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

P.S. If you’re seeing a lot more black BMWs driving around in your neighborhood, I think I know why.  And if you haven’t seen them, maybe you’d like to be the first and help a lot of other people get one as well ==> Get Started on Your Body By Vi 90 Day Challenge and join the nearly 1,000 other people that have improved their health and gotten behind the wheel of a new black BMW.

A blog is more than just a place where you can post your latest content online.  If you’re using it properly, it can be an absolute lead-generating machine that can work for you anytime of the day or night, completely on auto-pilot.  By using these 5 techniques in your blog, you’ll be on your way to driving more leads into your business and sponsoring more people without the stress of cold-calling or spending a ton of cash on leads lists that don’t produce any results.  Read on to find out more, true believer…

Read the full story

Have you ever wondered just how long you have to get someone’s attention and get them to read your blog post? I can tell you that you only have a matter of seconds, just simply from the nature of our microwave society.  We’re so used to hearing sound bytes, short commercials and flashes of information that are delivered to us very quickly that we’re easily distracted and also easily bored.

And if you’re blogging, your readers are probably being bombarded by about 60 million other things when they’re seeing your blog for the first time.  Or even the second time.  Just think about how you spend your days at the computer.  Do you ever have only one window open on your desktop?  How many tabs do you have open in your web browser?  As I’m writing this, I have 6 tabs open (which is actually a small number for me) and 6 programs running on my system right now.

And I’m not alone.

Read the full story

For those of us that run our online business through our blogs, we’re constantly looking for ways to make our blog more interesting. Yes, you’ve got to write well and get your readers actively engaged in what you’re writing, but there’s a lot more to do at this point than just write a good blog post.

You want your readers to be more engaged, so it’s your job to do something that many people just have big problem with doing. You’ve got to entertain your readers! Give them something to look at and, often times more importantly, hear on your blog. Some people would much rather listen to or even watch your blog posts!

Read the full story