WordPress

This is a question I get a lot lately. This feature of WordPress can be confusing, and throw in keywords for search engine optimization and people definitely get that glazed over look. And the more I read other good posts on the topic, the more I realize that there are a lot of opinions on what they are and how they are used.

Most small business marketing is done online where first impressions, relevant content and social media integration are key requirements for achieving visibility, which ultimately should result in quality inbound leads. Your website, which is the hub of your online presence, needs to be created on a platform that makes it easy for you to maintain, add new content and keep it fresh for your ideal clients.

For many of us in service based businesses, our knowledge is our main asset. When we write about what we know, in our blog, in an ebook or out on the social web, we share that asset with many people to help them out and to attract them to our businesses.

I highly recommend that all small businesses use WordPress for their Website. Even if you have no plans to blog, a WordPress website gives you control of your content so you can keep it fresh and relevant to your target audience. The following are a few tips that will help you get visibility in the search engines.

Are there benefits to having only excerpts on your blog home page or should you have the full post (or maybe a combination of both)?

I started thinking about this question from a marketing perspective (of course) and decided to do a little bit of research to find out if there were benefits to excerpts on the home page and if there were any serious disadvantages.

Small businesses need a Web presence. It’s the central hub of your social media strategy – the place where you send everyone to find out more about what you do or provide.

The challenge for many small businesses is to obtain a high quality, professional Web presence that is affordable and easy to keep fresh with new content.

Creating a Membership Site

Back in February, I wrote about two amazing WordPress plugins that made implementing a rotating flash header easy to implement. In this post, I want to talk about more nifty WordPress plugins that helped me implement a membership area on the Web site. This area is used by the  condominium association to communicate with the owners of the properties, providing updates to documents, minutes to board meetings and information on social events.

There is a reason why I just keep talking about why I love WordPress. I recently moved one of my client’s sites to WordPress for the usual reasons – ease of use, flexible architecture, add a blog when they are ready and all the other good things that come with Wordpress. When I suggested we move the site to Wordpress, however, I forgot that we had a couple of features that I hadn’t thoroughly investigated – a flash header with a variety of phrases that were randomly assigned to pages and a private membership area for the property owners.

Apologies to those of you who received the Masterful Marketing feed of quite a few posts yesterday. Here’s the scoop on what happened and my learning experience (which were many for the record).

I decided to take Chris Brogan’s advice (don’t remember where but possibly a Twitter post) about turning your web site around and have the blog be the home page to begin the conversation with your target right away. 

As one of your major marketing tools and in many cases, the only thing your prospect sees of your business before deciding to call you, your web site and/or blog is a valuable property that needs to be protected. Having had a client that built security software to help companies prevent malicious attacks on their systems and networks, I am sensitive to these issues.