1. Google Analytics
Probably the best-known analytic tool out there, Google Analytics provides invaluable insight into your website traffic. It helps you identify targeted keywords and determine which pages are receiving the most traffic and yielding the best conversion rates. Trace ecommerce transactions to PPC campaigns and keywords. You can even perform basic benchmarking and compare your site with others in your industry.

2. Google Webmaster Tools
This is a great tool for maximizing your site’s visibility on the search engines. See how Google crawls and indexes your site. Identify specific problems the spiders are having accessing your site. Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there. Tell Google about your pages with Sitemaps: which pages are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also specify you would like the URLs Google indexes to appear. You can connect your Webmaster Tools account directly to your Google Analytics account.

3. Yahoo Web Analytics
Yahoo’s answer to Google Analytics, YWA is a powerful analytics tool that goes an extra mile since integrating Index Tools, a recent acquisition. Its claim to fame is that it now provides insight into the demographics and category interests of your website visitors.

4. Alexa
Alexa provides free traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics and a variety of other metrics about any site – not just your own site! So you can gain invaluable insights into your competitors and industry leaders.

5. SpyFu
This site enables you to legally spy on your online competitors by giving you insight into competitive keywords and AdWord campaigns.

6. Compete
Compete allows you to get a site profile for one site, or to compare up to 3 sites for free (5 if you sign up for a free MyCompete account) providing metrics on unique visitors, referring sites, destination sites and top search terms.

7. Website Grader
One of the newest free tools to hit the web, HubSpot’s Website Grader gives you a detailed look at numerous variables for an overall assessment of how well your site is working. It identifies some basic SEO problems and measures your popularity in social media.

8. Open Site Explorer (formerly SEOmozRank)
This free tool is a link popularity checker and backlink analysis tool. Run your site through it and see what you learn.

9. Smarter Stats
Bundled FREE with every Applied Innovations hosting plan, Smarter Stats from Smarter Tools is a robust analytic tool you can access right from your control panel.

And for Social Media, we have a few more to add:

10. Klout
Billed as the Standard for Influence, Klout allows you to measure the overall online influence of a given Twitter account.

11. Twitalyzer
Although it used to be completely free, Twitalyzer is now largely a paid service. You can still get some interesting, basic information for a given Twitter account, such as their Impact Score, others in their network and commonly used hashtags.

12. Tweet Effect
This free tool allows you to find out which Twitter updates made people follow or leave a given Twitter account (yours or someone else’s!)

13. Tweet Psych
This creates a psychological profile of any public Twitter account and compares it to others in its database. It only works if the account in question has tweeted enough to be measured.

14. TweetMeme
A service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter and organizes them into categories, making it easy to filter out the noise and find out what you’re interested in.

• Install WordPress with just one click via the control panel.
• How to configure the basic settings for wordpress, including Search Engine Friendly URLS.
• How to upgrade WordPress to the latest version manually
• How to automatically upgrade WordPress if you’re running 2.6 or later.

In this video we’ll cover how to update your WordPress blog with one of the million+ custom themes available from the WordPress website.

The Video

Here’s a video that you’ll be able to use to watch as I install and configure a couple themes in our fictional/development blog at acme-hosting.net.

[flv]http://www.appliedi.net/blog/uploads/themes-final.flv[/flv]

Getting Started

To get started you’re going to want to log into your WordPress dashboard, this is the area you’ll use to administer your blog. It’s found at www.domain.com/wp-admin where www.domain.com is your actual domain name and it usually looks something like the below picture:

After you’ve logged in you’ll click on ‘Appearance’ in the left hand column which will bring up the Manage Themes options:

Testing & Activating a new theme

By default you’ll only see two themes in your installation the Classic theme and the Default theme. But these are good enough to demonstrate how to test and then activate your theme. In my image above I have two themes you probably don’t have japan-style and Pixeled, I’ll explain how to get these themes in the next step, for the time being though we’ll try to activate the Pixeled theme.

To select a new theme design just click on it’s thumbnail image and you’ll get a popup window showing you what your blog will now look like with the new theme applied:

To accept the new design, just click on the Activate “Theme Name” in the top right corner:

If you prefer not to use this theme design, then click on the ”x” in the top left corner:

and select another Theme.

Once you’ve activated your theme you’ll now have a fresh new look for your blog and can begin experimenting and tweaking it as you please.

Getting More Themes

WordPress has over a million FREE themes available in their repository and many more available across the Internet as premium/paid themes for a small fee. You can access the theme directory at: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/.  You’ll want to find a theme you like and then click the download link to download that theme to your local computer as a compressed ZIP file. You’ll then extract that folder to your hard drive and upload it to your website.

You’ll upload the theme to the wp-content/themes folder under your blog folder. For my blog site at acme-hosting.net this folder is shown here:

As you can see I FTP’d into my site, navigated to the wp-content/themes folder and then copied over my theme folders (japan-style, pixeled and ZZZZ). Once I’ve uploaded my themes to my wordpress site I can then go back to the wordpress dashboard and refresh the Appearance option and should see my themes appear for use on my blog.

Conclusion

I hope you have found this tutorial useful. There’s millions of great themes out there for your wordpress blog and with just a little web experience they are extremely easy to publish and use on your wordpress blog.

Every day we’re asked how to get a listing on the AppliedI.net website and a link. It’s no secret that the AppliedI.net website has a high ranking with the search engines and that a link from an established, trusted and high ranking website like www.appliedi.net will help your own search engine rankings. In addition, many of our clients offer services and products that our other clients would find useful and beneficial. These services include: web development, graphic design, marketing advice and services and various software offerings to just name a few. So here’s your opportunity to get featured and expose your company and resources to over 25,000 other websites and online businesses.  For your efforts we’ll not only feature you on our website but we’ll credit your hosting account with $25!.

What’s Required To Be Featured?

The requirements are pretty simple but here they are:

1. You need to be an active customer with Applied Innovations. 
2. We’ll ask that you submit a video testimonial. If you don’t have a digital video camera or don’t know how to take your video and put it online to send to us, NO PROBLEM! We have a few pocket video cameras and we’ll send one out to you to create your video with and then mail back to us (all postage paid by AppliedI).  
3. We’ll send you an email interview. We’ll have our writers take your answers and write a compelling article around it and then send it back to you for your approval before posting it.
4. We’ll ask that you send us a high resolution picture of yourself or your business. You don’t have to run out and hire a professional photographer, we’re all real people and we want real people photographs. It should just be a picture of you enjoying what you do.

That’s it. From there our experts will take that content create a new case study page around it and post it with your video testimonial and feature it throughout our site.

An Interview What Kind of Questions?

Everyone always worry about what they’re going to say or what they’re going to be asked. In this case, it’s quite simple. We want to tell your story. We want to know what brought you to Applied Innovations, how Applied Innovations has made a difference for your company and what is it that we do that you love the most about Applied Innovations. 

Video? What would I say?

Just like the Email Interview this would be your opportunity to tell your story about your company, how you came to find Applied Innovations and what impact Applied Innovations has had on your company. The great thing about video is now it’s personalized and it allows everyone to see a real person telling their own story.

Why are we doing all this?

Applied Innovation in a few weeks will turn 10 years old and we want to spotlight our customers and let them tell their story. Applied Innovations has already been about the customer and helping the customer solve their problems and then grow their business online. We think this is a great way to get this message out there and at the same time a great way to promote and say thanks to the people that have also helped us grow.

What do I do next? How do I get started?

Ready to get involved? Great! send us an email at sales@appliedi.net and we’ll get started immediately and in a few days your video testimonial will be online and live.