Another very compelling reason to use WordPress is its ability to integrate with social media and social bookmarking. Obviously this also equals more traffic and exposure. If you are even the least bit involved in social media and social bookmarking, you understand the value of utilizing a plug-in that will automatically broadcast your content or make it easy for your visitors to share your most recent posts on social networking sites. Continue Reading

Here’s another post in a series on WordPress Plugins…

As I’ve talked about before, plug-ins are available for every function you can imagine for your blog including updating, backing up and protecting your site.

Automatically Update Your WordPress Version

WordPress is constantly evolving. The WordPress developers work feverishly to make WordPress as user-friendly as possible as well as keeping it up-to-date with trends and changes in the Internet and search engines. As a result, a new version of WordPress is released every few months or more. This could be a big hassle, except – as you might have guessed, there is a plug-in to help you stay current. Continue Reading

This is the third post in a series on WordPress Plugins.

The word “statistics” is one of those words and topics that tends to make people’s eyes glaze over or causes a quick change in conversations. However, whether you are blogging for your business or whether blogging is your business, tracking and knowing your visitor statistics is important to helping you optimize your website for greatest profits.

Fortunately, there are ingenious plug-in developers who have made gathering our blog statistics and statistical analysis of our traffic easier for everyone. It’s painless now.

Google Analyticator is a plug-in that integrates WordPress and Google Analytics seamlessly and easily. On a standard HTML page you have to add Google Analytics javascript to your site. Google Analyticator automatically adds this javascript code to your WordPress template. In addition, it provides several widgets that allow you to display your statistics in your WordPress dashboard.

WP-Stats-Dashboard - Graphs are displayed so you can easily detect trends and see how your site is doing. This plug-in will add a graph to your dashboard so you can see your statistical trends immediately upon logging on.

WordPress.com Stats – This plug-in collects daily statistics on visits, page views, most popular posts and more and displays it all on a single page for you in your administration panel. One of the big advantages of this plug-in is that it runs on WordPress.com and therefore does not add any load to your server. It is simple to use and the statistics are easy to understand at a glance.

WordPress Download Monitor – Do you give away a lot of eBooks or have downloadable transcripts on your site? In either case, this plug-in will help you keep track of what has been downloaded. While this plug-in may not be considered “essential” for all bloggers, if you have a giveaway on your site, it is helpful to track clicks and downloads.

FeedStats – Do you know how many subscribers you have? Or which pages they are reading? Or which feedreaders they are using? This little plug-in will give you vital information about your subscribers and again is conveniently viewed on a window on your WordPress dashboard.

Few people are crazy about statistics but they give us important insight about who our visitors are, what they are reading, and what they like and don’t like. With this information we can tailor our content to our market best. That means more profit.

So, what are you using to track your blogging?  You know you can’t improve what you don’t track, right?  You’ve got to track your results to see what’s working and where you can apply more effort to improve your results from blogging…and drop the junk that’s not.

What’s your favorite tracking plugin?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.  And if you haven’t already, go ahead and push that little retweet button at the top, that is if you enjoyed this post.

Have we connected on Twitter and Facebook yet?  I’d love to if we haven’t already!

To Your Unending Success,

Mike Paul

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This is the second post in a series on WordPress Plugins.

Plug-ins are almost like having your own personal set of tricks for your website. They allow you to easily and quickly manage many tasks on your website therefore saving you time, helping you retain your hair (since you won’t be pulling it out anymore), and being a happier person all around. (You think I’m giving plug-ins too much credit? Nah. They’re that good.)

Are you expecting a huge surge of traffic? There’s a plug-in that will help speed up your site. Do you have a lot of links on your site? Manually checking those could take forever and is likely to fall to the bottom of your priority list. And then there are those nasty spammers. Even our blogs are not exempt from spam! Clever plug-in developers have even created an automatic spam detector for your comments.

Here are a few of the best plug-ins to help with these functions.

WordPress Super Cache – This plug-in helps increase the speed of your WordPress blog. The programming behind this plug-in is probably more complicated than any of us want to know about. All you need to know is that creates static html pages of your website and displays them more quickly than if your site had to call up the PHP scripting each time. So, when you hit the front page of Digg or other sites and expect a HUGE surge of traffic, be sure Super Cache is turned on so that your new visitors can see your great content rapidly.

Redirection – This plug-in creates 301 redirects for you if you change the permalink or slug of the post. Without Redirection, if you change the name of your post then any inbound links will be broken. Redirection however will automatically create a redirect for you. This is an incredibly helpful plug-in to have if you decide to change the name of your posts to increase your search engine optimization or if you started out posting to your blog using the WordPress default permalinks.

Broken Link Checker – Broken links are frustrating for you and the user. This terrific little plug-in will check each of the links of your site and let you know which ones need to be repaired. You can schedule it to run at a set frequency to keep your site at its best.

Askimet – Askimet is one of those plug-ins that every blog should have. In fact, WordPress has begun to include it as a standard plug-in for that reason. Askimet is essentially the equivalent of your spam checker for email. It monitors your comments and automatically labels spam comments and moves them to a spam folder or automatically deletes them depending on your preference. If you have previously had to sift through hundreds of junk comments for pharmaceuticals, internet marketing scams, or comments in other languages that you can’t read, you will be very grateful for this plug-in.

There is nothing that turns a visitor off from reading your content and becoming a loyal visitor than a slow site filled with broken links and spam. These plug-ins will help your site run faster and put your best foot forward with your readers.

We’ll cover more about plugins tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Now, before you take off, make sure to hit that retweet or share button back up at the top of this post, if you enjoyed it.

And have we connected on Twitter and Facebook yet?  Why not?

To Your Unending Success,

Mike Paul

P.S. There’s a HUGE movement going on right now that’s helping people change their lives and their health for the better.  I’m down 25 pounds myself since I began this challenge, and I’d love to show you how to get started and get the challenge going in your area.  Here’s the details for more -

Your Body By Vi 90 Day Challenge