A blog about personal development, making a living online, and following your entrepreneurial pursuits

Do you find yourself overwhelmed by all the different social networking options now available? Do you find yourself spending precious time trying to maintain a presence on a variety of social networking sites? Are you getting frustrated because of the results you are getting from social networking?

If you find yourself experiencing any of the above, then perhaps you need to do what I did and put together a social networking plan!

Simply put, a social networking plan is a plan used to get the results you want from your social networking actions. Whether you use social media to meet new people, market yourself or your business, or to build your brand’s awareness- you need some kind of plan to ensure you’re in control of your social media efforts instead of it controlling you and driving you crazy. This plan is broken down into the following three steps:

This is the third and final part of my How To Setup A WordPress Blog series. In How To Setup A WordPress Blog Part One, I covered why you should consider using WordPress if you are considering starting a blog for professional reasons or if you thinking about switching blog platforms. Then in Part Two, I talked about how you need a hosting plan and domain name before you setup a WordPress blog. I also covered the steps you have to take to install WordPress using the Fantastico program which most hosting companies offer.

Now I’m going to go over some of the steps you should take in order to setup your newly installed WordPress blog. The instructions here in this part apply to WordPress 2.9.2. If you have an earlier version, then some of these instructions may not coincide with the WordPress version you have. These steps will help make your WordPress blog easier for you to manage and maintain along with making your blog more SEO friendly which is vital if you plan on blogging for professional or business reasons. I’ll end this last part with some plugins which I heartily recommend you to try. There’s a lot to this last part so let’s get started!

Are you wanting to start blogging but you are having a hard time deciding which blogging service to use? Do you want to get started blogging using WordPress but you don’t know where to start? Or have you setup a WordPress blog in the past but you want to find an easier and quicker way of doing it? Then this series of articles will help you find the answer to any of these problems.

This How To Setup A WordPress Blog three-part series will cover how I setup the My Adventure Today blog using WordPress. It is the same trouble-free process I have used in the past when setting up other WordPress blogs.

I will lead you step-by-step on how I do it beginning with the installation of the WordPress application to setting up various Dashboard options which will help you manage your WordPress blog, and wrapping things up with where you can download different themes and plug-ins for your WordPress blog.

But I’m going to start things off by talking about why you should consider using WordPress if you are considering jumping into blogging or if you are currently using another blogging platform / service but want to make a change.

Once you begin to play around in Google Analytics, you’ll soon realize there’s a lot of information to take in. Some of it kinda confusing to very confusing. So what should we, the average blogger, keep tabs on? What data will show us what is working and what is not working on our blog? Where can we compare our blog’s new visitors stats to our returning visitors stats?

Before I get started, let me say up front that I am not an expert at Google Analytics. I’m just someone who has been doing a lot of research on it in order to make sense of it for my own blogging needs. And those needs are the following:

1.To see how many new visitors are coming to my blog
2.To see how many returning visitors are coming to my blog
3.How long visitors stay on my blog along with how deep (how many pages) they go?
4.Which pages of my blog has the most traffic
5.Where are people entering and leaving my blog

These five are a good starting point for now. As time passes, I’m sure there will be more areas related to my blog’s traffic I will want to learn more about. But for now, these five will work.

So if you are ready, go ahead and login to your Google Analytics account (you can learn how to do this in part one of this series) and let’s get started!