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Building an Online Business? Make it Easier with WordPress

Did you decide to start your own business or to become an affiliate marketer? Either way, one word comes to mind in this new venture: BUDGET.

In a down turned economy many businesses are getting serious about their budgets. Expenses that are not must-haves or that don’t have a really good return on investment (ROI) are quickly shuffled to the back of the pile and placed on a wish list. Let’s face it, the costs for maintenance and changes to your html website quickly place an unwelcome burden on your company’s bottom line. Unless you are using the WordPress platform that is!

WordPress crosses the barrier of labor intensive and costly changes, upgrades, or site implementation. WordPress is a user-friendly, non-techie platform that enables the new business owner or site developer to download and install a website and have it fully operational within a matter of hours with no html knowledge.

If you want to test drive your site first, you can do that too by creating your site through WordPress.com. Once you decide this is the right decision for you and you want to establish your own domain, you will need to find a service provider and register your domain. I will always recommend GoDaddy to purchase your domain as they are always reliable and easy to contact. You will also need a hosting account. Many providers offer one-click installation of WordPress into your control panel and I highly suggest using one of these accounts with fantastico. I offer cpanel and fantastico in my hosting accounts at Easy WAHM Websites. Transferring data, images, and text from the test site to the new domain is seamless.

Besides being friendly to the budget, WordPress offers many additional free opportunities to grow your business. With nearly limitless plugins available and the list growing daily, you can customize your site to include classifieds, blogs, job posts, product sales, contact forms, instant chat capabilities, and RSS feeds. Further you can incorporate tools to analyze your site and capture important data including number of hits, site popularity and more. The possibilities for what a site designed with WordPress is capable of are endless.

Once your site is operational, you will want to consider gaining customer loyalty as well as return visits to your site. This is similar to operating an actual storefront, whereas you want your customers to return to you, and return to you often.

One of the best ways to gain customer loyalty is to make your web presence easily identifiable. When a customer visits your site, you want them to know that it is you and what you have to offer immediately. WordPress has many free or premium themes available to use, all of which are customizable, making it easy to incorporate your business logo, brand and personality into your site. Consider uploading your logo, having pictures of products and offering a newsletter. Offer your customers free and valuable information or samples and encourage them to purchase additional items such as full products of your own, affiliate products, etc.

Running a website is as important as going to meet with your customer in person to seal the deal. You want to make sure your site is user-friendly, personable, informative, and professional. With WordPress you can accomplish all these keys and more. It’s time to see your business grow and succeed without draining your bank account in the process. The WordPress platform makes this possible.

7 WordPress Plugins You Can’t Live Without

You chose WordPress for the platform to build your website or blog and you are on your way to building. You have picked your site theme and now are wondering how to get your site to work just as you originally envisioned. These plugins will certainly help you achieve that dream and create the website you’ve always wanted, all while increasing productivity and visibility!

1. WordPress Contact Form 7.0: Of course, you want to be able to open the doors of communication with your clients. You could post a phone number and email address, but what you really want is to capture the data of the clients contacting you as well. Contact Form 7.0 to the rescue! This easy to install plugin comes with the default fields of name, email address, subject, message, and submit but can be easily adapted to your specific needs. Best yet – no coding is needed to add or change fields. Second best, is the fact you won’t have to put your email address on your site and get a ton of spam to your inbox.

2. Akismet: With blogging comes the potential for spammers to bombard your blog, especially when it becomes popular. It’s almost inevitable that you’ll receive all sorts of spam comments. Akismet stops spam in its tracks. Basically, this plugin previews messages that are being sent to you and checks them for potential spam before they ever make it to your blog. You can then delete the spam with one click.

3. WordPress Database Backup: Now that you have created your site, you’ll want to preserve all that hard work you’ve put into it. What would you do if your server crashed or your site gets hacked into? I had this happen to me early on and it was devastating to lose a year of posts that were so personal. I just didn’t understand the importance of backing up the database or even what a database was. With this plugin you won’t have to worry anymore. This plugin allows you to backup your site in regularly scheduled increments. Once you’ve downloaded and activated the plugin, simply customize your backup settings according to your needs. This once daunting task becomes a thing of the past as WordPress Database Backup takes care of backing up your site for you.

4. All in One SEO Pack: Certainly you want to drive traffic to your site. How do you get your site to appear in someone’s Internet searches? Use the All in One SEO (search engine optimization) Pack plugin. This plugin allows you to tweak your titles, item description, and add keywords to your posts to increase your rankings in search engines, which makes it easier for your readers to find you when they need you most.

5. Google Analytics for WordPress: Who is visiting your site, and what pages or sections are the most popular? Google Analytics is an easy to install plugin that allows you to see into the minds of your visitors in a sense. This easy to use plugin helps you track traffic whether it is from the title of one of your posts, the article itself, or possibly even the comments field. You can even combine this plugin with Google Adsense.

6. Adsense Deluxe: We have all seen them; those ads that appear within a website or blog post luring our visitors to another site. But how do they really work? The owner of the site creates “spaces” within their blog or posts that allow advertisers to purchase space. These spaces are often referred to as banner or box ads. Adsense Deluxe allows you to build these advertising spaces within your site. Simply decide how many ads you will host with each page, sizes of ads, display location, and then let Adsense do the work for you. Management of ad sites is also as simple as a few short clicks.

7. Google Sitemaps: Ever wonder how you get your site to appear in searches on all the different search engines? Google sitemaps can do the job wonderfully. This plugin provides XML-compliant feeds of your site and automatically updates the major search engines of any changes that you have made.

From backups to interacting with visitors on your site, building advertising blocks to managing spam and increasing your search engine optimization to managing traffic patterns, these plugins will help you create a site that is easy to use and manage. Achieving your website goals will be easier with the use of these and other popular WordPress plugins. Who doesn’t like easier when it comes to creating success online?

Top Seven Reasons to Use WordPress as Your Blogging Platform

You are ready to move forward.  You have researched a domain and some other blogs in the niche you want to write about.  You are ready to start your own blog.  Good for you – now a big decision of which blogging platform you should use?

Blogger, WordPress or TypePad are just a few of the more popular blogging platforms.  While there are several different blogging applications that are free, many bloggers find themselves in the world of WordPress.  There are many good reasons to choose WordPress over the competition, including open source content management and SEO ability.  If you find yourself trying to decide which is right for you, here are some everyday reasons to use WordPress as your blogging platform.

1. Personality – WordPress is all about you. There are hundreds of free themes available to personalize your blog and provide an Internet presence that represents who you are as a writer.

WordPress themes are flexible and can be customized to your niche audience and product line.  Best yet, if you get tired of the skin (theme) you have downloaded for your blog, simply change it by downloading a new theme.  With a simple click of a button WordPress moves your content to the new theme for you.  It’s now even easier to upload a new theme because you can do it right in your admin area instead of logging in to your hosting.

2. Plugins! Plugins! Plugins! – Get the idea? Plugins are another way to customize your blog.  Popular plugins include contact forms, site statistics, search engine optimization, and photo resources, but that literally doesn’t even touch the things you can add.  WordPress currently offers throngs of free plugins and is adding to their plugin resources daily.  There are some great shopping cart and membership plug ins as well to build a full community or ecommerce site.

3. Pagination – Back in the early days of blogging, blogs appeared as online diaries with one post following the next and comments intermixed between. With WordPress you can actually create pages to separate your material or to provide additional information.

Maybe you have a blog on homemaking, home repair, and recipes.  Each of these could be placed onto their own unique page, making it easier for your readers to find the information they are looking for.

You can also create additional pages such as ‘Contact Me’, or ‘About Me’ pages.  This functionality also makes WordPress the perfect platform for businesses, not just bloggers!

4. Performance – Believe it or not, not every blogger is an expert at web design.  Creating your own website or presence can be a daunting task for anyone.  WordPress provides easy to use functionality with a built in dashboard to help manage your sight.  Also, because of its popularity WordPress has many resources available to their users including online forums, help references, and support teams.  Best yet, if you just want to try out blogging for a bit before you invest in your own domain name, WordPress.com allows you to register your blog on their site for free.  You can easily move to being self-hosted down the road with no learning curve.

5. Permalinks – When you create your blog, you want the world to be able to connect to that specific blog quickly.  Alas, permalinks.  For every blog post, WordPress creates a unique permanent link to that specific post.  This way when you want to send someone to the specific post you created, you have a unique url that will take them directly to that post.

6. Ping Back to Me – What is auto pinging anyway?  It is a tool that allows you to notify the search engines that you have posted a new entry.  By simply adding the correct plugin and adjusting your settings, WordPress has the ability to ping your blog automatically.

7. Pathways Back – Have you ever commented on another person’s blog? Many times the blog will only post your user information when you leave a comment, but if you use WordPress.com and you are commenting on another WordPress blog, then WordPress has the ability to automatically provide a link back to your blog for anyone to see.  A great and free tool to increase your readership.

This is only a small list of reasons bloggers choose WordPress to host their blog.  Ultimately, you need to choose the platform that’s right for your needs.  Keep in mind, WordPress prides itself on being one of the most user friendly platforms and is constantly striving to make things better for users.