Archive for January 2010
The Many Uses of WordPress
The most popular kid on the block for blog software has got to be WordPress. It is used by well known corporations around the world, small businesses, and personal sites. But, did you know that with the large arsenal of plug-ins that are available for WordPress, it can be used for a lot more than just blogging.
WordPress, for the small script that it is, could be compared to a Swiss Army Knife or the iTouch and iPhone for the amount of functions that it can fulfill and the number seems to be increasing. The last time I counted various uses, I came up with at least five. For those of you who are not sure what WordPress can do outside of a standard blog, check out these uses.
- Website engine: Did you know that you could use WordPress to run your website rather than using traditional HTML? With the right options set, you use WordPress to display pages rather than posts which end up giving you the same effect as a web site except that it is dynamically generated.
- Shopping cart: WordPress also has the capability e-commerce by adding a shopping cart plug-in. There are many tutorials on the web which demonstrate how to setup a WordPress based shopping cart.
- Photo Gallery: For photographers out there who want to showcase their photos to the world, WordPress can help you out here as well. There are a few plug-ins which extend the content management to support photos as content as the original nature of WordPress is typewritten content, not photos.
- Membership Site: Membership sites are on the rise as the amount of profit to be earned on information grows. The core of a membership site is a plug-in which requires visitors to pay a fee via Paypal and other systems before getting access to the article. Memberships can be setup to be individual access, weekly, monthly or yearly.
- Contact Manager: Using the custom theme and plug-in from Rolopress.com, WordPress can become a searchable contact manager. So, here’s your change to convert that old manual Rolodex into a easy to use contact manager that is accessible from any web browser.
- Dating Site: There is a lot of money to be made on the dating scene. WordPress can also be morphed into a simple dating site as well, believe it or not.
- Social Network: We all know that social networks like Facebook and MySpace are here to stay. WordPress can fill a niche in your community as well with a very neat plug-in called Buddypress. It incorporates the features of the multi-user version of WordPress and the nuances of a social network, but relating to a unique theme or cause.
With all these various types of uses, I’m sure with a little bit of imagination you can come up with a reason to employ WordPress to use in your next Internet project.
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A Guide to Internet Publishing and Marketing
Since I started the business back in 2001, I have struggled to identify the exact niche that I would set out to fill. The idea finally started to become clear to me back in 2005 when I looked back at what I really wanted to pursue after college, graphics, publishing, and web communications. So, from that moment I began to seek out ways to rediscover opportunities in those areas, but with current and upcoming twists.
Nowadays, just about everyone offers web design services, however, very few seem to specialize in content management systems, helping clients determine which system is best suited for their needs, and developing Internet marketing strategies using this technology. The challenge is that every solution is different as each client has different needs. But, in general, the common factor in this early period of the 21st century is the need to be heard and visible on the Internet.
However, it seems like sites go up left and right, but there is very little emphasis placed on developing systematic approaches to Internet marketing tactics. In other words, incorporating search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging, social media marketing, and analytics should be as a whole rather than individually. There seems to be a lot of back tracking rather than developing a synergistic system from the start.
If we were to plan the end goal and develop an Internet marketing plan with all the pieces put in place at one time, we would not only get more results quicker, but also at a much cheaper rate. Much like anything else that involves labor, doing more at the same time saves money rather than having to go back and retrofit at a later time for another larger sum of money. This is the technique that I am planning on marketing in order to save my clients marketing time and money.
The Internet Marketing Trinity
There are three major parts that make up a quality Internet Marketing campaign. They are:
- Search Engine friendliness
- Social Media Marketing
- Email marketing
The main question that surfaces is which ones to use and in what order. The answer to this problem is not simple. If there was a simple recipe it would have been figured out by now. But a good strategy to use is:
- Develop good content on your web site or blog
- Include related keywords into the various pages and references to those pages
- Utilize the different social mediums to announce it to the general public (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Develop and email marketing strategy to grab the email addresses of those who have visited your site to keep them coming back.
This is just one strategy to use to develop a stream of traffic to your site. There are many other deviations, but to start this is a tried and true method.
