5 pageviews/visitor. In this way you can increase your earnings without having to increase the traffic actually.

The pageviews per visitor depends a lot on the niche your site is in. If you are writing tech articles where the visitor is looking for some very specific piece of information or solution to a problem he/she is facing, they will simple read the page and leave after getting what they want. On such type of websites, it can be quite challenging to increase the pageview count.

However there are some niches, where the users wants to explore more content naturally to learn or discover more. For example “craft ideas” or “home decoration ideas”. On such websites, the user will tend to explore more articles to find more useful and relevant content to his/her interests thereby increasing the overall pageview metric for the same number of unique visitors.

Traffic size / quantity:

The obvious thing that affects ad revenue is the traffic coming to your site. More traffic means more clicks which means more money.
Increasing website traffic is what SEO (search engine optimization) is all about. SEO has evolved over the decades into a very professional subject and science in itself.

You need to do keyword research, write high quality articles that are indepth, provide value to user and satisfy their query. As you write more and more articles, google sends you traffic for more and more keywords. This is the basic strategy behind increasing traffic through seo. On this website we discuss seo and various techniques a lot.

Besides seo there are also many other ways to generate traffic on your website. Social media is also a major source of traffic for many websites. Websites like twitter, facebook, linkedin, pinterest can send traffic to your website. Usually its classified as “referral traffic” since its another website that is sending users to your website.

When it comes to monetisation using ads, traffic from any source is good, be it seo or social media.

Niche or Industry:

Ads in certain industries pay a lot more compared ads in certain other industries. For instance if your website is about automobiles that auto makers will display their ads who spend a lot of money on online advertisements.

Similarly technology, finance, law, medical services are some industries where advertisers spend a lot of money on ads. So if you are blogging in these sectors, then your blog will very likely attract high paying ads and you will generate higher revenue.

But again, in 2023 its not that simple. High ad-spending sectors are also high competition and you need to have a lot of domain authority to rank and drive traffic in these niches. So choose your niche carefully.

Even in a high competition niche, there are possibilities of finding low competition keywords and rank for them by writing high quality articles. This is the whole point of keyword research and is something that you should learn well if you want to drive traffic from seo.

Ad placement:

Ad placement determines how and where you put the ad units on your webpage and how many ad-units you put in total. This affects earning significantly upto a certain level.

For instance “above-the-fold” placement is highly recommended, which implies that atleast one ad unit should should clearly and fully visible right when your webpage loads. For this you have to place the ad somewhere towards the top area. This can be in the header or just under the post title on a wordpress post.

Sticky ad-units is another strategy used by a lot of bloggers to boost their earnings. For example you might see a sticky ad towards the footer that keeps showing as you scroll the page down on a smartphone. Or there might a sticky ad on the sidebar they stays visible by moving its position as you scroll up or down.

Another technique is to strategically place the ad-units in the content area of the page rather than just the sidebar. Users tend to keep their eye-balls on the main content and look less towards the sidebar area.

So if you ads are in the content area they have a higher chance of getting noticed and eventually clicked by users. However this can be difficult if you have to do it for 1000s of pages on your website.

There are wordpress plugins for instance that allow you to inject ad units in the content area of the post or article. For other cmses you need to find a case specific solution.

Mobile Optimization: A big percentage of traffic received by websites is coming from smartphones now, which have a different display size. Your website should be optimized for mobile display when displaying ad units. For instance on a desktop screen, ads can be visible in the sidebar area. However on mobile phone there is little to no sidebar area (though there is a footer area for sticky ad).

For such layouts you should be able to inject ads in the main content properly so that as the user scrolls he can see more ad units along.

AdSense vs affiliate For Bloggers

When it comes to monetisation the choice is between adsense and affiliate. Now which one is better, is a very circumstancial question. If you have targetted traffic that converts on the affiliate offers you are promoting, then affiliate marketing will make huge lot more than adsense.

In general for targetted traffic affiliate marketing generates 5-10x profits compared to an adnetwork like adsense

I do amazon affiliate marketing on my main tech blog and drive targetted traffic through “buyer keywords” method. These keywords convert well and i generate sales for amazon and receive commissions in return. Doing this I made over $184,529.21 in amazon affiliate alone.

Here is a screenshot of what I made in since Oct 2021-Dec31

However getting targetted traffic is not easy, since they are already high authority domains go after the buyer keywords that attract the buyer minded targetted traffic.

In most cases small bloggers can generate traffic to their websites only for keywords that are not very targetted or are informational in nature that big sites would usually not chase aggressively.

In such cases, promoting affiliate offers will not deliver significant profits, and it would be a lot better to use ad networks like adsense. I also used different ad networks on my blogs like adsense, admedia, buysellads optimize. In ad revenue I made over

If you want to dominate the search results in your niche or market, make sure to find the right kind of keywords with correct intent and competition levels that you can tolerate, and then publish relevant content.

In this post we shall take a look at some simple techniques that you can implement right away to boost your existing keyword research techniques to get some extra mileage.

1. Use multiple sources for keyword research

Google keyword planner is the principal tool to start keyword research with. The data it shows comes directly from google, which is the biggest search engine and receives the highest number of search queries.

Feed one seed keyword or phrase and it will instantly show upto 800 keyword related to the seed.

However it is quite limited in terms of the data it shows. For any given seed keyword or phrase, google keyword planner shows only around 800 keyword ideas, all of which may not always be related to the actual seed keyword.

To overcome this limitation make it a habit to use as many different sources as you can to find more keywords and ideas.
Some of the best places are:

1. Google keyword suggestions – 7 best free tools to get keyword suggestions from Google in 2016
2. Related keywords
3. Forums – How to do keyword research on forum sites to find great content ideas
4. Question answer sites
5. Competitor sites
6. Social sharing sites like Pinterest, Instagram.

Widen your spectrum of tools for doing keyword research. You would find more and more keywords and ideas.

2. Look for topics/ideas rather than plain search terms

The very process of keyword research tells our mind to look for new and different words in order to come up with content ideas. You just keep running automated tools to extract more and more keywords out of all known search engines and sources.

This process is correct but has certain limitations. Firstly there are a lot of keyword that even the tools are unable to report. Automated keyword extraction tools will most of the time show only those keywords that are most popular or in-demand. These keyword have great traffic potential, but at the same time they are also highly competitive.

The goal of keyword research is to bring up topics and ideas around which content can be and should be developed.

Therefore its quite important to think in terms of what are people looking for and what do they want to know about a something.

Suppose you building a website on japan tourism. Some keywords could be –

1. japan travel guide
2. japan tourist attractions

You could write a lot of content around those kind of keywords.
You would soon run of ideas because the list of such specific keywords is usually small.
You are just writing another piece of content like many others that would weakly compete with rest, and get you no lead in marketing.

Now consider this keyword – Best places to see in japan in winter

It has a much stronger search intent and a much more unique topic to write content that would stand out distinct from the rest. Of course there are benefits of it being a long tail keyword that will likely have less competition and would be easier to rank.

The goal of keyword research is not to find words to fill your titles, h1s and content with, but to discover a topic to write about. Its not a big technical thing, just a different approach with lots of marketing benefits.

So start writing for “intent” rather than just “word”. Think!

And where to find ideas

Where-ever there is content, there are topics and ideas. Go out to other sites in your niche, like forums, question answer sites. Search popular content sharing sites for your main keywords and see what people are talking about. And you would find some great topics and ideas.

3. Keep an eye on trends to find great and easy keywords

Lots of tools out there can help you find topics that have become very popular recently or will be in near future. Here you can find some really exclusive keywords that you can grab early before others start chasing them.

Start with Google trends to see what is actually trending. The rising keywords would give you an insight of popular terms in your market.

Check the forums and question answer sites related to the niche and see what topics are being discussed at present. These would give you a complete insight into the market status.

Dig deep for Long tail keywords

Long tail keywords is

Analyse keyword competition

Avoiding the mistake of picking up a highly competitive keyword can save you a lot of time and energy. The idea is simple enough. Pick up keywords that you can easily rank for without immense SEO power.

Check the Geography – Localize

Check the search intent

Do it more and more

Keyword research is the core of your content marketing strategy and it must absolutely be done right without the slightest mistake. The more you do it, the better

Resources and further reading

• The New SEO — It’s About People, Intent, & Meaning
• How User Intent Will Forever Inform Successful Keyword Strategies

However due to lack of proper knowledge I did things completely wrong that resulted into just nothing. I went on doing these mistakes many years until I learnt the right process through an intense cycle of trial and error.

After I fixed my mistakes and developed my blog in the right direction, my earnings increased and crossed over the $10,000 per month mark. Eventually I made over 300,000 dollars from just 1 blog in passive income.

With mistakes you do learn but also hurt or prolong your chances of making money online from your blog and its important to learn from others whenever you have the opportunity to do so.

Knowing the common pit-falls will help you safe-guard yourself in the journey of blogging and reach your financial goals faster.

Let me explain bit by bit, some of my biggest mistakes.

1. Not deciding a niche first

I started my first blog purely out of enthusiasm to learn to make websites. I had no idea what a blog does and what we can achieve with it. I simply setup a site and posted extremely random content on it.

Sometimes I would post funny jokes, or some of my daily life experiences related to my profession (I have a background in software engineering).

I kept doing it for many years without seeing much growth in terms of traffic and revenue. For many years I could not make any decent monthly income out of it. Honestly at that point of time I did not even care, since I was working as a freelance software developer.

Many years later I decided to focus my blog on one particular niche (its in Tech niche). After I started focusing on one niche and posting content regularly in that particular niche only, based on keyword research, the traffic on my blog soared and I touched over 10,000 dollars/month in passive income.

This is the biggest mistake new bloggers tend to make. That is not knowing their niche.

Even if you don’t have a clear goal of what you shall be writing about, you should atleast know your field of interest, or passion or what things you find most interesting to talk or write about.

A Niche is the “Subject” that your blog or website talks about all day and all night. Your blog is like a book on that Subject.

Your blog should have posts, articles about a certain subject or niche that you are good at.

Your goal is to share your knowledge, expertise and experiences about that one particular subject. Ofcourse you can occasionally write about other topics as well, but having a primary niche is VERY IMPORTANT!

It could be travelling, cooking, gardening, beauty tips, health tips, real estate, software engineering etc.

But it has to be GOOD at atleast one thing.

A lot of people start a very generic blog and start writing about random things that happen in their daily lives. This is okay in the initial stages of your blog development. But if you keep doing this for long, you will eventually end up investing too much time without any valuable returns.

To save your time and money in the long run, and actually MAKE MONEY, its important to decide a niche first before you start your blog.

If you need help selecting your niche you can reach out to me and I would be glad to help! Check out the contact page for my contact details.

2. Not Knowing the basics of traffic

If you are planning to make a new blog, you should know how the world of websites and internet works and how actually you are going to make money.

Of course you know how it works. Billions of people like you around the world use their computers and smartphones to search something online and then read a website that shows up in search results.

But besides that you also need to know the system that works behind the scene. Building the website is the first part and generating traffic is the next.

Traffic can be generated through search engines like google, and social platforms like facebook, twitter, pinterest etc.

Make sure to read a lot about SEO and content promotion on social platforms at the minimum. Learning about seo will enable you to build a website that can generate traffic from search engines. And social promotion will teach you how to generate visitors from sites like facebook.

Writing content on your website and promotion go hand in hand. You publish a post, then promote it. You write the next post and then again promote it.

Not knowing proper seo can cost you a lot of time later on, when you would have to sit and fix stuff.

3. Not Having a Plan

With my first blog I used to post on casual topics in the initial years. This was because my main job was freelance software development the blog was actually my side hustle. And since it did not contribute much to my income, I did not pay much attention to it either.

This is a problem with many bloggers actually. That is not having a proper plan for building content.

To ensure the success of your blog you need something called a “CONTENT STRATEGY”. You might have heard it before because it is the most talked about thing in the blogging and social marketing field.

With a proper content strategy you basically first make a plan of what you shall be posting and how you shall be developing that content. You do not need to plan for 10000 posts in advance, but you should certainly make a plan for atleast 10-30 posts in advance.

Making a content strategy on paper gives you more clarity on what you should and can write about. Its the brainstorming process!

4. Not researching competitor

The most important golden rule of business or “marketing” in general is to do “market research”. In very simple words, look at what your competitors are doing and how are they crushing it for great success!

All of us have our own unique vision and imagination of how we want our blog to be, but when we look at others, we learn and get inspiration that would otherwise take longer if done all alone.

So look at other blogs in your niche and see what kind of articles they are writing. Take a look at which of the articles are receiving the most comments and this will give you an idea of how to find popular topics in that niche.

5. Not making a work schedule

Millions of times it has been told, that consistency is the key to success with anything and blogging is not different. If you want to see fast results with your blog then you have to be consistent which requires a proper work schedule.

Think of your blog as a full-time job and dedicate time accordingly. Your blog might practically be your side hustle, but inside your mind you should respect it as much as your main job or business.

Whether its 2 hours a day or 10 hours per week, or just work on weekends. Make sure you make a plan and religiously stick to it without any procrastination.

Some bloggers tend to get lazy the moment they see little success beyond their expectation. I know this because it happend to ME. Yes ME!
When I saw big success with my blog for the first time, I did get lazy because I thought that now I am about to reach the top of the world in no time. And that did affect my blog growth in different ways. So you should not make this difference.

Whether you are a beginner or a already running a decent blog, you should work on it considering it to be your career and profession.

Mom bloggers often have kids to take care of and find it difficult to manage multiple things at a time. But still you have to do it. Nobody is coming home to do it for you.

Look for ways to increase your productivity. Look at how you can save time and get more done in less time through out every single day. You day job, household duties and what not. There is a way to manage time better.

Learn to manage time, because time is key to success!

Question for you

Are you also a blogger… Which mistake do you think you make the most when it comes to blogging.
Let us know in the comments below. And if you need any help in growing your blog feel free to reach out to me. Check the contact page.

If you don’t already know, an income report is where a blogger tells about his earnings for a given month or period of time.

Your next thought might be, why would someone reveal their earnings so openly ? Wouldn’t that invite robbers. Ha Ha!

There are actually several reasons, and an important one is to document my journey to motivate others into believing that blogging is a real legitimate way to build a source of online income.

Its a real online income that takes time to build but gives real results if you are willing to put in the effort. Okay so lets get into this month’s earnings.

Income Report – Breakdown and expenses

Lets get straight to this months earnings from various sources.

• Amazon Affiliate – $5316
• Display ADS – $3253

The month of may 2021 has seen a drop from the previous month. This is due to decline in traffic, which resulted from google releasing its Product Review Update, which requires product review articles to adhere to stricter standards in terms of quality.

More about it here: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/product-reviews-update

This particular update has affected sites that publish product review articles for amazon products. On my tech blog the top earning source is the amazon affiliate program and I publish a lot of review articles which generate the revenue.

As you might have noticed that I earn from 2 sources only. One is affiliate marketing and the other is display ads.

Always keep in mind that the profit is not what goes into your pockets. You have to pay taxes as well. Consult a chartered accountant if you don’t know about that.

Most of the amazon affiliate income comes from my niche blog where I write about technology. Its an old blog where I have been blogging for past many years and I also have hired writers to write for me.

Lessons

Sites publishing amazon product reviews need to be more careful about their content. Previously sites with long form (long article) content could rank easily even if the content was not original enough.

Google now puts more stress on the content to be original and research based rather than just re-purposed content that summarises product description.

This is the most important lesson from this particular google update.

So if you are running an amazon affiliate site, then make sure that you write well researched content that answers real questions for the the customers and presents useful analysis that helps the reader to understand the product better.

Future Goals

Looking forward from here, I have set the following goals for myself:

Monthly income: $10,000

You might ask how I plan to do it. The answer is very simple. By publishing more content on my site and growing it. The bigger the audience on your website, the more money your site makes.

At this point I also planning to start some other blogs as well, to work in other niches beside tech and diversify my income sources.

Did you start Blogging ?

Blogging is a great way to make some extra money online or even full time online income.

1. If you are a college student looking for some extra cash to support your education
2. You are a work-from-home mom looking for side hustles to make money online.
3. You are an entrepreneur who wants to start an online business.

Blogging is for everyone! Thousands of people blog everyday and have found success that have changed their lives for ever.

Take your first step today. Check out my free course where I offer one-to-one free mentorship for those who take action.

What do you think ?

So that was my story for the month. If you have any feedback or questions let me know in the comments below, or contact me directly.

You can ask me anything about blogging, affiliate marketing and making money online and I would be happy to assist you with whatever little knowledge I have.

I wish all my readers success with blogging.

This is real, but you have to work. All of these methods need time and effort on your part and if you can follow it to the end, you can be sure of making extra dollars every month consistently.

In this article we shall focus specifically on ways to make extra income online. You just need a computer and internet connection at home to work. No more hassles. So plan your schedule and dedicate time accordingly.

If you are just starting out, you need to spend some time to learn. As your move on, slowly and steadily you shall see more opportunities lying ahead.

1. The Best – Blogging

Blogging is a very popular way to make money online. A blog is your own website where you write and publish articles on a certain topic that you have knowledge about. Other people worldwide find your website to learn about the same topic.

When other people visit your blog, they can click on an ad or an affiliate link to make a purchase somewhere. This way you end up making money.

Here are some ways to make money from your blog:

• 1. Advertisements
• 2. Affiliate Promotions
• 3. Selling your own digital course
• 4. Sponsorships and paid content

Pros

• Can make money passively
• Complete freedom
• No work commitment, or obligations

Cons

• Takes a lot of time to make money.
• Lot of things to learn.
• Small initial investment needed for domain and hosting
• Some risk involved

2. The Fastest – Freelance Writer

Freelancing is one of the fastest way to start making money online. You can work for clients from all across the world and get paid.

Freelance writing is a big business online. There are hundreds of thousands of freelancers worldwide that sell their writing services to make money online.

If you think you are good at writing then try out this method. All you need is to connect to clients that are looking for writers. And this is not difficult at all. There are online marketplaces that connect freelance writers with clients.

Here is a list of the best freelance sites for writers:

1. Upwork
2. Fiverr
3. Problogger Jobs
4. Freelancer.com
5. Guru

You can signup on the above marketplaces and start looking for writing projects.

Pros

• Start making money quickly
• Use your existing skills. Little need to learn new things
• Flexible in work timing. Work from Home
• No risk of any kind.
• No investment needed

Cons

• Like a contract job. Get paid only when work done.
• No passive income or long term returns

3. Freelance Graphics designer

If graphics designing is your skill then you can do it for clients online. People are looking to hire graphics designers for jobs like logo designing, banner designing, infographics designing, artwork etc.

You can join freelancing websites and look for projects related to graphics designing and then connect with clients to work on their projects.

1. Upwork
2. Fiverr
3. Freelancer.com
4. Guru

Besides graphics designing, thee are many more skills that are in great demand like video editing, animation designing. If you can do those fancy stuff, then you have the opportunity for work on similar projects.

Pros

• Start making money quickly
• Flexible in work timing. Work from Home
• No risk of any kind.
• No investment needed

Cons

• Needs specific skills
• May have to learn and practice new tools and techniques as per industry requirements
• Like a contract job. Get paid only when work done.
• No passive income or long term returns

4. Freelance web/software developer

Freelance software development is one of the most popular ways to make money online. I myself worked as freelance software developer on Upwork and Freelancer for many years.

Software development is a vast subject and industry and there are numerous technologies to work with. Depending on your skills, you could be a web developer, mobile app developer, or a desktop application developer.

Technologies include php, python, html, javscript, android and ios development etc. If you don’t have any experience of coding and still want to become a freelance software developer then you can first read online tutorials and watch youtube videos to learn. Then you can start looking for projects on freelancing sites and work on them.

I personally worked as a software developer for over 5 years and made a full time income from it. It works and is great if you like coding.

1. https://www.upwork.com/
2. https://www.fiverr.com/
3. https://www.freelancer.com/
4. https://www.guru.com/
5. https://www.toptal.com/

5. Voice over artist

6. Social media marketing manager

Social media marketing is a kind of skill that requires knowledge of both marketing, effective copywriting and social media. Its a completely new branch of marketing that companies all across the world are slowly beginning to use.

If you think you have these skills then there are opportunities for you out there. Small and big companies need someone to manage their social media profile and create effective marketing strategies to generate business from this channel.

For example you can manage the facebook, twitter, pinterest, instagram profiles for a company and develop a marketing strategy to generate more traffic and leads. The company pays you for this service.

Pros

• Start making money quickly
• Flexible in work timing. Work from Home
• No risk of any kind.
• No investment needed

Cons

• Needs specific skills
• May have to learn and practice new tools and techniques as per industry requirements
• Like a contract job. Get paid only when work done.
• No passive income or long term returns
• Highly Results oriented – You have to deliver results

However, social media marketing has its own challenges. You have to be able to deliver results to your clients and make sure that they achieve their goals of generating more business. Its not a submit your work and get paid kind of business model.

You have to generate more business and eventually more profit for the client and then only shall your service be considered valuable.

This needs knowledge and experience on how to use social media effectively for promoting a product or service or whatever the client is selling.

7. Translation services

Similar to writing, translation is another kind of service that has a good market out there. If you are fluent in 2 or more languages you can help your clients translate documents from one language to another.

For example from English to Spanish or the other way. Or Japanese to english and vice versa.

Translation projects are available on most freelance websites and market places like upwork and fiverr.

8. Transcription services

Transcription jobs involve listening to some audio and writing it in text format. Sometimes the audio can be in a different language and then its very similar to translation.

Transcription and translation is an ideal job for those who have a good grasp over writing in one or more languages and can help others translate audio or existing text from one language to another.

For example if you are good in both Spanish and English, then you can help someone transcribe spanish audio to english text and so on. Or you could just convert english audio to english text, though that would be a very easy job and would pay lesser.

Knowing more than one language can be a great advantage in transcription services as you would not only be transcribing but also translating which means you are delivering more value and hence get paid a higher price for your service.

Most online outsourcing marketplaces have separate categories for transcription and translation where thousands of jobs are listed every month or so. You just need get started with it.

Pros

• Start making money quickly
• Flexible in work timing. Work from Home
• No risk of any kind
• No investment needed
• No need to learn any software or application as such

Cons

• Needs specific skills
• Like a contract job. Get paid only when work done.
• No passive income or long term returns

One important advantage of this method is that you don’t have to learn any software application or new skill. You just need a computer and a software to type documents into.

Here are some quick links:

Upwork Transcription Jobs

You could also list your own transcription gigs on Fiverr, and charge your own rates.

9. Online tutoring

Online tutoring is an emerging market segment, wherein teachers or experts can help others learn a subject by giving online tuition classes. For example someone from a non-english country might want to learn english and you can help them learn english because you are a native english speaker.

Search google “online tutoring jobs” to find more resources.

10. Online data entry – Virtual Assistant

Virtual Assistant jobs are probably the easiest kind of spare time/part-time jobs that you can do to make some quick extra cash. Basically you do very simple tasks like data entry into excel spreadsheets or typing documents etc.

You can find plenty of virual assistant jobs on freelancer.com and Upwork, or you can list your own gigs on fiverr, and let clients find you.

11. BONUS – Start a youtube channel

Video blogging is the new emerging trend for content creators, though not everyone has the skills or feels comfortable making videos. But starting your own youtube channel can be a great way to setup an online business.

If you think you can videos then definitely give it a try. Running a youtube channel is in itself a big subject and needs a complete training course. However there are plenty of training videos on youtube itself that teach you how to start your own channel and run it as a successful business.

Or if you know somebody who is running a youtube channel you can seek guidance from that friend to help you get started. Or may be I shall post about it sometime in future.

Conclusion

Those were some of the best ways to make money online from home. You can make upwards of $1000 per month if you have the right skills and the time to use them.

Setting up your online business is not an overnight thing. You need to put in time and energy and be patient. With efforts in the right direction you will eventually reap the profits.

Think carefully and chose the correct business model that matches your skills and mindset. If you are not in a hurry to make extra money and are willing to invest time, you might try blogging as it can be a great source of passive long term income.

On that other hand if you dont want to invest anything and just offer services in exchange for quick money then writing or virtual assistant can be a great option. But remember, that the earning potential may be lower on this route.

Semrush is a great tool for SEOs, Bloggers and Affiliate marketers. It is an all in one competition analysis tool that reveals the keywords, backlinks of your competitor’s website.

If you are building websites and want to drive more organic traffic, semrush provides valuable data that can help scale up your online marketing efforts.

With keywords data you can discover new content opportunities, and with backlink reports you can find new places to build backlinks for your own site.

If you are doing any kind of serious content marketing or managing ppc campaign, a comprehensive suite of tools like semrush can make a huge difference.

In this post we take a quick look at some of the most useful features of semrush.

1. Find keywords a website is ranking for

If you need to check what keywords your own website is ranking for, you can use the Google Search Console. But when you need to check the keywords of your competitor’s websites then you need a competitive intelligence tool like Semrush.

With semrush you can check the keywords of any website and use this data to discover lots of content opportunities and angles for your own site. You can target these new keywords on your own website to generate more organic traffic and consequently more sales and leads.

Chances are that you would come across keywords that you have not yet used on your website or written an article about. Now that you know such keywords, you can straight away publish content and get more traffic from google.

As semrush shows the volume date as well, you can prioritise your selection on those keywords that have higher volume or lower competition. That way you have a data driven accurate strategy for your content marketing plan.

Semrush also tells the position of a website in google for each keyword which gives you an idea of how the competition levels likely are.

2. Check traffic of website (fairly accurate)

With Semrush you get the traffic estimates of any given website over a large period of time. You can see how much traffic other websites in your niche are getting and how strong each of them are. The ones getting more traffic likely have more content or more backlinks or both.

By carefully analysing these high traffic websites, you can get an idea of what you need to do for your website to get more traffic.

The traffic estimates indicate the popularity of a website and how good their SEO is. Websites receiving more traffic have likely done a better job at SEO.

3. Find the top ranking pages of website

If you can find out which pages or posts of your competitor website are getting the most traffic you can steal those topics right away and publish content on your own blog. That’s an absolutely great idea to increase your traffic quickly.

The above report inside semrush shows the top pages (by organic traffic) of pinterest.com and how much traffic each page is getting along with the number of keywords that are driving that much traffic.

Popular posts mean that the posts are getting a lot of traffic either due to high search volume or due to high rankings.

4. Find close competitors and similar websites

When starting a seo campaign in a new niche, its important to check other sites that are in the same niche and performing well.

These sites show up what kind of content is ranking well on Google and what similar things we can do as well in this niche market. From these sites we can quickly get lots of content ideas and topics and save time.

This is a great way to build a content plan for a brand new website specially if you are less familiar with the niche. All you have to do is study and follow other sites and take inspirations from these.

5. Find popular topics on the web around a keyword

Viral topics that are popular across the web on social sites is a great source of ideas for content on your website. Topics that are popular are likely to generate lots of traffic and you can publish content around these topics on your website as well.

In the above example we used the keyword “funny dog” to find popular topics on the internet around that keyword. Semrush shows the url of each content article along with facebook shares and number of backlinks.

Metrics like number of social shares indicate the popularity of an article. Sort by these metrics to find the most popular articles from across the web and get an idea of what the audience is looking for.

6. Find the ppc ads and keywords of website

If you plan to run ppc campaigns to drive targeted traffic to your or a client’s website then spying on competitor’s ads is a good place to start.

By looking at your competitor’s ads you can find out what kind of ad copies, headlines and keywords are converting for that market. Next you can use these ad copies to model your own variations. Save time and don’t reinvent the wheel.

Competitive intelligence and research is extremely importantly for ppc marketers whether you are driving traffic for a client or your own business websites.

There are many other tools that provide similar data like https://www.ispionage.com/ and https://www.spyfu.com/. However if you wan’t a single tool for all needs then Semrush is the tool to go after.

7. Monitor and Audit your own website projects

Audit your own website’s using Semrush project management tool. Its a collection of tools that scan your website and look for seo issues that are affecting your site. Check for onpage factors, backlinks and many other things.

The Backlink audit tool reports the bad quality and toxic backlinks that could have a negative effect on your site. check the report and take necessary steps to fix the problem.

8. Check backlinks of website

If you wan’t to know how a website is ranking high on google, check its backlink profile and see who is linking to them. The backlink profile of a website reveals how strong its link authority is and it also enables you to find potential opportunities to build links for your own website as well.

Semrush has a comprehensive backlink checking tool that comes with the Pro plan. It allows you to check the backlinks, anchor text, dates when seen, backlink types, link attributes and many other details.

Here is a quick screenshot showing the backlinks of pinterest.com. Now of ofcourse your website won’t be having so many backlinks.

To build backlinks the first and the most critical step is to find websites where backlinks can be built. This is not an easy or quick task. It takes lots of search and research over many months.

However, one easy technique is to take the look at the backlink profile of your competitor website. Those places where your competition has backlinks, you can get a backlink too. And to check the backlink profile of your competitor you need to good enough tool like Semrush.

This is perhaps the most powerful application of any seo tool. People always want to see the backlinks of other websites in order to find opportunities to create backlinks for their own site.

There are other backlink checker tools like Ahrefs and SeoMajestic.

9. Generate keyword ideas with volume data

Semrush can generate keyword ideas just like the google keyword planner. It generates a lot more keyword keywords than the google keyword planner and also shows the keyword volumes.

Google keyword planner stopped showing the exact volume numbers recently. You need to have campaigns running in order to see the volume metrics.

10. Check advertisers on a website

A lot of websites use display ads to make money and such websites are called publishers. If you wish to know what ads are being shown on a publisher website, semrush has a tool for that named “Display Advertising”.

This tool will tell you which websites/urls are serving their ads on the ad units on a particular website. The ads could be coming from any ad network like Google Adsense, media.net etc.

By looking at the advertisers on a certain website, you can get an idea on whether there are lots of high paying advertisers in that particular niche or not.

If you see a lot of niche relevant ads on a website, its an indication of a commercial niche that has products and services being advertised by companies and brands.

On the other hand if you see very generic non targeted ads, then the niche does not have a lot of high paying advertisers.

This tool can be used to analyse the market in a niche and see if its profitable to build a site on it.

Conclusion

That was a very brief review of the most useful features of Semrush. Semrush is just one of the many paid seo tools out there in the market, but it packs together some of the most essential features that every SEO needs.

Having all the necessary tools in one place along with data that is highly accurate, makes semrush an excellent investment for any seo professional or affiliate marketer.

Some of the major competitors are Ahrefs and SeoMajestic. Each tool has a slightly different set of features and a comes at a different price range. I have personally used many of these paid tools and found Semrush to be an excellent all in one tool where you get all the tools that you would need without having to pay a big subscription fee.

If you are into affiliate marketing, blogging, client SEO, PPC services or any similar domain, Semrush can get you a lot of useful and powerful data about any niche or marketing helping you to do better in your online marketing goals.

So you are running a niche site and want to promote other people’s product and services as an affiliate to make some extra money.

Affiliate marketing is the golden way to monetise the content on your blog or niche site and if done in the right way, it can make a serious amount of money passively.

If you already have a niche website or are planning to build one, its important to find the best products in that niche and promote them all. Yes, the more products you can promote the more are the chances of you making a sale.

Depending on what niche or vertical you are in, you may be able to promote both physical and info products or just one of them. Besides promoting products you could also promote services to generate leads.

1. Amazon Affiliate Program

The amazon affiliate program lets your promote any product from the entire collection of physical products that are selling on amazon. Its a great affiliate program for beginners because of the following reasons:

• 1. There are lots of products to promote
• 2. The conversion rates are high. Everyone shops at amazon
• 3. You get commissions for indirect sales as well (products you did not promote but the user bought).

For most niches, there are almost always some physical products on amazon that can be promoted on an affiliate site.

For example if you are in the cooking niche you could promote kitchen appliances. If you are in the travelling niche you could promote travel gear and related products. Or if you are into gardening you can pick out the gardening tools from amazon and promote them.

Commission are created after about 2 months of the sale and then payments are released when you reach the minimum threshold of $100. Payments are sent via cheque or direct bank deposit.

2. Clickbank

Clickbank is one of the oldest affiliate networks that primarily focuses on selling digital info products. They have digital products in a variety of niches and markets ranging from health, business, sports to spirituality, parenting and home improvement.

The good thing about clickbank is that the products are digital and customers get access instantly and hence the products are sold worldwide without any geographical restrictions.

Also the commission rates are quite high. There are products that pay upto 90% of the sale amount as commissions. Higher commission rates means more money for affiliates

To find out offers for your niche, visit https://accounts.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm.

On the left column you shall find the categories. Select the category closest your niche market and then start taking a look at the products.

Another alternative to Clickbank is Digistore24 which hosts digital products similar to that found on clickbank under numerous categories. If you do not find the product of your choice on clickbank, check this one.

3. Shareasale

Shareasale is another affiliate network that has a large collection of physical products being sold by various merchants on their own website. Shareasale just refers the customers to the merchant’s website and the actual transactions happen on the merchant’s website which is later reported back to shareasale.

There are lots of merchants in various categories like apparel, technology, web services etc. The process of promoting a shareasale offer is different because you need to get approval from every merchant whose product you want to promote.

Initially this might feel quite tedious, but if you have a good niche site up and running, setting up shareasale affiliate offers will take some time for once and then you are good to go.

4. Commission Junction

Commission Junction is another popular affiliate network where there are lots of merchants whose products you can promote on your website.

It is similar to Share a sale.

5. CPA Offers

CPA marketing is another great channel to find and promote affiliate offers on your website. You typically need to join a cpa network like maxbounty, affiliaxe or smartadv.

Once you are inside the network, you can browse through a huge list of offers from different niches and industry verticals like tech products, nutra products, insurance and loan offers, pet products and so on.

There are some aggregator sites that collect cpa offer details from various cpa networks and let users find the ones they need. Here are two such popular website:

https://www.offervault.com/
https://odigger.com/

6. Search Google

The easiest way to find affiliate offers specific to your niche or market is by using google.

Search google for terms like “ affiliate offers”. For example if your blog is about travel then search for

travel affiliate offers
travel affiliate programs

If its about pets then search google with the search term: pet affiliate offers. Google shall reveal some of the highest paying affiliate offers for your niche.

There are a lot of niches where brands run their affiliate programs directly on their own website or platform and not via third party affiliate networks like Shareasale or CJ Affiliate. In such a scenario it is best to find them directly via google.

Some examples of such niches are travel, fashion, pet products, apparel, flight booking, hotel booking etc. In these industries, the product owners or brand run their affiliate programs directly and you can signup on their respective affiliate portals to work with them.

7. Spy your competitors

The final and most effective way to find good affiliate offers in any niche is to spy on your competitors. Look out for websites similar to yours and see what offers they are promoting. If some other affiliate is promoting a product, chances are that the product is converting quite well for them.

This way you can quickly find winning affiliate offers for your niche without have to do the hard work of searching and testing offers all by yourself and waiting for months.

The first step would be to make a list of websites that are in your niche and promoting affiliate products. Next, start reading their website and see what offers they are promoting in their articles, posts and ad banners. Make a list of those products and search for their affiliate offers on google.

Once you have found out, start joining those programs and start promoting them on your website.

Conclusion

It is always a good idea to promote multiple affiliate offers from multiple different networks, specially if you want to make good money and be risk free.

Find the best offers that convert well and pay genuinely and timely, is not quick process. You have to shortlist a bunch of highly relevant and targeted offers and then place them in the proper place on your website in the form of ad banner or contextual link or a review article.

Then test if for several months and see the ones that are generating the most earnings. Once you find the winners you know what to do next.

I hope, the above list helps you to find high covnverting offers for your niche site or blog. If you have any questions or want to share your experiences feel free to comment.

Drive Traffic to a new blog fast

Driving traffic to a brand new blog or website can be challenging. Specially when its your first blog and you have little experience about building online traffic.

Without traffic a website is of little use and with traffic you can start generating money online. So you should learn fast how to generate traffic to your brand new blog.

Traffic can be generated from multiple different sources and a lot of them are actually free. These include search engine traffic, social traffic and referral traffic.

In this article we shall take a quick look at some of the best and free ways to drive traffic to a newly launched blog so that it can start rolling.

1. Organic Search Traffic with Content & SEO

This is the easiest way to generate free traffic to your blog that is very high quality. However this is the slowest as well. Building search traffic (also called organic traffic) takes time and some hard work.

The simple steps are:

1. Do keyword research
2. Publish quality and long form content
3. Sit back and relax!

Generating organic traffic is a slow process and it takes several months depending on how well you do it. For most niches, you have to be patient and keep publishing quality content for about 3 months. From the 4th month onwards you can expect to see a good number of people visiting your website daily.

Don’t forget to install Google Analytics on your website to keep track of the traffic and where they are coming from.

2. Pinterest

Pinterest is a social search engine that uses visual images to display results and help users discover new content. Pinterest is a great tool to drive targeted traffic to your website specially if you are targeting female audiences.

With pinterest you have to pin your post’s url on boards with proper description and keyword tags. Rest is taken care by pinterest.

Other users are going to discover your content via search or through recommendations. Listicle style articles tend to do well on pinterest. For example “10 Ways to ….”, “10 Best …. for …”

Besides listicles, infographics also perform great on pinterest. Users tend to save, share and repin infographics which drives viral traffic to your website.

So you could actually create a mini version of your article with short information in the form of a infographic and then share it on pinterest with a link to the actual article on your website. This should be great way to drive free targeted traffic.

How you create infographics is a different topic altogether that we shall cover in another post. Creating infographics is sort of time consuming but if you want to create just a very simply infographic with minimal information on it, you can use a tool called Canva to create them.

Keyword Research on Pinterest

When using Pinterest to drive traffic to your brand new website, it would be a great idea to do some keyword research and find popular search terms being searched on pinterest. Consequently if you can publish content on these popular search terms and topics, you have much better chances of seeing lots of traffic from pinterest.

Doing keyword research on pinterest is simple and easy and there are only a few steps.

Building traffic from Pinterest takes less time compared to search engines like Google. You might be able to see traffic coming in within the first few weeks itself.

3. Facebook groups

Facebook groups are a great place to meet to interact with a community of people interested in a particular subject. There are facebook groups on all kinds of topics like health, fashion, business, technology etc.

The first step would be to find groups in your niche using the search feature. Then start joining the groups one by one. Some groups need approval from administrators before you become a member.

After you have become member of the groups, its time to post in the groups. Before you start posting in the groups, take note of what kind of stuff other people are promoting. Most quality groups have some kind of moderation policy that do not allow posting stuff promoting affiliate offers.

Make sure to post content that is valuable for the members of the group so that they like to read it and get something to learn from it.

For you example you could write educational how to articles around popular topics in your niche and share those in the facebook groups.

A great strategy would be to collect emails on your website. So that you can build an audience that you can monetise later on.

4. Forums

Forums are also a community platform just like facebook groups. The rules are almost the same. On forums you are required to signup and then interact with the community.

Most forums don’t allow outright promotion of your own website’s content even if its useful. So you have to be careful when posting your website’s content on forums. Ideally look for topics started by other members that are similar to the topics of your website.

If you find a relevant opportunity then share it as a reply to that thread. But make sure to add some text content and not just a link to your website.

Besides that you can also put links of your website in the signature. That way, your website will be visible on all replies you make on all forum threads.

5. Blog Comments

Blog commenting is another way to interact with the community in your niche. You find other blogs in the same niche as yours and start commenting on their blog posts and placing your website’s link.

Blog commenting can drive from little to moderate amounts of traffic depending on how well you do it. First you have to find other blogs in your niche and then spend some time reading their posts. When you come across one where you can share your thoughts or suggestions, you make a comment at the bottom.

On wordpress blogs there is a field to specify your own website as well which you are supposed to use when commenting.

Conclusion

Those were some of the simplest and fastest way to generate traffic to a new blog. Sure it will take some hard work and time but its totally worth it if you plan to setup a long term business with your blog.

If your blog is completely new, you should spend some time writing about 30-35 posts first. Once you are done with that, you can start promoting your posts on social platforms. Go slow and don’t try to do it too fast.

Promoting your stuff too fast is not going to get any better results, since all major platforms like Facebook and Pinterest have automatic checks in place that are going to detect aggressive promotion and restrict it.

If you do all the above steps, which you should ideally, you should be able to see some traffic within the first few weeks. Let us know what your experience was and ask any questions that you have in the comments below.

Having a fast loading website with a good pagespeed score is essential for good seo. It is not a ranking factor that is going to increase your rankings, but is a technical requirement so that visitors don’t have to wait too long for your website to load.

If you are running a wordpress blog, then its easy to boost your pagespeed score easily by installing a few plugins and some extra tweaks.

1. Install the Autoptimize Plugin

Autoptimize is one of the most popular and widely used plugin for website performance optimisation and the best part is that its completely free for basic usage.

The Autoptimize plugin will do the following things:

• Combine and minify CSS
• Combine and minify JS
• Combine and optimise loading of Google Fonts
• Lazy load images

Now thats a ton of optimisation alread. Your website shall see a significant boost in pagespeed score just from this one plugin alone.

2. Install a caching plugin

A caching plugin will prepare and serve all pages from cache, reducing the server response time. There are actually multiple caching plugins available and each one has a slightly different set of features, but all of them do the same basic things.

I use WP Fastest Cache on many of my blogs and it works great. It has both a free and paid version but the free version works great for basic caching and is sufficient for most websites.

There are lots of free caching plugins available for wordpress and some of the popular ones are :

• 1. Litespeed Cache
• 2. WP Total Cache
• 3. WP Super Cache
• 4. Comet Cache

Get any one of those and you are good to go. The set of features of different plugins varies. Some caching plugins support js/css minification while some don’t.

If you are using Autoptimize for minifying css and js you don’t need to use this feature from a cache plugin.

3. Increase the expiry time of static resources (browser caching)

Set the expiry time to 6 months or more. There are different ways to do it on different server setup. We shall talk about 3 typical scenarios, apache, nginx and cloudflare.

On apache (most cpanel hostings use this) you need to add directives to the .htaccess file. This is applicable on hostings like Bluehost, Hostgator, A2 hosting and all similar cPanel based shared hosting providers.

.htaccess code for browser caching

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
        ExpiresActive on
        ExpiresDefault                                    "access plus 3 month"

    # CSS
        ExpiresByType text/css                            "access plus 1 year"

    # Data interchange
        ExpiresByType application/json                    "access plus 0 seconds"
        ExpiresByType application/xml                     "access plus 0 seconds"
        ExpiresByType text/xml                            "access plus 0 seconds"

    # Favicon (cannot be renamed!)
        ExpiresByType image/x-icon                        "access plus 3 week"

    # HTML components (HTCs)
        ExpiresByType text/x-component                    "access plus 3 month"

    # HTML
        ExpiresByType text/html                           "access plus 0 seconds"

    # JavaScript
        ExpiresByType application/javascript              "access plus 1 year"

    # Manifest files
        ExpiresByType application/x-web-app-manifest+json "access plus 0 seconds"
        ExpiresByType text/cache-manifest                 "access plus 0 seconds"

    # Media
        ExpiresByType audio/ogg                           "access plus 6 month"
        ExpiresByType image/gif                           "access plus 6 month"
        ExpiresByType image/jpeg                          "access plus 6 month"
        ExpiresByType image/png                           "access plus 6 month"
        ExpiresByType video/mp4                           "access plus 6 month"
        ExpiresByType video/ogg                           "access plus 6 month"
        ExpiresByType video/webm                          "access plus 6 month"

    # Web feeds
        ExpiresByType application/atom+xml                "access plus 1 hour"
        ExpiresByType application/rss+xml                 "access plus 1 hour"

    # Web fonts
        ExpiresByType application/font-woff2              "access plus 3 month"
        ExpiresByType application/font-woff               "access plus 3 month"
        ExpiresByType application/vnd.ms-fontobject       "access plus 3 month"
        ExpiresByType application/x-font-ttf              "access plus 3 month"
        ExpiresByType font/opentype                       "access plus 3 month"
        ExpiresByType image/svg+xml                       "access plus 3 month"
</IfModule>

If you are using your own shell server from digitalocean or linode then you are probably using nginx webserver. On nginx server you need to add a few lines to the sites configuration file to enable browser caching and change the expiry time.

If you are using the cloudflare CDN, or any other cdn then you have to implement the changes inside the configuration area of the cdn admin panel, which again is easy.

4. Use a Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network takes your website speed to the next level, by storing and serving your website’s content via distribution servers that are geographically closer to the actually location of the visitor.

So if your website’s actual server is location in Europe, but the visitor is from the US, the the CDN will store and serve the website’s content from a server that is actually located in US. This makes the data transfer faster.

Visitor <=> Your Website’s address <=> Cloudflare <=> Your website’s actual server

For most bloggers, Cloudflare is an excellent free service to use for CDN. The free version of cloudflare has all the necessary features of a CDN. You have to point your domain name’s nameserver to the CDN and the CDN will in turn connect to the actual hosting server to fetch data.

5. Disable Gutenberg block library on frontend

If you don’t use the gutenberg editor then you can disable it on the front end. The block library loads additional css file which is not needed.

To disable the block library add the following code to your theme’s function.php or your own custom plugin:

// Disable gutenberg style in Front
function wps_deregister_styles() {
    wp_dequeue_style( 'wp-block-library' );
}
add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'wps_deregister_styles', 100 );

Conclusion

If you have any third party javascript code on your website, the pagespeed score will be lowered. You have no control over the optimisation of those javascript files the come from other servers and hence there is very little that can be done, other than removing those.

If you have adsense units on your website, then the pagespeed score will be affected due to the additional javascript that is loaded and processed by the adsense code.

There is not easy and adsense compliant method to deal with this and the pagespeed score will for most of the time be stuck around 70 for mobile devices.

Resources

The following article from geekflare shows some optimizations that can be done without using a plugin. Note that you would have to add custom php code to wordpress functions file.

https://geekflare.com/wordpress-performance-optimization-without-plugin/

Tracking visitor time on site can be useful if you are want to track user behavior and conversions based off that. For example, if you are driving paid traffic to your website you would want to check time spent on site from different sources to assess the quality of traffic.

Or you could compare the time spent on different landing pages to split test and find the winning variant.

Recently I was running paid ad campaigns on Bing and Facebook Ads and wanted to analyse the visitor behaviour on site. Google analytics reveals a lot of information about user behaviour like bounce rate, time on site etc. However this has limitations.

If the user does not interact with the site in anyway (like clicking on some internal link), google analytics cannot accurately tell the time spend by the user on the website.

One solution is to use some kind of periodic function call in javascript that measures the time spent.

Google Analytics Events

Google Analytics provides a useful feature called Events that can be used to record specific actions on a website as events. These events can then be analysed inside the google analytics interface in combination with other data like page url, traffic source etc.

To trigger an event on our website is actually quite simple. A simple call to the gtag function will record the details.

Lets say you want to record users that spent 10 seconds time no your website and those who spent 30 seconds on your website.

The following code will trigger 2 events, one after 10 second:

<script>

setTimeout(function() {   
   gtag('event', '10sec-visit', { 'event_category': '10sec'})
}, 1000*10);

setTimeout(function() {   
   gtag('event', '30sec-visit', { 'event_category': '30sec'})
}, 1000*30);

</script>

The code uses the setTimeout javascript function to trigger the event call after 10 and 30 seconds respectively. The event call sends a request to google analytics in the backend which records it.

The above piece of code assumes that you have the google analytics gtag code installed in the header of the website.

Once you start receiving event data inside google analytics you can create reports to analyse them further.