What are my two most important plugins?
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My main aim for The Photographer Blog is cultivating and fostering a community where photographers can talk about their love. And I aim to do that by attracting readers and building the RSS subscribers to the blog. Therefore the two most important plugins to to let me do this are Google Analytics and Feedburner Feedsmith.
Google Analytics
This will help me to track my visitors and let me see where they are coming from and which articles they like. So I can then choose the best traffic generation for the blog. Using this in conjunction with AWStats or Webalizer statistic packages will give me good information about my blog trends that I can use to help it grow further.
I have an account already so I can just add the new case study blog to the websites being tracked. It will give me a unique code to place on the blog on whichever pages I want. Then it will track my visitor’s, what they read, what they click, where they have come from and how long they stayed, plus more. It really gives a great insight into what my readers and visitors like and how I can make the blog better.
But it can be a bit messy placing code before the body tag on all the pages, so that’s why I use the google analytics plugin to make the process a lot easier. Once installed I put in the my unique id number and the plugin will read the code from google and place it automatically on all the pages of the blog. The only thing you have to remember is if you change your theme like I have done recently on this blog, then you need to move the code across in the templates or the tracking will not work. You can tell if it’s working and receiving data on the analytics site.
Feedburner Feedsmith
To build my RSS subscribers I first need to make it as easy as possible to subscribe to my feed. The first thing I want to sort out is my feedburner feed so visitors to the blog will be able to subscribe. So I went to my account on feedburner and burnt the new blogs feed, which just means entering my url and feedburner checks for it’s feeds and identifies them. Then you pick the feed you want because there can be more than one, I went with RSS 2.0. It then creates a feed url, and that is how my visitors will be able to subscribe to the blog.
Because there can be more than one feed and there are lots of ways to subscribe to a feed, it is best to use the feedburner feedsmith plugin and this will gather subscribers from any of the subscription methods and direct them to the right feed. It will also make the feed easier to find and more importantly subscribe to.
Then putting the orange RSS icon on the blog with the feedburner choice of subscribe options will make it easier for visitors to subscribe.
These are the first plugins to be installed onto the blog, so that the RSS subscription option is up and running straight away. What is the main aim for your blog? Which plugins would you install first?
Thanks
Mandy
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