written by John Chow on July 9, 2014
Why do you blog in the first place?
Most bloggers find that it’s really hard to build a profitable blog, drive all the traffic needed as well as make money at the same time. If that’s your concern, I’m here to tell you something more powerful you’ve been neglecting.
The truth is we all have personal engagements, new projects and family to attend to. You can’t possibly achieve overnight result. And you can’t achieve all your goals all at once. So rest your mind and do what other people have been neglecting.
If you do this one thing, you’ll definitely experience a surge in targeted traffic, get loyal readers to your blog, increase in sales of your products and become the inspiration of your first time reader.
Taking the first step
What is it like the first time you visit a website? Can you still recall what you liked about that website or blog? I’m sure you’ve forgotten why you came to this blog in the first place.
You’re beginning to justify your loyalty to the value of content and that you always feel at home each time you come here or any of your favorite blogs.
Instead of hosting your website in one location, how about distributing your heavy files and images across multiple servers around the world?
Do you know that good content isn’t the first thing that makes a reader stay and motivated? It’s speed. If I come to your blog and click to read your post, only to stay glued waiting for it to load – I’ll be discouraged.
I may not leave right away if the title of your article looks good, but you’ve failed in meeting my expectation – creating the first impression.
I can gladly go out there and tell other people how good your content is, but how horrible your load time is. Of course you didn’t ask me to tell others about my experience, but I chose to. Because it’s my job, your job is to give me a reason to do it.
Increasing your blog speed
There are several ways to increase the speed of your blog, so that it can load quickly, serve the reader what they want as though you were right there in person.
Some people have done the common tweaks such as uninstalling wordpress plugins and using premium themes that come with no bugs and malware as well as other unwanted scripts.
The problem?
Every plugin you delete is still on your database or should I say your hosting server. For most of us, when we start using a new theme, the one there before would simply be replaced as you activate the new one. But you didn’t delete it. Even if you did, it’s still there.
It’s like deleting a file on your PC and you forget it’s inside the recycle bin. If you use Windows operating system, you should be familiar with that.
What you really need as a blogger isn’t very many plugins, or a constant tweak of your themes because it can demean your credibility. Your readers would one day get angry with you for confusing them.
This is serious because I’ve visited a popular blog only to find that the theme had completely changed and when I stumbled on it again in less than 3-months, a new theme was right there – activated and looking scary. I quickly looked through my Evernote where I save domain name URLS of my favourite blogs. There it was…
Do you know that if your wordpress blog is hosted in United States for instance, but your readers are coming majorly from UK and other European nations that this can slow down your blog?
Yes, you need a server that’s closer to your target audience. That’s why the traditional means of increasing website speed isn’t acceptable. There is a limit to how fast your wordpress website can be.
Here’s what you must do:
Use a Reliable CDN
CDN is the acronym for Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network. The technology is very useful for anyone who uses wordpress as his content management tool.
Here’s what CDN does: When someone loads and visits your website/blog, CDN will instantly find the closest server to you in their diversified server networks and deliver your content from there.
In other words, if a reader loads your blog from China, a CDN will serve him/her your blog and all its content from a server right there in China or nearby. No, your reader isn’t going to know what’s happening at the back. What they are after is to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. That is how you create the first impression.
If you really want to take your blogging experience to the next level, stop tweaking your themes right now.
You’re indirectly chasing your readers away and remember it’s more difficult to get a new reader, and very easy to persuade loyal readers. Take advantage of what you’ve – speed up your blog using a CDN today.
Improve your site speed with a CDN
Maybe you’re trying to figure out how a CDN can serve end-users your content when you’re not there. How in the world is that going to happen? Well, when you start using a CDN provider, the first thing you’ll do is to create a pull zone.
Pull zone?
Yes. You need to set this up, so that a CDN can seamlessly deliver content to your readers without you having to upload anything. I mean you don’t have to upload a pin from your wordpress blog. It’s that simple.
I think I should tell you this…
I own a handful niche sites promoting several health products. At a time, I read from a blog that a fast loading website can increase your organic traffic. Guess what? That’s the truth.
When I started delivering content (review articles) using a CDN, Google on their own deemed my websites friendly with their algorithm. And today, I get about 340+ high quality visitors to each of my niche sites. Before I started using a CDN, my daily hits from Google ranged from 46 – 83 but my story is changed now.
You’ll use the W3Total Cache to integrate and install CDN. You should download it for free. This would give you an added benefit in terms of speed and performance.
And most essentially, you need to guard your wordpress blog against hackers and external threats. CDN makes it possible for you to back up your files and retrieve them whenever you want. This is also made possible because you’ve set up a pull zone.
And how long does it take to do that? You’ll be done in less than 30 seconds or 1 minute, depending on your local internet speed. Isn’t that wonderful?
My final words to you
Do you know that Blogging goes beyond waking up every morning and hitting hard on your keyboard? There are priceless benefits, and over and over again, young millionaires emerge who generate decent income blogging.
That blog of yours has the potential to make you rich. Period!
The freedom it brings, the joy and the hope that unforeseen recession and economic crises can’t drown your business is heavenly. What do you think?
Take baby steps today. Ideally, find out the speed of your wordpress blog right now using Pingdom. Afterwards, sign up with http://maxcdn.com/john-chow to quickly speed up your site within 2 hours.
As usual, I’d like to know what you gained from this post. Have you used a CDN before? Share your thoughts in the comment box below. See you ahead!
(P.S. John Chow readers will get 25% off for life at MaxCDN).
One of the most common complaint (or excuse) I hear from potential new bloggers is they don’t know how to install WordPress. Terms like FTP and CPanel are like a foreign language and setting up a database might as well be setting up the space shuttle for a launch. Because of the technology barrier, many would-be bloggers never start their blogs...