Welcome to part 2 of a series of articles on the basics of effective blogging for business. Last time I discussed setting up a blogging site using WordPress. Now we’re going to look at how you equip your blog with the tools to help get your content noticed and shared.
You’ll remember that we discussed whether it’s best to have a site hosted at wordpress.com or to download the framework from wordpress.org and host your own site. If you’re still thinking about how to set up a site you might want to refer back before reading on: Blogging for Business Part 1.
Hosting your own blog allows you much more freedom to control what it does by installing plug-ins. Inevitably I’m going to be talking more about self-hosted sites as there is so much less flexibility and less to say about .com sites. But I’ll also point out things you can do if you’re using wordpress.com to host your blog.
WordPress Plug-ins
Installing a plug-in is simple. Down the left margin of the dashboard you’ll find the word Plugins (I wish they’d hyphenate it). Roll the mouse cursor over this and you will see options including ‘Installed Plugins’, ‘Add New’, and ‘Editor’. You don’t need to worry too much about ‘Editor’.
To install a plug-in, click on ‘Add New’. You can then use the search functionality to find what you want. For example, type SEO into the search box and you will get a list of the SEO plug-ins with star ratings, brief information and a link to reviews. I would also recommend doing a bit of research on Google to see what people think of the various options before you decide. When you’ve picked the one you want, click install and it’s done. In most cases It really is that simple. Sometimes a bit of extra configuration is required but this is usually straightforward.
Get Yourself Noticed
The point of blogging is to use content to get noticed by a wider range of people. There are two main ways to do this: search and sharing.
Optimising your blog for search engines is critical and there are several excellent Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) plug-ins to choose from. The one I use is the WordPress SEO by Yoast. This provides a simple way to improve the optimisation of all the posts and pages on your blog. Once you’ve decided on your key word or phrase you get an analysis of how effectively you have used it, with suggestions for how optimisation can be improved. You can write an SEO title and description that will appear in the Google search results page and see the preview of this ‘snippet’ appear as you type.
A simple traffic light indicator shows whether your SEO is ‘green for go’.
Sharing
The next critical thing is making it easy for people to share your content. Again there are several excellent plug-ins that you can find by typing ‘social media’ or something similar into the ‘Add New’ plugins search window. In one way or another these will all add buttons to your posts and pages so that people can use a single click to send your post to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, or whatever you decide is most appropriate.
I use the Shareaholic plug-in, but there are plenty of alternatives. It might be worth experimenting to see how the sharing buttons look on your screen before making a final choice. Make sure that you have this in place before you start blogging as there’s no point publishing content that it’s difficult for people to share.
For wordpress.com sites you can find a ‘sharing’ option from the Settings menu (again, down the left margin of the dashboard). Here you’ll find an option to add sharing buttons for the most common social media tools. You can also set up links to post automatically to your social media accounts.
Blogging – Keeping track
Tracking the traffic to your site is vital. You want to be able to see how many people visited your site as a result of each post you put out. This way you can evaluate the topics, headlines and the times of posting that are most effective.
Google analytics will also tell you where visitors come from so you can see which social media tools are most effective. You’ll also know how many are new visitors, how many returning, how long they spend on your site and any other pages they visited. This is all marketing gold.
Track, evaluate and learn. I use the Google Analytics for WordPress tool but it’s largely a matter of choice. You will also need to visit the Google Analytics site to get a tracking code for your blog in order to set this up. It’s a bit of effort but well worth it.
For wordpress.com sites you are restricted to using the standard WordPress analytics tool. This will give you basic information on the number of hits your site is getting.
Other Plug-ins
Once you see how easy it is to install plug-ins you’ll find loads of other things you can do. I won’t try to cover everything here but here’s just a few to think about:
Security. I would install a security package to protect your site from malicious software attacks. Again, there are several options. Once you’ve installed one your site will be safe from hackers.
Spam. Your Comments box can quickly get overrun by spammers. The Akismet plug-in will sort that out immediately. You’ll need to visit the Akismet site to register and get a key to activate the plug-in. It’s quite simple and very effective.
Pictures. Images give your posts impact. There are plenty of good quality free images available through sites such as Pexels and Pixabay.
Hopefully that’s given you plenty to think about for now. Next time we’ll look at the really important business of developing a content plan.
Richard Hussey is the founder of RSH Copywriting which supports businesses in Devon, Somerset and across the South West to market themselves more effectively using written content.