How to Videos for Wordpress Blogging

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WordPress has become a hugely popular open source blogging and publishing platform. The abundance of free themes and plugins as well as its ease-of-use have contributed to the attraction and popularity for using WordPress. While there are some great free themes for WordPress, many only offer basic functionality and simplistic designs.

Since late 2007 however an increasing number of WordPress theme developers have been offering premium WordPress themes – themes which are offered for a fixed price. These premium WordPress themes are usually sold for between $50 to $250. Originally only a small number of talented and well-known WordPress theme designers created paid premium WordPress themes which were well designed, highly functional, top-quality themes that transformed a WordPress installation from a simple blog into a powerful content management system. However as the premium WordPress theme business concept spread, more and more WordPress theme designers have hopped on the bandwagon trying to cash on the new trend filling up their portfolio with premium (paid) wordpress themes.

However with greater variety and numbers of paid premium WordPress themes also comes varying levels of quality. So what specifically makes a premium WordPress theme premium? Some characteristics that should set a premium wordpress theme apart from a free theme are listed below:

Quality and Unique Design

Premium WordPress themes should be just that – Premium. They should look better and be of a much higher quality and unique design than compared to those available for free.

Wordpress Theme Features

While all themes are different, in general premium WordPress themes should have more “Features” than their free counterparts. What that means depends on the theme in question. However some features may include: “Featured Posts” areas, Multiple layout options for the home page, drop down menus, multiple customs templates for pages, custom field options, print style sheets etc.

Theme Customization Options and Fexibility

People want options, so Premium WordPress themes should be customisable. Buying a premium theme will set you apart from the crowd significantly, but since other people will still be using the same theme, premium themes should be able to be easily customized further, whether it be for the layout, colours, images, or all of the above.

Theme Live Preview or Demo

There should be a live demo or preview of the theme so you can test it and check it out before buying. If there is no live preview or demo that should be a warning sign. You should ask why don’t they want you to test the theme first? All reputable premium theme sellers will have a live demo full of content for you to test. Explore the live demo thoroughly, testing all pages to see that the theme works properly and there are no errors or mistakes.

Full Wordpress Theme Support

If you’re buying a premium WordPress theme it should also come with a certain degree of support from the designer. The level of support can vary however and will range from personalised individual support from the designer, to the provision of forums or blog comment sections for asking questions and obtaining support from the designer and other people who have purchased the theme.

Theme Supporting Documentation

Premium WordPress themes should come with an instruction manual or document. This should explain how to upload and install the theme and how to manage any of the options that are built into the theme.

Free Wordpress Theme Updates

Wordpress is continually being updated and improved and a premium WordPress theme developer should be offering you free updates of the theme when required.

Well Coded Theme and Error Free

There should be no coding errors, misspellings, X images, etc in a premium WordPress theme. The theme has cross browser compatible and been tested to work properly on all the major browsers, plus the theme should have clean and valid code and adhere to strict XHTML and CSS standards.

There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is Wordpress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress, the earliest now termed as “Wordpress” at Wordpress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed “Wordpress.com” which is of course available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We’ll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of Wordpress. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, Wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

Why Is It Important to Monitor Your Wordpress Blog Stats?

You have blogging goals, presumably, and how will you know if you are hitting those goals if you don’t know your wordpress blog stats.

Your statistics can tell you many things: how many people visit each day, where they come from geographically, which pages they visit most and many other things as well.

Where Do I Find My Stats?

The first place to look for your stats is in Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google (obviously) to help you to monitor your wordpress blog traffic. Google analytics can monitor the traffic on any website not just on blogs. The key is to set it up properly.

We have a video in our video catalog called Install Google Analytics which will show you how to set up Google Analytics if you haven’t done so already.


Once you have installed Google Analytics you need to make sure that you have the proper filters in place. Our video on Google Analytics – How to Install a Filter is a useful blogging tool that you can find in one of our earlier posts. The filter is used to filter out your visits to your own wordpress blog so that Google doesn’t include your visits in your statistics.


The second place to look for your traffic statistics is in your cpanel which is connected to your hosting account. The statistics in your cpanel account will be different from those in your Google Analytics account because you can’t apply filters to your cpanel statistics.

Still it is useful to have a look in both places because you can glean extra information.

Step 1- Log Into Your Google Analytics Account

The first thing you will see is an overview of your wordpress blog traffic. Google Analytics keeps a running tally of how many people have visited our blog and compares it to the previous month (you can change these settings).

Step 2 – Look At Your Wordpress Blog Traffic Statistics In More Detail

Click on the view report button and you are taken to the dashboard. You see a graphical representation of the visitors per day along the top. You can change the time period displayed.

The dashboard also gives you an overview of the:

Whenever you click on view report under each category you see more detailed statistics. For very separate category you can find out:

The bounce rate is how quickly someone clicks onto your site and leaves again. The higher the bounce rate the quicker they are leaving so a lower bounce rate means they are actually staying on your wordpress blog site and reading or watching your content.

How Many People Visit My Wordpress Blog?

If you drill down deeper in the Visitor Overview section by viewing report you can see how many unique visitors you have had to your wordpress blog and how many are returning visitors.

The statistics also tell you how many pages on average they view on your blog, how long they stay on your blog and even the web browser they are using.

Where Does The Traffic To My Wordpress Blog Come From?

Clicking on the view report under the “Map Overlay” section of the Google Analytics dashboard will show which geographical regions your visitors come from. As you might expect most of our visitors come form the USA and Australia but we have European and Asian visitors as well. If you click on a country that you are interested in you can get more regional data as well. It’s actually quite amazing how specific you can become with these statistics.

Which Sites Send Traffic To My Wordpress Blog?

The traffic sources report gives you a visual representation of your traffic sources using a colored pie chart. You can easily track the main sources of your wordpress blog traffic. The major categories represented in the pie chart are referring sites, search engine and direct traffic.


A high proportion of search engine traffic means that you are getting lots of organic traffic. A high proportion of direct traffic may be coming from other strategies such as Google Adwords campaigns. Presumably, for a wordpress blog organic traffic would be the preferred traffic source.

If the content from your blog is being picked and utilized by other bloggers you might see a high proportion of referred traffic. Referred traffic may also come from other strategies such as using articles to drive traffic to your blog.

Which Keywords Are Important Sources Of Traffic For My Wordpress Blog?

Google Analytics even tells you which keywords draw the most traffic to your wordpress blog. This feature can be found within the traffic sources reports. This feature can help you track you Adword Campaigns. It can also tell you if you are using your keywords and keyphrases in an optimized way.

Which Parts Of My Content On My Wordpress Blog Are Drawing The Most Traffic?

This information can be found by drilling into the content reports. You can see which of your pages are being viewed most often. By using the site overlay feature you can see which of the links on your page are being clicked on most frequently.


There is also much more information that Google Analytics provides but these are the variables to check regularly so that you know how your wordpress blog is performing.


Your cpanel will also provide you with similar information but since each cpanel provides their statistical data in a slightly different way, it is too big a topic to discuss at this time.


If you need any help setting up Google Analytics on your wordpress blog our video on Installing Google Analytics will give you step by step instructions.