Get your message out to the masses easily, quickly, attractively and automagically.
WordPress is the most widely used platform for blogging – and increasingly, for non-blogging websites, too. With its evolution in the past 6 months to a more “Content Management” style of structure, you can accomplish so much more than you could before.
If you’ve been using wordpress for a while, maybe you haven’t explored the new features or plugins. Maybe your site isn’t working as hard as it could be for you. Maybe you’re still working too hard, too!
Below are some great WordPress plugins that can help improve your marketing & search engine results, that can push out your content automagically, and draw more traffic to your website, while you do the fun stuff of actually DOING your business.
My favourite Search Engine Optimization plugin is WordPress SEO by Yoast. It is designed to really help you laser focus each post and page to a single keyword or phrase and get the best possible results from it. It includes a keyword density measure, and on-page SEO analysis plus will generate recommendations for keywords & other content. Setting it up only takes a minute, tho if you’ve got a lot of content already, retrofitting will take some time – but it’s totally worth it.
Other popular SEO plugins (that have been updated for current WP version 3.2.x) are All-in-One-SEO, SEO Smart Links and SEO Ultimate. I find each of those to require too much configuration for the average user, and none seem to provide the laser-clarity of WordPress SEO. Choose an SEO plugin that you can make sense of – otherwise, you will drop the task partway thru, and your time & energy (and money if you’re paying someone else to do it) will be wasted. And wasted money is bad money.
To push out your content to warm leads, you really need to cover a few different angles. I recommend Simple Twitter Status Updates, Tweet Old Posts, Networked Blogs and Subscribe2.
Simple Twitter Status Updates does exactly what it sounds like. When you publish a new post, it sends out a tweet letting your tweetverse know about it – including a link, of course, and you can set custom default hashtags and pre/post content. Simple setup, easy to change anytime, you can set it for updates to posts as well so if you change something it will tweet again (yes, you can turn that off, too).
Tweet Old Posts is a nifty little constant marketing tool. Again, aptly named, it pushes out your old posts while you’re not looking. You can set the randomness of timing, categories, dates of which posts it sends, as well as hashtags & other pre/post content. It’s a great tool for keeping your name running down the tweetstream without having to remember to do it, and it gets traffic to older content, which helps google see that you are relevant!
Networked Blogs is a simple way to push your content out to facebook. It can be a bit convoluted to set up – the interface isn’t brilliantly designed – but once you get it done, you can just forget about it and it will do its thing. You can set it to push your blog out to multiple facebook pages, too… which is kind of cool (tho you want to be careful about too much duplicate content hitting the news feeds). You access this through facebook apps – search on Networked Blogs, “add to your page” and go from there. (If you can’t find your way around Networked Blogs, another reasonable facsimile that works inside WordPress is Facebook Page Publish. )
And the piece de resistance… Subscribe2. This is, in my not so humble opinion, the most important plugin for getting your word to the warmest leads – the people who say “yes, i want to know when you publish a new post”. Subscribe2 sends an email – plain text or html with a few other settings you can control – to your list of subscribers or “followers” (NOTE: THESE ARE NOT YOUR NEWSLETTER OR REGULAR EMAIL CONTACT SUBSCRIBERS) as soon as you hit the “Publish” button. It tells them, instantly, when you’ve got something new and important to say!
So, there you have it. Some useful tools for getting your word out in simple, streamlined, automatic ways, leaving your more time to work your work… not work your website.
What are YOUR favourite wordpress plugins for accomplishing these tasks?
