Archive for category: WordPress

Do you want to know how to build a steady readership for your blog and ensure high amounts of traffic to your website?

Perhaps, it’s time to pick up some useful tips that can get you started on attracting more number of quality visitors by engaging them through your valuable content. Remember, no matter how excellent your blog content maybe, it’s of no use until you are able to get readers coming back to your site for more information.

You may be able to boost your publicity efforts and improve the SEO of your website but having a loyal base of regular readers is a huge challenge, which requires sustained and conscious effort from your side.

Let’s look at some interesting ways that you can use to boost your blog readership:

–Learn more about your target audience

Most of the marketers do not have good information about their target audience, their interests, likes, dislikes, preferences etc. Without this, it’s not possible to cater to the specific needs of their target audience and marketing fails miserably. To ensure your blog is able to communicate directly with the audience, focus on specific subjects that may be of interest to your blog followers.

Know what you are trying to achieve and who is your target audience to address issues related to them. This may be also useful for targeting your products and services to your customers based on their interests that can guarantee better sales as well.

–Create trust among your customers

Customers are fully aware of marketing companies trying to sell their products to make fast bucks. Hence, don’t simply make selling your main focus and this is unlikely to yield any positive response from your customers. Instead, your main motive must be to educate your readers by sharing valuable and useful information with them.

Allow them to make their own decisions, without influencing them at any cost which is likely to build more trust among them for your products. Provide them with different options, but never try to convince them to purchase your products.

–Provide immense value to readers

Always share something valuable with your readers that can provide them with some new insight on a particular issue or topic of their interest. Offer them with useful tips, ideas and suggestions, how-to guides, tricks that are likely to catch their attention and help them solve their problems.

They are more likely to appreciate that and come back to your blog for more information in the future in this manner. Try to be as specific as possible, while addressing their needs, issues or answering their questions. This can help in boosting the confidence of your customers and even encourage them to buy your products in the future.

–Link to high authority and popular websites

On one hand, linking can invite penalties from Google but it’s definitely not detrimental to provide links to high authoritative sites that contain useful information for your readers. Research papers, case studies, posts from experts or other popular bloggers have plenty of valuable and interesting information. This is also one of the best ways of building relationships with your readers and engaging with them.

If your business website or blog is using WordPress as its content management system (CMS), you’re in good company. The majority of  the top 100 blogs are using WordPress, says a new study from Pingdom.

Understanding that a website essentially acts as a virtual storefront, the majority of small to medium sized businesses in the U.S. have created some type of website in an effort to reach more customers. Unfortunately, due to the time and expense that it takes to create and manage a website, some small business owners have decided not to spend their resources in this area at all, therefore missing out on a huge opportunity.

For those budget minded business owners, WordPress is the ideal small business marketing tool that can be used to create a professional looking website and business blog. WordPress is a free content management system that is extremely user friendly and allows you to edit and manage your site without having to know the HTML or coding. This means that you can still have a great website for your business without spending the money on an expensive web developer to create and maintain your site.

We use WordPress for not only our blog, but all of our clients’ blogs that we host and manage!   Outlined below is a brief overview of the features that WordPress offers users:

• Themes: You can select from a wide variety of free themes to give your website a distinctive look. In the event that you wanted to custom design something, you can refer to the massive WordPress development and designer community for assistance.
• Plugins: Plugins add functionality to your website, such as creating a forum for discussions or a customer only area. Basically, if you can think it up, there is probably already a plugin that is available to meet your needs.
• Blog: We hear so much these days that content is king, and an easy way to produce more content to boost SEO is to create a business blog. With WordPress, you can easily create a blog to help drive more traffic to your website.

While many people often think of WordPress as a blogging platform, it really is a much more powerful small business marketing tool that can also be used to create and maintain a website. WordPress is also extremely SEO friendly and makes it easy to share your content through your various social media channels as well, making it a valuable social media marketing tool as well.

Fifty-two percent of the top 100 blogs are currently using WordPress, either hosted or self-hosted, according to an annual study conducted by Pingdom.com. Pingdom gets the top 100 list of blogs from Technorati.

The study notes that the Web and blogging sites, specifically, have changed considerably in the last few years. Pingdom says:

“For many of us, what we used to blog about we now publish to social networks. But there’s also no denying that blogging is not gone. It has, however, changed as has the tools used to publish blogs with. Some, like WordPress, started out as blogging platforms and has taken on more general content management functionality. Others have developed in the opposite direction.”

The 2013 study from Pingdom shows that 4 more of the top 100 are now using WordPress compared with last year. No other single CMS provider even comes close to matching WordPress’ dominance among the top Technorati blogs.

Interestingly, 12 of the top 100 have custom systems created specifically for them. Drupal is the second-most popular blog platform, with 7 of the 100 using it.

But some of the old stalwarts are no longer as popular as in years past, specifically Movable Type, Typepad and Blogger.

Two of the top five blog sites, including the most popular (The Huffington Post), are using Movable Type for their CMS system.

And while TypePad added two spots in the top 100 and and Google’s Blogger added one, they are still mere shadows of their former place in the lives of bloggers.

Not only is WordPress popular for blogs, but as the report points out, WordPress has taken on a much larger role as a general CMS system. It’s become very popular with small businesses that use WordPress to build their entire websites, not just their blogs. WordPress keeps a running counter of the number of WordPress sites, and reports the total is over 65 million worldwide.