Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye » traffic

Google Whackness: How The New Instant Auto-complete Suggestion Feature Warps Search Trends

Loren Woirhaye — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 21:36:48 +0000

Google Whackness: How The New Instant Auto-complete Suggestion Feature Warps Search Trends is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

Good old Google has unleashed some new whackness into our lives with it’s new “instant auto-complete” feature. I’m not sure what it’s really called, but whatever it is, if it sticks around the roll of search marketing optimization as a traffic source will be changed.

In brief, the auto-complete suggests key-phrases based on what you type in for your first word. Google has had something like this before but it was vulnerable to manipulation. Phrases like “why won’t my parakeet eat my diarrhea” would pop up in Google’s older auto-complete feature—which may just be a slower version of Google’s new suggestion tool.

Aside from the parakeet thing being gross, it’s hard to believe that more than one person ever typed in that search phrase sincerely looking for an answer to such a question. Two theories about why the phrase showed up in Google’s trends are that either somebody at Google put it there as a joke, or a bunch of people got together and conspired to search Google with that phrase or create content and links containing it. Either way, it’s not really the kind of content Google wants to be serving up in general.

Now you can check out Google’s new version of auto-complete for yourself. I think the main difference is that it’s faster, as in almost instant. If you go to Google.com and type “why” into the search engine, you’ll get something that looks like this:

why search

Some of those results are pretty odd. The raven one from the Mad Hatter in “The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland” by lewis Carroll. Of course it seems like nonsense popping up in your Google search, but it is a rather famous riddle. Furthermore, not making sense was the author’s point.

The thing about poop might seem odd, but I can imagine quite a few people wonder about why their excrement comes in funny colors sometimes. I’m sure the answer to this question has assuaged concern in more than one child so I figure some good is being done with Google’s calling it up as a search phrase.

How This Affects Online Marketers Like You and Me

By redesigning the auto-complete feature to be instant (or at least much faster) Google is in effect steering millions of people towards the most common searches. This in turn will make those search phrases more popular.

The concern among marketers, both SEO people and Pay-per-click people, is that this move by Google will steer much of the so-called “long tail” traffic towards the more popular terms.

This means Google is making up our minds for us. Google is choosing what we want to search for. Maybe this isn’t all bad because it does make some types of general searching easier for the average Google user. For Google, the effect will be to consolidate more traffic towards a tigher grouping of key-phrases which will—when those key-phrases are monetizable with advertising—cut the long-tail Pay-per-click marketers out of the zone where profits are made and create Pay-per-click bidding wars for the keyphrases being pushed by Google.

It’s very clever really, if Google’s motive is to increase and consolidate Pay-per-click revenue.

In addition, Google has recently gone on a rampage of banning direct response marketers from it’s Adwords Pay-per-click program. In effect Google keeps putting up new roadblocks to making direct sales from web-pages advertised with Adwords. My theory is that Google wants Adwords to be more of a corporate advertising engine and get rid of us direct response marketers, as we’re viewed as troublemakers.

What do you think?

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

Blog Traffic Voodoo and YOU (Blogging To Your Central Demographic Model)

Loren Woirhaye — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:58:27 +0000

Blog Traffic Voodoo and YOU (Blogging To Your Central Demographic Model) is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 9 – 15 minutes

I’ll assume to start that like most people, you’re way, way more interested in yourself than what I’m doing.

Don’t feel bad – we’re all like that; largely interested in our own ends, our own stories.

But I’d like to tell you a little bit about my experiences with blogging and affiliate marketing on the internet. I don’t expect you’ll care about my experiences, but there are some lessons you’ll learn (if you’re open to learning).

These lessons in my little story will will help YOU:

Get More Traffic!

By Blogging!

PLUS!!!

It’s Easy For YOU To DO!

Now do I have your attention?

I came around to blogging slowly. At heart I’m a believer in proven direct response marketing methods and my early experiences marketing online validated those beliefs.

But the marketplace changed and the web became, well, more social. The same shtick that worked for content marketing when I started out doesn’t work today. That’s because the internet as a marketing environment has matured and the competition for “mindshare” is hotter than ever.

For years I focused almost entirely on list-building and then I would email newsletters and promotions to the list. I did do blogging, but the blog content was not my focus much at all. My emphasis as a free-content provider was to shower my lists with good stuff – but subscribers only got that content on the inside. It wasn’t out there for everybody to read on the blogs.

I still do list-building and it’s still valid. As far as my newsletters and content however, I’ve shifted into a more transparent mode of putting it out there in the blogosphere for anybody to read. I notify my email lists when I update the blog and I’ve shifted more into the mode of working to get RSS subscribers to the blog and get my writing syndicated and published widely.

This may seem pretty obvious to you, but you have to understand that when I started marketing online blogs were fairly primitive and not many people knew what RSS was. Many still don’t. I’ve had to let go of my old opinions about what good internet marketing was and adopt new methods to grow my income and influence.

If I were starting out today, I’d start as a blogger and work hard to be a darned good one. I would still market in other ways, but I would always try to put my best foot forward in my public blog and grow readership for the blog as a primary goal in my traffic strategy.

The lucky thing is, getting blog traffic isn’t hard at all.

That’s because blogs, by their nature, attract the search engines. Those search engines, including specialized blog-search engines like Technorati, are on the lookout for fresh content—and they know blogs provide it so they give blogs “love”.

Blogging for traffic

Blogging is a relatively easy way to get traffic. Some of the traffic you’ll get is better than others, but the way blogs are indexed pretty much guarantees you’ll get some traffic every time you blog.

To my way of thinking here are two or more ways to go about blogging:

1. The sloppy way. This is where you don’t have much care for quality blogging, but you can get traffic and build your list anyway. The problem with being a sloppy blogger is you’ll never establish a reputation and a genuine following and you’ll undermine an important part of the second half of my system, which is monetizing and leveraging your list to get more traffic.
2. The “Pro” way. The second approach is blogging as if you want to establish yourself as a preeminent expert in your field. If you use my system exactly as I teach, this will be related to internet marketing and making money online. but Within that range you could write about personal development, entrepreneurialism, hot marketing trends, affiliate marketing – there is really a very big range but trying to make a blog about raising chickens work to build an internet marketing would be an unrealistic stretch.

Step 1. Who Is Your Reader ?

Recently I gave some advice to a startup entrepreneur who had $50,000 to invest in promoting his website. He was wondering what sort of advertising would be a good investment. When I asked who his target users were his reply was:

“Anybody who uses Facebook, Ebay, or Craigslist. Our site is a cross between all three.”

Basically, he was saying his site was designed to appeal to everybody. Big mistake. You cannot please everybody in marketing anything. Some businesses get lucky after they have a base level of support from a specific group of targeted people. Facebook, for example, started as a college thing and attained core support only from a relatively small, but loyal, user group of students and alums from Ivy League schools. Ebay started as a site for auctioning off collectible PEZ containers and Craigslist just caught on in the San Francisco area for some reason and grew from there.

Your Central Demographic Model

Anyway, the smart way to launch a project to get traffic these days is to decide who your ideal target market is on a fairly detailed level. One name for this is a “central demographic model”. This is like a voodoo doll of your target customer. Your model might be represented by a picture but behind the image the important thing is your understanding of the values of the person who looks that way.

For example: If you were to make a blog about video games you’d want to create a model of your reader in your mind: chances are he’s male and between 12 and 30 years of age. That’s still pretty vague, but it’s more specific (and more useful) than saying “my site is for anyone who plays video games”.

So you make a mental list, or write it down, of what your reader likes and doesn’t like. You try to imagine what his or her average day is like. The more defined your mental image of the person is, the more you’ll be able to reach the emotions of people within the demographic sweet spot you want to reach and the more easily the traffic will come.

Traffic Comes When You Blog About The Right Stuff For Your Market

It’s almost like magic how blogs attract traffic. It’s not at all, but as I said above, the search engines and specialized blog engines have a way of getting you traffic when you blog relevantly. How much traffic you get is a result of two factors primarily:

1. How much your blog is linked to by you (through self-promotion) and by other sites linking to you blog as a recommendation.

2. How effectively the titles and content of your blog posts enters into “the conversation” within the average head of the average person who fits your central demographic model.

Keyword Research

I dislike keyword research and I hate writing around keywords, but if you can do it without descending into idiot-level writing, more power to you. The search engines are getting better at sorting out what’s really relevant, so stuffing your blog posts with blatant “spider food” in the form of high-density use of keywords isn’t as necessary as it once was to get search engine rankings and traffic. The reason is the search engines now use a fancy-schmancy technology called LSI or “latent semantic indexing” which allows them to look at not only the specific keywords and phrases you use, but also use complex algorithms to rank your blog for the actual topic based on synonyms and context. You might actually rank rather well for keyphrases you don’t even use because the search engines discovered you’ve written relevantly about the topic with a different vocabulary.

If this seems all over your head, don’t worry. The upshot of LSI technology is that it allows you and me to just focus on creating good blog content. That said, some keyword research will be helpful to you. I don’t like doing it so I use Market Samurai as my tool of choice to help me save time doing the tedious business of researching keywords.

Starting Your Blog

I recommend you use WordPress and you self-host, which means you’ll have to spend five or ten bucks a month to run your blog. Self-hosting gives you freedom to write about whatever you please with no worries about having your blog arbitrarily deleted, which is known to happen to marketers who use free blogs like Blogger or free WordPress.org blogs. Free blogs have their uses, but I believe your main blog should be totally controlled by you.

Pinging

Pinging your blog every time you update it gets you traffic. When you post and ping frequently, the traffic comes. How much depends on your subject matter, your market niche, and how well established your blog is. But the traffic will come if you blog and ping and in fact a few years back some “gurus” were selling “how to make money online” products based on the same simple premise I’m showing you for free.

In your WordPress blog control panel there’s something called a “ping list”. Depending on how you have it set up, your blog will auto-ping one or several ping services. I like to install a plugin called “cbnet Ping optimizer“ which prevents your blog from auto-pinging too often. By default WordPress pings every time you make the slightest change to your blog content, which can run to a lot of pings and get your blog banned as a ping spammer. So I recommend you use the plugin. By default WordPress doesn’t ping many services (just one in fact I think). There are some ping lists that run over 100 ping services but I feel that’s overkill, so I’ve narrowed it down to about a dozen.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

I set the ping optimizer to ping at most once every 60 minutes. Often when I publish a blog post I read the post afterwards and I want to correct some dumb grammar error or add something. With the ping set to 60 minutes, I have an hour to make the post the way I want it without double-pinging being a problem.

I am not claiming, by the way, that getting traffic as a blogger is not work. All success takes work. Blogging well and blogging often will get you traffic and build you a following, but with that comes a commitment of your time. The most important thing is just to get started and then keep going.

P.S. you’ll also want to sign-up for an account with Technorati. When you do you create a profile and claim your blog. Then Technorati gives you some love as a registered member. All you do is embed a code in one of your blog posts (looks like: JMUMM7FSB8X5 ) and then Technorati helps you get some more traffic. Technorati isn’t the only free service that does this sort of thing, but it’s probably the most influential one.

Blogging to the Bank

3 Easy Ways To Get More Free Traffic and More Free Leads From Your Articles and Blog Posts

Loren Woirhaye — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:44:15 +0000

3 Easy Ways To Get More Free Traffic and More Free Leads From Your Articles and Blog Posts is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

In the next few minutes I’ll share with you the 3 “secret” ways I’ve used to get more traffic and leads from articles and blog posts. Using these three methods you’ll easily double, triple or even quadruple the effectiveness or your articles, sending your list-building into overdrive. At the end I’ll tell you how to get a free guide that teaches you an automated traffic method you can use to get free web traffic with push-button ease.

Picture this common list-building scenario…

You’re putting up squeeze pages and writing articles. You’re getting some traffic, but that traffic isn’t converting to email leads very well. Sure, you’re getting an opt-in here and there, but you’re looking for the secret that will explode your opt-ins.

Right Under Your Nose…

I’ve been testing different copywriting approaches for years and isolated key elements that cause articles to succeed and get traffic. The answer to your problem is right in front of your nose. The reason you don’t see the answer is because there’s so much confusing information out there.

You need to get clear why people don’t opt-in or why your traffic results aren’t what you want them to be.

3 Reasons Articles Aren’t Drawing More Subscribers

Not enough people are searching for keywords you are using to draw traffic
You aren’t making a really attractive free offer to build your list
Your writing is confusing to readers and they lose interest

You might be aware that many people are short of time. Therefore it’s important you tell people what they are going to get and assure them that to get it won’t take much time or effort. The real thing you are competing for as a markter is not readers’s time, it’s their attention.

Three “Structural Persuasion” Secrets

Secret #1: The best way to get and retain attention in your articles is to make a promise at the start of the article. I like to quantify the time investment too. I did it at the start of this article and if you got this far, it worked on you. If it worked on you, it will work on other people too. Telling readers how long it’s going to take them to get the information they want may see a little goofy, but it works, so start doing it.

Secret #2: The easiest formula is “3 easy ways” formula. Title your article with a promise of 3 easy ways to make something they are doing better or easier. This may seem like a slow-pitch promise, like you’re writing for dummies. But guess what? It works so use it. You can mix things up and use “5 simple ways” or whatever, but always a straightforward promise to deliver your information in bite-sized chunks. The number of points you are promising your reader doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you’re promising to divide the information up into easy bullet points. People crave and respond to well-structured communication and this titling method is an easy way to start doing that.

Secret #3: The offer at the end. Article traffic is all about getting readers to click on your link at the end. To get a lot of click you need to offer a very attractive free goodie. Make an effort to imply that the goodie is an almost magical solution to all the reader’s problems. While it may not be in reality, you need to whip that reader into a feverish excitement to get him to click. If you’ve built some momentum into your article and offer at the end, many readers will just click through and opt-in to your free offer, which takes some of the pressure off your squeeze page.

When you use these 3 secrets in your articles, you’ll be writing the way real copywriters do. Copywriters know that every step of the persuasion process has to be easy-peasy for the reader. When it is, lookout! because your results will be much better.

Start looking for ways to use these 3 secrets in every article you write. They don’t always all fit with all article types. I don’t always use them myself (because I get lazy sometimes) but when I do I get clickthrough rates as high as 40% of readers checking out my offer. There are other ways to write a good article, but if you’re after opt-ins for your email list, the formula I just shared with you works great.

Now you know the basics of writing killer articles using structural persuasion principles.

You can expand what you’ve learned here.

How about a system for getting unlimited free, automated traffic to your website?

Well, I’ve got such a system and I wrote a guidebook about how it works. You can have the guidebook for free.

Your Free Traffic Guide awaits.

If you want an internet money machine, you’ll want to learn more about how to use software to get traffic. Just grab the Free Traffic Formula for free and find out how.

3 Easy Free Ways You Should Be Getting Traffic (From People With Money) To Your Blog

Loren Woirhaye — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:37:44 +0000

3 Easy Free Ways You Should Be Getting Traffic (From People With Money) To Your Blog is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

In the next few minutes you’ll discover:

3 easy ways to start attracting the right kind of visitors to your blog
How to start growing your email list immediately
The secret ingredient (that skyrockets sales) you must deliver in all your content

First some bad news: in today’s web marketplace just having a blog won’t get you any real traffic at all. In fact, the market is savagely competitive and crowded, so if you aren’t super-focused you probably won’t get far in marketing your site.

The good news: people are super busy these days and what they need and want when they look for information online is clarity. When you create focused information that is easy for people to understand and explore, you win.

Some of the best, most friendly traffic is free. Friendly traffic is the kind of visitors who want information and come searching for it. I call this traffic friendly because they are asking questions and want solutions to their problems. They aren’t really expecting to be sold anything, so their guard tends to be down. The “friendly factor” is part of what makes blog traffic so high quality.

Of course some of your traffic will usually come from phrases people type into search engines. You’ll get this sort of traffic naturally over time, but getting lots of it is a technical process I won’t try to teach in a short article.

The cornerstone of the best free traffic is human engagement. That means giving information as from one person to another. Imagine a person asked you a question and you knew the answer. You would probably share the answer, right?

Sharing answers to questions is the easy way to get free traffic. Of course sharing answers means putting words together. There are many opportunities online to share answers to questions, but the easiest to learn to use are:

forums
article sites
press releases

Online forums are easy to figure out. You’ll want to explore whether the forum allows you to put a signature link at the bottom of your posts. If it doesn’t allow links, it’s probably not a good forum for getting traffic. There are hundreds of great forums where people ask questions. One easy way to find forums is using Google Alerts, which is a service that emails you whenever somebody uses keywords, anywhere on the internet. For example, if you had a blog about alternative energy, you could have Google Alerts email you whenever new content turned up with phases like “home solar power” turned up.

It can take awhile to build up forum traffic, because with most forums the more you post, the more people on the forum will trust you because they can see your “post count”. People naturally assume the more you’ve posted, the better your advice. Thus, a good strategy is to stake out a half-dozen or so forums and promote your expertise on them consistently. This strategy takes awhile to generate a lot of traffic, but in time the traffic can get to be quite substantial.

Article sites are another good way to get traffic. The most important thing is to learn how to title your articles so people will be curious to read them. Arguably your title is more important than the content of the article in getting people to read the article. Article marketing can be frustrating if you aren’t writing about subjects lots of people are desperate to learn more about. A smart approach is to test different approaches until you figure out what kind of article topics and titles get you the most traffic, then write more of that type of article.

Press releases are like articles but you can get away with a lot of self-promotion in them. Articles tend to do well when they are informative on their own. Try to make your releases more newsy and tease the reader to go to your site to get the really hot information. Not many marketers use press releases effectively, but the traffic is often substantial.

How to start growing your email list immediately (plus a secret)

All anybody online searching for information thinks about is “what’s in it for me? What do I get and how do I get it?”. Web searchers are about as self-centered as 2-year olds. The best way to build your email list is offer instant gratification in terms of bait. Free reports or training videos are common subscriber baits because they work. The secret missing ingredient you must offer in the bait, if you want a lot if subscribers, is the implication that if the person gets your free goodie, all their problems will go away effortlessly. I cannot emphasize this enough – you have to write to the “Chimpanzee brain”, the 2-year old who wants only easy, instant gratification. A nice box shot or graphical presentation of the free prize your subscriber will get can skyrocket your email list to. That’s because people want what’s new. Make your free prize “goodie” appear as new and exciting and effortless as possible and you’ll get much better results in building your list.

Cookie Monster List Building System – 3 Easy Free Ways to Get Top Quality Traffic

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:24:44 +0000

Cookie Monster List Building System – 3 Easy Free Ways to Get Top Quality Traffic is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

Experienced folks may find this information basic, but it’s a fun read because…

In the next two minutes you will discover:

What kind of traffic is best for making money
How to get the best kind of traffic for free
A little-known secret proven to increase your income from free traffic

Not all traffic is equal. Some traffic is high quality and you can make money with it. Some traffic is poor quality.

The only kind of traffic that’s any good to most marketers is targeted traffic. When traffic is perfectly targeted making money is easy. All you have to do is send the people to a webpage that offers exactly what they want. This is targeting. If you have traffic looking for barbeques and you send them to a site about baking cakes, the traffic is unlikely to be well targeted to sell the cake stuff. Send traffic looking for barbeques to a page selling barbeque recipes or barbeque sauce and your chances of selling something are way higher.

The internet is an amazing thing for targeted traffic. The easiest way to do it is to pay for clicks, which can get expensive but can be very accurate in targeting people who are ready to spend money.

Since I know you want a free method, I’ll tell you the three easiest free methods. The bad news is they all involve you working to get the traffic. No martinis on the beach for you yet!

Article traffic is the best-known free traffic strategy. You’ll improve with practice, but the secret revealed at the end of this article will instantly improve your results when you use it.

Free press releases are less used than articles. Overlooking press releases is not very smart because they are excellent ways to get traffic and often out-perform articles.

Forums and message-boards are also excellent ways to get free traffic. Don’t let yourself get glued to any one forum though, and make sure you are writing plenty of press releases and articles to balance your forum activity. Forums can seduce you, because they are often social and fun. Use forums but don’t over-use them. The easiest way to learn how to get forum traffic is emulate what the other people on the forum are doing to get traffic from their forum activity.

The little-known traffic secret took me a long time to figure out. People surfing the web are like little cookie monsters. They want a cookie. You have to point them to where the cookie is and tell them how easy it is to get it. To get them to go from where they are to where the cookie is you need to tell them how delicious the cookie will be. Then you tell them what to do to get it.

You may find this makes a funny picture in your head. Enjoy it, but take it seriously. The cookie I offer you here is how to get the best traffic for free. Then I offer you an even bigger cookie in my link below, a free system for getting free traffic.

Would you like to know more about getting traffic and making money on automatic?

You can get a free guide to “el-Cheapo” ways to get traffic and make money automatically – Free Traffic Guide

If you want an internet money machine, you’ll want to learn more about how to use software to get traffic. Just grab the Free Traffic Formula for free and find out how.

Automated Traffic Review – Is It Worth Your Time and Money?

Loren Woirhaye — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 04:52:09 +0000

Automated Traffic Review – Is It Worth Your Time and Money? is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not promoting this product, because I bought it and I did not find it useful to me. That doesn’t mean you won’t like it or shouldn’t buy it. What you get out of any program of this nature has a lot to do with your commitment to taking action and your own experience level. I would classify myself as a “seasoned” online marketer with mastery of many fundamental skills. A less experienced marketer than me might find this product meets their needs very well.

The salesletter and positioning of the product seem to be working awfully hard to convince us that these “scripts” product automated traffic. They don’t. They simplify some minor marketing tasks like adding meta tags to blogger blogs and searching Yahoo answers for keywords.

You might be dazzled by the spit and polish of how this program is promoted. Once you buy the upsell offer alone are dazzling in their quantity and pushiness. You’ll get many offers in your email for other products as well.

I tested the banner rotator on this blog (http://malibumentor.com)… and all I ever saw it display was a banner for the Automated Traffic program. The idea is that it’s supposed to test banners for you from popular ClickBank marketing products and display the ones that get the most clicks – it’s disappointing but hardly surprising that the banner rotator favors the Automated Traffic product so strongly. I smell something a bit fishy.

I got a bunch of bonuses through an affiliate who was running a launch promo for Automated Traffic. I liked the bonuses, but I didn’t like the product and canceled after one month.

I thought the keyword tools were lame. You might not if you’re inexperienced at online. If you’re looking for a serious keyword research I suggest investing in Market Samurai, which is a first rate tool.

The people who created Automated Traffic made an impressive looking membership area. The marketing after the sale is done quite well and the creator’s have clearly recognized that to keep people on a monthly subscription plan you will do well to come up with new, exciting stuff every month.

I wouldn’t say the product is shoddy at all. It’s nicely put together as these things go. I just didn’t personally find it very useful.

Working With WordPress – Big Features and Easy-to-use, Powerful Plugins Enhance Usability for Bloggers and Marketers

Loren Woirhaye — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:24:36 +0000

Working With WordPress – Big Features and Easy-to-use, Powerful Plugins Enhance Usability for Bloggers and Marketers is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

I’ll admit, I was slow to jump into using WordPress for blogging. I had tried using it and always found Blogger much more intuitive.

As WordPress matured however more marketers were using it and by a year ago many marketers were so enthused about it they moved all their existing sites over to WordPress, claiming WordPress sites rank better in search engines and get a better “quality score” with Google Adwords.

Thus, the theory is that with WordPress you’ll get more traffic, cheaper.

I’ll make some comments from personal experience about WordPress. There are a lot of people out there who know a lot more about WordPress than I, so if you’re confused, use Google to find an answer. Chances are somebody has had the same problem figuring out WordPress you’re having and it’s been answered somewhere online by a real expert.

WordPress, being free and open-source, is also very cheap to get started with. I still use value XsitePro, and there are many things that are far easier to do with HTML editors than WordPress.

Where WordPress shines for those who are design-challenged. The availability of thousands of good-looking “themes” makes it easy to find a theme that meets your needs. Themes are the graphics and code that make WordPress sites look good. With very little trouble, you can change the theme your WordPress blog runs with, too. If you’re addicted to playing with your site’s layout and appearance you’ll probably find WordPress lots of fun.

In addition to the very cool theme features, WordPress has an absolutely jaw-dropping range of add-on modules available, mostly at no charge though many developers accept donations.

WordPress also featured integrated RSS feeds, which means your blog can be syndicated and shared around the web very easily. If your blogging is crap, nobody except search engines and content-scrapers will read it, but if you are a serious, funny, informative, origninal or just interesting writer, RSS feeds give you many opportunities to expand your readership.

Why you want people reading your stuff and watching your blathering head on videos has to do with this bizarre notion of “thought leadership” – which I’ll write more about later. In short, people follow, hire, and buy from people they perceive as having a clue. Thus, if you want to have money in the “information economy” – it helps to self-publish. A printed book in nationwide-plus distribution is ideal, but takes a lot more discipline to create than a blog.

So, in order to conquer the universe with your viewpoint, start with a blog.

WordPress works real good for blogs.

So give it a try.

You can download WordPress at http://www.wordpress.org

Recommended Plugins:

I haven’t even tried dozens of plugins, but I’ve come up with a short list of ones I’ve used on on most WordPress sites I’ve set up. I like to keep things fairly simple so I can focus on writing and marketing, not tweaking WordPress. These are all pretty easy to install and configure so don’t be intimidated.

Permalink redirect – I actually don’t remember exactly why I started using this, but at the time some research into SEO and link structures indicated this plugin would be a good thing to use in conjuction with the SEO plugins and the “Canonical URLs feature”. http://scott.yang.id.au/code/permalink-redirect/
A lot of folks use and recommend the All-in-1-SEO-Pack. It gives you a lot of features common to HTML sites but absent from “stock” WordPress installations, like Meta-keywords and Meta-descriptions tags. I recently started using the Platinum SEO pack which shares many features with the All-in-1. Both are good. I think Platinum SEO makes the above mentioned permalink plugin unnecessary as the permalink redirect feature is integrated in Platinum SEO. http://techblissonline.com/platinum-seo-pack/
Tag clouds are those funny bunches of big-and-little words you see on the sidebars of blogs sometimes. Some people hate ‘em. I use ‘em though. In a stock WordPress installation you can use tags, but the search engines don’t read them as keywords for your posts, which is lame. This plugin fixes that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-tag-cloud
This last is weird, even by my standards. It reads you blog in a robot voice. This could be cool for visually-challenged people, but realistically they probably have screen-reader software anyway. The real reason I use it is because it creates a new RSS feed of audio content for my blogs with almost zero additional work on my part. Cool beans. Check it out and see if it makes sense to you. http://www.odiogo.com/listen_button.php
This blog runs on the Atahualpa theme – which has integrated SEO features, but I’m not using them here. By default they are enabled in Atahualpa, which is a very rich and full-featured theme. You can only use one SEO plugin at a time, so if you use Atahualpa, choose to use either the “stock” SEO features or turn them off and use another SEO plugin. You can get Atahualpa here: Get Atahualpa Theme

Feel free to comment here about your own experiences and plugin preferences. I like to learn new stuff so if you’ve found a WordPress plugin you think rocks, I’d love to know about it.