Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

Why You Should Be Using WordPress on Your Website

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

If you do not have a blog, then you should. With a blog you can encourage user interaction, start conversations, ask questions, post content, and much, much more. Also, search engines love blogs, and therefore blogs can rank more highly than similar websites. You have probably noticed that you come across many blogs during your searches, so you should know that I am not lying.

You may have noticed that I tend to love WordPress blogs. In fact, what you are looking at right now is a WordPress blog that I have put onto my website. You may have also noticed that I have created WordPress themes that you can use for free.

Why do I like WordPress so much? Well, here are a few of the reasons that I absolutely love WordPress blogs and why I think everyone should be using them:

1. Anyone Can Use It

Anyone can add a WordPress blog to their site either using Fantastico or through WordPress.org. This means that anyone can add a WordPress blog to their website, or make their website a WordPress blog. It is also free, which means you can have a great blog set up on your website in no time!

2. It is Search Engine Friendly

WordPress blogs are designed in a way that is friendly for search engines. This means that your blog will get indexed quickly and rank highly with little effort on your part. You can also get plugins that can enable you to really set up your posts and pages so that they easily rank in the search engines.

3. You Can Choose From Thousands of Themes

With WordPress you can choose from thousands upon thousands of themes so your blog will look like whatever you want it to. You can even get themes that look like normal websites, but still have all the benefits of a WordPress blog.

4. No HTML Required

If you have no knowledge of HTML, it doesn’t matter with Worpress. At times it can be helpful, but HTML is not needed to have a fully operable WordPress blog.

5. Thousands of Plugins & Widgets

Probably one of the best parts of WordPress is that you can use thousands of plugins and widgets so that you can automate many processes including SEO, and you can add many cool features such as polls, surveys, language translators, and basically anything you can think of to your blog!

These are just 5 of the reasons you should be using WordPress blogs. If you are not already using one, you should seriously look into it right away. WordPress is an amazing tool that if you aren’t using, you are missing out.

To Your Success,

Shawn Horwood

If you would like to take your internet/affiliate marketing to the next step, then I want to help you! Visit my blog for more Articles, Resources, Product Reviews, Search Engine Optimization Tips, Profitable Niches, and more: Make Money Online Blog

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Can I Learn WordPress in One Week?

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

You own a small Italian gourmet store and are passionate about Italian cooking. You have been advised to start a blog for a long time and now that you have decided to do so, you are a little concerned about the technical details of the whole process. You just want to share your cooking passion with others through the blog and hope to hear about new recipes as well. Not being technically inclined, you wonder if you would be at the mercy of some technical person every time you are in the mood to write up something on your blog. Well, with WordPress, you have the power to build a blog and manage it just the way you want.

Learning the Basics of WordPress

You can certainly learn the basics of WordPress in one week, maybe even less. To begin with, there are two ways in which you can use WordPress. You can install WordPress on your website through your web hosting service provider and customize it to suit your needs. This will give you more flexibility and control over the website, but you’ll need some basic technical skills in setting it up. The other simpler option is to use WordPress.com which provides you free blogging services. You can begin your blog in a matter of minutes. Being a free service, it does have its limitations but is quite enough if you are just starting out. It offers enough customization to give a professional look to your blog.

Note that there are two WordPress sites: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The .com site provides the free blogging service and the .org site provides the technical support, free themes and plugins for more advanced users.

To start your own blog, visit the WordPress.com website and click on the ‘Sign Up’ button. You will immediately be taken through several screens where you will have to fill in simple details like your email address, user name you desire and your password. You will of course be asked if you would like to start a blog and if so, you will be asked for the desired blog name. You may want the name ‘ItalianGourmet’ for your blog and being on WordPress, the complete address will be ‘italiangourmet.wordpress.com’. Your site will be a subdomain because it’s part of the WordPress.com site.

As you log into your new blog you will be taken to the user dashboard. From here you will be able to customize the blog by changing the design, adding useful features – called widgets – like an RSS feed, search tool, area for user comments and so on. You can decide what content goes where on your blog. If you have any problems, you just need to click on the ‘Support’ tab and you will be given access to online help and will also be directed to many user forums where similar issues are being discussed.

Once you have finished customizing the look of your blog and have added enough functionality to it, you are now ready to write your first blog. All you need to do is type your thoughts, give it a suitable title and click on ‘Publish’ for your first blog post to go live. You have learned the basics of how to use WordPress! It’s that easy to get started.

Though WordPress is better known as a blogging tool, it can also be used as a complete website management tool as well. Most hosting companies now include WordPress in their hosting packages. Although this does allow for greater freedom in designing and developing your website on the whole, it does require some technical expertise. A good option is to start off with a blog on WordPress.com and get comfortable using it before moving on to a hosted option.

Kurt R. Hansen

Find out more at: TheWebHostReport

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Blogging on WordPress – A Delightful Experience

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Blogging is an effective weapon using which you can communicate, interact, build credibility and community of readers thereby driving in remarkable web traffic to your website and opening multiple revenue streams.
Blogging, in addition, empowers you to hone your writing skills & pen down your thoughts convincingly on the World Wide Web and enables you to create a strong online presence.
Where to set up the blog?

Thanks to a blogging platform like WordPress! Now anyone can start writing a blog even without adequate knowledge of web designing or web hosting. Take a quick tour of the steps mentioned below that would help you get started with blogging instantly:

1) Create a free account on WordPress.com and give a name to your blog as per your choice. However, there are some important points to keep in mind while choosing a name for your blog:
- The name of the blog must be easy to remember.
- The name of the blog must work for you.
- The name of the blog must not be lengthy or complicated.

2) Once you’re done with filling in all the details & creating your account, you can log in and then you’d be directed to the dashboard.

3) Selecting a theme for your blog matching your blog message can be a mind-boggling task. However, WordPress gives you ample of options to choose from. Click on the “Appearance” section on the left hand bar, which would direct you to the themes page. You get to see the theme thumbnails and then choose a theme that you like the most. Activate the picked theme. Click on ‘View this Site’ and see how it appears.

4) Write a test post that would fetch you some firsthand experience about blogging on WordPress. You can
delete this post later on.

5) Add a Category under which you want your post to be published.

6) To add a new post to your blog, click on “Add New” button that is placed on the left-hand side menu bar.

7) Once you have finished the writing part, you’d like to enhance your write-up with some visually appealing images to add value to your post.

8) You can add images and hyperlinks (if any) in your write up.

9) Before publishing, do not forget to add the tags you want for your blog post. Tags can be the keywords that you have used in your post.

10) Place your post under the relevant category.

11) Once you have added the tags & category, click on the “Publish” button.

12) Now visit your website to see how your post appears on the Internet.

13) Also if you wish to customize your blog some more, you can:
- Remove the default post by clicking on the Edit button under “Posts” on the dashboard. Put your mouse on the post that you wish to delete and click on the “delete” button there.
- You can also edit the post similarly by clicking on the “edit” button there.
- You can edit the default “About Me” page that comes with WordPress blog. You can write down some about yourself, your career interest and other personal information such as likes, dislikes, hobbies etc.
- You can also adjust your widgets, which can be easily accessed via Appearance button. Remember to put the widget appropriately on your blog post.
- We hope that by now you must have gained a fair idea about blogging on WordPress. Get started with sharing your thoughts with the world in the company of your online friend-WordPress.

Mark is an online marketing consultant and has worked with renowned organizations and published authors for more than 5 years now. With stupendous professional business writing related to the topic Web Hosting, Domain name etc.. and a penchant for traveling around the world, Mark has got a lot to say.

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WordPress Login Security

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

WordPress remains a very secure and stable blogging platform, but there is more that can be done out of the box to help protect your private data. There are many simple steps that can be taken, even by the inexperienced blog owner and a multitude of plug-ins available that can help. Once thing to be particularly aware of is brute force attacks. Brute force login attempts are one of the more common, rather annoying and potentially dangerous types that can occur.

Brute force happens when an attacker targets the login screen for your blog and repeatedly attempts to guess the username and password to gain access. By default, WordPress allows you to type in incorrect usernames and passwords infinitely. Since there is nothing to stop the attacker, they can try for minutes or hours entering a dictionary list of names and simple passwords in the hope of just stumbling upon the correct one. Installing something as simple as the “Login Lockdown” plug-in can combat this.

The plug in works by limiting the number of attempts you can make to enter your username and password in a given timeframe (typically 3 tries in a 5 minute period). Once that limit is reached, the IP address of the potential attacker is blocked for up to an hour. This is usually enough to discourage the would be hacker and make them move on to a different target. There are many plug-ins that can do this, but we recommend the plugin is recommended for three reasons:

  1. Easy to set up
  2. Easy to administrate
  3. It just plain works!

Brian Yurick

Need help installing, upgrading or optimizing your WordPress blog or site? http://easywordpressinstall.com can help. Try us out!

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WordPress is No Longer Just For Blogging

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Seems like a rash statement I know. But by the time you finish this article you will know six ways to use WordPress besides as a blog. Exactly why WordPress is more powerful than the majority of static websites. And why you should be using it too.

WordPress is well known as one of the best, if not the best, blog platforms around. What you may not know is that with minimal effort WordPress can be used in not just one or two other types of sites but at least six and probably ways besides Being used as a blogging platform. Don’t believe me here are six different ways you can use WordPress.

1. As a squeeze page to collect leads for your email list

2. As a review site allowing you to make affiliate sales

3. As a sales letter for your product that is search engine friendly

4. As a static looking site for any regular content site

5. As a membership site to help you generate residual income

6. As an affiliate site to promote your favorite affiliate programs

Those are the ways that you can use WordPress That brings up the question as to why you would want to use it for any of those things. There are 3 primary reasons.

1. The structure of a WordPress blog with just a couple of plugins is very appealing to the search engines.

2. Search engines tend to spider them faster because of the structure that is inherent in the software.

3. Add in the automated RSS feed and you have a perfectly set up spider friendly site quickly and easily.

Think how many more visitors you can get by having the search engines liking your site structure. Think your page just may rank a bit higher in Google, Yahoo and Bing? Will that generate more visitors to your site for whatever purpose you are using it? I sure think so what about you?

The other great thing about WordPress is the ease of installation and the vast number of plugins. You can add lots of functionality quickly and easily. There are literally thousands of plugins available to you.. The really nice part is most of them are free.

There are also a huge number of themes available to customize your blog to get the look you want to achieve. All of these things together mean that once you get comfortable with WordPress you just may put your webmaster out of a job. It is easy when you know how.

To discover exactly how to bend WordPress to your will spy on this programming nerd and watch exactly how he does it at http://WPNerds.com

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How to Reset WordPress Administrator’s Password

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

You installed WordPress and you forgot the administrator’s password. You’ll need it back for a lot of reasons.

  • you need to perform certain administrative operations, from time to time. You must be logged as an administrator do do that.
  • if you are the sole author, usually you’ll publish as an administrator
  • if you posted as an administrator and you got a reply, you have to get inside the adminstrative panel in order to approve it or to delete it.

The password is stored in the WordPress MySQL database, in the encrypted form. In order to reset it, you have several choices.

1. You can use the link “I forgot the password” to receive a reset link by eMail. The problem is that, sometimes, you don’t receive that eMail.

Possible reasons for not getting the eMail:

  • you set a wrong eMail address when you created the blog
  • the eMail is filtered by the ISP’s SPAM filter and you don’t have access to it
  • the hosting server is simply not sending the eMail.

2. You can access the database, using PHP MyAdmin. This method is very hard to do because:

  • you might not have PHP MyAdmin available and your hosting company will not allow you to install it
  • you need to know MySQL well enough to be able to write an encrypted password in the database
  • the name of the table that contains the password can change from version to version. WordPress made quite some changes to the table names over the years.

3. You can use only FTP and simple search to reset WordPress administrator’s password

Try to think as the program. What the program does is simple:

  • it compares the password you enter with the password from the WordPress database
  • if they are identical, it will let you access the administrative panel
  • otherwise, it will ask you to enter another password.

The above behaviour can be changed. There is only one character, from one file, that needs to be changed. After changing it, the system will allow you to login using any WRONG password. Once inside, you can reset the password, by using the WordPress’ interface. Guess what? WordPress will not ask you for the current password.

Method 3 has some exceptional advantages:

  • it works with ANY version of WordPress, because it’s not influenced by the changes of the tables from the WordPress’ database.
  • it’s by far the most safer, because you’re not playing with the database, but with some plain text files.
  • it does not need PHP MyAdmin to work. You only need FTP access to transfer back and forth one file from the server to your computer.

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The Easy Way to Turn Your WordPress Into a True CMS

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

WordPress is becoming a very popular blogging platform by each day. Now a days it is used not only for blogging but large scale business content management systems. You can do almost anything with WordPress if you really have good knowledge of WordPress.

There are thousands of free themes available for WordPress but sometimes you need to have a unique design for yourself. The easiest way to create a theme for WordPress is to use some online theme builders.There might be many online WordPress theme builders tool but you may have never seen such a tool.

WPThemeBuilder is not only just a formatting tool but can also build premium WordPress themes. Here are some good things about WPThemeBuilder

  • You can do all formatting and styling up of elements like all other online theme builder tool does.
  • Theme background formatting with built-in image manager and ability to upload your own graphics (best for designers)
  • Rounded corners support for layouts (browser compatible feature)
  • Customize almost every part of your WordPress themes including theme background, wrapper, header, sidebar, content column
  • Custom Home Page (Rocking Feature): Now you can create a custom home page that will have different look than all of your other site pages.
  • Archive Layouts (Another rocking feature): Create themes from simple blogging style to complex magazine based styles by choosing an archive style from a big list.
  • WordPress CMS Widgets : These widgets are a part of your home page. You can add/remove these widgets to your home page. This is a big help for business oriented websites. Once you added any of premium widgets to your home page , its control panel will be automatically built and embedded in your WordPress admin area.. These widgets are of many types such as text widgets, photo gallery widgets, content sliders widgets, slide show widgets, multi-column magazine widgets, sticky post widget, tabbed content widget and a lot more.
  • Drop down menus in your hands: Now you can also create drop down menus for any page or categories list. These drop down menus can also be configured from WP-Admin and you can add/remove menu items in these menus.

In short, WPThemeBuilder is an excellent product and it can defeat the popular rockers very easily such as WP-Remix, thesis, revolution and all theme clubs. Because those themes and clubs does not gives you a unique end-product but WPThemeBuilder does…. And it have better flexibility over them.

Best for those people who manage a lot of sites and don’t want to pay extra cost to the developers.

Imran is a professional web designer and developer and also have very good WordPress development experience. He built the WPThemeBuilder which is becoming a popular community of WordPress users.

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Five Reasons You Too Will Love WordPress

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

After working on my blogs for several hours today I finally understand why WordPress is, in my opinion is the premier blogging program available today….and it’s COOL.

Now, that is really an understatement and the est of this article will explain why. So, here are just five (5) of the reasons I fell and continue to be in love with WordPress.

Reason #1: It’s FREE – I love open source, free stuff. Because it’s free and open source, (meaning that individuals can add to the code. WordPress, being open source, is constantly changing due to the help of a world of programmers rather than being the property of a group of self-anointed experts who develop based upon their own needs rather than upon the needs of the WordPress community. That by itself is a major statement and not to be minimized.

Reason #2: Do It Your Way – With WordPress you have a couple of choices as to how you will develop your blog. You can use the free (I love saying free) application at WordPress or if you have your own domain (the more suggested pathway) you can use a program like Fantistico usually found in your domain’s cpanel and upload WordPress to your own domain.This is the preferred way because it truly gives you almost unlimited control and you own the blog.

Reason #3 – No More Websites – WordPress provides you with a different way to create websites so that you don’t have to design them in the old fashioned way. WordPress blogs (and I guess blogs in general) are really just simple websites that can basically replace most of the reasons to create websites in any other way.

Reason #4 – Plug Me In – Now this is really where WordPress shines. Because of it being open source, WordPress provides the world community the ability to easily develop unique little programs that integrate easily with your WordPress blog. The number and variety of “plug-ins” is abundant. Just think of something you’d like to do with your blog and I’ll bet there is a plug-in somewhere that will accomplish the task…and did I mention that most of the plug-ins are FREE.

Reason #5: Change Your Appearance As Often As You Change Your Underwear – OK. If having lots of different blogs with different looks is something you want, there are hundreds of themes available for you to use. Most of these themes are FREE and they can be installed in a matter of seconds not minutes.

OK, I’ll give you one more reason for free….you can create as many WordPress blogs as you can imagine. There is no limit on the number or types of blogs you can create with WordPress. The only limitations is your own creativity and possibly your wants and needs.

Conclusion – In reality there are probably many other reasons beyond the five (OK six) reasons I present in this brief article. Now is the time for you to get going with creating your first blog with WordPress on your own domain and I’m positive you’ll start falling love as well.

Find out everything you need to know about WordPress at “WordPress Unleashed” , a library of thirteen (13) videos that will make you a WordPress expert and provide you with an opportunity to take WordPress and your online business to the next level.

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How to Secure WordPress

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

If you are an internet marketer, you probably have quite a bit on your plate already.   You have spent a great deal of time putting together a good website or blog and are really concentrating on how to deliver your product or information.   Unfortunately, there are a certain breed of people out there in cyberspace whose self appointed mission is to break into your vault and create havoc.

If you are using WordPress as a platform to blog from, here are a few tips on how to secure WordPress

Keep WordPress Updated and Backed Up

Older versions of WordPress still have many vulnerabilities that are widely known in the hacker community.  To their credit, the WordPress people are always doing their best to plug security holes and are updating constantly.   So your first line of defense is to keep your blogging platform updated.

Medical Tip:  To avoid increasing your blood pressure, always be sure to make a backup of your blog before installing any updates.   Its a good idea to regularly to keep your WordPress backed up regularly anyhow, since any number of things can go wrong.

Another tip is to delete the meta tags that tells the world of the version of Wp you are using.  This info is usually in the header file.

Keep Your Plugins Hidden

One of the great things about using WordPress is the plugins. While they greatly increase your blogs capabilities, they too contain certain bugs and vulnerabilities that are exploited by hackers.   So be sure to keep them updated also.

It is easy for anyone to see what type of plugins you are using by visiting the wp-content/plugins folder.   To keep potential intruders from finding out the plugins that you use, create an empty  ‘index.html’  file and place it in your plugins folder

Its also a good idea to check your plugin folder and make sure the plugins there are the ones you want.  Some hacker, once they get into your files upload their own plugin.   So if you see something that you are not familiar with, delete it.

Here is a  Free WP plugin that keeps track of the attempts to login to your site.   Many hackers use brute force to try and get your password.   So, if there are too many of them coming from the same IP address within a short period of time, the plugin will disable the login function for that IP range.   Login Lockdown:  bad-neighborhood.com.  Click on login lockdown and you will be taken to the download page.   Be sure to check out their other plugins to.

Change Your Passwords

This is an easy hack that is often exploited.  You can have a more  secure blog by making up a crazy, difficult password.   Even change it monthly if need be.

But not only your WordPress login.  Don’t forget your hosting account and your ftp passwords as well.

Headache tip: Be sure to write your passwords down immediately and keep all your them all in a safe place.

Secure the /wp-admin/ directory

Your  most sensitive WordPress information is stored in the /wp-admin/ folder.  By default, WordPress leaves that folder open, so people can access these files to make changes  if they know what they are doing.

To secure this folder:

Place an .htaccess file inside the /wp-admin/ folder to block the access to all IP addresses, except yours.

Here is the code you need to put in the .htaccess file:

AuthUserFile /dev/null

AuthGroupFile /dev/null

AuthName “Example Access Control”

AuthType Basic

order deny,allow

deny from all

allow from xx.xx.xx.xx

allow from xx.xx.xxx.xx

Now, ff you ever find your site being redirected to another website you will need to:

Check For Hidden Code

This requires a bit more knowledge of the inner workings of WP on your part, so don’t mess with it unless you know what you are doing.

Browse your theme files

Log into your WordPress control panel, go to the theme editor, and look inside your theme files.   See if there are any lines of code that are not supposed to be there, or that contain a PHP code that you don’t recognize.

Check your database tables

Some hackers upload fake images to your “Uploads” folder and activate them with a plugin call.   To detect this you need to open PHPMyAdmin, browse the “wp-options” table, and edit the “active_plugins” record.

On that record you will see a list of all the plugins that active on your blog.   Delete any that seem unusual or that you aren’t using

Browse your site files through FTP

Log into your FTP account and browse through the folders on your site.   You are looking for any files that have a strange name or that look suspicious.    If you have another WordPress blog installed on another site, compare the structure of the files to make sure they match up.

Tip to avoid a heart attack:  Remember: Backup, backup, backup, before you star messing with anything!

Be Fearless

Billy Ojai

Do you want to make more money in Internet Marketing? One way is to learn good copywriting techniques. Pick up your Free copy of ‘Copywriting for the Web’ at http://billyojai.com

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Add Google Analytics to WordPress

Monday, June 1st, 2009

So much has changed in the way business is done and viewed of since the internet and numerous internet-based technologies were introduced. And a fact is that a lot of entrepreneurs and marketers are doing very well with the help of the internet, whether the business maybe online or an ordinary company having a website for customer attraction.

Marketing certainly plays a very vital role in operating a business and this is one business aspect that entrepreneurs cannot afford to ignore. Marketing a company’s products or services does not end with creating advertisements or creating a website. But this doesn’t mean you also stop with just the creation of the website and having it up live.

Operating a website provides a very good opportunity and gateway for entrepreneurs to monitor how their products or services appeal to the general public, most specifically people who visit their websites. It enables entrepreneurs to check and analyze everything that goes on in the website and use this information to come up with ideas to improve or generate solutions for weak points that they could point out. This is all made possible by website statistic options available online.

For this very specific purpose, Google Analytics would be the best choice for any website operator or owner. It is one of the most efficient and effective website statistics services available on the net. The best part is that it doesn’t cost a thing. It’s completely free. It allows you to monitor and track the activities on your website and analyze this information in order to find ways on how to increase traffic and gain more customers. You can check the number of visits by the day of the week, the time period, the page view, bounce rates, the sources of traffic, the location of visitors and a whole lot of valuable information.

First things first, you have to sign up with Google Analytics. Make sure to use a Google account. If you do not have one, sign up for one and use this information for Google Analytics. Then go to the Analytics page of Google and click on Access Analytics. If you already have an account, you will be redirected to your Overview page. If you do not have a website registered yet, you should create one. Make sure to provide all necessary details required for the registration especially the URL. This information will be necessary for the monitoring and tracking of the WordPress site you will be registering. After filling up the necessary information, click on yes after reading and agreeing to the Google Analytics Terms and Services.

This will then take you to your tracking code information, which you will need to copy and paste for reference purposes. There are two kinds of tracking codes provided:  urchin.js script which is used for older versions of WordPress and the new ga.js script which is used for the updated WordPress. Also take note of all the instructions available in the same page.

For an existing Google Analytics user, from the Overview page you can access your profile and copy your tracking code by going to the Action column of the profile and clicking Edit. At the top right of the ‘Main Website Profile Information’ box, click Check Status. You can view and copy your tracking code from here and view the Instructions for adding tracking to your WordPress.

Now you’ll have to download a zip file for the Google Analytics plugin. The plugin is set up to automatically ignore authors that are logged in, and track special events that may occur on your pages, including newsletter subscriptions and also allows you to easily add Google’s web tracking script to your site.

This could be downloaded through WordPress.org where all you’ll need is the Analytics Account Id which is embedded in the tracking code. You could also get this through a company called Semiologic.com which effectively manages WordPress. You can download it from there and once you check your plug-ins section, you can see that you have a Google Analytics option where you can paste the tracking code.

You’ve completed installing and encoding Google Analytics into your WordPress. Wait for 24 hours till you start seeing reports and other valuable information.

For a video instruction on Add Google Analytics to WordPress visit: http://www.TheCustomerCompass.com/add-google-analytics-to-wordpress/

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