How to use Google Analytics to track your top blog posts

Google Analytics can give you a great help in understanding how your blog is performing and how to improve it. In this article I'll show you how to get started with a Google Analytics account and track your blog's most popular posts. This will help you to:

- Track your blog's top posts and find out which ones are read the most
- Understand what content makes your visitors subscribe to your blog and keeps them coming back

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Case Study: La Habra High School Alumni Association

LHHSAA has been using Wild Apricot for two months. Priscilla is quite technical and is a competent Joomla user, but she was finding that it was just too hard to keep up with the technology and tweaking the code to suit our organization turned into a full time job. In her own words: "...we discovered Wild Apricot and we're so happy we took one more look on the Web for an economical content management solution..."

Here are the features La Habra High School Alumni Association has found to be of the most use:

• To attract our target audience, we use email blasts to any alumni list we can find and promote ourselves at class reunions. As we get the word out about our organization we always tie in our Website as a virtual place to congregate.
• The ability to auto register and track free, as well as, paying members is great. So is being able to post events on our website.
• With Wild Apricot, we could also track our offline and online members as we encourage new members of both types to join all within one master database. Wild Apricot also helped keep lists of emails for promotion and announcements current, sort lists to differentiate between members and opt-in interested parties.
• Additionally, we often read the Wild Apricot blog and try to investigate any mashup or widget we can, hoping to extend the functionality of our Wild Apricot website.

La Habra High School Alumni Association can be found online at http://www.lhhsaa.com/

Read full case study

Wild Apricot Infozone

Client Satisfaction Survey

First of all - thanks to all of you who have participated in our client survey. Your candid comments are sincerely appreciated - it is both nice to hear your positive feedback as well as extremely useful to know about problems and frustrations you sometimes experience. Overall we got pretty good grades - but we have also identified a number of things we need to invest more effort on.

One of our key priorities is ease of use and we got an average 79% score on this (with 100% being a perfect, the easiest to use system in the world) - which we consider quite good, but this does include a number of responses where we got 50-60% which means we have to keep working on this aspect!

For those who missed the survey - you can still do it any time - go to http://www.wildapricot.com/survey.aspx Thanks in advance!

a few quotes:

"Seriously, you guys are saving my life. I can now sleep, find paying work and relax once in a while."

"I have followed your release notes and see you implement improvements based on user response. Outstanding!"

"WA works really well at very reasonable price and if you don't use WA, it's your loss. WA wasn't around when I started my research and I almost gave up. I am so glad I took one last look for a CMS solution. I AM WA's biggest fan. I have to be."

"It is great to have the website creation, member database/dues management all in the same place. This is exactly what a small, new organization like ours needed. Not hard at all to learn how to use it, which I appreciate. It is so useful to members sign up themselves, update their own info, etc. That means I don't have to do it manually!"

"Wonderful system for membership organizations. Love all the automated features which is why we went to it, in combo with the web hosting."

Wild Apricot recent updates

A couple of version updates to Wild Apricot were released since our last newsletter. Here is a brief summary of key enhancements:

• Admin roles - now you can differentiate access to each administrator (content/event/membership/donations management)
• Blog module is now available - site administrators can post blog articles, it has an RSS feed and members can reply to posts and to each other's replies.
• You can now enable online and offline (manual) payments at the same time - so that your users can choose a preferred payment method for each registration/transaction
• A number of new design themes have been added (and do not forget that you can tweak your site design via CSS customization)
• You can now add introductory text messages to automatically generated pages: Member application, Online donation form, Events list page
• To help you with PayPal reconciliation, you can now access a complete log of payment transactions (this is a beta functionality, it will be further refined and enhanced in the upcoming releases)
• Event end date - events now have an optional end date.
• Create events by copying from another existing event
• We have enabled adding Javascript code to pages!
• Page header customization has been much simplified - you can now easily position pictures and text with drag and drop
• White labeling is now available for our partners
• ...and tons of other improvements and fixes!

To read more about the updates above see Wild Apricot release 2.20

Coming up next

Rest assured, we are hard at work on more enhancements and changes to address your feedback and make Wild Apricot an even better solution for you. Here are some of the things you should see in mid-August:

• Payments report
• Show/hide events (similar to making web pages invisible)
• Further enhancement to the Blog module - members will be able to create new posts and not only reply to existing posts and replies
• First Wild Apricot widgets - to embed Wild Apricot functionality into your existing website
• Insert table wizard
• Customization of member directory: default set of search fields, default search mode (advanced search vs. full list with keyword search)

Also, we are designing the following features for the subsequent releases:

• Unlink membership levels and event prices (ability to define custom event prices / registration types)
• Improving the event registration process (Completing pending payments, handling member registrations)
• Members pictures
• Customize fields to show in the member directory list
• Group (Corporate/Family) memberships
• Monthly membership payments

Thank you for your ongoing feedback as it really helps us to make the system better and more usable for you.

Promote your cause on Facebook in 5 easy steps

Everywhere you turn, you're hearing about social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. Project Agape recently launched Causes on Facebook - extending the groups features and making it possible for users to create causes, take donations, and recruit members. This article explores the power of this new application and provides five simple steps to set up and promote your Cause on Facebook.

Read more...

N4P Dose of Humor

Board Meetings...Why have them?

Copyright, Grantland Enterprises; www.grantland.net. Used with permission. May not be reproduced in any format

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