This video provides a brief overview of how to use the Google Analytics. It is one of the best tools used by many people to monitor blog traffic and improve results online. Best part is it’s free of charge!

I use it on a daily basic to monitor how my sites are doing. You can get so much information about your site’s traffic using Google Analytics such as finding out where your visitors are coming from, what content they are seeing and what is most popular, how long they stay on the site and how many pages are viewed. The information made available to me through Google Analytics enables me to write key articles that I know people want to read about by just looking at what keyword searches are being used in search engines like Google.

Here is a small summary of what’s available. More can be seen in the video at the end.

Dashboard
The dashboard is the home page for your results. It shows how many visits you’ve had over a certain period. It also provides the site usage information which basically tells you the total number of visits, page views, average time spent on the site, bounce rate and how many new visits to your site.

Visitor’s overview
This section tells you the total number of people that visited your site in a certain period. You can change this period using the calendar tool provided. It also shows you how many absolute unique visits you’ve had which basically means all those that don’t include your own. The time spent on the site is given which is also very important information. If none of your visitors spend more than 10 seconds on your site, then something is wrong. You can use this sum to try and improve the performance of your site. Think of ways you could increase the average time spent on your blog.
 
Traffic Sources
This piece of information is vital. It tells you where all your traffic comes from and what the top traffic sources are. Also the keywords that people use to find your site.

Content
Again this is also great information to find out what the top content is on your site that gets read.

It’s very easy to set up Google Analytics, all you need to do is signup and insert the code Google Analytics generates for your blog into your file and upload.

Here is a list of FREE Blog Templates

WordPress

Short description: WordPress is a Blog tool and Weblog platform. You canyou’re your own wordpress account in seconds or install it on your own domain. Wordpress is easy to use and custmoise and one which I definelt recommend. Thers are hundreds of themes to choose from and plugin that make creating a professional blog so easy. Some of the features include password protected posts, importing, typographical niceties, multiple authors, bookmarklets, permalinks.
Homepage: http://wordpress.org/

Blogger

Short description: Blogger is easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts; interact with people, and more.
Homepage: https://www.blogger.com/

b2evolution

Short description: A blog script featuring multiple blogs, categories/sub-categories, skins, search function, multiple languages, search engines friendly URLs.
Homepage: http://b2evolution.net/

Nucleus

Short description: A powerful blog script featuring multiple blogs, multiple authors, drafts and future posts, bookmarklets.
Homepage: http://nucleuscms.org/

pMachine Free

Short description: This is a features limited version of pMachinePro.
Homepage: http://www.pmachine.com/

If you use any other blogging platform and would like to see it listed here then please leave me a comment and I will add it to the list.

FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP client which can be used to transfer your site files to your website.

Click here to download it now.

1. Double click on your FileZilla icon  from your desktop. Once you have done so, you should see the following:
   
2. Complete the following boxes (below the header at the top of the screen):Address - The URL of your blog/website (don’t include http:// at the beginning)
   User - your ftp username
   Password - your ftp password
   Port - Leave Blank or enter 21 (it should by default enter this automatically)
3. Click Quickconnect! You are now connected to your ftp account.
   
4. Double click on the WWW directory folder located on the right hand side so that the directory is opened. If you have a registered domain on your account then the “index.html” file should be within your “www/yourdomain.com/” directory.  “index.html” will be the main page of your site.
   If you use Wordpress and have a registered domain on your account then the Wordpress files can be accessed using the following path /www/wp-content/themes/ and select your theme folder. You will find all the php, css and image files for your Wordpress site in there. For more help you can watch a demo “how to upload Wordpress plugins and templates with Filezilla“.
5. From the left hand side of the FileZilla program, you will need to search for your files on your computer in which you would like to upload to your site under “Local Site“.
6. Highlight all of the files you wish to upload and then DRAG them over to an open area on the right hand side of the FileZilla program so that you will upload the files into an area inside your WWW directory.  PLEASE NOTE: If you are using Wordpress then you will need to upload these files into www/wp-content/themes/your theme folder.
7. Your files will upload instantly onto your site. A message will appear at the top above the local site to let you know if the upload was successful.
8. That’s all there is to it - EASY!If you have any questions about FileZilla or need further help, please leave a comment at the end of this post and I will respond.

Filezilla: Watch a demo to help you download, install and configure Filezilla

Learn how to download, install and configure FileZilla, so you can create an FTP connection to your website, in this video demonstration

 

This video will show you how you can use FileZilla as an FTP client to upload plugins and templates to a WordPress installation.

For more help or information please leave comment.

I’m already too late to announce BlogRush with this post because it’s already all over the blogosphere, the social networks and the blog forums.
            
John Reese, Founder of BlogRush, has released the new exciting tool called BlogRush,  which is a blog traffic exchange widget.
You can visit John’s blog where he talks about the new release and hear what others have to say.

BlogRush is basically a way to group together related content across blogs. The way it works is really simple, you just sign up and insert the code in your template and the BlogRush widget appears on your blog instantly. Similar to the one you see on the right. You earn a credit each time it is displayed when your page loads. You are rewarded by using your credits to display your blog content on other blogs that use the widget. Once you have placed the widget THAT’S IT, you don’t need to do anything further, you start earning credits immediately.

When you sign up with BlogRush it asks you for your feed URL. The reason it asks you for this is because it takes your RSS feed content across the web and places it on blogs that have similar topic and content to yours. BlogRush will show your content on the widget of other blogs that it thinks are similar to yours. This should increase the click-through rate.

BlogRush has a ten-tier referral system, which means you will be credited if anyone signs up from following your links up to ten times below you. So basically when someone you refer into BlogRush starts to earn credits you are rewarded with credits too. When your referral refers people they earn credits, you get some more again, and so on until ten levels below you.

Will You Get Traffic From BlogRush?

Of course you will get some but as with any new program don’t expect instant results it might take some time especially if your blog doesn’t get many page views a month. Give it time and try to place the widget above the fold meaning anywhere on the page where users don’t have to scroll down to see it. That way you have more chance of it being noticed.

If you would like join the BlogRush program and soak up those credits before everyone else hears about it, now is the right time to join and insert the widget on your site. Here is the link -

http://www.blogrush.com

Backup your database regularly, and always before an upgrade.

This is the advice given to you if you want to play it safe and have a peace of mind all the time. I don’t know what I would do if I lost my blog and all the content inside it…all those posts I’ve spent years writing, all those links, images etc. So how do I avoid all that? It’s easy - you backup it up and doing a backup of your entire Wordpress blog literally takes minutes trust me.

If your reading this article and so far thinking “what the hell, why should I do a backup when I pay good money for hosting, it’s them that should do a backup not me” or worse, “I don’t have to worry, my hosting provider creates backups every day”. These are a few common excuses I’ve heard of many times.

Well let me tell you what can happen if you think the same way others think by telling you my story. About 9 months ago I was hosting with a company called Bliksem. I’d been with Bliksem for a couple of years and had no problems with them at all until one fine day that all changed. I found all my sites were down as was bliksem’s support site. I was unable to contact them to find out what happened. I started visiting forums and found out I was not the only one.  It seemed they have gone out of business which was not good news for me because my backups were a month old and a few new sites I had started were not backed up at all. I was very upset but more so angry with myself for not sparing myself a couple of minutes to do a simple backup.
Remember the saying, “you only realise what you have until it’s gone”. So take my advice and backup your blog NOW if you haven’t done so already.
Spending a few minutes to create an easy, convenient backup of your Wordpress blog will allow you to spend even more time being creative and productive with your website.

How often should you backup?

I usually backup twice a week but it really depends on how often you update your blog. I update mine everyday and I spend a lot of time writing most of my articles so ideally, I want to backup almost straight after I publish to be on the safe side.

How many backups should I keep?

Well this question got me thinking because what I use to do is create a full backup and then just replace it every time with a new one. The reason I did this was the obvious really, plus I didn’t want too many backups on the server cause that just used up my disk space even though I save the backup to my hard drive also. But then I started to think…what if that backup file is corrupted or deleted? Then what would I do? So now I keep at least two backups on my hard drive, one on a CD and just the one on the server. If you want to you can save them to floppy disk, CD or even email it to yourself.

Can backups be automated?

Yes, although this can be a complicated process it can be done on one of two ways:

• Cron Job Backups - nightly SQL backup which can be emailed to you
• Skippy’s Wordpress Database Backup Plugin (Email, Save to Server, and Auto-Scheduling) (version for Wordpress 2.1.x)

Backing Up Your Wordpress Site

It’s important to understand how your Wordpress blog is made up so we understand the backup process. There are two parts to backing up your Wordpress site: Database and Files. Your files consist of any plugins you have installed, your Wordpress theme, images, php files and any other code files.
You also need to backup your Wordpress database. The database are things like your posts/pages that contain all your content.

If your Wordpress site is hosted by someone then you should check with your hosting company if they provide backups. Some companies are not responsible for doing backups and this will be stated in their Terms of Conditions (TOS) when you sign up. It’s usually the case with small hosts.
With other companies they will backup the entire server, including your database and files. As mentioned at the start you should always take precaution because you just never know what might happen. That’s why you need to learn how to backup your own Wordpress site. Here are ways how:

1. Website Hosting Provider Backup

   Most website hosting providers will offer a full backup of your site. Check with your host to find out if they do provide this and how often they backup. But MOST IMPORTANT, ask them how you can do the backup yourself. I use Oxynic.com and they provide a full backup facility where not only they do the backups but you can as well. It’s very easy to do and I can carry out a full backup from my control panel. I can save a backup to my server as well as my hard drive. It takes literally minutes to do. When you log into your Cpanel you will see the Backup option under files. Click the Backup icon. This will take you to the next page and you need to click “Download or Generate a Full Backup“. (Full backups can only be used for moving your account to another server or keeping a local copy of your account) On the next page, click the”Generate Backup” button. A message will appear to say the backup is in progress. This will backup your Wordpress site on your server. After a minute Click the “Go Back” link once. You will now be able to see the backups available for download. (tar.gz) Right-Click on todays backup and select “Save Target As…” A dialogue box will open and you need to choose a location on the hard drive to save your backup to. That’s it your done! 

2. Wordpress Database Backup Plugin

   This one is also pre-installed by default and is recommended as part of the routine for upgrading Wordpress. Every time you increment your install, you should do a backup with this plugin.

3. Copy Your Files to Your Computer

   You can use any Ftp program like FileZilla (recommended), WSFtp, SmartFtp to copy your files to a folder on your computer.
   Remember to keep at least three backups on the computer incase one is corrupted or deleted. It would also be worth saving each one in a different place incase the folder is corrupted or deleted like a CD, floppy drive, different hard drives, etc.

You are welcome to leave comments of ask a question if you need more help or information.
 

Most blogs use the following standard features:

Author byline

You will notice on some blogs they include the name of the person who wrote the post. This is a default setting know as the author byline. You can choose to remove the author byline by deleting the code from the template file.

Permalink

Short term for “permanent link,” this is the link you see in your browsers address bar. To read more about permalinks and how to create SEO titles using permalinks click here

Blogroll

The blogroll is a standard add on with every new theme but you can remove it if you don’t want it on your site. Basically a Blogroll lists the blogger’s favourite blogs in the sidebar. What I usually do is customise the blogroll by delete the existing blogs there and overwrite them with my own favourite blogs. They can be easily managed and edited in the admin control panel of your blog.

Categories

A few blogging platforms like Wordpress allow the blogger to create and assign categories
to blog entries. These categories are listed in the sidebar, so that visitors can browse the categories they are interested in. When the category is clicked it will show all the posts grouped under that specific category. You can even have sub-categories to break things down.

Comments

You can allow comments to appear under published posts and set a rule where by only the administrator is allowed to approve the comment before it appears on the site. Comments are a great way to build content on a site and to connect with your readers.

Trackbacks

I published an article about trackbacks called “Increase your Blog Traffic using TRACKBACKS“ and is well worth a read especially if you have never heard of trackbacks before.
What usually happens is you the blogger will read a post on another blog site and if you have something to say about that post then you leave a comment right? Well with a trackback, instead of leaving a comment on THEIR site you leave a comment on YOUR site. To find out how to send a trackback and how to use them effectively, read “Increase your Blog Traffic using TRACKBACKS”
Something else you should know is that comments or trackbacks will not give you better search engine ranking – why? Because external links in the comments column including Trackbacks do not contribute to your Google Pagerank or any other search engine page rank. Although you might think this is not fair the one good thing to come out of it is the incoming links from other blogs that increases your blog traffic which is what you want.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

A final element common to most blogs is the Really Simple Syndication link (RSS). It’s a really clever technique used for notifying new content at a website. An example of a RSS feed is http://bloggerholic.com/feed. This feed contains frequently updated content which you can subscribe to if you want to, it is added to the Common Feed List. Updated information from the feed is automatically downloaded to your computer and can be viewed in Internet Explorer and other programs.  The format of the information that appears is up to you as you can customise it to show full text or a summary. You can also choose how many posts you want the RSS to show. In my example it shows the 10 most recent posts. It displays the title, link and the full body of the content.

The following plugins are highly recommended if you want your blog to be successful. Here is a list of my own top 9 that I use for BloggerHolic.

1. Comment Relish: An excellent plugin that is certainly part of my “must use” folder when setting up new blogs.
2. Social Bookmarks: I use Sociable. It automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites. When ever you or someone bookmarks your posts via the links it will auto fill the URL and title therefore all you have to do is click “submit”
3. Meta Tags: The plugin name is Autometa. It will automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post. This is an SEO essential plugin you must install and use. It’s very easy to use; the creation process involves generating a list of all the important words in the article, by stripping out punctuation and then removing common words like the, and, then, a etc. Of course you can edit this and add your own which is what I do every time.
4. Google Adsense: has become the most popular Internet contextual money-making program and integrating Google Adsense into your Wordpress template has become so easy with the many plugins available. The most popular is Adsense Deluxe. It offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense to your Wordpress posts. You can easily enable, disable and change your Adsense through the Wordpress control panel.  Click here for a list of the 10 best Adsense related plugins
5. Akismet: Do you get lots of SPAM messages every day in the comments column of your blog? If you do then did you know you can block such spam messages? All you need to do is install Akismet - a anti-spam plugin. It will filter your spam separately so you can delete them from one location within the Wordpress admin panel with a single click. I use Akismet and it works great. Since installing it, it has caught 173 spam comments for me.
6. Send to a Friend: I use WP-EMail that allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend. A very good plugin that will help to increase the number of visits to your site. 
7. Daily Top 10 Posts: This fantastic plugin tracks the number of pageviews per blog post for TODAY and you can display the results anywhere you want, i.e. sidebar, header, footer, etc. You can see a demo of this on this site just below the header. It tells me and other readers what the most popular posts are for today and how many views those posts get. With the same plugin I can also show the most popular posts overall.
8. Ultimate Tag Warrior: A tagging plugin that you will often see being used on more and more sites. To put it simple it’s basically a list of keywords visible on the sidebar in my case called a “Tag Cloud”. The bigger the font size of that keyword the more popular it is. It’s very easy to use and you can add the tags through the Write post page in Wordpress in a tag box.
9. Sitemap Generator Plugin: I use DDSiteMapGen, an excellent plugin. This plugin creates a sitemap for your site and it’s not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which can easily be customised from the options page in the Wordpress admin panel. For a demo click here

There are several sites on the internet that talk about blogging and you can search for them on Google in seconds, however not all are so good or as active as others so you could end up posting a message and waiting days to hear from someone. My advice is to take time and visit each site before deciding which one to register and become an active member with. You can tell how successful a forum/discussion board is by the number of replies and views each thread receives as well as the number of active members which usually is at the footer of any forum page.

Here are the top 6 blogger forums I found in my research that are really good active networking sites.

1. Webmasterworld: News and discussion board for the web professional. You can even pay to join webmasterworld supporter’s forum that deal with webmaster, tech and business issues. This forum is good because you get to hear everything first hand before anyone else does.
2. Bloggerforum : Primary internet source for blogging information, help and tips that cover a whole range of blogging interests. I definetly recommend.
3. Digital Point Forums: I can recommend the Digital Point Forums, it’s one of the biggest and best. There is a blogging forum in there and a huge number of active members (33,588 ) the forum is always active. Whenever I post anything in there I almost instantly get a reply. You will notice when visiting this site that it’s not just about blogging but they cover a huge range of topics and issues related to things like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft, General Marketing and lots more. The site is similar to webmasterworld in that it covers similar topics.
4. Focused: This forum is similar to Digital Point forum, however the community is smaller due to it being a fairly new site but needless to say it’s doing pretty well with currently 468 members and active threads. I’ve heard also that they are an AdSense revenue sharing forum, which means that as a member of their forum you can earn yourself up to 65% of the AdSense revenue generated by their threads - kind of a incentive for being an active member.
5. Blog Writers: This forum is for blog writers and blog readers who have blogging interests and skill levels. It has
   544,732 members and you can register for free. The membership includes an online writing portfolio, numerous blog writing tools, email services and the chance to network with other people with same or similar interests as youself.
6. Bloggst: This site has a thriving discussion forum with daily updated articles on blogging.