Question: How do you install Google Analytics on Wordpress?
Answer:
One way is to install one of the many Google Analytics plugins and activate it then go to settings for that plugin and give it the ID for the site.
Pros: If you switch themes, your Google Analytics will still work.
Cons: It takes some time to select and install a plugin since there are so many for GA.
The other option is to go to wp-content/themes/yourthemename/ and paste the code in your footer.php (just don't do it between <?php and ?> )
Pros: This is very fast to do since you just past the code and save the file.
Cons: If you change to another Wordpress theme, you will need to paste the code in its footer.php
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Video Marketing and Video Distribution Made Easy with TubeMogul
I am very new to creating "videos" for marketing or for any purpose. I only started publishing slideshows of my visual artwork on YouTube a few months ago. I still need to get a camera for creating decent video for YouTube and other sites. I keep hearing about specific camera brands in the USA designed for that purpose, but they aren't available here yet. In any case, it is important for marketing to consider the use of video, podcasts and other media with video sharing sites like YouTube.
YouTube is the largest video sharing site right now, but there are others and it is important to get your videos seen by people on a variety of sites even if most of your video views and traffic come from one site.
I really enjoy YouTube and how it was easy to get my updates published to Facebook and Twitter automatically, but YouTube doesn't distribute videos to other sites so that is where TubeMogul helps.
With TubeMogul you upload videos to their system and add your credentials for other video sharing websites like blip.tv, metacafe, dailymotion, myspace, etc.. You can even add your YouTube settings and it will upload to YouTube as well.
Once the videos are up, TubeMogul will start to collect statistics from different sharing websites and make general, per site, and per video reports so you can see which sites are getting the most video views.
Video marketing is great for branding and for generating interest in what you are offering. If you can make informative, funny, or otherwise interesting videos, you will get more traffic and new business contacts.
Which video sharing websites get you the most views?
Do you also generate sales with your video marketing efforts?
YouTube is the largest video sharing site right now, but there are others and it is important to get your videos seen by people on a variety of sites even if most of your video views and traffic come from one site.
I really enjoy YouTube and how it was easy to get my updates published to Facebook and Twitter automatically, but YouTube doesn't distribute videos to other sites so that is where TubeMogul helps.
With TubeMogul you upload videos to their system and add your credentials for other video sharing websites like blip.tv, metacafe, dailymotion, myspace, etc.. You can even add your YouTube settings and it will upload to YouTube as well.
Once the videos are up, TubeMogul will start to collect statistics from different sharing websites and make general, per site, and per video reports so you can see which sites are getting the most video views.
Video marketing is great for branding and for generating interest in what you are offering. If you can make informative, funny, or otherwise interesting videos, you will get more traffic and new business contacts.
Which video sharing websites get you the most views?
Do you also generate sales with your video marketing efforts?
Monday, March 15, 2010
Moonlighting on the Internet: 5 case studies on ways to make money online
Moonlighting on the Internet: 5 case studies on ways to make money online
If you are looking for ideas and suggestions for making an extra check a month with less hype, you should consider this book, Moonlighting on the Internet. It uses examples of how others have made money online to help you brainstorm and refine your internet based business activities. Who wouldn't want 288 pages of practical useful hype-free information about doing better business online and get an extra paycheck every month? I hope to order my copy soon. This book would be good for getting or refining your online money making activities by comparing their success with what you've been doing. What can you take from those to improve what you've been doing?
Moonlighting on the Internet: 5 World-Class Experts Reveal Proven Ways to Make Extra Cash
Here are some testimonials from Amazon where this book had a 4 Star rating as of the writing of this post.
“Well-written, practical, useful, money-earning advice for anyone interested in using the internet to create an extra $500 to $5,000 a month. Yanik Silver, one of the internet's truly remarkable success stories, holds nothing back. Instead of lots of meaningless claptrap contained in most books about the internet, the author shares the inside secrets of what really works. And what doesn't.” -Ted Nicholas, author of Billion Dollar Marketing Secrets
“Moonlighting Online is a breath of fresh air. Yanik Silver doesn't claim you'll become a millionaire online, but he can show you 5 effective and simple ways to pull in a lot more money than you're earning now-and do it month after month. This is brilliant advice from a true professional. I strongly recommend this book.” -Joseph Sugarman, chairman, BluBlocker Corporation
“Forget all the hype and B.S. you see about making money on the internet-Yanik Silver has truly provided the easiest and most down-to-earth ways of legitimately socking away a little (or a lot of) extra 'life-changing' money each month online.” -Robert Scheinfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Busting Loose From The Money Game
“Imagine waking up every morning and finding orders waiting for you in your email box. While you were sleeping, customers from around the world were sending you money. I've been doing just that for over 12 years and Yanik Silver shows you how you can do it, too. It's a thrill every day.” -Melvin Powers, author of How to Get Rich in Mail Order
“If you want to get rich overnight, this isn't the book for you. If you want simple-to-use strategies for making an extra $500+ per month online with minimal effort, listen to Yanik. He is one of the few who truly knows how this works.” -Timothy Ferriss, New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek
Friday, March 5, 2010
Thoughts regarding Buddypress 1.2
BuddyPress is a social feature plugin for Wordpress.
Buddypress 1.2 was recently released this winter (2010), and I've spent the last couple weeks trying to use it. This post isn't a review or a list of features, but instead my thoughts about this update. I have been running buddypress on my main visual art website, http://visualartgifts.com. It is a small community and marketing site for visual artists of all kinds and people who love art are also welcome to join for commenting and feedback.
I was pretty happy with the progress in 1.1, but there are still quite a few issues for BuddyPress to fix before I want to run it on other sites.
I followed the instructions on the BuddyPress website for upgrading from 1.1.
Essentially you have to:
I admit that having to yet again change themes bothered me since I use my own customized theme for Wordpress and for external pages and scripts linked to Wordpress. I live having my different website components blend as much as possible.
The sitewide recent posts widget was broken completely in this version and I did let them know in a trouble ticket. I don't use the "activity streams" component since I don't want my site to be like Facebook or Twitter. I want it for blogging, forums, and messaging. With activity streams off, the Sitewide Recent Posts widget disappears COMPLETELY.
When I turned that feature set back on, the Sitewide Recent Posts widget reappears, yet there are no recent posts displayed on site.
This really bothered me since that widget worked perfectly with BuddyPress 1.1 with Activity Streams off. I understand that sometimes things break while improving other areas, but I always considered Site wide Recent Posts to be essential to a multi-blog community site.
I'm hoping that this feature will be fixed and working properly with version 1.3 when it comes out.
I really don't remember if the BuddyPress profile and the Blog ID #1 profile data synced in earlier versions, but it doesn't seem to be working right now. It became important to be when I added extra fields to my profile info using the new feature in Wordpress 2.9.2.
Those fields don't appear in Buddypress's profile list nor profile page. I'm sure that this is complicated, but it is a sticking point for me. If a user is a guest author/blogger, they have to be told to edit their "other profile" in the main blog. There really should be a way to truly merge them or at least add the variables to the Buddypress profile and have them saved twice.
The new default theme for BuddyPress is another case of one step forward and two steps back. The default buddypress theme for 1.1 was quite attractive with separate widgets for the homepage and other main blog post sidebars. It was easy to get those sitewide posts in the main widget and everything just worked.
The new default theme for 1.2 really seems to be dumbed down. You have just one widgetized sidebar to work with so you can't say what should go there for the homepage vs. blog pages. There just isn't room there for multiple BuddyPress widgets and those look really strange on post pages!
I knew that I had to "yet again" make another child theme of the default theme. I just don't believe in running plugins for compatibily. I figure that perhaps in version 1.5 there will be yet another make over and the compatibility plugin would just bloat more.
What I had to do was edit the functions.php and add new widgets and then edit the theme files to point to those widgets. I did that in a "child theme" basically you create another css file and save it in another directory in your theme folder while pointing to the theme it is based on. Next you just have to go in and edit each file in the default theme you want to modify and save each in the new folder. To use the child theme you have to activate it in Site Admin -- Themes then activate it in Appearance - Themes.
Adding my own special widget sidebars and widget areas to the sidebar was a little more complicated, but if anyone comments about it, I'll write a post with more information. It isn't any different from adding widgetized areas to any other Wordpress theme.
I see great promise in BuddyPress and it is still the best way to add social features to a Wordpress install. It is also free which is amazing. If you are thinking of going beyond comments on your Wordpress site, I'd suggest waiting a few more updates before giving it a try. The code base is still going through radical changes even though it is beyond 1.0. Any customizations you make to BuddyPress now will most likely need to be redesigned or fixed in later 1.x versions.
Buddypress 1.2 was recently released this winter (2010), and I've spent the last couple weeks trying to use it. This post isn't a review or a list of features, but instead my thoughts about this update. I have been running buddypress on my main visual art website, http://visualartgifts.com. It is a small community and marketing site for visual artists of all kinds and people who love art are also welcome to join for commenting and feedback.
I was pretty happy with the progress in 1.1, but there are still quite a few issues for BuddyPress to fix before I want to run it on other sites.
Upgrading to BuddyPress 1.2.x
I followed the instructions on the BuddyPress website for upgrading from 1.1.
Essentially you have to:
- Deactivate BuddyPress and plugins that work with BuddyPress.
- Update BuddyPress in the plugins page using the upgrade link by the plugin list. (or manually do it by FTP)
- Delete old BuddyPress theme files from the server. (Previous themes don't work ) OR install a compatibility plugin.
- Activate the default theme or make a child theme of it and activate it instead (first in the site options then in appearance-themes)
I admit that having to yet again change themes bothered me since I use my own customized theme for Wordpress and for external pages and scripts linked to Wordpress. I live having my different website components blend as much as possible.
Site Wide Recent Posts broke
The sitewide recent posts widget was broken completely in this version and I did let them know in a trouble ticket. I don't use the "activity streams" component since I don't want my site to be like Facebook or Twitter. I want it for blogging, forums, and messaging. With activity streams off, the Sitewide Recent Posts widget disappears COMPLETELY.
When I turned that feature set back on, the Sitewide Recent Posts widget reappears, yet there are no recent posts displayed on site.
This really bothered me since that widget worked perfectly with BuddyPress 1.1 with Activity Streams off. I understand that sometimes things break while improving other areas, but I always considered Site wide Recent Posts to be essential to a multi-blog community site.
I'm hoping that this feature will be fixed and working properly with version 1.3 when it comes out.
BuddyPress Profile Syncing
I really don't remember if the BuddyPress profile and the Blog ID #1 profile data synced in earlier versions, but it doesn't seem to be working right now. It became important to be when I added extra fields to my profile info using the new feature in Wordpress 2.9.2.
Those fields don't appear in Buddypress's profile list nor profile page. I'm sure that this is complicated, but it is a sticking point for me. If a user is a guest author/blogger, they have to be told to edit their "other profile" in the main blog. There really should be a way to truly merge them or at least add the variables to the Buddypress profile and have them saved twice.
New Default Theme for BuddyPress
The new default theme for BuddyPress is another case of one step forward and two steps back. The default buddypress theme for 1.1 was quite attractive with separate widgets for the homepage and other main blog post sidebars. It was easy to get those sitewide posts in the main widget and everything just worked.
The new default theme for 1.2 really seems to be dumbed down. You have just one widgetized sidebar to work with so you can't say what should go there for the homepage vs. blog pages. There just isn't room there for multiple BuddyPress widgets and those look really strange on post pages!
What I did about the theme...
I knew that I had to "yet again" make another child theme of the default theme. I just don't believe in running plugins for compatibily. I figure that perhaps in version 1.5 there will be yet another make over and the compatibility plugin would just bloat more.
What I had to do was edit the functions.php and add new widgets and then edit the theme files to point to those widgets. I did that in a "child theme" basically you create another css file and save it in another directory in your theme folder while pointing to the theme it is based on. Next you just have to go in and edit each file in the default theme you want to modify and save each in the new folder. To use the child theme you have to activate it in Site Admin -- Themes then activate it in Appearance - Themes.
You need something like the following at the beginning of your child theme's style.css:
/*
Theme Name: BuddyPress Your Theme Name
Theme URI: http://yourwebsite.com/themes/yourtheme/Description: Your Theme Name theme for BuddyPress.Version: 1.0Author: Your Name
Author URI: http://yourwebsite.com/Template: bp-defaultTags: buddypress, number of columns, keyword, blah*/
If you want to use the CSS (style/layout settings) from the default theme, also add the following to the style.css file:/* Inherit the default theme styles */@import url( ../../plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/css/default.css );/* Inherit the default theme adminbar styles */@import url( ../../plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/css/adminbar.css );Adding my own special widget sidebars and widget areas to the sidebar was a little more complicated, but if anyone comments about it, I'll write a post with more information. It isn't any different from adding widgetized areas to any other Wordpress theme.
Final thoughts about BuddyPress 1.2.x
I see great promise in BuddyPress and it is still the best way to add social features to a Wordpress install. It is also free which is amazing. If you are thinking of going beyond comments on your Wordpress site, I'd suggest waiting a few more updates before giving it a try. The code base is still going through radical changes even though it is beyond 1.0. Any customizations you make to BuddyPress now will most likely need to be redesigned or fixed in later 1.x versions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)