How to get traffic to your website

How to get traffic to your website

Everyone who has a website need a traffic to his website, only people can give you the success.

Here is the best way:
this website gives you a high quality visitors: www.trafix.website 

This is a case study on how I built a website that receives over 100,000 visitors per month, in less than 1 year, without spending $1 on advertising.

This was done 100% through SEO and content strategy.

Building a Keyword Database

This is an obvious no-brainer for all SEO’s, however, unlike most search campaigns – this was a big keyword database, to the tune of 50,000 keywords.

The main idea here was leave no stone un-turned. Since we were of the mind to test everything and let the performance metrics dictate where to allocate resources, we had to get creative with query combinations.

We first went through all of our target search verticals, as dictated by our chosen go-to-market categories, which I think was roughly 19 to start. The next step was to identify the top 100 highest search volume terms within those verticals and scrape the top 100 URL’s that were currently ranking.

From here we began what started out as an exhaustive process of evaluating the opportunities for each keyword, and then aggregating opportunities to discern which categories we needed to focus on to grow traffic.

Essentially we targeted the low-hanging fruit; keywords identified by our model that could generate a minimum level of traffic  in 3 months or less, with a minimum investment in content development.

I watched (obsessively) which phrases and topics generated the most traffic.

As soon as a topic began to grow legs, we would focus additional keyword research on finding concepts and phrases that were both complimentary and contextually relevant.

Designing a Content Strategy

This is the single hardest part of any content-focused website or project.

The key to success on this particular project was taking a page out of Jeff Bezos’ book, and becoming obsessed with our customers.

We not only embarked on an aggressive a/b testing schedule, but we constantly reached out to our users for feedback.

We asked tough questions, ranging from what users’ liked and disliked (colors, fonts, and layouts) but also the specific components of the website they found to be less than ideal or even ‘sub-par.’

We took the responses seriously, making changes as they came in, trying to take something constructive from every piece of feedback, and pushing as many as 10 deployments a week.

It started to work.

Once we saw the needle begin to move on our user engagement metrics; time on site, pages per visit, and direct or branded traffic, we moved onto the next phase of our strategy; analyzing our audience.

Targeting the right audience is so much harder than it sounds.

I can honestly say from the experience of working on this project it is almost never as it seems. We began with targeting a very large segment of users (remember that time I talked about a keyword database of over 50,000 keywords?) but after a few months it turned out our largest (and most active) users were finding us from only a handful of targeted categories.

Information Architecture with SEO in Mind

Please allow me to preface this by saying that I am bias; in my opinion the architecture of a website is critical to achieving SEO success.

My largest successful SEO projects have come due to a variety of factors, but tend to come down to 3 core components of architecture:

It’s Scalable

It’s Crawlable

It’s Tiered

Scalable architecture is an obvious one; you need a system that can grow as large as you want/need it to.

Crawlable is nothing new to anyone in SEO; this simply means that the structure of our pages allowed for all of the most important content to quickly and easily be crawled and indexed by search engine robots. It actually sounds easier than it is… ensuring that the content is rendered (code wise) in the most ideal format for robots to parse takes more consideration than just laying out your div’s to properly render your designs.

To do this properly you need to make sure all of your code is in the right place, and more so, check how each crawler sees your page.

Take every opportunity to DRY out your code as much as possible, remember modern code is designed to cascade for a reason.

Information tiering… is a concept I have long-time preached to anyone who has ever talked with me, at length, about SEO. It means that your URL architecture should be built in a way so authority flows upwards through your directories.

For example, if I wanted to build authority around a core concept, I would focus my domain on that concept. If I then wanted to build relevance around specific locations for that concept, I would structure my URL’s so that all relevant content for that location fed upwards to a location specific directory.

So let’s say I had an SEO consulting firm with locations in several cities across the U.S., I would design an architecture that would allow for location-specific information to feed upwards through my directories.

So something like NicksSEOFirm.com/Philadelphia/Specific-Location-Content. The specific location content could be the team, any value-add competencies, anything geo-specific that was relevant to operations at that location, flowing relational authority upwards to the parent directory of /Philadelphia/.

Link in sub-directories can feed authority to parent directories.

A perfect example of this is local sitelinks for popular categories; tertiary directories with the most links and content which cause their upstream sub-directories to receive authority translating into higher rankings and local sitelinks.

Launch Before The Launch

The easiest way to ensure a successful product or website launch is to launch before you actually launch.

What I mean is to build your prospect list well in advance of pulling the trigger to go live.

John Doherty wrote a great post on ProBlogger that talks about the power of leveraging list-building pre-launch pages. By building a list of users before publishing your full website you are essentially guaranteeing traffic immediately upon launch.

Our pre-launch is how we were able to generate over 2,000 visitors within the first 30 days of taking the website live.

Since our platform is not built on WordPress we didn’t get to use any of the fancy plugins available, and instead created a basic one-page site that allowed visitors to convert the same way the full website would support, just on a much smaller scale.

The most important part of our pre-launch page was that it not only supported social sharing, but was able to track and aggregate shares to give active users more points; gamification is cool.

Some of the major benefits of a well planned pre-launch are:

Your website is already being crawled and indexed by major search engines.

You begin building your user base and audience.

You can gain invaluable feedback while it’s still easy to make changes.

Choosing a Platform

Let me start by saying not all platforms are created equal.

It’s also worth sharing that it is not always better to build versus buy, as there are a lot of smart people building a lot of slick content platforms.

However, we chose to build.

Once we had laid out all of the project requirements, including URL architecture, conversion funnels, user permissioning, design templating, and localization, it became clear that in order to get exactly what we needed – we were going to have to build it ourselves.

One major benefit of building is we were able to design a system that would support both our internal and external processes right out of the gate. This also meant it was going to take a lot more time and a shitload more money to bring our website to market.

Hosting & Evolution

This is a known but rarely talked about factor – hosting infrastructure is critical.

Once we were ready for public launch we setup chose a reasonably affordable VPS provider with what seemed like more than enough memory, and it was at first.

By month 4 it was clear we were going to have to make some changes; load times began to bloat and large content pages were timing out. We beefed up the space and quadrupled the memory, which solved the problem temporarily until…

We got some press.

Tags: how → Make money online

How to get traffic to your website

By YM Humidifier → Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Chrome hack work for everyone who keep lots of tabs open

This neat Chrome hack will work for everyone who keep lots of tabs open

Everyone who uses a lot of Chrome tabs could use this neat little trick to free up memory

Everyone who likes Chrome including me, often keep several tabs open at any single time. Some of the geeky ones may even have hundreds of Google Chrome tabs open at the same time. This often leads to the Chrome hogging the memory and slowing down the laptop’s performance. It can also affect the laptop’s battery life.

While running all those tabs can take a heavy toll of the laptop, closing these tabs is also not an option. Because, closing them completely might make you lose something you intended to come back to later.

There’s this neat little hack which can kill tabs while keeping them open at the same time and reduce the strain on your laptop.

Click on the ‘Settings’ button in Chrome (the three lines in the top-right corner, to the right of the URL field), and go down to ‘More tools’.

Hover over this button and click ‘Task manager’ in the new menu which pops up.

Here you’ll then get a list of all the tabs your browser is running, along with information about how much memory they’re using up.

By clicking the ‘Memory’ button in the top bar, you can sort all the tabs to see which are using the most.

You can make the task manager window a bit bigger and increase the size of the columns, showing information about all the tabs you’ve got open.

If you want to kill some and free up memory, just click on the tab and press the ‘End process’ button in the bottom-left.

This will get rid of the page, replacing it with Chrome’s ‘Aw, Snap!’ error warning.

The page with the ‘Aw Snap’ error won’t take up any memory, but if you need to go back to it later, you can find it again by scrolling through your tabs and refreshing the page.

Web developer Primož Cigler says that by using this method to shut some troublesome tabs, he managed to double his laptop’s battery life with just a few clicks.

While we agree that it is far from a perfect fix, but, if especially your laptop is old and every bit of juice left in your battery is important, you should try this one out.

Tags: how

Chrome hack work for everyone who keep lots of tabs open

By YM Humidifier → Tuesday, March 22, 2016

How to Improve Gaming Performance with Intel HD Graphics Chips - Steps

How to Improve Gaming Performance with Intel HD Graphics Chips

Intel’s integrated graphics have improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, but they still aren’t as speedy as dedicated NVIDIA or AMD graphics hardware.  Here’s how to squeeze some more gaming performance out of your Intel HD Graphics.

Onboard graphics like Intel HD Graphics aren’t designed for high-end gaming, so expect to turn they settings way down if you want to try playing modern games. But a surprising number of games are playable, even if you have a low-powered laptop with Intel HD Graphics built-in.

Update Your Intel Graphics Drivers

Like NVIDIA and AMD, Intel releases regular graphics driver updates. Graphics driver updates are crucial for gaming. They often contain important optimizations that dramatically improve performance in newly released games. To ensure you get the best gaming performance, you should be using the latest graphics drivers.

Windows 10 should automatically be updating your drivers, but it may not update your Intel graphics drivers frequently enough. Windows is conservative about updating graphics drivers, as only PC gamers really need the latest graphics drivers whenever they’re released.

Download Intel’s Driver Update Utility and run it to find if there are any new graphics drivers available directly from Intel. Install any graphics driver update it finds.

If your computer is using graphics drivers customized by the manufacturer (e.g. Dell or HP), Intel’s tool won’t update them automatically and will inform you of this. You’ll instead need to get the latest graphics driver updates directly from your computer manufacturer’s website. Look for the download page offering drivers for your specific PC.

Tweak Performance Settings in Intel’s HD Graphics Control Panel

You can use Intel’s graphics control panel to optimize your graphics settings for performance instead of image quality and battery life. To launch it, right-click the Windows desktop and select “Graphics Properties.” You can also launch the “Intel HD Graphics Control Panel” tool from your Start menu.

Click the “3D” icon when the control panel window appears to access 3D graphics settings.

To squeeze the most possible performance out of your hardware, here are the options for best performance:

• Set Application Optimal Mode to “Enable.” This option enables optimizations that increase performance in a variety of games.
• Set Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing to “Turn Off.” Even if applications request multi-sample anti-aliasing to reduce jagged edges, this option makes the Intel graphics driver ignore that request. This boosts your performance at the cost of some jagged edges.
• Set Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing to “Override Application Settings.” This is an alternative to the above setting. If you choose “Use Application Settings” for Set Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing, despite our recommendation, set Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing to Override. That way, if a game requests MSAA anti-aliasing, the Intel graphics driver will use a better-performing alternative instead. This particular option is a good halfway point between disabling anti-aliasing entirely and using the slower MSAA approach.
• Set General Settings to “Performance.” This chooses the best-performing settings for anisotropic filtering and vertical sync. You can select “Custom Settings” if you’d rather tweak those settings yourself.

It’s possible that some graphics hardware could have different options here, or that future drivers could change the options. Just click the question mark icon to the right of a setting to see a description of what a setting does if you need more information.

You should also click the “Power” icon on the main Intel HD Graphics Control Panel screen. This will allow you to manage power saving settings. By default, Intel configures the hardware to save some power, and you can squeeze some more performance out of it by using maximum performance settings.

There are separate settings for Plugged In and On Battery, allowing you to save power when unplugged and use higher-performance settings when you’re plugged into an outlet.

For the Plugged In setting, select “Maximum Performance” for maximum gaming performance at the cost of some additional power use.

If you want to play games with the best performance when you’re running on battery power, select the On Battery category and change the settings there, too. Select the “Maximum Performance” graphics power plan and set Extended Battery Life for Gaming to “Disable.” This will give you maximum performance when you’re unplugged, at the cost of some battery life.

Allocate More System Memory to Onboard Graphics

Dedicated graphics cards include their own video RAM (VRAM) on the card itself. This memory is dedicated to textures and other graphics-processing functions.

Onboard graphics don’t include separate RAM. Instead, the chip simply “reserves” some of the RAM on your motherboard and treats it as video RAM.

There’s a trade-off here. The more RAM you allocate to your onboard graphics, the more VRAM it has. However, the more RAM you allocate to your onboard graphics, the less memory you have for general purpose use. That’s why you can sometimes customize exactly how much RAM you want to allocate to your video card in your computer’s BIOS or UEFI firmware.

This is something to tweak, but it’s tough to say whether it would help. You may want to try changing this option and see what happens. If your Intel graphics is starved for RAM, allocating more of your system’s RAM to it can speed things up. If your Intel graphics has more than enough memory for the game you want to play, but your computer is running out of normal RAM, allocating more RAM to VRAM will just slow things down.

To find this setting, restart your computer and press the appropriate key to enter the BIOS or UEFI firmware settings screen while it boots. This is often the F1, F2, Delete, F10, or F12 key. Consult your computer’s manual for more details, or just perform a web search for your PC’s model name and number as well as “enter BIOS.”

In the BIOS or UEFI settings screen, locate the integrated graphics options and look for an option that controls the amount of memory allocated to the integrated graphics hardware. It may be buried under “Advanced,” “Chipset Configuration,” or another such menu. Note that not every computer has this option in its BIOS–many don’t. You may or may not be able to change this.

Adjust In-Game Settings

NVIDIA and AMD offer one-click graphics settings optimization tools you can use to quickly adjust a game’s graphics settings to fit your hardware. Intel offers no such tool, so you’ll have to adjust game settings by hand.

This is probably the most important way to make games perform better. In each game, find the graphics performance options and screen resolution setting and lower them until the game performs well. Some games may have an “Autodetect” option that may help, and you can always just try using the “Low” or even “Medium” graphics presets rather than adjusting options individually.

If a game doesn’t perform well at the minimum settings, there’s not much you can do aside from getting more powerful hardware.

Ultimately, there’s nothing you can do that will make Intel HD Graphics competitive with a high-end NVIDIA or AMD graphics card. Modern high-end games may not even officially support Intel HD graphics. But Intel graphics are now surprisingly capable, especially for older games and less-demanding new games.

Tags: how

How to Improve Gaming Performance with Intel HD Graphics Chips - Steps

By YM Humidifier → Monday, March 21, 2016

How to Use an iPhone with a Broken Home Button

How to Use an iPhone with a Broken Home Button

A broken Home button can spell trouble, and may seem like the device is practically useless until you get it fixed or replaced. It isn’t, however: you can still access the Home button with a neat little workaround.

The key is iOS’ AssistiveTouch feature, which we’ve mentioned before. AssistiveTouch works by placing a small button on your Home screen. When you tap it, a handy menu will appear allowing you to access actions that are normally triggered using gestures or buttons.

If you’ve broken your home button, you can enable AssistiveTouch by opening the iPhone’s Settings app. Head to “General”.

Once in the General settings, tap open “Accessibility”.

Now that you’re in the Accessibility settings, you can open the “AssistiveTouch” settings.

Here, you have some options. First, you can simply tap on AssistiveTouch to turn it on.

You can also customize it from this menu. Tap any icon to change its function.

A new screen will open up providing a bunch of alternatives.

Not enough buttons on the AssistiveTouch menu? You can add two more for a total of 8 by tapping the “+” symbol below, or you can reduce the number by tapping the “-” symbol.

Additionally, you can assign an action to the AssistiveTouch button when you apply 3D Touch, meaning that you can press hard on it to invoke a specific action. Thus, there is the capacity for at least 9 functions if you add more icons to the AssistiveTouch menu.

Once you have enabled the AssistiveTouch menu, a small button will appear along your device’s screen edge. You can tap and drag it to move it along the edge wherever you want. When you tap it, the AssistiveTouch menu will appear over your Home screen. Already you can see how it is useful it is if your Home button is inoperable.

There’s a lot you can do with the AssistiveTouch menu that will expand your iPhone or iPad’s functionality. While all these functions already exist via swipes or button presses, this puts them all on your screen in one easily accessible menu. Don’t like swiping up for the Control Center, or maybe you turned it off? No problem, whenever you want to get to the Control Center, it’s there with AssistiveTouch.

Tags: how → iphone

How to Use an iPhone with a Broken Home Button

By YM Humidifier → Wednesday, March 16, 2016

How to Read PDF Files on Your iPhone or iPad

How to Read PDF Files on Your iPhone or iPad

PDFs are something of a necessary evil. Sure, they’re a handy way to preserve any document in the style you intended, and can be read on virtually any device…but if your device doesn’t have a good built-in PDF reader, finding one can be a pain.

It’s no different on an iPhone or iPad. The default method to read PDF files on these devices is using iBooks, which was included as a preloaded app beginning with iOS 8. Sure, you can view PDFs in Safari, but you won’t have very many additional options. And while iBooks is sufficient and has some nice features, there are other apps that make reading PDFs downright luxurious, and these can all be downloaded from the App Store.

Use iBooks Instead of Safari for Basic Reading

When you open a PDF file in Safari, you can read it like other web content, but you also have the option to open it in iBooks, which will appear in the upper-right corner of the page. If you have other PDF readers installed, then you could tap “Open in…” instead.

Reading PDFs in iBooks provides three main features. First, you can adjust the brightness.

If you tap the magnifying glass icon, you can search for any word or page number.

Finally, if you want to mark your place in a document or save a particularly interesting location, you can tap the bookmark feature.

If you tap the icon with the three lines in the upper-left corner, you’ll see all the pages in the document including the ones you have bookmarked.

Here you see what we mean by this, note, if you wanted to see just the pages you’ve bookmarked, you could just tap the bookmark icon.

iBooks is great for basic PDF reading. It has enough rudimentary features to make it a lot better than Safari. Still, if you want something with more advanced features, such as text-to-speech or markup capabilities, then you will want to look to other options.

Use Foxit if You Like Features

One such option (and probably the best) is Foxit Reader, available in the App Store for free. Foxit is a full-featured PDF reader that puts iBooks to shame.

Aside from giving you the ability to change brightness and search for text, Foxit also has a wide range of view modes.

Best of all, many of these views can be used together. For example, in the following screenshot, we’ve enable night mode, crop mode, and shown the document as one continuous page.

One of the best features found in FoxIt, however, is the text-to-speech feature. Simply tap on the speaker icon, and FoxIt will read the document to you. This could go a long way towards helping you be more productive. Say for example you boss sends you a long document he or she wants you to go over. You could then just have Foxit read it to you in the car ride home.

You can also read pages as a single column rather than having to pinch to zoom, which is another killer feature. When you tap the button shown in the following screenshot, the entire document will zoom to a single column making it far easier to read.

Then, tap the options at the bottom of the viewer to enlarge or decrease the size of the text as well as advance to the next page or go back to the previous.

Finally, there’s markup mode, which will unveil a host of cool options, too many to list here, but for example, you can mark certain parts of a document, highlight passages, and add notes.

FoxIt offers additional in-app purchases, most notably the ability to add cloud drive support for some of the most popular services.

There’s much more to Foxit so we urge you to check it out if you’re looking for something chock full of features without charging you a nickel.

Create and Convert PDFs with Adobe Acrobat

Finally, there’s always the old familiar Adobe Acrobat, which is also available in the App Store for free, but doesn’t have nearly the same feature set as Foxit. That said, it does allow you to create PDFs, export them to other file formats, and convert photos to PDF, which is something you can’t do with iBooks or Foxit, unless you pay for the “Create PDF for iPhone” addon.

Acrobat provides the ability to bookmark pages, change the view mode, add text markup, search, and more. The markup features are good, but not as extensive as Foxit’s.

You can also open PDFs from the Adobe cloud or you can add your Dropbox account to open and save PDFs located there.

Acrobat is suitable for users who are looking for something between the feature-rich Foxit and iBooks. You can still add markup and bookmark locations but you won’t have the luxury of text-to-speech or the nice full-screen column view.

However you choose to read PDFs on your iPhone or iPad, whether it’s using Safari, iBooks, Foxit, or Acrobat, the fact is you have options, and in fact, there are even more readers available in the App Store for you to explore. So, if you’re not exactly thrilled with reading PDFs on your iPhone or iPad because of iBook’s limited features, do yourself a favor and check out Foxit Reader or Adobe Acrobat.

Tags: how → iphone

How to Read PDF Files on Your iPhone or iPad

By YM Humidifier → Thursday, March 10, 2016

How to Clear Browsing History in Firefox

How to Clear Browsing History in Firefox

Like other browsers, Firefox collects a detailed history of your internet adventures. If you want to cover you tracks, or don’t want Firefox to collect any data at all, you can make changes to ensure a more private browsing experience.

You can access Firefox’s history from the aptly-named “History” menu on OS X, or by clicking the three lines in the upper-right corner on Windows and selecting “History” (“Control + H”).

Not only will the History menu display recently visited websites, but also recently closed tabs and windows. You can also display tabs from other devices and restore a previous session.

The items of most interest to us however, are the options to “Show All History” and “Clear Recent History…”.

When you select “Show All History”, you will see your entire browsing history laid out in a windowed list.

If you want to delete any of these websites from your history list, you can select one at any time and hit the “Delete” button. If you want to delete everything, then use Command+A on OS X or Ctrl+A on Windows. If you want to select several sites at once, use the “Command” key (OS X) or “Control” (Windows) to select each site you want to remove from your history.

The fastest way to clear your history is to select “Clear Recent History…” from the History menu, which will give you a dialog to choose the history time range you want to clear. You have the option to clear the last hour, two hours, four hours, today, or everything.

Click “Details” and you can choose far more than your browsing and download history. You can also clear out stuff like your cookies, cache, active logins, and more.

If you want to set up special options for your browsing history, you need to open Firefox’s preferences and select the “Privacy” category. In the Privacy settings, there is a section devoted entirely to History. In the following screenshot, we’ve selected the option to “use custom settings for history”.

If you decide to always use private browsing mode, then your browsing history, cookies, and other items will not be saved. You can also elect to not record your browsing and download history, search and form history, or accept cookies. If you don’t want to accept third-party cookies, the option is there if you elect to enable it.

Finally, if you want your browsing history to clear whenever you close Firefox, you can select that option and then click “Setting…” to choose exactly what is cleared when Firefox shuts down.

It’s important to remember that, clearing some of these items affect later browsing sessions. For example, if you clear active logins, you will have to log back into any sites from your previous session. Similarly, if you clear out your cookies, your login sessions will be deleted and you will have to reenter your credentials.

When you choose the option to clear your browsing history upon shutdown, Firefox won’t give you any warnings, so it’s important to remember that you’ve selected the option in the first place. Otherwise, you may wonder why you’re always being logged out your favorite social media sites or why your recent browsing history is always gone.

Clearing your history and other private data is one of the best privacy practices you can undertake. Firefox is unique in that it has the option to clear this stuff every time you shut it down, so if you’re particularly privacy-conscious, such as if you use Firefox one a work or publicly used computer, then this is a great option to enable.

Tags: how

How to Clear Browsing History in Firefox

By YM Humidifier → Monday, March 7, 2016

How to Stream Games From Your PlayStation 4 to Any Android Device

How to Stream Games From Your PlayStation 4 to Any Android Device

Much like Microsoft’s Xbox-to-PC streaming, Sony’s PlayStation 4 can stream games to a few of Sony’s Xperia smartphones and tablets. However, with a small tweak, you can stream your PlayStation 4 games to nearly any Android device.

Step One: Install the Modified Remote Play App

Sony provides a PS4 Remote Play app in Google Play, but it’s only officially compatible with certain Xperia devices.

Despite that, it can actually work on a wider variety of Android devices–Sony just wants to use it to push its own Xperia phones and tablets. XDA Developers forum user twisted89 has modified the Remote Play app so that it can run on a wider variety of devices. It also won’t check if your device is rooted or refuse to work if your connection speed isn’t slow enough like the original app.

To get this working, you’ll first need to open Android’s Settings app and tap the “Security” category. Enable the “Unknown sources” setting. This will allow you to install the modified Remote Play app from outside of Google Play. You may want to disable this setting after you successfully install the app.

Then, you can head to the XDA Developers forum page, find the download link for the latest version, and download it to your Android device. Open the APK file on your Android device and agree to install it.

Step Two: Connect Your PlayStation 4 Controller

You can play PS4 games using touch screen controls, but that probably won’t be ideal for most games, which are obviously designed to be played with a physical controller. You’ll probably want to connect a PS4 controller to your Android device to play games.

This is actually quite easy. You can pair the controller with your phone wirelessly using standard Bluetooth pairing. Just hold down the “Share” and “PlayStation” buttons on the controller until the light bar starts flashing to put it into pairing mode.

Then, visit Android’s Bluetooth settings screen, and select the controller.

You could also physically connect it to your Android device directly if you have the appropriate cable. If you have a USB OTG cable adapter, you could use the standard USB cable that came with your console to plug it directly into your Android device, too

Whether it’s connected over a wireless or wired connection, it should just work. To confirm the controller is working after you’ve connected it, go to the home screen and move the joysticks–they should allow you to select icons on your home screen and navigate Android’s interface.

On some Android devices, the button mappings may be a bit messed up. If the controller’s buttons don’t work as you’d expect when you start playing games, you can install the SixAxis Controller app from Google Play and use it to change the button mappings. However, this requires a rooted phone. This is the only part of this process that requires root, however–and it’s not necessary on all devices. On our Nexus 7 tablet, the controller appeared to work fine when paired over Bluetooth with no controller configuration tweaks, additional apps, or rooting required.

Step Three: Set Up Remote Play

You can now launch Sony’s “Remote Play” app and go through the configuration process. Tap “Next” to continue and skip the controller setup screen. If you’ve already connected the controller over Bluetooth or USB, it should just work anyway.

You’ll need to sign in with your PlayStation Network (PSN) account. Assuming your Android device is on the same Wi-Fi network as your PS4, it’ll find your PS4 and connect. If it can’t connect automatically, you’ll be told to visit the Remote Play Connection Settings screen on your PS4. This screen will give you a PIN and you can enter that PIN on your Android device to pair your PS4 and Android device for Remote Play.

You can then use the controller–or the touch screen–to launch PS4 games. Your PS4 will run them and stream them to your Android smartphone or tablet.

You should be able to play remotely after the first-time setup, even if you’re on another Wi-Fi network or on a cellular network, streaming games from your home PS4 to your device wherever you are. Of course, it won’t work quite as smoothly if it has to transfer data over the Internet. It’ll also work best if you have a speedy Wi-Fi connection.

Sony has actually offered remote streaming for quite a while. Sony’s PlayStation Vita handheld console, PlayStation TV set-top box, and Xperia smartphones and tablets can stream games from a PlayStation 4. This trick just extends that support to almost all Android devices.

Sony has announced it will officially bring this feature to Windows and Mac, and it will appear in PS4 system update version 3.50. There’s also an unofficial Windows client. However, Sony hasn’t announced it will officially offer this feature on non-Xperia Android devices or Apple’s iPhones and iPads. This unofficial support may be necessary for quite a while if you’d like to stream games to non-Xperia Android devices. Of course, even Microsoft doesn’t offer support for streaming Xbox games to smartphones–not even Windows phones. So at least it’s something.

Tags: android → how

How to Stream Games From Your PlayStation 4 to Any Android Device

By YM Humidifier → Friday, March 4, 2016