Must Have Google Accounts For Blogging
If you are new to blogging you will soon find that there are numerous free tools and resource available to help you succeed. Its all about learning what they are and how to use them.
Google is one of many companies that provides numerous free tools as well as a incredible income generating platform.
Below is a list of top Google products to utilise as a blogger. These resources are extremely powerful, easy to use and free.
*Note: Having a Gmail account makes signing up for these products even easier.
1. Google Analytics – Analytics provides you with extremely detailed statistics across any metric you can think of – traffic source, conversions, sales, time on site, popular/unpopular pages, how people navigate your site, what device they visited your site from, etc.
Implementing Analytics onto your site is simple – if you have the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, just copy your UA code (ex. UA-000000-01) and paste it within the plugin and your done.
2. Google Webmasters – This is a tool which allows you to see how Google views your site, essentially assisting you to monitor and maintain your site’s presence on Google. It’s extremely useful for SEO purposes as you can see who links to your site and what types of words you rank for in Google search results.
Implementing Webmasters onto your site is simple – if you have the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, just copy the verification code
(ex. BWC4igNIHkbMQvyE4elqgqFT3mA5GJi8I9rUKncEgyQ) and paste it within the plugin and your done.
Quick tip: To locate the verification code, after setting up webmasters you need to click on “Verify this site” then in the new page click on “Alternative methods” > tick HTML tag > copy the piece of the code which is identical to the example provided here.
3. Google Adsense – Adsense is one of the most popular ways to generate a income online for bloggers. It is a very simple advertising model.
This is how it works:
1. You decide what type of ad you want to promote on your site and where (see examples of actual ads here)
2. Copy the Adsense code of the ad format you like and paste it on your site
3. People see and click on the ad – you get paid
That’s all there is to it, simply cut and paste and your done. A good way to decide where to put your ads is to look at popular blogs and websites and see where they insert their Adsense ads. This can save you a lot of time trialing and testing different ad units and placements. Although testing is the best way to see what works best for your site and your visitors.
4. Google Trends – Trends is a great resource to help you research what types of topics to write about with regards to your sites niche. With trends you can test and see what types of search terms people type into Google, based on this you can create content around these terms knowing that people are interested in them.
Simply follow the link provided and type in a term in the search bar at the top of the page to see how it works. The results provide will be self explanatory and you can then use the different filtering tools to play with the results.
As mentioned, Google provides many different tools and resources but the above 4 are a great place to start. These tools help you identify traffic (Google Trends), track traffic (Google Analytics & Webmasters) and make money off of the traffic (Google Adsense). Its up to you to utilise these tools and create exceptional content which attracts visitors.
