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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In Detail
Blogging has been part of the web landscape for over a decade and has matured into a ubiquitous mode of live communication. The power of blogging has been recognized by the business community, and canny marketers view it as a powerful weapon in their digital arsenal. Done well, blogging can bring myriad benefits to businesses of any size. Done badly, it can cause more harm than good. Central to the success of any business blog is a thorough understanding of the technology. This book will give you a competitive advantage by helping you to create an engaging, effective, and well polished business blog.
WordPress allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with many outstanding features. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users, who have created a large and diverse collection of plug-ins. It has various features that can help business bloggers to boost their business strategy.
This book will take you beyond the basics of WordPress, helping you take full advantage of its rich and powerful features to transform your basic blog into a more advanced and professional blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. You will learn everything you need to know to extend and grow your business blog. You will learn to mange the content including images and videos, which will make your blog more appealing. You'll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools. So, if want to transform your business blog to give a kick start to your business this book is for you.
This book deals with using WordPress and third-party tools to manage and optimize your blog, focusing on the business aspects of blogging. It is not an introduction to WordPress and does not cover the basics such as installation or how to post. Most readers will already have an established WordPress blog or will at least be in the advanced stages of planning one.
This practical guide will show you how to make your business blog different from the crowd and attractive to your target audience by implementing the features of WordPress.
Approach
This is a practical, hands-on book based around a fictitious case study blog, which you will build on a development server using WordPress. The case study grows chapter by chapter, from installing your local development server, right up to the finished blog.
The book starts by looking at the important features that make a successful business blog: adding value to your products and services, providing proper customer service and support, driving traffic to your website, and so on. It then shows how to implement these features in WordPress. It provides clear instructions and detailed screenshots, so you can see exactly what to do at each step of the build. You will install and configure a selection of WordPress plug-ins to improve the functionality of the case-study blog.
When you have completed the case study, you will have the knowledge and confidence to apply all the techniques you have learned to your own WordPress business blog.
Who this book is for
This book is for anybody running or starting a business blog using WordPress. Whether you plan to use your blog for PR and marketing, or want to profit directly from blogging, this book offers you everything you need.
As we want to get into the specifics of business blogging as quickly as possible, we don't cover the WordPress basics. So it's best to have some experience with WordPress before you start with this book.
The book mainly focuses on a self-hosted WordPress installation, but most of the advice also applies to blogs hosted on WordPress.com.
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Seitenzahl: 366
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008
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Table of Contents
WordPress for Bussiness Bloggers
Paul Thewlis
WordPress for Bussiness Bloggers
Copyright © 2008 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: August 2008
Production Reference: 1300708
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847195-32-6
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Karl Moore (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Paul Thewlis
Reviewers
Lee Jordan
Narayan Bhat
Senior Acquisition Editor
David Barnes
Development Editor
Ved Prakash Jha
Technical Editor
Dhiraj Chandiramani
Editorial Team Leader
Akshara Aware
Project Manager
Abhijeet Deobhakta
Project Coordinator
Rajashree Hamine
Indexer
Monica Ajmera
Proofreader
Chris Smith
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
Paul Thewlis has worked as a web communications professional in the public and private sectors. He is currently E-Communications Manager for a multi-national transport company, headquartered in the UK. He began his web career as a Technical Editor, working on web design books for a well-known publisher. He has extensive experience of many content management systems and blogging platforms. He is an expert in the use of social media within corporate communications, and blogs about that subject, as well as WordPress and the Web in general, at http://blog.paulthewlis.com. Paul lives in Birmingham, England, with his fiancée, Zöe.
I would like to thank Matt Mullenweg and the WordPress development team, as well as all the hard-working members of the wider WordPress community, who created the plugins featured in this book. Scott Wallick and Andy Skelton deserve a special mention for the great work they do on the Sandbox theme. I would also like to thank my parents, Jack and Margaret, for their unending support, and my wonderful fiancée, Zöe, for putting up with so many late nights and lonely weekends during the writing of this book.
About the Reviewers
Lee Jordan is an avid user of Blogger, Twitter, and other useful web applications. She designs interactive customer service portals, enterprise-level websites and other web-based applications and writes web content and user guides. She applies over ten years of experience designing and writing for the Web to developing interactive, user-friendly websites, and writing technical guides to popular web technologies.
Narayan Bhat is passionate about wandering the Internet and blogging. Get Blogger tips from his blogging websites:
Dummies Guide to Google Blogger (Beta)— http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/2007/08/hot-tips-on-blogger-profiles.html
SEO Adsense Tips— http://seoblogadsense.blogspot.com/
THE WIDGETS OF BETA BLOGGER—http://widgetry.blogspot.com
Tips for Bloggers—http://tipsforbloggers.blogspot.com
Preface
WordPress for Business Bloggers provides advanced strategies and techniques to take your WordPress business blog from average to extraordinary. Whether you already have a blog, or are still in the planning stages, this book will show you how to use WordPress to create a highly successful blog for your business.
The release of version 2.6 has confirmed the status of WordPress as the leading blogging platform. This book has been written for and tested on WordPress 2.6, so all the screenshots and tutorials are accurate for users of that version of the software.
This is a practical, hands-on book based around a fictitious case-study blog, which you will build using a development server on your own computer. The vast majority of tutorials and examples will be applied to the case study blog. The case study grows chapter by chapter, from installing your local development server, right up to the finished blog. You will be installing and configuring a selection of WordPress plugins to improve the functionality of the case-study blog.
You are provided with clear instructions and detailed screenshots, so you can see exactly what to do at each step of the build. When you have completed the case study, you will have the knowledge and confidence to apply all the techniques you have learned to your own WordPress business blog.
The author assumes you have basic experience with WordPress, already know how to set up a self-hosted WordPress blog, and are familiar with the basics: creating posts and pages, configuring blog settings, and so on. By the time you have finished the book you will have moved forward from WordPress novice to an advanced user of the software in a business context.
What This Book Covers
In Chapter 1 you will examine many different types of business blogs. You will be shown a selection of great business blogs and see what you can learn from them.
In Chapter 2 you will be introduced to the case study blog, and taken through the process of developing strategic goals and your blog plan. You will learn that the planning process is important, even if your blog is already up and running.
In Chapter 3 you will learn the basics of blog design. You will work through a brief introduction to HTML and CSS, and see how easy it is to create your own custom design using the Sandbox theme.
In Chapter 4 you will learn some advanced image and video handling techniques, including setting up an image gallery and using video from third-party sources, such as YouTube and Google Video.
Chapter 5 focuses on different techniques and methods required for creating the best possible content for your business blog.
Chapter 6 covers some of the most important SEO strategies and how to apply them, as well as how to submit your blog to the search engines.
In Chapter 7 you will learn some advanced blog promotion techniques, including: advanced RSS with FeedBurner; using Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices; submitting to the blog search engines, like Technorati; using social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter; and using social bookmarks, such as Digg and del.icio.us.
In Chapter 8 you will learn the importance of connecting with other bloggers and playing an active role in the blogosphere to promote your business blog.
In Chapter 9 you will learn how to analyze your blog's performance using tools such as Google Analytics and WordPress.com Stats.
In Chapter 10 you will be introduced to a variety of strategies to help you generate revenue from your blog, like using advertising and affiliate programs.
In Chapter 11 you will learn how to manage the growth of your blog by optimizing it for high traffic and introducing multiple authors by using WordPress MU.
Who is This Book for?
This book is for anybody running or starting a business blog using WordPress. Whether you plan to use your blog for PR and marketing, or want to profit directly from blogging, this book offers you everything you need.
As we want to get into the specifics of business blogging as quickly as possible, we don't cover the WordPress basics. So it's best to have some experience with WordPress before you start with this book.
The book mainly focuses on a self-hosted WordPress installation, but most of the advice also applies to blogs hosted on WordPress.com.
Conventions
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Chapter 1. A Blog Less Ordinary— What Makes a Great Blog?
Blogging has been part of the web landscape for over a decade now. From personal journals to big corporate marketing, the medium has matured to become a ubiquitous mode of live communication. The power of blogging has been recognized by the business community, and canny marketers view it as a powerful weapon in their digital arsenal.
Done well, blogging can bring myriad benefits to businesses of any size. Done badly, it can cause more harm than good. Central to the success of any business blogger is a thorough understanding of the technology he or she is using. This will give you a competitive advantage by being able to create a more engaging blog. You have wisely chosen WordPress as your blogging platform and this book will give you the in-depth knowledge of the software you need to take your blog from ordinary to exceptional.
This is not an introduction to WordPress; that is, we will not be covering the basics such as installation or how to post. Most readers will already have an established WordPress blog or will at least be in the advanced stages of planning one.
In this chapter, we will consider the essence of great blogs and the groundwork that is required to produce one. What separates the mediocre from the marvelous? What should you do to blast through the blogosphere and take your blog to the next level? We will look at some examples of the best blogs out there and see what we can learn from them. The principles outlined here are a jumping-off point for the techniques and methods that we will cover through the rest of the book.
You Can Stand Out from the Crowd
Let's begin with a quick pep talk.
Making a success of your blog can seem like an uphill struggle. It's easy to be disheartened in the early days because success rarely happens overnight. One of the first psychological stumbling blocks for many bloggers is the overwhelming size of the blogosphere. It's easy to feel like a small fish in a very big pond. But, that's not necessarily the case.
It's true, the blogosphere is a crowded place, with millions of blogs out there all clambering for attention.
The statistics are mind-boggling.Technorati, the leading blog directory, claims it is tracking in excess of 112 million blogs, with over 175,000 new blogs created daily and 1.6 million new postings per day (see http://technorati.com/about/ for the latest data, as the figures will almost certainly have increased by the time you read this).
It's actually very difficult to be precise about the number of blogs out there. The 112,000,000 blogs quoted above are just those being tracked by Technorati and not all of them will be active. Putting an exact figure on it is largely an academic exercise (as you'll see from my attempt, below). The point here is that the blogosphere is big and getting bigger by the second.
At first this seems a little daunting. You may be wondering how you can stand out in such a crowded arena. With so much live information being constantly updated, is there room for any more? Does the world need another blog? Is the web-surfing public in danger of reaching blog-saturation or information-overload? I believe the answers to these questions are yes, yes, and no, respectively.
When you break them down, the numbers become a little more reassuring. Many of the 122 million blogs being tracked by Technorati are inactive—we can deduce this from their own statistics. 1.6 million new posts per day works out at just 0.014 postings per blog, per day. If we assume that for a blog to be considered active it needs at least one new post per week, we'd expect that figure to be more like 0.14. In which case, the total number of active blogs is around 11.2 million.
OK, that's some pretty rough and ready arithmetic, but it highlights the point that most blogs out there are, in fact, dormant. This effectively thins out the blogosphere and adds weight to blogs like yours, which are regularly updated.
11.2 million is still quite a big number, but when you consider the size and diversity of the global web audience (currently estimated at around 1,250 million), hopefully you can see there is room for you and your blog. Yes, there are a lot of blogs out there, but there are also a lot of web users hungry for information.
As well as being big, the blogosphere is also diverse. However, there are millions of blogs, which cover an enormous spectrum of subjects and genres. The blogosphere can be almost endlessly segmented, which adds even more weight to your activities as a business blogger. You're not competing for audience share against the blogosphere as a whole. Like most bloggers, you'll find your niche and realize success is within your grasp.
Where Do You Fit In?
Blogging began very much as an exercise in personal publishing. It was an evolution of the personal home pages that have been with us since the early days of the Web. It's still true that the majority of blogs take the form of a personal journal, with no implicit business agenda. (However, many 'personal' bloggers have found ways to monetize their activity; there is now a growing breed of 'professional bloggers', who derive much, if not all of their income from blogging.)
Note
It's widely believed that John Barger first used the term weblog in December 1997. Peter Merholz shortened it to blog in 1999, saying, "I've decided to pronounce the word 'Weblog' as 'wee-blog'. Or 'blog' for short."
It was politics and journalism that brought blogging into the mainstream, particularly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The 2004 US presidential elections marked a watershed as blogging became an increasingly normal part of the media landscape. Journalist, Andrew Sullivan, was a pioneer of the political blog, starting The Daily Dish in 2001. The following screenshot is of Andrew Sullivan's blog from September 30, 2001.
With politicians and influential journalists playing an active role in the blogosphere, it wasn't long until the business community recognized the potential benefits of blogging. Today, business blogging is commonplace with more and more web users expecting to see a 'Blog' link on company home pages.
In this very brief history of blogging we can already see three of the biggest blog genres: Personal Blogs, Political Blogs, and Business Blogs (there are, of course, many others). Most readers of this book will fall into the 'Business' genre.
Not All Business Blogs Are the Same
So, you're a business blogger. However, that doesn't say very much about your specific goals and aspirations. All blogs are different. Their reasons for existence vary depending on what the publisher is trying to achieve. Key to the success of your blog is having a clear vision of what you want it to do for you. This is your blogging strategy. Once it's clear in your mind, you can start to set concrete tactical goals for your blog, which we'll cover in Chapter 2.
For now, consider the 'raison d'être' of your blog. Why are you putting your time, energy, and resources into it? What do you hope to achieve?
Note
One of the key drivers for many business bloggers is the fact that blogs can be a very inexpensive form of marketing—you can get a lot of value for a relatively small investment.
Obviously, not all business bloggers are trying to achieve the same things with their blogs, but here are a few of the more common strategic goals of business blogging:
You may well have several of these strategic goals in mind for your blog. There is no reason why your blog can't achieve a combination of these. Let's take a look at each of the goals in more detail with some examples of blogs that have them. (Not all of the example blogs here are created in WordPress; they're included as they are good illustrations of these strategic goals.)
Increasing Sales
A blog can be a great way of expanding and updating your online and offline sales literature. Posting about the benefits and features of your products or services can be a great way of converting leads into sales. This usually involves a simpler approach rather than a full-on hard sell. Your regular sales brochure, whether online or offline, will probably list your selling points with brief explanations, which for many customers, can seem rather over-hyped. A blog allows you to expand on your selling points and, in doing so, demonstrate that there is more to your products than just sales hype.
A great example of a 'sales' blog is that of GPS manufacturer, Garmin (http://garmin.blogs.com). Their blog not only gives background information about the products, it also shows innovative ways in which customers are using their GPS units, going beyond the scope of their regular sales literature. There are also plenty of customer testimonials and images of the products actually being used.
Adding Value
Your blog is a great place to tell customers about extra features and added benefits of your products and services. This is related to the idea of increasing sales, already mentioned, so your blog can probably kill two birds with one stone. Customers who use your products and services can learn ways of getting more out of them. For example, software developers might blog about hidden features that regular users might not otherwise know about.
A good example of this type of blog is the 37signals Product Blog (http://productblog.37signals.com/). The company uses it to educate its customers about features in its range of online productivity software. The following screenshot illustrates this approach—who knew there was a Backpack version optimized for iPhone and iPod? As well as adding value for its existing customers, this kind of information is also sales material for prospective buyers.
A Dialog with Your Customers
Blogs provide the perfect environment for a genuine conversation with your customers. A key feature of any blog is the ability of readers to write comments about posts. Businesses can use this in-built technology to engage in a live conversation with their customers. It can be a great way of receiving feedback and testing opinions about new products and services, as well as finding out what your customers really want.
Obviously, opening up public communication channels with your customers can involve some risk—you may receive damaging comments. How to deal with negative feedback is a delicate issue that we'll look at in more detail in Chapter 8. For this reason, many large businesses do not use comments on their blogs. A notable exception is Boeing, which does allow comments on its blog (http://boeingblogs.com/randy/).
Raising Awareness
Blogs are a great way to raise awareness for your company and products. The nature of the blogosphere is that bloggers link to each other. This provides a great platform for spreading your message virally. Having your blog linked to and commented on by bloggers across the globe can spread the word quickly. It's a great form of 'buzz marketing' and many start-ups use a blog to create an air of anticipation about their forthcoming launch.
Joost, the web TV Company, used a blog in the lead up to its launch, using the code name 'The Venice Project'. It helped to create a buzz and raised awareness for the company before it launched (http://blog.joost.com/).
Showing Expertise
Demonstrating your professional knowledge and positioning yourself as an expert in your field is a great way of raising your business profile. This is particularly true for consultants and others who are hired because of their knowledge and experience. Web designers, academics, authors, life coaches, and software developers are just a few examples of the kinds of business people who may wish to demonstrate their expertise. Using a blog is a great way to achieve this because it provides a regularly updated outlet to showcase your professional activities and write about your achievements.
A great WordPress blog that demonstrates this is that of web designer, Jeffrey Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com). He uses his blog to discuss issues in the web design arena and give his comment about what's happening in the industry.
Customer Service
Providing efficient customer service is a cornerstone of most successful businesses. Using a blog as part of your customer service provision can be a great help to both you and your customers. You can use your blog to provide answers to frequently asked customer service questions. Blogs are also great for quickly alerting your customers to product issues as they arise.
A great example of a customer services blog is Dell's Direct2Dell (http://direct2dell.com/).
Public Relations
Your blog can provide a great window on your business. It can put a human face on the organization and provide a great way for both the public and media to get an understanding of what you're about. Blogs can also provide a means to transmit your company news, which can complement or maybe even replace the traditional press release. They also provide a forum to discuss and respond to any media coverage you receive, be it good or bad. A blog is also an invaluable tool for crisis management, as it enables you to provide instant updates about any negative situation you may find yourself in. Blogs allow you to control your corporate reputation.
Digg's blog has a strong PR-focus. It provides plenty of good-news stories, such as awards the company has picked up and enhancements to its service. It also uses it to respond quickly to any potentially damaging feedback it has received about its service. The blog also gives a good sense of the company's ethos and outlook, which is useful in managing its brand and reputation. All in all, the Digg blog is a great example of a WordPress blog with a PR-focus (http://blog.digg.com/).
Driving Traffic
Search engines love blogs. A continuous supply of frequently updated content is the key to improving search engine rankings. However, many company websites are updated infrequently, particularly if they are brochure style sites. A blog is a great way of bringing dynamic and fresh content into the mix. If you have a relatively lightweight company website that isn't updated too often, you may find you get far better search engine success from a blog. It's basically down to the fact that search engines like fresh content to index.
This strategy would work particularly well if you keep your blog within your site's domain. So, rather than having www.mycompany.com and www.mycompanyblog.com as separate domains, consider placing your blog at http://blog.mycompany.com. This is becoming the standard approach for more and more company websites, who understand the importance of driving traffic from their blog to their main website (or vice versa—it works both ways).
An example of this approach is the blog set up by HubSpot (http://blog.hubspot.com/). Not only are the blog pages within the main site's domain, they are also well integrated into the design and navigation of the main site. The blog and the main website have similar headers and menu bars.
Add Some Personality
Blogging's evolution with its roots in personal journals means many blogs often take on a very conversational style. This lends itself very well to injecting a personal touch or a human face to corporate communications. Many companies use blogs to reveal some of the personalities behind the business. These days, many CEOs and senior executives blog on behalf of their companies. The topics discussed aren't necessarily related to company activities. These bloggers have the opportunity to write about their extra-curricular interests or anything else that takes their fancy.
This approach can be very useful in building a relationship with your customers. People are now far more used to informal communications with the organizations with which they do business. They like to get to know the people behind the corporate façade. But it's still important to gauge the tone correctly. If things get too informal or inappropriate content begins to creep in, you may end up upsetting or alienating some of your customers.
Bill Marriott, Chairman and CEO of Marriott International, maintains a blog at http://www.blogs.marriott.com/. The blog contains a mix of his personal musings as well as company news, and remains firmly under the Marriott brand. It's an excellent opportunity for a huge multi-national corporation to give a personal touch to its web communications.
Categorizing Business Blogs
So these are a few of the strategic goals that successful business blogs aspire to. They provide you with one method of analyzing your blog (and the blogs of others).
But we can also look at blogs in terms of their type. Looking around the blogosphere, we see many types or styles of blog. Each of these types of blog is likely to have its own set of strategic goals. By understanding what your strategic goals are, you can probably determine what type of blog you should have. We can measure the success of a blog by looking at its type and deciding whether it achieves the strategic goals for that particular blog type.
Product Blogs
These tend to simply focus on a company's product(s). They provide information on research and development, product features, user guides, where to buy, and anything else directly related to the product or service. They are usually regarded as a straightforward sales channel—their purpose is to close sales. The strategic goals that these blogs are trying to achieve are usually to increase sales and add value.
Another great example of a product blog is Dopplr—the online service for business travelers (http://blog.dopplr.com/). It's built using WordPress.
Corporate or Company Blogs
This is probably the most diverse type of blog as it can fulfill many, if not all, of the strategic goals we highlighted above. The corporate blog can take many forms and has many purposes.
These are at once the easiest kind of business blog to get started and the easiest to get wrong because remaining focused can be a challenge. They provide almost a completely blank canvas, so it's important to identify the strategic goals and stick to them.
General corporate blogs are probably the most common type of business blogs to be found on the Web. They provide a great deal of flexibility and can cover a diverse range of subject matters.
If you have several strategic goals in mind for your blog, you will most likely end up with a general corporate blog. A great example of this type of blog, built using WordPress, is Flickr's (http://blog.flickr.com/en).
News Blogs
These are a slightly different type of blog as they can be a business in their own right.
They usually provide news coverage for a specific niche and may be run by an expert in that field or a team of experts. Many of the most popular blogs on the Web take this form. A lot of these focus on internet and digital technologies. They are almost like online magazines or newspapers.
Because of the high traffic that these types of blogs can attract, many have become successful independent media businesses by raising revenue from advertising sales and corporate sponsorships.
In terms of the strategic goals behind this type of blog, it tends to be showing expertise and adding personality. However, as many of these are businesses in their own right, they also have the goal of increasing sales, that is, advertising sales.
Two notable blogs in this category are TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com/) and GigaOM (http://gigaom.com/), both of which use WordPress.
Expert Blogs
These are written by pundits or experts in their field. They are usually aimed at promoting the business activity of the author. The experts behind these blogs may be freelance consultants, professional speakers, authors, or they may run their own companies.
Again, many of the most popular blogs on the Web are of this type. Some expert bloggers derive a good income simply from running their blogs—they can monetize the high traffic they receive by selling advertising space.
The strategic goals behind these blogs are usually raising awareness of the expert's business activities, demonstrating knowledge and expertise, and driving traffic to the expert's other websites.
Expert blogs can also come under the auspices of large corporations who use the reputation of some of their senior employees to improve their company profile.
Some expert blogs have a long history coming directly from the tradition of the 'personal home page', which we have already seen was instrumental in the development of blogging. Famous expert bloggers include Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/), Guy Kawasaki (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/), and Robert Scoble (http://www.scobleizer.com/) who use WordPress to run their blogs.
These are just four, rather broad categories. It's easy to see that many blogs will fit into one or another of these types, but some blogs cross over and there are certainly other types of blogs that we haven't covered. The main point to understand is that having a clear idea of the type of blog you want to achieve, based on your strategic goals, is an important first step in making your blog a success.
The WordPress Arsenal
We've seen that successful blogs need clearly defined strategic goals and these goals will often determine the type of blog that will work best.
WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging platforms available, and it makes possible a number of techniques and methods that will help you put your strategic goals into practice. The tools, techniques, and methods you pull out of the WordPress arsenal will depend on your blog's strategic goals.
We'll be covering these techniques in detail throughout the rest of the book, but here are a few of them to give you a taste of what's to come.
Good Design
Whatever your strategic goals may be, design is going to be an important consideration—you must come up with a design that facilitates your strategic goals.
Luckily, WordPress gives you almost unlimited control over the look and feel of your blog. You may have already experimented with ready-made themes, of which there are thousands available from various sources. However, we'll be looking at how to modify WordPress themes so that you can develop a design that is unique and fits your purpose perfectly.
Maximizing Usability
This will be closely linked to the design of your blog. Ensuring that your blog is usable and accessible to everyone is key to its success. Your readers must be able to navigate your blog and find content easily.
WordPress has many built-in features that help to maximize usability. There are also several plugins that can be used to improve this. Throughout the book, we'll be looking at a selection of the best plugins, so that you can see how to choose the ones you really need.
Promoting Your Blog
Again, whichever strategic goals you are aiming for, a key factor to your blog's success will be getting it out to as big an audience as possible.
Promoting blogs is a wide-ranging skill that involves many techniques. For example, search engine optimization (SEO) is central to any promotion strategy. There are many ways you can use WordPress to improve the findability of your site and we will be covering these in detail.
WordPress also enables you to take advantage of social networking and social bookmarking. We will also be looking at syndication and submitting your blog to the various indices, like Technorati. Chapters 6 and 7 will give you all the details on promoting your blog to the search engines and beyond.
Analyzing the Statistics
It is essential to monitor the progress of your blog and WordPress offers many tools that enable you to do this. We will also look at a third-party statistics tool, that is, Google Analytics.
We will be looking at the various statistics that are available to you and examining how you can use the data to push your blog forward.
Managing Content
WordPress is a powerful content management system and we will be looking at the ways you can manage all types of content within your blog. Depending on your strategic goals, there may be many different types of content that you need to create. From static pages to image galleries and multimedia content, WordPress gives you the control you need.
We will also be developing the skills you need to create engaging and relevant content, including copywriting techniques, and how to manage categories.
Monetizing Your Blog
WordPress provides you with a variety of options to develop revenue streams from your blog. There are several plugins and widgets that help you to do this.
In Chapter 10, we will be looking at creative methods of generating cash via your blog, which could go a long way towards covering its running costs or even develop into a significant revenue stream for your business.
Measuring Success
To ensure that your blog is a worthwhile use of your resources and is providing benefit to your business, you need to measure its success. It's also useful to be able to assess other blogs against yours and against others within your market sector.
There are several tools that can be used to measure the success of blogs.
Google PageRank
This is an algorithm that Google uses to rank web pages in its index. In very rough terms, the PageRank of a web page is assessed by the number of other pages that link to it. Google gives a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each web page on the Internet. The higher the PageRank, the higher up it appears in Google's search results. So having a high PageRank helps you to achieve a better ranking in Google.
Taken on its own, it is a matter of some debate how important PageRank actually is. But as a general rule of thumb, PageRank is a good indicator of how well a page is doing. You can see the PageRank of any web page by installing the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/).
Alexa Ranking
Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/) is a company that measures websites based on the traffic they receive. You can look up any website in Alexa to see how well it ranks. The higher up the list a website appears the more traffic it receives.
Summary
In this chapter, we have considered what makes a great blog. We have looked at how the success of a blog depends on its strategic goals and how well it fulfils them. We outlined a number of strategic goals that are relevant to business blogs and saw examples of blogs that aspire to those goals.
We have also seen a number of blog types that are derived from the various strategic goals, and introduced some of the tools and features of WordPress that allow bloggers to realize them.
In the next chapter, you'll be introduced to the case study blog we'll be using throughout the book. You'll learn how to identify your own strategic goals and draw up your blog plan, by using the case study as an example.
