Why WordPress is Such an Important Small Business Marketing Tool

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.