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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.
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.
