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The Five Minute WordPress Business Blogging Challenge

We covered blogging in the last post and the challenges for someone starting out now to promote their business. As the volume of blog posts online now far outweighs the amount of readers, it’s critical that blog content is rich and fresh.

There are various blogging platforms around with the most popular being WordPress and Tumblr. In fact right now I am using Tumblr to draft this post on my smartphone but WordPress is my main platform I use for publishing.

wordpress, seo, blog,
The WordPress Challenge

So what is WordPress and how easy is it to start a blog?

Well…Recently I went to see a client based in Farnborough, Phil Stockham who runs Lockrite Security. I challenged him that I would be able to get him blogging within five minutes and broadcasting to the world. He wasn’t convinced – he understood the concept but could not see how I could get him online that quick.

Well, WordPress.com actually makes this possible -after setting up a profile within a few clicks : lockritesecurity.wordpress.com, I also customised the design of the blog and all within the five minute deadline.

Phil has now successfully posted his first article : http://lockritesecurity.wordpress.com/. This has now already been indexed by Google and he is on his way to improving his ranking in search engines and getting more visitors to his site.

Once setup, a few more tweaks to appearance and the addition of a few widgets allows you to customise the look and the social functionality of your blog. There are hundreds of templates which can be used when building a WordPress site with an assortment of colours and layout, these changes can be applied with a single click in some cases, giving true power to the blogger.

WordPress allows you to save posts in draft mode and publish on specific dates, this is extremely useful if you want to write a few posts in one go but not make them all live to your site at the same time.

WordPress has two variants – WordPress.com and WordPress.org, the .com is the simplest to understand and is a good starting point for new users. Over time businesses will want to customise their sites further and host themselves, this is where .org comes in.

Some tips for WordPress.com :

  1. Register a keyword/location rich domain,  i.e lockritesecurityhants.wordpress.com/
  2. Update your blog site regularly, focus on using new content
  3. Use images and video throughout your posts to add visual appeal
  4. Integrate Social links throughout the WordPress site i.e Add Twitter and Facebook feeds
  5. Encourage users to subscribe on the site and using Social Media
  6. Write blogs on the move using smartphone apps and do not restrict to using a desktop
  7. Create short and concise posts that are digestable
  8. Update your blog design regularly to optimise performance
  9. Review your stats on a regular basis, these are provided as part of the standard site
  10. Respond to any comments posted and encourage participation
  11. Take up the option to use a custom URL for your blog on WordPress.com
  12. Make use of the Tags and Category options, this is good for SEO
  13. Link to other sites online throughout your posts
  14. When adding images use Alt tags and captions to add to the appeal of the post and help with SEO

3 thoughts on “<span>The Five Minute WordPress Business Blogging Challenge</span>”

  1. Hi Sham, good article and thank you for the link back to Lockrite Security. Well written article, although I would say that point 6, “Write your blog using a smart phone” probably isn’t practical on 90% of smart phones. The iPad and Netbooks I’d say are more relevant to writing on the go.

    We’ve taken your advice and are now writing more articles for http://lockritesecurity.wordpress.com, in fact we’ve recently published a new article, maybe you’re marketing wisdom is rubbing off on us!

    1. Ben,

      Glad you are finding the SEO articles useful. Good work with the most recent articles on your site, well on your way to setting up a successful blog and audience online. Keep it up and thanks for your contribution.

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