Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing


Using WordPress To Grow Your Business – Part 3

Inside Small Business | January 21st, 2009

Joshua ‘The Red’ Russak, MarketingBlog.NET

Part 1 of this series can be found here:
Part 2 of this series can be found here:

Best WordPress Plugins

It’s important to elaborate on just how strong and vast Wordpress Extensions are. Kieran Hawe, Sr. Director of Online Marketing at Folica Inc., (previously Director of SEO at MTV Networks) said it best: “The real value of using WordPress are the enormous amounts of plugins available to help you manage, promote and do just about anything else with your blog.” He published a list of the Best WordPress Plugins covering anything and everything. I suggest you check it out. A few of my favorites include:

  • All in One SEO Pack: Optimizes your Wordpress website for Search Engines. Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines, generates META tags automatically, avoids the typical duplicate content found on site. Override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want. You can fine-tune everything, Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
  • Lighter Menus: Lighter Menus creates drop-down menus instead of the regular admin menus of the WordPress interface, so that you can browse items with one click and work on your website in a much more usable environment.
  • Enhanced WP-ContactForm: WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. In the message it sends to you it gives the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referrer. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
  • Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your website which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
  • WordPress Automatic Upgrade: Usually you have to go to your hosting company in order to upgrade your site – not with this plugin which takes care of the upgrade automatically.

For more information on Wordpress plugins and development visit Yoast.com.

Deciding if WordPress is Right For Your Business?
Other CMS’s?

I recently attended an Ultra Light Startup group that put together a panel on Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS). Experts representing different CMS’s, including Wordpress, went head-to-head discussing the pro’s and con’s for small business using their services. I caught the panel on tape and if you need help deciding on a CMS, watch the video on YouTube. Even more noteworthy, the article I wrote about that event was picked up by the well know online publisher SmashingMagazine (<–They’re website is built on Wordpress).

If you’re serious about WordPress for your Small Business needs, check out Don Campbells “WordPress for Small Business Websites” where he explores WordPress as a content management system for small business websites, including video tutorials on how to set up WordPress for yourself quickly to manage your small business website. You can also sign up for his free newsletter. Steve Bruner of Slipfire.com is another great person to contact if you’re considering WordPress. In terms of reading I suggest the blog of Wordpress’s founding developer, Matt Mullenweg and also the WordPress Blog itself. By the time you’re done with all this reading, you’ll be a “WP-Pro”.

Feel free to contact me with any questions and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction. You can contact me from my blog MarketingBlog.NET (also built on WordPress). Now go, sign up for WordPress and create an online presence for your company!

Don’t miss the first two parts of this great series:
Part 1
Part 2

*With a year of Online Marketing experience, Joshua ‘The Red’ Russak finds himself very passionate about the interactive space. He recently headed up all Online Marketing efforts at AC Lion Interactive and New Media Recruiters. His day-to-day tasks included Blogging, Social Networking, Analytics, E-Mail Marketing, SEO and Paid Search.Joshua is also co-founder of RezRedo, LLC., a vertical search engine for resume job experiences and blogs daily on MarketingBlog.NET keeping his readers up do date with event reviews, industry coverage, interviews, pictures and more. To learn more about him, check out JoshuaRussak.com.

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Posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Business, Design, Web 2.0, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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