Every blogger wants to find an audience. While we each have different ideas about the definition of great content, it’s clear that making informed, data-backed decisions can help us connect with our potential readers.

Today, we’ll conclude our Stats Wrangling series by focusing on a key ingredient in any blog’s success. We’ll show you how to look at your stats to determine if you’re using Tags and Categories to their maximum potential.

While tagging can make a difference on its own, be sure to check out earlier posts in the series to form your own, stats-inspired plan. If you haven’t looked at your numbers before, take the grand tour of your Stats tab. Then follow up with a closer look at the data you can glean from analyzing your stats through time, focusing on your best-performing content, and tracing the sites your visitors go to before and after coming…

Out with the Halloween candy, in with the ballot boxes: today is election day across 50 states! All over the world, in fact, falling leaves seem to inspire the urge to cast votes. From Norway in September to Tajikistan later this week, this is the season for lively political discussions — and what better place to hold them than your blog?

Today, we’d like to show you some of the best tools to encourage the exchange of ideas on your own WordPress.com site.

WordPress.com is already home to some of the best political blogs around, from Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish to Time‘s Swampland. Others, like Dave Pell’s Next Draft, collect the best commentary from around the web and deliver it daily to curious readers.

Many politicians and political organizations choose WordPress.com for their official sites, and every possible viewpoint is present on the grassroots level, too.

Anarchist…

It’s easier than ever to add another dimension to your posts with embedded videos or tweets: announcing the Media Explorer, a new media curation tool that lets you add trending content from Twitter and YouTube without ever leaving your post editor!

To access the Media Explorer, simply click “Add Media” while editing a post, as you would to insert a photo. You’ll see a couple of new options below the familiar image tools: The Twitter Explorer lets you find tweets by keyword or hashtag, by tweets to or from a specific user, and by geographic location — search for tweets using any of those parameters right in the same window: Want eyewitness stories on some breaking news? You can pull tweets from people on the ground into your blog ASAP — the geographic search is the next best thing to having someone there: The YouTube Explorer changes the way…

There are more than 200 themes to choose from in the Theme Showcase: themes with sleek magazine-style front pages (like Oxygen and Watson), static business and profile sites (like Forefront and Profile), and portfolio designs (like Gridspace).

Within this mix are free themes that act as blank canvases for your blogs — ones you can use right out of the box, yet also transform dramatically.

You recognize Coraline, right?

It’s Theme Thursday here at WordPress.com, and we’ve got double vision: Organization and Expound!

Organization, developed by our partner Organic Themes, is a sharp, professional-looking theme intended for advancing your cause to the world. A crafted front page template is available for highlighting important pages and post categories, and templates for full-width and two-sidebar layouts are also included. Being fully responsive and a pleasure to read on any device, Organization is also prepared for our mobile-moving world, and ensures your message is loud and clear for everyone. A simple logo uploader and full support for numerous social media accounts are also included, while sidebars and five footer widget areas let you keep your content and calls-to-action easily accessible from all layouts.

Whether you simply need a home for your voice, or a vehicle for delivering your message around the world, Organization will support you every step of…

In the past few weeks, we’ve gone over the basics of domain ownership in “Introduction to Custom Domains” and covered the details of domain registration versus website hosting in “Mapping It Out.” In our last segment of Domains 101, let’s delve into the wild world of custom DNS (Domain Name System) records and email. Ready?

What is a DNS record?

Within a single domain name, there is a hierarchy spanning from the TLD — such as .com — to the subdomain — such as, mygroovysite.wordpress.com. Your domain name servers resolve, or connect, to a unique IP address that lets browsers know where to find your site when a visitor types your domain into their address bar. Domain Name System, or DNS, records are similar in that they connect subsets of your domain to the servers on which services, like your email, are hosted.

DNS records live in the DNS Zone. When…