I always recommend using self-hosted WordPress instead of the free version, as you end up having much more control over your site. However, one area in which I’ve always felt a bit cheated with WordPress.org sites is the lack of built-in stats monitoring. I guess this is why most bloggers end up using sites like Google Analytics to keep track of things – myself included.
There are also third-party WordPress plugins available which provide some of this functionality – I wrote about one such statistics plugin a few months back. But a couple of days ago I stumbled across another plugin – that provides the bona fide WordPress.com stats within a WordPress.org blog! Now, this is not a new plugin – it’s been around for a couple of years already by the looks of it – but it’s the first I’d heard of it.
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This morning I was checking out my stats in Google Analytics, and noticed that I’ve been getting a little traffic coming from StumbleUpon. Great stuff! But I wanted to know which article(s) were generating the buzz; unfortunately I had no idea how to find out. I tried the obvious: I tried searching StumbeUpon itself for my domain name, but that didn’t get me anywhere.
Now, I do happen to know how to find a specific page in Stumbleupon: simply navigate to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/ and append the url of the page you’re looking for (thanks to Terence Chang for the tip). This can be quite a handy way of finding out who submitted your article, what they said about it, what category it was put in, etc. But still, the thought of repeating this for each of my posts to try and find which one(s) had been stumbled didn’t fill me with great excitement. So I decided to try to find the answer elsewhere.
Continue reading ‘Where’s the StumbleUpon buzz on your site?’
Every blogger or website owner should check their stats regularly to measure the progress (or lack thereof) of their site – things like:
- traffic
- subscribers
- revenue from ads and affiliates
The key, as with so many other things in life, is not to overdo it. Every minute you spend checking your stats is a minute you could have spent crafting that latest post or networking with other sites via commenting, social bookmarking, or whatever other means you choose to build your traffic.
I know I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to this, which is why I was thrilled the other day to come across a plugin that automates the process for you and brings your stats right into the WordPress dashboard.
Continue reading ‘WordPress statistics plugin’
