Automated Wordpress

I am a small business proprietor who now uses WordPress for many of my web pages templates and website templates. Until 1 year ago (February 2009), almost to the week, I could not develop my own web site or blog on my own.

After doing some research, I figured out I was missing out on some big opportunities by not having a much bigger internet presence. Hence, I started researching developing sites.

Until that time, I had paid for 2 internet sites; however, you get what you pay for. I went the cheap route and ended up with terrible internet sites that did nothing but cost me money.

I set out to try a number of do it yourself solutions. I used web site builders (free and paid) and several blogging platforms. After getting familiar with many solutions. I decided WordPress (WP) was the way to go, for now, and it had a strong future.

My top twelve reasons business owners should learn and use WP for their business websites and blogs are as follows:

1. Take control of your online marketing. I quickly tired of counting on someone else to get my sites right. If you can create web sites, then you can plan your entire online campaign on your own.

2. Save money by not having to pay for every new website you launch (including blogs). I realized a good web advertising campaign included numerous internet websites. If I could build one website, I could build many. The same with SEO costs; I didn’t want to pay thousands every month or SEO So I learned to do it myself.

3. After researching how some business owners did so well marketing online, I came to understand that I too could enjoy huge growth going online in a big way. I was right; I’m growing big time as a result of my aggressive web marketing campaign.

4. Why WordPress specifically? To start, the price is right. It’s free. Just get hosting for under $9 per month and you are in business.

5. Speed. Once you are familiar with WordPress, you will be able to set up web sites very quickly. Your second site you will build in a fraction of the time it took you to build your first site. Just think of the microsite and blogging opportunities you’ll be able to create that will boost your online marketing.

6. The WordPress platform has phenomenal ongoing improvement and development. Because WordPress is open-source, there is a huge community of developers and designers who contribute themes, plugins (enable enhanced functionality), and share information. There’s a great deal of free help and plenty of dialogue about WordPress which is enhancing it every day. It’s the future of website building.

7. Unlimited functionality. For nearly every need you have for your business website and web pages templates, an enterprising developer has created a plugin that solves that need. Most plugins are free; and if not free, relatively inexpensive.

8. Ease-of-use. Many themes, free and paid, offer many customization options out-of-the-box. You do not need to know coding to build a WordPress website. The WP dashboard and panel pages are fairly intuitive; you will be up and running in no time.

9. Search engine marketing and SEO are no-brainers (as long as you understand website optimization). What I mean is the various search engines like WordPress sites (I’ve read that anyway). More importantly, the plugins for website optimization are simple, free, and make optimizing your web pages so much easier than regular html or other style of internet websites.

10. Unlimited web pages templates. Whether you need a traditional business internet site, e-commerce internet site, a news site, etc., WordPress delivers. Again, it’s all in the WordPress theme you get that will help with your web pages templates style, layout, and functionality.

11. Content Management System (CMS). WordPress started as a publishing platform. It’s ideal for adding and creating tons of content. Since my web sites are content-centric, WP is perfect because I quickly and easily add content. This, in my view, is the optimal way to get lots of excellent traffic to my business websites.

12. For optimal ease-of-use and the nicest looking sites, there are plenty of paid themes available – ranging in price from ten dollars to over one hundred dollars. I use premium themes exclusively now because they’re well-coded and in my view, look the nicest. I also love the many very easy customization options available with premium themes.

There you have it, 12 reasons every entrepreneur should learn to use WP for their internet marketing.

By: Peter Lawlor

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There are millions of WordPress blogs on the internet, but the majority of them are not optimized for the search engines. This article explains 7 ways that you can make your WordPress blog more search engine friendly.

1. Make sure that your permalinks are set up optimally for SEO – whenever you publish a blog post it will have a permanent URL known as a “permalink”. By default the WordPress permalink setting is not optimal but you can easily edit this by clicking on the Settings->Permalinks menu in the WordPress dashboard and then use a custom setting such as yourdomainname.com/category/postname. This will mean that your blog post category and title will appear in the URL rather than a number.

2. Install the All in One SEO Pack (or a another similar plugin) – the All in One SEO Pack plugin allows you to add a custom title, meta description and keyword tags for your home page and blog posts.

3. Optimize each blog post for a low competition long tail keyword phrase – before you make a blog post take some time to do a little keyword research. Visit the Google AdWords Keyword tool and use this to find a long tail keyword phrase that has a low amount of competition. Ideally this phrase will have just a few hundred monthly searches rather than a few thousand monthly searches. Use a different keyword phrase for every blog post that you make and put the keyword phrase in the blog post title and 2-3 times throughout the post.

4. Use Social Bookmarking services to bookmark each blog post – whenever you post to your blog use a social bookmarking service e.g. Digg or StumbleUpon. There are also services such as OnlyWire and SocialMarker that will let you submit your site to multiple bookmarking services at the same time. Social bookmarking can get you additional traffic to your blog and give you a backlink to your blog post.

5. Optimize the home page of your blog – it is normal for the home page of your blog to get more traffic then any of the other pages. You can increase the number of visitors even more by optimizing your home page. Pick 1-2 keyword phrases for your home page using a keyword research tool such as the Google AdWords keyword tool and choose one or two phrases that are related to your niche. Ideally these phrases should get a few thousand searches per month and the competition shouldn’t be too tough. Ensure that you include these keyword phrases are mentioned in the TITLE tag, meta description and throughout the permanent content of your blog home page.

6. Install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin – this won’t increase your search engine rank, but having a sitemap will help to ensure that the search engines index all the posts and pages of your blog. You can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create a sitemap for your blog.

7.Build links to your blog – building links back to your website is the surest way to improve your ranking in the search engines. If you ignore this it will be very difficult to get a good level of visitors from the search engines. You can build links using article marketing, directory submission, forum posting, commenting on other blogs, press releases, link exchange and social bookmarking.

For more tips on how to improve your search engine rank visit Suzanne Morrison’s website http://www.3StepsToSearchEngineSuccess.com

By: Suzanne Morrison

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For those not familiar with WordPress, it is a free Content Management System that has grown to be the most popular choice when it comes to creating a blog. While still being used as the number one blogging platform, many marketers and webmasters have moved all their websites and mini-sites to WordPress.

WordPress is considered to be the best platform to write and publish any content very easily from any computer connected to the internet. With a few tweaks to the standard layout (theme) of a blog, it is possible to easily create mini-sites and sales letters using the CMS we all learned to love. By changing the layout and theme to a more minimalistic look and removing columns you can make WordPress appear like any HTML coded sales letter or mini-site commonly found among Internet Marketing.

How well does WordPress mini-sites perform, is the plain “old-school” HTML better?

The benefits for webmasters are endless, WordPress is super fast, easy to use and comes with thousands of downloadable plug-ins and features. As far as SEO is concerned, WordPress is brilliant and webmasters believe it is favored by Google more, and often WordPress sites gets indexed quicker, but in my opinion it is always about the quality content the website contains. From your visitor’s point of view, a WordPress mini-site would mean a better overall experience and fresher look. WordPress has excellent web 2.0 features and very popular membership plug-ins, making it a perfect CMS for mini-sites with “members only” areas.

Using WordPress for mini-sites or sales letters gives you complete control and freedom. And really takes no effort to maintain or even setup your website. If you have not yet used WordPress before it is no problem, WordPress will have you running your own blog or mini-site empire in no time and no experience is required.

By: Ruan Otto

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There are several WordPress auto post and autoblogging plugin software tools that have recently emerged which allows internet marketers to put their content building on autopilot. These products are great for creating content rich blogs for various niches that can be targeted specifically at a group of keywords.

These products will have a significant impact for internet marketers that decide to pursue this strategy. Using these products you can easily put up 2 or more new blogs per day and build an extensive network of highly keyword relevant niche market websites. And once they are set up, there is absolutely nothing else you need to do.

Most of the WordPress auto post and autoblogging plugin software tools provide ability to manage content from multiple content and monetization sources. So after setting up the overall theme and contact template for a website, and input your keywords to target, these tools will pump out new content with fully populated content and monetization pages on a schedule you define.

So every day, multiple times per day, or once per week, you will have new articles posted to your blog. Combine that with other automated tools like social bookmarking submissions, pings to RSS networks, blog pings, etc. and it really is a 100% hands off business.

There are several options for these tools, I am giving a high level overview for the following:

Autoblogged – Very nice product, has good content options, but limited monetization options. Low cost, single license cost for $59. Mage – The cadillac of the industry, very rich content options, but comes with a very high price tag of around $1000. WP Robot – New player, innovative a la carte pricing model allows picking only the content modules you want. Great long term opportunity at a moderate price – $165 will get you unlimited license for all modules, you can easily cut this cost to less than $100 depending on modules you choose. Others… there are several other WordPress auto post and autoblogging plugin software tools but the three listed above the favorites of most internet marketers.

This is a new wave of internet marketing and the early adopters of this technology will have an upper hand on other internet marketers in their niche markets.

By: Rob Brown

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Here is the big debate in the blogosphere: which is better, WordPress or Blogger? If you have made up your mind to start blogging but is still quite undecided which of the two most prominent free blog hosting service would be best for your business, then here are some ideas that can help you in your decision making.

Most people use WordPress, but again the choice would depend on you. Thousands of newbie bloggers, however, choose Blogger simply because it is free and offers more customization preferences if compared to WordPress’ free version.

WordPress.com offers themes that can be used for a specific blogging purpose, though you cannot do anything to make it more personalized. You also cannot use a theme offered by other websites because WordPress does not allow uploading of themes other than their own free themes and even plugins. In this context, Blogger has captured the hearts of a first-time bloggers since they can easily upload themes or widgets that they find online and design their own if they have web design and coding skills. In addition, even with all these customization activities, the service remains free.

If you are only into “hobby blogging”, which is posting your thoughts and personal views on just about anything under the sun and keep in touch with friends and colleagues, Blogger would be a better option over WordPress. Creating a blog in Blogger is uncomplicated and does not need a lot of effort in setting up. All you have to open a Google account choose your site title and it’s URL, then you already have a blog. After this, you can begin sharing your thoughts already, with hardly anything on your blog, except your posts.

If you were into serious blogging, however, WordPress would be much more advisable. By opting to upgrade and paying a certain amount, you can get total control on various customization of your blog site. You can personalize it according to your specific purposes for the blog – home business promotion, network marketing, etc. Upgrading your account on WordPress would enable you to place free themes and plugins that are available on the Internet.

If you cannot seem to decide still, then it really does not matter. Whatever blog platform you use, what matters most is getting your blog contents properly indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Alexa, achieving a better rank on these search engines and attracting a constant stream of traffic to your site.

If you are into serious blogging, then you are likely looking to your blog as a means to make money, more or less. Making sure that your blog has a steady stream of traffic will also ensure that the online income you would like to earn is possible.

Quite a notable number of people who use free blogs hosted by Blogger have attested to earning hundreds, even thousands of dollars each year. The secret may not lie on the type of blog platform they used but by how they helped people find a solution to a problem. Remember this: the blog software is not the key to earn money from your blogs – your content is actually the main ingredient to help you get the big bucks.

Whatever, blog platform or free blog hosting service you use, do not neglect it and put your energies on creating, relevant and good content that would drive traffic to your blog and make it rank for specific keywords that your target market is searching for.

By: Diane Mumm

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