MyBlogLog - adding widget and trackiong [ 4:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is the next section in the MyBlogLog series to help you get the most from this service. Hopefully you have followed the steps in the previous post and taken the time to add in the services you already use and create your profile. If not check it out now and start there.

First we will add a widget to the sidebar so we can see who is visiting.

Now the widget that shows who visits is next. You need to know what size your sidebar is and you have quite a few options.

You can personalize this to a wide variety of styles but you need to make sure that you make it smaller in width than your sidebar or you will have problems.

Check your style sheet for your themes for the width of your sidebar and also look to see if there are padding parameters. Quite often it is 5px so if your sidebar is 200 px wide the largest you could make the widget would be 190px to not mess up how your theme displays.

Once you have designed your widget you will get a piece of code which you need to copy to your clipboard. Log in to your dashboard and add a text widget to your sidebar (drag it ot the proper position then click edit.

This will open up the text widget and you can copy and paste in the code there. Add a title if you wish it to show on your sidebar with one. (I usually do not do that but to each their own. If you have header graphics in your sidebar you may want to for the separation.)

Make sure to click the done button AND to save the changes to your sidebar. (Forget this step and then you will be like me scratching your head when you go look to figure out why it does not show .

That is all it will take to get your widget in your sidebar. If you don’t like the way it is displaying go back and start again with the widget design.

Tracking is one of the things I really love about MyBlogLog. You can see exactly how people find you, what they view and where they click to leave. Think this can give you some great information?

It displays in 3 columns and shows all of the above. You can also see what is hot on other blogs in your communities. This is where the interaction can be very valuable and will be discussed in more detail when we talk about using MyBlogLog for research.

Now to fully use the tracking you need to upgrade but at $25 for the year it is a no brainer (that is per blog not account if like me you have more than one blog.)

Now you need to add a piece of code into your theme for the tracking to work if you have not added a the widget. They have decent tutorials and as each theme is different it is very hard to have a single answer. The key is like most tracking codes it needs to show between the body tags in your theme.

Finally if you have upgraded you can run a variety of reports from your tracking stats. This is really powerful for helping you to see what is working, which posts are the most popular and where people are clicking.

Checking this weekly allows me to find topics that are drawing the most traffic and which posts (especially presell posts) are working and getting people to click through to a sales page. This makes adding popular content or complimentary content on similar topics that people have already told you they are interested in.

This should give you a bit more to get done now in getting the most out of your usage of MyBlogLog. Your comments drive this series so let me know what you like or don’t like or anything that has been skipped. Once I get enough comments then the next session will be posted on using MyBlogLog for research.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: mybloglog, MyBlogLog tracking, MyBlogLog widget, sidebarwidget, theme, tracking, widget, wordpress

Today’s question is:

I’d like to give my Word Press blog a nice look, a home page with photos, each one of my article should be in an independant page; how can I upload videos to my home page.

A few questions in one short comment.

You can change the look of your blog by adding a different theme. Just upload it to the folder wp-content/themes then log in to your dashboard, click design and then click on the theme you want to use.

Not sure why you would want to use a page instaed of a post for your articles. You can set the blog to only display one page at a time inside your dashboard. Click settings, Reading and select to show one post.

Finally, to add video I use a plugin called Viper Video but there are other good ones available. It is more a matter of what you get used to using.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: add video, single post, theme, video, viper video

Today’s question:

I recently was able to launch my blog (thanks to this site). Well I ran into a problem: apparently the site loads perfectly with firefox, but with Internet Explorer the middle column, where my content is shows up all out of whack (under the left link column). How does I fix this? I did edit some of the css in the theme so I hope I didn’t make an error.

Well as I don’t have a link to the blog or know the theme it is a bit hard. Most likely it is the change in the css file but I have seen themes do that without touching the css file.

I try to always make sure that I check new themes in both along with Safari and Opera. If it works in those 4 browsers I really don’t care if there is a problem in any of the other minor browsers.

IE and Firefox parse pages differently and treat the same code differently. So much for standards.

Now to fix your problem, (hopefully), go to the the current css file and download or make a copy of it so you know what changes you made. (No sense doing the same work twice ).

Overwrite the css with the original css file that you downloaded. Check the blog in IE. If it displays okay then go through and make one change at a time to add back in your changes.

Now if the blog still displays wrong in IE with the original css file it can be one of two other things. First check the size of any images you have added and if they exceed the width of the post area or the side bar. If so you have found the culprit.

If it exceeds widths IE will break where as Firefox will forgive that. If that is not the case then it is time to get a new theme.

Good luck.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed.

Technorati Tags: ie display problem, internet explorer display problem, theme, theme problems

Today’s question:

Does or should a Blog have a sitemap? I see too many blogs that are all over the place in their design. I want to be able to follow some kind of “order with a purpose” in designing my blog but not too busy that it drives traffic away. It seems as though there is a delicate balance here, right.

A very good question but I think you don’t quite have the terminology quite right.

I do recommend that you use a sitemap plugin so that you can automate the spidering of your site. I do not use a sitemap for people to read.

One of the things that WordPress does quite well is to organize the navigation of your blog. The more tightly targeted your content is to a single subject the better a blog performs with a few exceptions.

One of the things I like to do especially for my niche blogs is to pick out the major areas I want to emphasize and use them for categories. If you are dealing with a very specific topic this will probably give you between 4 -10 categories. These would be your upper level keywords you want to target.

Now if you are doing a general blog like I do with my name blog it can end up being many more because it tends to be more eclectic and cover a much wider range of topics. (Not something I recommend except for name blogs.)

If I understand your real question and unfortunately this means I have to use that ass/u/me word, you are looking for a checklist more for your side bar so that it doesn’t become too overwhelming.

The key will be how you are using the blog and what your monetization is. For most I use something like this but it does vary from topic to topic.

1. Lead capture form – If you have followed me at all you know why.
2. Pages – this is where I will have things like about but it will depend on the theme as this theme lists pages in a top header so this would be redundant on this particular theme.
3. Categories
4. Recent posts
5. Recent Comments
6. Links
7. Subscribe Me
8. Tag cloud

That would be the basics but if you use things like My Blog Log I would use their widget too.

The key though is not to copy the order but see what your primary goal is. If it was to attract people to my links then that would move up as an example. It really depends on your own goals and testing and tweaking to see what gets the most attention and putting your primary goal in that position.

Hope this helps as I hate answering questions where I use that ass/u/me word. If not resubmit or leave a comment here and we can continue the conversation.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

P.S. I just updated the 7 Tips book and if you have bought it before you need to login and download the latest version.

Technorati Tags: side bar, sitemap, theme, themes, wordpress theme, wordpress themes

Yesterday we discussed how to find your niche or topic for a profitable blog. The next step is to get your blog up and running.

Now there are a variety of choices to get a blog some free some paid but if you are serious you really need to have a blog on your own domain. If you have a Cpanel server hosting account with Fantastico this is a point and click set up.

The problem is that if you stop there you would be better using a free service like MyCCBlog with the proper plugins already installed.

At the very least you will need the following plugins if you are using WordPress.

• All In One SEO
• Google Sitemap
• Google Analyticator
• Smart RSS Pinger

Now there are a ton of others but these are the absolute minimum that you need to make your blog friendly for the search engines.

There are a few other things you need to do to improve your blogs effectiveness. Next is to use custom permalinks.

This allows you to change links that look like

http://mydomain.com/?p=122 to
http://mydomain.com/category/postname.

This gives you more places to have keywords to get you ranked for the keywords that you generated for your blog posts.

Next you will want to change and tweak out your theme. This way you can customize the look of your blog. Appearance counts. If you go to a site and it is the standard Kubrick theme .

Compare that to the look of this blog. There are thousands of Kubrick’s floating around and when I see one I am usually gone.

Now there are a lot of other plugins that you can add to your blog to make it do just about anything that you might want.

For example – podcast, video, contact forms etc.

If you need help doing things like installing WordPress, upgrading WordPress, adding plugins and adding themes check out WordPress Made Easy.

Next step is creating your posts.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed.

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: plugins, set up blog, theme