It’s been a little quiet here this week because its the end of the month and I have been jamming to try to get some projects wrapped up. I have been working on two sites this month that are what we would consider to be traditional, semi-static websites that are being built using WordPress as a CMS. Once each site is launched, I will certainly share them with you.

I also did a little modifying to my Casual Keystrokes site so it could be ready to go Pink for October in support of Breast Cancer awareness month. I’ll warn you - it is PINK and girlie, but I am really happy about how it turned out. While you are checking it out, you can see who else is going pink for the month.

While I have been doing a lot of reading this week, I haven’t been commenting as much - not sure why, but I plan to change that this coming week. Here are some of my favorite posts this week:

• Ben asks “Are You Ready For Writer’s Block?” - this is something we all deal with at some point and he offers up many good strategies for getting past it.
• At Performancing we are reminded of the importance of forums as part of social networking - some of my best online relationships are the result of actively participating in forums.
• Wendy wants to know what your favorite online moneymaker is? Me - I am very partial to TextLinkAds, too, but have had great success with Adsense (of all things) on some of my niche sites.
• David Airey asks if we follow logo design trends. Anyone remember how every logo a few years back had some form of an oval around it?
• Digital Inspiration shared one of the coolest online apps I have played with in a while - FlauntR. FlauntR allows you to easily add a variety of frames/borders to your images. Way cool.
• Gayla is pondering Top 10 Overkill. Lists are a popular link baiting technique, but also a great way to share a lot of ideas quickly. Are they getting too popular?
• And Ed at Evolving Times talks to the geek in all of us when he teaches us how to install love - very creative!
• Darren at ProBlogger wants to know what WordPress plugins we consider essential. I’ll be posting my list later this week. How about you?

Here’s to another productive week!!

What tools do the pros consider essential for online success? Author, pro blogger and new media consultant, Chris Garrett of chrisg.com and Authority Blogger Forum, is on board today to share his secrets with us! But before we find out Chris’ secret weapons, check out a few of his most popular articles:

• 10 Reasons Commenting is Good for Bloggers
  
• Blog SEO - Get Your Blog out of the Supplemental Index
• Where to Find Fresh Blogs and Get Your Blog Discovered

Chris G’s Essential Tools (in his own words)

WordPress - While I have built blogs on Drupal and CommunityServer the one system I LOVE to use is WordPress. It just suits me perfectly, plus has such a rich community that support it with help, themes, plugins … for an individual blogger or a team I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Firefox + Scribefire - I could be accused of slightly biased but I really do use this Firfox plugin every day and still recommend it even though I have absolutely zero input into it any more! Coupled with a Firefox spellcheck dictionary it is really a bloggers killer app.

Feedburner - Without feedburner how would we know how many subscribers we have? We wouldn’t!

Flickr - Whether it is for storing our own pics or for finding CC licensed images, you can’t beat Flickr for photographs. I just wish it allowed you to crop and annotate too.

CC PDF Converter - This PDF converter is useful for anyone wanting to create viral PDF ebooks. The CC PDF Converter is a free (open source) application that enables you to create PDF documents from almost any application (Word, Excel, Internet Explorer and more). The CC PDF Converter also allows you to easily embed a creative commons license in your PDF file.

Two new apps I have been trying out recently are MindManager for mindmaps  and Camstudio, a free screen recorder  that has most of the main features of the most popular $300 app.

Thanks to Chris for sharing his favorite tools! What’s in your essential toolbox? 

Related Posts:

• Essential Tools of a ProBlogger
• Essential Tools: Successful Blog Style
• 164 Essential Tools for Online Success

I confess, I am a statistics junkie and I know that many of my readers are too!! We want to know what is going on behind the scenes of our blogs down to the minute. We are nosy. We want to know what are readers are interested in. We want to know where they are coming from. And there is nothing more exhilarating for a stats junkie than to watch a wave of traffic sparked by a Stumble, a great Digg or a link from a high profile site happen REAL TIME! Yes, real time.In my webmaster toolbox, I keep a handful of stats packages - basically, because they all serve a different purpose. I like the big picture traffic information I get from Awstats that comes with my web hosting package. Google Analytics gives me pretty detailed stats, too, and its free.

However, Performancing Metrics (pMetrics) does it all - and it does it all REAL TIME. pMetrics makes it so easy to capture a great amount of information about your site’s visitors quickly and in logical groups.

Let’s take a look at what pMetrics has to offer!

The Dashboard

When you log into your pMetrics dashboard you can quickly get a sense of the traffic, visitor actions, and what is popular at a glance. pMetrics uses tabbed navigation so you can get to different types of data quickly. Data is also presented numerically, using a bar graph, and by percentage increase or decrease from the previous time period. You can grab your data by day, week, month and more through a simple drop down.

Detail Pages

The visitors detail page shows the time, IP address, country, operating system, browser, number of actions the user took, how long they were there, where they came from, and what search term they used for each and every visitor to the site. You can get aggregate information by country, city, language, browser, operating system and screen resolution as well.

Action information is available by page views, searches, incoming links, outbound links and downloads. You can get detailed information at every turn.

Get content details displayed in multiple formats. If you prefer to see aggregate data as a bar graph, its available. Prefer a cloud display? You can get that, too. You can even export data to Excel for more analysis.

Using the pMetrics Spy tab, you can watch visitors interact with your site as it happens.

Stay informed without logging in! You can subscribe to feeds of your traffic summary, visitors, searches, and incoming links.

Save yourself a step. You can even monitor your feed statistics, subscribers, item views and click throughs directly from your pMetrics dashboard.

Get the most information on your visitors! Another cool feature is that readers who have left comments on your blog no longer show up as IP addresses, they show up as the name they use when leaving a comment.

Conclusion

pMetrics has it all. You can get more information on your site traffic, visitors and source from pMetrics than you can from any other stats package. The pMetrics developers have managed to deliver all of that information in a logical, easy to read, and meaningful way.

pMetrics is a must have for bloggers, but even more so if you manage more than one blog. You can access all of your sites from one main page. With the basic free version of pMetrics you can monitor up to 3 sites at once. If you are like me and manage more, I recommend upgrading to the Pro version for $2.99 per month. With Pro you can monitor up to 10 sites at a time and you get access to all of the pMetrics features. When you register, you get 21 days of Pro for FREE anyhow, so give it a whirl!

If you use pMetrics or decide to try it, let me know what you think!