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. Read the full story

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. Read the full story

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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We’re all looking for ideas for content for our blogs.  At least we all should be…

Don’t feel bad if you seem to run out of ideas, it happens to everybody, even those of us that have been blogging for awhile now.  And, when you can’t come up with new content ideas, you can get really frustrated.  Frustration eventually leads to failure, if you let it take over.

Don’t get frustrated, get inspired.  Take a look at this video to see how you can use Google Reader to get new ideas for blog content, plus find places to link to and leave your comments to get some more traffic coming to your blog.

Did you enjoy this video or learn something from it?  Let’s hear about it in the comments below.  And, if you wouldn’t mind, how about a little Retweet love?

And, have we connected on Facebook and Twitter yet?  No?  I’d love to!

Good Sunday Morning….