How do you install Google Analytics on Wordpress?

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

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?

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

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.

Upgrading to BuddyPress 1.2.x

I followed the instructions on the BuddyPress website for upgrading from 1.1.

Essentially you have to:

1. Deactivate BuddyPress and plugins that work with BuddyPress.
2. Update BuddyPress in the plugins page using the upgrade link by the plugin list. (or manually do it by FTP)
3. Delete old BuddyPress theme files from the server. (Previous themes don't work )  OR install a compatibility plugin.
4. 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: 1.0

Author: Your Name


Author URI: http://yourwebsite.com/

Template: bp-default

Tags: 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.

Buddypress 1.1 Works

I've been following the development of Buddypress since it was first announced because I had been searching for a community solution that would have many of the features they announced would be included.    I had even tried an alpha version with horrible results last year.  At that point I had decided to wait until it was beyond 1.0.

qTranslate plugin incompatible

I was actually testing the 1.1 release candidate so I could help with some bugs and I did actually find one.  I also discovered that the current version of qTranslate the multilingual plugin I use totally breaks the new buddypress pages causing "page not found" or whatever your Wordpress 404 page says. This is due to something in the URL rewriting.  I reported it to the qtranslate forum on Monday, but now it is Saturday and there wasn't even a reply to my thread there. This is frustrating because Wordpress doesn't check language tags so pages that were translated display their content twice when the plugin is disabled.

The bug  I had discovered involved a Buddypress function being called when I had that feature disabled in the Buddypress configuration. I was happy to see that the if function exists check was added to the problem line of code the same day I reported it.

Buddypress adds several features and fixed one important problem.

Working Forums

The problem I had and any reader will notice is the integration of forums with wordpress. Wordpress's parent company started their bbPress forum software project before Buddypress but after Wordpress however my testing of the software over the last year only made me want to cry. It was never compatible with recent versions of Wordpress and for about a year there was always a message of it being just a month or two away of being up to date. Also the integration needed so that people wouldn't have to register and log in never seemed to work right.   When it was announced that Buddypress would use bbPress as the forum software I was brought to tears and I totally refused to try 1.0 since you had to manually install bbPress and I remember how much fun that was.

I had tried the SimpleForum software on my sites for several months and it was easy to install and configure, but when I updated my sites to Wordpress 2.8 the forums broke and no content would display even after following their instructions so that promising plugin lost my favor.

In Buddypress 1.1, special code was added so that the integration of the bbPress forum software was automated so you couldn't do it wrong. Additionally the display of forums is also handled so you don't need to log in to bbPress to edit themes and other frustrating tasks you'd want to avoid.  This is great because having to manage a separate theme for integrated forums just does not make sense.

Groups

Buddypress set up a group system which works like bbPress's main forums, but the difference here is that different users can join groups and start threads.  On a group page you can see who is part of the discussion group and the admin can manage it all there.

Friends

Being able to friend someone is fun, but the functionality is that you can invite your friends to join a group not any member.

Blog Directory and Member directory

I was surprised to discover that the system automatically added a directory of blogs (including blog 1) and a directory of members.  I thought I'd need a plugin for those, but they just appeared.

Sitewide Recent Posts

If you enable the Buddypress option to track posts, you'll discover a widget for displaying recent posts from all the blogs.  Before you needed a plugin to do that on Wordpress MU. I don't know when that was added, but I'm glad it was. It saved the installation and configuration of yet-another-plugin.

Buddypress still has much work to do even though it is officially 1.1 it still feels like a beta. Although it was announced from the beginning there still isn't a system for users to make a photo gallery.  You can use a plugin for that though.

There also isn't any way to set a membership level or be able to charge for features. (so you can pay for that dedicated server you'll need)  Since the plugin is for setting up communities, I think memberships really should be included as an essential core feature not something left for plugins.

In any case, I'm happy that the development of Buddypress is active and have great hope for Buddypress in the future.  It was nice to see that Buddypress took care of about half of my "wishlist" in the previous post.

Goodbye Popshops Hello Custom RSS

Goodbye Popshops, Hello Custom RSS!

You may remember that I mentioned how I was using Popshops a graphic interface system for creating product tables for affiliate websites using datafeeds. It let you include up to 99 (100?) products in a table and change the display css and column number all graphically. While this is very nice and at first I was extremely amazed by the product over time I discovered it wasn't the right product for my needs and this month I finally canceled my Popshops account.

This was actually planned this spring, but I was going to replace those product tables or "shops" as Popshops calls them, with my own custom RSS solution. Unfortunately I kept coming up with other tasks to do and kept seeing my credit card charged.  I decided to just cancel my account and spend the next couple weeks removing those old tables and add my custom display as I can.

Popshops is a good solution for people who want to have very general display of products that updates with other products from the same merchants OR people who want a few displays of products that are hand selected.  My problem was that I wanted to have UPDATING displays of SELECT products... see the problem?

Well actually it was simple. I wanted to be able to select up to 4 merchants and using positive and negative keywords show a display of products.  I had asked for that feature for their updates, but it must have been a low priority.

When I used their updating table feature, I'd get replacement products that were not very related. For example I'd have a table with men's swimsuits and I'd get baby clothes and womens bras appearing to replace out of stock or discontinued items. If  just had a general clothing site that would work, but if I call my page "Men's Swimsuits" and the site is for men's clothing there is a problem.

Yes, I could easily log in and scroll down my list of  "shops" find the offending table, remove the unrelated replacement products, do another search in their interface, and add new products. That process is much longer than just doing what I wanted to do which just takes a minute or two to get the right keyword combination and always have existing products appear on those pages.

While it is very easy to make a product table or "shop", it isn't so easy to keep them updated and relevant using that system. I really tried to keep them updated by logging in once a week and finding unavailable products and replacing them in the Popshops system, but sometimes I'd do that and find the next day that some of the replaced products are gone too! I actually got to the point where over half the products in my displays were invalid!  *sigh* Automation is important if you want to have more than one website.  Why reinvent the wheel and make busy work?  I'd rather update my code once in a while than spend a few hours a day updating product tables.      I suppose that isn't really a problem for someone with just one niche site, but with several or many sites, that's a big headache. As I said, it wasn't the right product for me, but it could be the right product for you.

In the last few months Popshops has been releasing a new API which will use positive keywords. (perhaps only one keyword) which looks like a step in the right direction, but I didn't see how that would integrate with a CMS like for the regular shops. I can't give a review of that system because I only saw an example page linked to a forum thread.  To use that you needed to have a more expensive "Data Pack"  account which now costs $59.99 a month pre-paid discounts (as of September 8, 2009). They have added some information on their website about what that service can do.  I unfortunately don't get enough website traffic to justify that expense.  If you have a high traffic website and you don't mind using an API, this might be a good solution for you. Lower traffic websites probably would find themselves breaking even or worse after subtracting their expenses.  Good economy or bad economy, you still have to renew your domain name every year, and pay for hosting in addition to fees for services like this one.

Conceptually the Data Pack service is an interesting option for people willing to program, but who don't want to go through the set up of getting and importing datafeeds from each merchant on their own hosting account.  If time is more important than money and you want to skip those steps  for your high-traffic website then this might be good for you.

Unfortunately, dear reader, I don't have any real alternative to recommend for what I wanted to do  other than to code your own system.  I found that RSS feeds are the easiest to work with when managing external content. That way if you switch from Wordpress to Joomla or Joomla to Drupal, etc.  you can just figure out how to import RSS and your display will still work.   I coded my own PHP display as RSS taking information from my mysql tables which got their info from merchant datafeed files. Sound complicated? yes, it was. It took me about a year to learn how to program in PHP and at least a couple months learning how to use mysql, automating my datafeed imports and at least a month working on the display and search options.  It isn't for the unmotivated. You have been warned.  :-)

Google Adsense Google Analytics Integration FINALLY available

Integrate Google Adsense with Google Analytics

Way back in October Google Adsense's blog officially launched integration for Adsense with Analytics so you'd actually know when your blog posts or pages are getting clicks and be able to optimize even more.  I don't know about you, but I found the Adsense channels not very interesting and sometimes more confusing.

The Problem with Adsense channels

Yes, if you set up a channel for a site you'd know that a site was getting clicks, but without knowing which URLs or URIs were getting the clicks, there wasn't much you could do.

One big question I have is if people are clicking just on product info pages, category pages, coupon pages, blog post pages, etc.?  If people are only clicking on ads on certain pages then I could perhaps use a larger format on them and remove ads from the pages that don't get clicks.

I'd also be able to compare the content and see if a certain writing style or a specific topic or category were getting clicks IF I could see those statistics.

From October my excitement turned to worries of vaporware. It is hard to stay focused and excited after seeing almost half a year go by without an update on the Google Adsense blog. In fact, I had forgotten about it until yesterday I saw the  link in my Adsense statistics telling me I can integrate... It took me a while to remember what that was about and I spent this morning adding Analytics code to my header and footer only loading when no Wordpress cookie is set since normally the logged in user is me 99% of the time.

The Google Adsense Analytics integration solution

Google Adsense integration with Google Analytics adds a new "Adsense" menu item under "content" in Google Analytics's sidebar menu.  If you click on that you'll see statistics on how much money was earned for that website profile and you CAN see which page was clicked on!

You can also see information about the people who clicked on an advertisement like the city they live in.  Perhaps you'll want to make a post just for that visitor next time.  Another great feature to the integreation is the ability to see clicks by referrer (website that linked to you!), so if you got a link from another blog or a forum and someone clicked through and then clicked on a Google Adsense advertisement on your website, there'd be a reference there. This can be useful because you could work more with those sites to get more traffic and hopefully make more money to pay those hosting & domain registration bills!

The Adsense report page is now very detailed with the common statistics to help you understand your CPC earnings. You get statistics per impression, per visit, per Adsense unit,  and Click Through Rate. The pages with the most earnings and the top referrers are listed right below.

I think the pages with the most earnings will be great. The usual pages with the most visits will not necessarily be the pages with the most earnings. I'm excited again! Thank you Google for finally making statistics available. I'll be checking it often.