In this Episode of the Niche Blogging Tips Podcast, we're going to talk about free blogging tools available to bloggers, there are only a few. So stay tuned.

Welcome to the Niche Blogging Tips Podcast where we help you start and grow a successful blog. And now your host, Andre Vaughn.

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This is going to be somewhat of a technical episode, if you will. And I'm gonna get right into it. I have three tools I'm going to talk about today. And the first one, I was thinking more so about site speed, because that's a factor when it comes to the search engines is a real strong factor, your site speed, Google doesn't like when they try to go on your site, or they try to crawl your site. And it's slow. And there's things that you have on your site, such as a bunch of plugins and other things that may be hindering your, the speed of your site. So the more so worried about user experience.

And the first thing of the first tool I was thinking about first tool that I always use is a website that's called GT metrics. It's GT metrics.com. And this is a site it's a it's a performance site. Add it's real real, it gets real detailed. If you really go into it, it tells you what the top issues are. Once you plug your site in, it gives you a performance percentage structure, percentage, which your structure score, as they say is our proprietary assessment of lighthouse and custom GT metrics. Audited represents how well your page is built for optimal performance, and also has a thing as your whip vital stature, your grade your overall great when I was reading the performance on the structures, your overall great, they have something called the web vitals is more so a thing that I look at more than anything which has more so to do with the speed of your site. It says their web vitals represent a small set of core metrics that indicate whether you're delivering a fast what Google calls a delightful experience to your visitor visitors remember I was talking about user experience. It says focus on these impactful metrics first before under taking deeper optimizations. And the three things that they use for the web vitals and says the largest Contentful paint, total black and time cumulative layoffs shift, the largest Contentful Contentful Paint. It says LPC is the acronym that they use.

LCP measures how long it takes for the largest content element, example a hero image or heading tags on your page to become visible within your visitors viewpoint. For good user experience aim for an ale Cp of 1.2 seconds or less than the other one is the total block time which they say TBT tells you how much time is blocked by scripts during your page loading process. For good user experience aim for TBT of 150 milliseconds or less cumulative layout Schiff says indicates how much layout shift is experienced by visitors at your paid load at your page loads sorry, for a good user experience aim for a CLS score of 0.1 or less. But the cool thing about this is it tells you the issue specifically, it takes a deeper dive in all those performance structure. It has what's called waterfall talks about the video history. And that's if you have if you create an account. I believe there's a paid version of this also, but I'm just specifically talking about the summary performance structure which is the free stuff and it tells you specifically what may be wrong or what is wrong with your site performance or your site structure, which is pretty cool. And like I say it gives you the score gives you the speed index first Contentful paint largest Contentful paint Time to interactive time, the total blocking time and it has quite low question marks tells you exactly what each of these things specifically are browser timings, it tells you all of that it gets very, very detail with you so you can fix your site speed. That's GTmetrics.com.

The Google Search Console, which is formerly Google Webmaster Tools, and it says improve your performance on Google Search. Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site's search traffic and performance, fix issues and make your site shine in Google search results says optimize your content with search analytics. Get your content on Google get alerted on issues and fix your site. So if there's anything major, they can shoot you an email or whatnot, send you an alert, tell you tell you what's wrong or maybe wrong with with your site says understand how Google Search sees your pages the URL inspection to provide detail crawl index and service information about your pages directly from the Google index. And as you have to sign up for it and enter all into your information like your your web page. And all of those good things. You might want to wait I guess about a week or two or even a month. And they'll kind of tell tell you your how your site is performing. It has all these different things. The performance, it has the pages, this is the end, the index section has an index section, which sockless talks about the information on your page index video pages, if you have videos on your website, your sitemaps.

This is a place where you can enter your Sitemap also talks about removals, I guess you can temporarily remove things outdated content, and so on and so forth. Also, within the Google Search Console, it has some indicators on experience, which is more so the user experience enhancements, security and manual actions. And, you know, it has to look like it as a redirect to the old Google Webmaster Tools, which you really don't need to a good thing that it has on here. One of the most important things as Links tab on here, which talks about shows you your external links, your backlinks, your external links, your internal links, when you link to pages that's already on your site tells you the top linking sites, which are backlinks, it tells you to anchor texts, also the top linking texts, that's our source real helpful. It's a real helpful tool, Google Search Console, you should do this, you should be on here is immediately once you start your website, once you upload your website, upload your blog, you should be entering you should have a Google Search Console account, you should enter your URL and your sitemaps and all that stuff within the search console.

And the final one final one I'm going to talk about is Google Analytics. Analytics is gonna scare the heck out of a lot of people. I don't know why. But I think it's the number of elements the number aspect of it, you know, when a lot of times people see numbers they run, you know, so everybody, it's almost when you think of the term analytics is almost like you're watching CNBC or Bloomberg and you see all of the, you know, the different s&p 500 tickers and NASDAQ tickers. And you know, it's almost like a stock, just that mentality, just numbers everywhere. But your analytics gonna tell you, everything about your site, almost everything about site in terms of who's coming to the site, it gives you, you can go pretty much to any range of your site range, as far as the dates, where you can see the traffic, you can see so many details about your audience.

It has a real time tab, you can see if anybody's on your site in real time, has an audience tab which has a bunch of different things demographics, it'll tell you who's coming to your site, male female, the geography part of it, you know, to location who where are they across the world, attribution, which is another tab, discover admin, all that but the main one is going to be your audience tab on here, the audience tab, you can almost break down anything on here, your audience tab in your acquisition tab so you can see all your traffic see where it's coming from. Um, and so on and so forth. They have it to where it's broken down, they can break it down almost to anything. If you're using Google ads, if you're using social media, you know, it tells you where that traffic is coming from, to your blog.

It's almost foolish not to have Google Analytics. If you have a blog, like why are you blogging? Like you don't want to know information about your users? Because it's not about remember, it's not about you. It's about your users. So you want to gather as much information about them as you can. These three things that I really want to get into. I mean, there are free blogging tools that are available to all bloggers, you should use all three of these no questions, no question whatsoever about it, you should use all three of these. Whenever you have a blog, period. These are a must. I believe these are a must, once again is GT metrics.com, the Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and I'm gonna have all of these in the show notes at nichebloggingtips.com/episode 37.

Make sure you check out our private Facebook group at nichebloggingtips.com/group, make sure you join it. Also, give us a subscribe on our YouTube channel and check us out nichebloggingtips.com/YouTube. Thanks for listening to Episode 37 of the Niche Blogging Tips Podcast. And in Episode 38, we're going to talk about the pros and cons of making money blogging. So you want to join in and check that out. Thank you. And enjoy.

The thought of having a blog is so important, especially when you're new. But just like a lot of new bloggers, you get stuck in a lot of different places because you're getting all this information from all these different places, all these different bloggers or whatnot. But what we did was we put together a free mini course we call it the Five Day Blogging Mini Retreat is what we call it and you can get that at nichebloggingtips.com anywhere on the website, nichebloggingtips.com Sign up for a Five Day Blogging Mini Retreat. It's a free mini course a free Five Day Blogging Mini Retreat, check it out at nichebloggingtips.com.

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