Wordpress Blogs - A quick win for Marketers
Wordpress, an open source blogging platform that is the popular CMS for many famous blogs and websites is a gold mine for online marketers, yet very rarely utilised.
Why Wordpress over other blogging platforms? It is open source, has a very big community of plugin developers making the most hardest of tasks possible with the install of a plugin and best of all, it let's marketers perform numerous objectives in one single offering. All you need is an amazing design and you are on your way.
Search Engine Optimisation
A Wordpress blog will create a new page of content each time you post an article/blog. This can rapidly increase page count and combined with thought leading articles, will generate significant long tail traffic to your website on topics that would otherwise be hard to rank well for in search engines with a generic corporate website.
Another facet of blogs that people often forget is that they become easy ways for other websites to link to specific articles and content. A blog such as Wiliam’s might paraphrase and link back to the author in support of an argument that was brought up – immediately creating another link to your website and the traffic benefits that entail from featuring on someone else’s website.
Social Media Integration
With all the hype of social media, it can be often quite hard to integrate the neccasary sharing tools on a corporate website. A blog however can easily incorporate such tools with the simple install of a plugin.
This will immediately give the visitors the ability to share on Twitter, Facebook and some of the former fav’s like Digg and Technorati.
There are even plugins to feed your content into social media websites automatically.
Informal marketing channel
My favorite reason for having a Wordpress blog is that you can discuss topics that would otherwise have no place on your corporate website. This could give you a chance to compare your services to that of a competitor, actively target localities in your keywords, ask your consumers for feedback or perhaps even discuss new product development to test sentiment before taking up valuable real estate on your homepage.
Interacting with people at different stages of the buying cycle
Sometimes as consumers we just want to read a bit of out loud thinking, something that correlates with our own concerns we are actively hunting down to satisfy. Perhaps you want to hear someone else’s opinion on a product before you buy or even learn if there is a newer or greater product about to be released.
Depending on the stage you or your customer is in, it is nice to satisfy all angles of this cycle – a general rule of thumb for any marketer is we want to appear relevant to all of our customers’ needs to ensure their purchase decision will involve us, either now or later down the track. Wordpress blogs allow us to do this in ways that were quite hard in the past.
Consider not only engaging with your audience through these information channels, but also having house ads or further reading for your customer – perhaps you could push them in the direction you are wanting them to take.
Final note
As Wordpress is quite heavily used by many developers, the success or failure of your blog tends to lie within how the design engages the consumer. It is very important that you have a cutting edge, industry leading, consumer driven blog that performs both your marketing requirements and the requirements of your readers.
The last thing you want is to launch a blog using a below par template. Your blog should be properly integrated with your existing website or create a point of difference – something that is quite hard to achieve with free to the public templates.
Wiliam have created a number of different Wordpress blogs, for a quick peek at some of the designs and ways they can be manipulated, see below:
