An analytics surprise [ 2:15 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Was digging through Google analytics this morning and something just jumped out and shocked me. Normally when I am checking things there I am more concerned with seeing the top level.

• How many visitors
• Traffic sources
• Bounce rate
• Keywords

You know the items that tell me if I am improving or declining. Which posts are drawing the most traffic. How the traffic is finding me. That type of thing.

Now what shocked me is when I looked inside the visitors area. No surprises there until I noticed the browsers. A big surprise there.

Firefox was number 1 by a huge percentage and Chrome was number 2. IE for this blog was number 3 with about 15%. A huge surprise and actually something that made me smile.

WordPress uses css and one of the big problems with a lot of themes is that IE does not display them the way the other browsers do. Usually when you are looking through the better themes the coder has added extra code to account for the difference in IE.

Maybe that has caught up with them and people have gotten disgusted with it. I sure hope so.

Now to be sure this was not an anomaly because this blog is about WordPress and the readers would tend to like Firefox because of the various plugins, I checked a couple others .

The numbers were similar across the board.

In fact on another blog Firefox was even higher on that blog at over 60%.

So it looks like I am not the anomaly I thought I was. Except for checking display I never use IE. Always Firefox or Chrome and most of the time it is Firefox.

So what browser do you use? Why? Leave your comments below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: browser, google analytics, wordpress

One of the over looked way to generate more traffic is by paying attention to how people find you that you did not target. I do this but was reminded of it yesterday.

I had a Twitter conversation with a good friend of mine. Long time readers know my good friend Steve Roye. He runs a blog to presell his Killer Standup Comedy System.

We are always bouncing ideas back and forth even though Steve has gone away from internet marketing and is focused on his comedy business.

I saw a post he wrote “Is The Killer Stand-up Comedy System A Scam? Is Steve Roye A Scam Artist? “

So I dropped him a direct message asking if someone had been bad mouthing his course. (They should not be but he teaches a different method so I thought maybe someone had tried to rip him.)

The answer was no that no one had but he was getting traffic from the terms with his course name and scam. So he wrote a very specific blog post to target that topic. It will increase his traffic and it also is a very targeted topic for targeting his buyers. Someone interested enough about his course to be searching about it being a scam is definitely a potential buyer.

He was taking advantage of what people had already been searching for and wanted to rank higher. It is something I do when I go through either my Google Analytics account or MyBlogLog stats and see searches for topics I did not initially target.

This is a great way to get additional traffic and to increase your ranking for terms that people are already searching for and finding you through. Write a blog post targeting those keywords and you will stand a very good chance to rank much higher for those terms.

If you are getting one or two visitors this could easily get you even more traffic.

So pay attention to your stats and if you are getting one or two visitors for a term you never targeted then a blog post can move you up the serps for that term and send you even more traffic.

Your questions and comments are welcomed.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog, google analytics, internet marketing, scam artist, serps, stand up comedy, traffic

Almost finished the series on plugins here. There will be one more post on this tomorrow and that will be the most important one of the series so stay tuned. Remember that I am always looking to answer the questions you have here so feel free to ask them in the comments.

The original question that started this series was..

what are you top plugin choices for WP?

Today we address spam plugins and other miscellaneous plugins. There are a lot of choices and this list could be much longer but these are the ones I use at least semi-regularly.

• Askimet
• WP Spam Free
• Podpress
• Google Analyticator
• WordPress Thread Comment
• WP Ezine Articles

Askimet – Comes with the base installation and is a good anti-spam plugin but needs some help.

WP Spam Free – When combined with Askimet the two do a decent job of eliminating spam.

There are lost of other spam plugins but some hurt your number of comments such as the captcha plugins which keep people from commenting so it becomes a thin line to walk. Do you increase comments or reduce spam? I prefer more comments and deal with moderating the additional spam comments.

Podpress – This is the best of the podcasting plugins that I have tried. It interacts with the major podcast directories and can be tied directly into Itunes easily.

Google Analyticator – Easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code and allows you to see the stats from there within your dashboard.

WordPress Thread Comment – If you have an older theme that does not support threaded comments (they are integrated into the latest versions of WordPress) this will allow you to take advantage of them without having to hack the theme.

WP Ezine Articles – If you are a Platinum member of Ezine Articles this is a nice plugin that allows you to submit your articles to Ezine Articles from your dashboard.

Repurposing your content is a great way to get more traffic to your blog and article marketing can be an easy way to do that.

Now I could have added literally hundreds of other potential plugins but there is a trade off when you add plugins and that will be tomorrow’s discussion as we end up the series on plugins.

Your comments and questions are welcomed. Talk to you tomorrow.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: article marketing, blog, eliminating spam, google analytics, plugins, podcast, podcasting, podpress, traffic

Yesterday we discussed the need to be tracking what is working so that you can improve things. If you do not know what is working or not working it is all too easy to waste your time and your money. I will be covering some other ways to track what is happening in the future but we will start with Google Analytics as it is my preferred method.

You need a Gmail account to use Google Analytics. You can sign up for a Gmail account if you don’t have one at Gmail. Once you have an account you can go directly to Google Analytics and login with your Gmail user name and password.

Once your are in click on Add Website Profile. Fill in the domain you want to track along with your country and time zone. Now that you have it set up you will need to add the code to your site on each page.

Now before we go further the instructions below are for where your blog is in the root of your domain. This means you access your blog by using mydomain.com and not mydomain.com/blog.

If your blog is not in the root you will need to manually add the java script code to the pages in your root (public_html) directory also.

There are many ways to do this with your blog. It will depend on your theme and if you want to use a plugin. On this blog my theme is coded to add the appropriate code. I only need to add the id I get from GA.

I just add the id that was generated when I set the account up in the theme options. You can add the Google Analytics plugin and again just add the id into the settings after you add and activate the plugin.

You can add the java script code into your theme header file if you do not wish to add a plugin or if your theme is not preset for GA.

You will copy and paste this code into your header php file right after the opening <body> tag. This will add the code into each page of your blog.

Inserting all of the code there and saving the file will also set up your blog for Google Analytics.

Once you have added the code whether you did it manually, through your theme or using a plugin you need to check in your analytics account to make sure that Google is finding the code properly.

Open the profile for that domain in your account and you will see if they are getting the information.

Do remember that if your blog is not in the root of your domain you will need to manually add the code to the file that are in the root to get this to work.

Click on the check status link and it will go check your setup and let you know if it is working. Once you have succeeded it will take a day before you start to get the stats when you login to your account.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: gmail account, google analytics, java script code, public html directory

Just finished reading a great post from Alex Syseof who I met last June in Philadelphia, Alex has guest posted here a while back and has a blog I follow regularly.

The post was titled ” Allow Google Tell You What Search Results To Dominate“.

I strongly recommend you check it out. This blog uses comment luv and do follow. His post will show you how to let Google tell you what to write about next and then you will be able to use that info for more traffic.

My traffic tip series is stalled due to lack of 5 comments (hint, hint) but this is an article worth your time to read and implement.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: alex syseof, comment luv, google analytics, traffic

Today’s question:

Could you show us how to setup and use Google Analytics plugin correctly

Rather than do a long drawn out post I put this video up at You Tube.

Your comments and questions are always welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: google analytics, google anylticator, wordpress

So far this week we have run through the first four steps to having a profitable blog. With the exception of the very first step this is the step that gets ignored by most people.

Yes people will set up their blogs properly, post them and generate traffic. Unfortunately they never do research first for profitability and they don’t test and track what is working.

One of the plugins that I had as a must have was the Google Analyticator. This allows you to have the code for Google Analytics on your blog.

You need to check this and see exactly where your traffic is coming from. This tells you what of the things you are doing is working so you can do more of it. Just as important you can see what isn’t working so you can fix it.

If you find three blogs that every time you comment you get a traffic spike do you think it might be a good idea to comment there as often as possible with out spamming?

My Blog Log also has a tracking service that will cost you $25 a year but you can see everything that is being clicked on your blog. You can see 10 for free so when starting you don’t have to pay initially.

There are numerous other pieces of software that can help you analyze your web stats but if you aren’t tracking what is happening and which posts are getting people to take the action you want it is very hard to improve your results.

Test and track your reslts and watch how much you can improve your results.

As always your comments and questions are appreciated.

Mike Paetzold

Saturday at 2pm edt I will have a free teleseminar on Step One that will expand what has been offered here. You can call in or listen on the web. Details are available at Profitable Blogging – Step One.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, mybloglog, tracking

Google Analytics is a great free way to track your visitors and see where your traffic is coming from and how they found you.

It is easy to set up you just need to create an account and follow the instructions to get the code for your site.

This will be a small piece of code. You can just add this into your footer of your blog.

I have added a video to show you exactly how to do that. Your theme files need to be writable on your server (permissions set to 666) to do it the way the video shows.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed. I would particularly like to know how you like the videos and if yu do stop at You Tube and rate them.

Thanks
Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: add-google-analytics, google analytics