Blog Setup Lab

So you have a blog but no idea how many people are reading it, where they’re coming from or how long they’re staying?

Google analytics is the free website statistics system that cam give you all those answers and more. Here’s how to set up a Google Analytics account, create a website profile and install the tracking code on WordPress.

Step 1 – Sign up for a free Google Analytics Account

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account go to the Google Analytics site and create a new account. When you’re done log into your account and move to step 2.

Step 2 – Add a new website profile

Once logged into your Analytics account go to ‘Add website profile’. You should see a page similar to this:
You now need to select ‘Add a Profile for a new domain’ and enter the URL to your site and select a time zone then click finish. Google then shows you your tracking code including the tracking status information. In this status information you’ll see a Web Property ID. Make a note of this Web Property ID and click ‘save and finish’.

Step 3 – Install your tracking code on your WordPress blog

Now we have created a Google Analytics account and create a profile for your website we need to install the Google Analytics tracking code on your site so Google can track visits to your site. Google does give you a block of tracking code which you can paste into a WordPress template but there’s a plugin available to make it easier to do and stop us having to paste the code all over again if we change themes ever.

The plugin we want to install is Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk so log into your WordPress admin and go to plugins > add new and search for ‘google analytics for wordpress’ and install the plugin.

Wordpress Plugins Google AnalyticsOnce the plugin is installed you should get a ‘Google Analytics’ link in your WordPress settings. Click this and there’s an analytics profile box where you enter your UA code and click update analytics settings.

That’s it! – your WordPress blog vistors are now being tracked by Google Analytics. Once Google has received some data from your site you should be able to view your stats on your Google Analytics account.

Blogger ads are one great way of making your blog pay. If you’ve got some good traffic coming to your blog, whether in quantity or quality, then showing targeted ads to your audience can monetize your blog.

Here we look at a few ad plugins for WordPress that make it easy to integrate ads into your blog. The plugin you choose will depend to a degree on the type of ads you want to show. There’s Google Adsense ads which can show text and/or image ads on your blog. The ads that are displayed depend on the content of your blog as Google tries to match the ads displayed with the context of the page they’re being displayed on and you get paid for each ad that is clicked on.

Then there’s affilliate links and ads where you get paid a commission for each sale coming from an ad you displayed on your blog. These can be through a site such as ClickBank or directly from sites such as Ebay or Amazon.

All in One Adsense and YPN

All in One Adsense and YPN is a free,  open source plugin for WordPress which automatically inserts Adsense ads or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads in to your blog posts. You can control all aspects of your ad’s display and position including optionally not showing ads in a post and how many ads to show on a page or in a post.

MaxBlogPress Max Banner Ads

Max Banner Ads allows you to add and rotate banners in your wordpress blog. You can place your banners in any position you want to on your blog and track those banners to find out how good they really are doing.

Advertising Manager

Advertising Manager also allows you to place Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog and manage and optimize those ads. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Commission Junction, OpenX, Yahoo PN and many other ad networks.

Advertising Manager provides a simple way to import your ads, widgets can be used to place ads in the sidebar and the displaying of ads can be limited by by author, category, tag, page type, and more.

That’s just a few plugins available to show your blogger ads – they’re free to use so if you don’t like one of them it’s relatively easy and painless to change to another advertising plugin.

Mailchimp – the email list management & marketing service and competitor to the likes of Aweber and Get Response has recently raised the limits on their free forever account.

For a total monthly subscription of ZERO you can have 1000 subscribers and 6000 sends per month which is more than enough to get most people started and then their paid services are equally as competitive.

With the free account offering so much it now enables everyone to setup a mailing list even for a personal or hobby site and not have to worry about the ongoing monthly subscription until you actually reach your limits. If you never reach more than 1000 subscribers or send more than 6000 emails per month your account is free forever.

Mailchimp has all the features you’d need, whether for a simple mailing list or the experienced Internet marketer. For a full list of features go to the MailChimp website.