As featured in TEQ Magazine:
Many people (as in 200,000,000) are familiar with blogging, one of the earliest forms of social media. But did you know that you can use a blog platform, WordPress, to build your entire website? Check out my website, www.WeSocialize.biz, as an example (you probably already have).
In addition to a tab labeled “Blog” where I add these posts once or twice a month. You’ll also see a raft of other pages: “Home”, “About”, “Speaking”, etc. All of these are pages are also powered by WordPress.
There’s a big advantage when powering your website with WordPress: You can change it in under 60 seconds without knowing HTML, CSS, Java, and the like. Imagine, your cost and cycle-time for changes collapsing to zero. Yes, if you can edit Microsoft Word, you can run a WordPress-based website. In fact, there’s even a button on the WordPress toolbar called “Paste from Word”. If you’ve got content in Word, you can publish it to your website with just a couple of clicks. How cool is that?
The trick to getting started is selecting a WordPress “template”. There are thousands of free templates and countless more for sale at modest prices (often around $30). Or you can hire a designer to create one for you as I did.
Once you have your template, log into your WordPress account, click “Pages” to access your list of web pages (e.g., “Home”, “About”, etc.) and then select the one that you want to edit.
With WordPress, it’s easy to add photos, videos, and virtually any other aspect of social media to your website. Did you notice the Twitter feed on my Homepage? There’s an app for that (actually called plug-ins in WordPress parlance).
In fact, there are plug-ins for virtually everything. Check out the calendar of events on my “Speaking” tab. As a visitor, you can change the calendar view from “list” to “week” to “month” to “year”. You can hover over a date and see where I’ll be speaking. All of this functionality comes from a free plug-in that is just as easy for me to use on the back-end.
My favorite WordPress plug-in is one that eliminates “comment spam”. If you don’t have a blog yet, let me explain. When you publish, your readers will comment on what you write. That’s the thrill of social media dialog… for all parties. Unfortunately, these comments benefit the creators with improved visibility in Google. That’s bad… because it attracts spammers and spam-bots.
To avoid dealing with a tsunami of spam comments, install the “Akismet” plug-in. It costs just $5 per month and is the best investment you’ll ever make.
For search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, it’s best to have your own instance of WordPress, rather than using www.wordpress.com for free. GoDaddy, BlueHost, Rackspace, and many other hosting providers feature a one-click WordPress installation option for roughly $100 per year.
Remember to use your keywords in your page titles, blog titles, and always in your first hundred words of content (see my previous column about Google’s AdWords Keyword tool). That way, people will find you when they search for what you do.
Finally, if WordPress doesn’t provide exactly what you need, look for a leading content management system (CMS) instead. Like WordPress, you’ll focus on editing content instead of on coding HTML, or worse… paying someone else and waiting on them.