Dashboard Access

Creating a basic website with WordPress does not require you to know any coding or programming. If you want a simple website that people can read and navigate, all you need to do is use the default templates and tools available. When you create a website with this platform, you do everything through the administrator dashboard. This dashboard lets you add new posts and pages to the site, change font colors, add graphics and videos, and even change the appearance of your site. The availability of the dashboard is one of the things that make WordPress so easy to use.

Widgets and Plugins

If you have a traditional website, you probably have to hire someone every time you want to make a small change. If you don’t have the budget to hire someone, you have to try to change the code yourself, which takes a lot of time and can create a lot of frustration. WordPress users have access to thousands of plugins, which are tools that help you add features to your site. If you want to add a newsletter sign-up form in the sidebar of your site, you can easily do so by adding a widget. Widgets also make it easier to manage ad units from affiliate programs and direct advertisers.

Flexibility

When you pay someone to design a site for you, you typically have to use that design until you are ready to pay for a redesign. This may not happen for several years. When you use WordPress, you can change the look of your site at any time with just a few clicks. There are thousands of free and paid themes available for this platform, making it easy for users to change the appearance of their websites. Even changing the layout of a site is easy when you use WordPress.

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress makes it easy to optimize each post and page for the search engines. There are dozens of tools available to help you assign content to categories, assign tags to each post, create meta titles and descriptions and add keywords to your pages. All you have to do is fill in the settings for each post and WordPress takes care of the rest. There are a number of plugins available to help you link from one related post to another, which can also help you improve SEO for your site.

Easy Ad Management

If you want to make money with Google Adsense or with one of the many affiliate programs available, you have to display the ads on your site. If you have a traditional website, getting the ad code to work with your website code can be a nightmare. WordPress has plugins available to help users manage AdSense units, Amazon affiliate products and other affiliate program ad units. There is even a widget available that allows you to rotate which ads appear on the sidebar of your blog posts. Instead of showing the same ad on every page, you can customize your ad placement to generate more revenue.

Security

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress is the added security. When you run a traditional website, there is always the risk that you will not immediately identify a security breach, allowing unscrupulous people to steal your information and even disable your website. WordPress regularly updates its software and keeps security in mind when doing so. If a new version of WordPress is available, you will get a notification at the top of your dashboard. Installing new versions not only improves security, it also expands the functionality of your site.

Due to its ease of use and availability of thousands of customization tools, WordPress is ideal for personal websites or small business websites. With just a little time and some clicking, you can create a website that gives visitors a great first impression.

Twitter Name Creation

When you sign up for Twitter, you will be asked to choose a user name. Too many people make the mistake of picking something like Joe194 or Gurlie921. Your Twitter name should tell people about who you are or what your blog is about. Someone with a blog about nursing might choose the user name “nurseblogger” or “surgicalnurse.” If you want to blog about marketing, “marketingmaven” or “marketingexpert” would fit. Pick a name that will not confuse people about what you do.

Completing a Profile

You should treat your Twitter profile like an advertisement for your blog. If your profile is empty, it won’t attract the interest of other people. If your profile lists your expertise, other Twitter users will be more likely to follow you and click the links leading to your blog posts.

Linking

Twitter gives you plenty of opportunities for linking to your blog posts, but there are a few things you should know before you start tweeting links. You need to shorten your links using a URL shortening service, or else they will exceed Twitter’s 140-character limit. Once you have a shortened URL for your blog post, send out a tweet with the link and a short description. Don’t tweet something like “Here’s my new blog post.” You want to draw readers to your blog by sparking their interest. A tweet that says “Is your water bottle giving you cancer?” is sure to capture attention and get people to click on the link to your blog post. Avoid tweeting about the same link multiple times, as you do not want to lose followers because they are annoyed with your Twitter habits.

Customization

Twitter offers a number of customization options that you should use if you want to promote your blog or website. Upload a custom background image that includes the name of your blog, your business logo, your tagline and a short description of your blog. Doing this will help you build your own personal brand.

Business Updates

Let your customers know about new products and services, staff changes and other important business news via the Twitter interface. Make short announcements that get the message across without exceeding the 140-character limit. Include links to longer announcements on your blog or company website.

Ask for Input

When developing new products or deciding which services to offer, you need to consider the customer first. Your marketing team members may have great ideas, but they might not be exactly what your customers need. Use Twitter to take surveys or solicit feedback from those who follow your tweets. You will gather valuable information you can use to improve your business.

Customer Service

In the past, unhappy customers would call you and make a complaint. Today, many people skip this step entirely and post about their problems with your company on Facebook and Twitter. Since this type of publicity can harm your business, it is important that you handle any complaints properly. Set up custom searches to search for tweets with your company name or product name in them. If you come across a complaint, respond professionally. Offer to assist the customer and resolve any outstanding issues. If other Twitter users see you responding quickly, they may be willing to try your products or services.

Respond to Tweets

The whole idea behind using Twitter for business is getting customers engaged with your brand. If someone asks a question about your business, respond as soon as possible. Not only will you be providing good customer service, you’ll also be posting helpful information that can help turn other Twitter users into customers.

Follow and Promote Others

You don’t necessarily want to promote your competitors when using Twitter, but you should find other companies to follow and talk about. Try to find companies with products and services related to your niche. If you run a sporting goods store, you might want to follow companies that produce hunting gear, fishing poles and camping equipment. You can promote their products and suggest that your followers visit your store to buy them.

Get Staff Members Involved

One of the many problems with using automated menus for customer service is that customers start to think you don’t care about their concerns. Letting people see that you have great staff members that want to provide good customer service is an excellent way to connect with customers. Allow your staff members to send out tweets or make regular updates to your blog. You might even consider creating a schedule so that every staff member gets to make at least one or two tweets per week. This will help your customers get to know your staff members so they feel comfortable contacting you with questions and concerns.

Brand Yourself

When you spend valuable time and money creating a brand for yourself, you should be sharing it with customers so they always have your company in their minds. Customize your Twitter account with a background made from your logo or company color scheme. Make sure you use a Twitter account name that is your real business name. You want to come across as authentic, so avoid using a fake account name.

Post a Company Bio

Unfortunately, many businesses do not take the time to educate people about their products and services. Creating a complete Twitter profile is one of the best ways to broadcast information to a broad audience. Create a compelling biography that tells the story of your company and lets people know about the products or services you offer. Talk about the company’s managers and staff members so customers feel like there are real people listening to their concerns. If you have photos from your company picnic or latest staff retreat, post them to your account so your followers can see them.

Creativity

Personal blogs provide an outlet for personal creativity and expression. You can blog about anything, from what happened at work on a particular day to how much fun you had spending the holidays with your family. Personal blogs are also a great way to stay in touch with family and friends when you can’t visit them in person.

Enhanced Credibility

Customers like to do business with trustworthy, credible people. Writing a business blog helps demonstrate your expertise to current customers and potential clients, as you can post tips, tricks, and warnings about your industry. It is also easier for people to trust someone who has a regular online presence and posts free information.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization refers to a set of techniques that help improve your website’s ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. When someone searches for a word or phrase related to your business, you want your website to show up on the very first page of results. Blogging can help you achieve this, as the search engines look favorably upon sites that publish content on a regular basis.

Community Creation

Some blogs turn into vibrant communities where people exchange ideas and advice. Having a business blog is a great way to create a community around your brand. Users can comment on new products and services, share their experiences with your company, offer each other tips and advice, and get in touch with your staff members directly.

Competitive Advantage

Starting a business blog helps you compete effectively against other companies in your industry. Customers do not want to work with companies that do not respond to their concerns or suggestions. Giving your customers a way to interact with your staff members sets you apart from companies that do not take customer service seriously.

Generation of Referrals

Once you have an established community that sets you apart from other businesses in your niche, you can generate referrals from your happy customers. Personal referrals are very valuable, as they cost you nothing.

Reputation Control

Unfortunately, dissatisfied customers are more likely to share their experiences with others than satisfied customers. However, blogging gives you a way to respond to negative comments and show customers that you value their business. When you resolve a problem or answer a question in a public forum like a blog, people will see that you respond to concerns and may be persuaded to do business with your company.

Public Relations

Your business is competing with all of the other businesses in your area for good publicity. Ideally, you want to capture the attention of local, regional and national journalists and convince them to write about your company. One of the best ways to get good publicity is to make it easy for reporters to learn about your products and services. Maintaining a blog allows you to publish information about what you offer.

Additional Income

Once you have an established blog, you have the opportunity to make extra income in several ways. Other blog owners might approach you and ask you to write guest posts for their blogs. If your blog receives a lot of traffic, you can offer advertising space to related companies. A furniture company owner, for example, might sell ad space to companies that sell lamps, rugs and other decorative items.

Reduced Marketing Expense

Some forms of marketing are very expensive, such as purchasing ad space in magazines or buying commercial air time from a local television station. Blogging allows you to market your business at a very low cost, which reduces your expenses and helps you increase profits.

Social Media

Many people use sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to network, find product vendors and connect with service providers. When you have a blog, you can use these social media tools to even greater advantage. Tweet about your recent post to drive visitors to your site. Let your Facebook friends know when you have new content on your blog. Share your blog address with LinkedIn contacts so they can follow your business.

Blogs enable you to establish your brand as the trusted source. In addition, blogs let you “tell the story” of your brand over and over again, allowing your customers to become both familiar and comfortable with it, something static websites can’t do. Manifesting your brand with a blog allows for personalization, which is something that static websites can’t do either.

Not only will consumers talk to you via your blog, they also will talk to one another. Your readers can become your best brand-building evangelists, helping you to spread your message and your presence throughout their networks.

Blogs are word of mouth-supercharged. The best marketing that ever was, is, or ever will be is word of mouth. There is no dollar value you can assign to having someone else talk positively about you, and your services.

So what are you waiting for? Go start a blog today!

Maintaining a blog can transform an ordinary, everyday person into a local, national, or even international expert in their field.

What about Realtors?

Agents and brokers have specific knowledge about the community that can be used to demonstrate their value and expertise. Most people are not going to trust a home sale or purchase to data from a website. Realtors need to worry less about technology solutions and focus more on having a presence that proves their worth and their value!

Blogs give brokers and agents a platform for articulating their viewpoints, knowledge, expertise, and experience with clients and prospects. This expertise can be with local neighborhoods, industry trends, home values, or other information of interest. Because they are updated routinely, blogs give Realtors an opportunity to be very current regarding their activities and to tell their own stories over and over again.

If you don’t have a blog yet, please do yourself a favor and start one as soon as possible!

The truth is that without a blog component, many company websites are impersonal and uninviting to prospective customers and clients. Most often there is simply no effective connection made between the company and the potential customer. In addition, most websites are static (unchanging) or updated infrequently. They give readers little reason to visit again and again.

Blogs include the comment feature that allows interaction between you and readers. Better than this, any time a comment is posted to the blog, most blog platforms will also send it to you via e-mail. Then, simply by hitting Reply button, you will be conversing directly with the commenter. A blog delivering fresh new content on a regular basis results in “stickness” – the action of visitors coming back to the blog again and again. Just like any knowledgeable salesperson, you know that it’s easier and cheaper to keep a customer than it is to find a new one.

From President Obama’s campaign right up to the State of the Union address in 2011 he has been a proponent of blogs & social media. Businesses should take notice.

Saving my critque of the President’s blog for another day, I love how the current administration used social media tools with the recent State of the Union address.  The strategy included a unique, content generated  “Your Interview with the President” YouTube video.  Over 142,000 questions were submitted and 1,382,00 votes were cast to select the final questions for the interview.

For lack of a better description, I think this is a really cool use of social media. Imagine a prominent member of your business being featured in a similar campaign. Along with serious issues submitted to President Obama other more human questions were used. Some examples included:

• What is you favorite and least favorite part about being President?
• What was your favorite class in college?
• Who will win the Superbowl, Pittsburgh or Green Bay?
• What did you get Michelle for Valentine’s Day?
• What is your favorite YouTube video, and why?
• It is cheaper to feed kids Fruit Loops than fruit. What are you going to do to reverse that?

The President’s example of open and prevalent use of social media is a great success story.

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One thing that every corporate or business blog has in common is a start-up period. During this time it is important to realize the personality of your blog is yet to be determined. Think of your blog as a newborn child. The genetics, infrastructure & design, will in place. The environment it was born into will eventually impact its personality (tone) of your platform as it matures.

There is always a sufficient amount of parental attention, and well-intended suggestions from relatives during the first months. This might lead to some uncomfortable moments.

You may have multiple authors who contribute to your site, each with a unique writing style. You might have corporate stakeholders vying to influence the blog’s messaging. Some might push for loud marketing & soft promotion, others will ask for protective brand press releases.

It takes a village to raise a blog. Eventually, you will learn how to deal with the corporate culture, filter through all the advice & input from the in-laws, and see your blog grow.

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My first recommendation to anyone with intentions for creating a blog, is to start slow and build up. Launching a site with all the bells and whistles on day one doesn’t happen. You have to start somewhere and build.

Blogs are supposed to be dynamic. They need to be updated frequently, building momentum like a freight train working up to full speed. Inevitably, all blog hubs with social media platforms will begin with incomplete components of design, content and infrastructure.

• Design: No matter how many goals, objectives, or strategies your site may have, they can’t all be presented in the first public view of your site.
• Content: No matter how much wisdom or experience you wish to share with your readers, it can’t all be included in one blog post.
• Infrastructure: No matter how many social networks you built for extending your reach with your messages of wisdom, they won’t all have a legion of followers during start-up.

Oh, by the way, this is good news because:

• No student can earn an “A” for a course just by showing up to class on the first day
• Rome wasn’t built in a day.
• There would be no Cowboys if there weren’t any horses to ride.

A blog has to walk before it can run, and must crawl before it walks.  Be patient, and take your first steps into social media & blogging sooner rather than later.

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