One of key things that every webmaster or blogger should pay attention to is monitoring your site’s traffic and search keywords, if you are serious about growing your sites or blogs. Traffic and search keywords info can give you insights on your website visitors, their location, preferences, and lots more crucial info.

There are tons of tools can help you achieve this goal. Some of them are free to use while others require you to pay for the usage.

Personally, I would prefer free tools. After all, why pay for it when you can get it for free? Here are two free website traffic and keyword monitoring tools, which are my favorite. Why I loved it? because they are very easy to use and equally powerful compared to some of the paid tools.

The first tool is StatCounter. It offers free and paid versions to users. But for average website owners, the free version is good enough. It can log all your website visitors’ IP address, location, devices, OS, web browsers and more. You can also see your visitors’ search keywords on some of the search engines they use.

The second one I recommend is JetPack, which is designed specifically for WordPress bloggers. Basically JetPack is a WordPress plugin that does the same job as StatCounter, which is monitoring your visitor and the browsing data. But It has one advantage over StatCounter. You can keep your traffic and search data as long as you want with JetPack. That’s really useful if you want to do some analysis with your site’s historical data. By default, JetPack comes with your WordPress installation if you use a web hosting service like Bluehost.

Both tools are powerful, easy to install and use. Best of all, they are totally free if you just want the basic features. Try them out if you are looking for such tools, I bet you’ll love it like I do.

For those who make money from their websites or blogs, one of the most important things is to get more people (ie. the traffic) to view their content. After all, if you only got a small number of audiences, your chances of making money will be slim. More traffic means more earning potential. But, how to drive more traffic to your content? That’s the million dollar question that we’ll try to tackle in this post. Here are three effective ways to do just that.

1. Create original, good quality content

“Content is king”. Who doesn’t like fresh, original and good quality information that can create value? Focus on topics that your are passionate about and are an expert on. Write articles or create YouTube videos around it. You can share your experiences, knowledge, and insights with people, as long as it has unique value, people (and search engines like Google) will love it and come back for more.

2. Share your content on social networks

Don’t just rely solely on your website or blog. Share your great content with the world. Spread the word so that people know the existence of your content. You can share your content and connect with your audiences through different social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… etc.

3. Promote your website/blog using Google Ads

You can also promote your website or blog through advertising network such as Google Ads (formerly AdWords). If you want your sites to be known by people around the world in a relatively short time, this is probably the best way to do it. Google has the largest advertising network in the world which can reach enormous amount of audiences. You can take advantage of it by joining the Google Ads program. The process is extremely simple, you sign up for an Google Ads account, set a daily budget for your ads, and it gets displayed on different websites which can drive targeted traffic to your website continuously.

Related links:

ads.google.com

As a well respected web hosting service provider, the US based Bluehost has a strong competitive advantage in price and services compared to its peers. One of the features that makes me love Bluehost more than other hosting providers is its ease of use. Bluehost comes with a wide variety of site building tools (applications), which can help beginners quickly finish the building process of a website. So what third-party website building tools does Bluehost support? Let’s take a quick look.

By far, Bluehost supports the following quick site building tools: WordPress, Weebly, Concrete5, Drupal, Magento, Prestashop, phpBB, etc., which are all freely available. According to Bluehost, it provide website owners with more than 70 site building tools, all of which have simple and clear installation wizard and can be completed independently without requiring users to understand coding or technical details. These “one-click installation” makes building your websites a breeze. By the way, this installation function of Bluehost is realized by Mojomarketplace.

Whether you are planning to start an independent blog, or building your own online shop, Bluehost can help you simplify the technical details and save you a lot of hassle, so you can focus on things that are really important for you.

If you haven’t done so, I strongly recommend that you try out Bluehost. It’s so good you’ll be amazed!