The Benefits of WordPress in Digital Marketing

One of the best Content Management System is WordPress as its functionality can be expanded to fit most of the website needs, desired by most of the client. Throughout the year of 2015, the digital marketing plan for a business requires a Content Management system which is simple to run and which will not obstruct the purpose of promotion as well as content.

There is a reason why many WP developers and marketers prefer WordPress nowadays to build websites and systems for their clients. It’s easy to use and a tonne of feature rich plugins make things a lot flexible for business owners as well as developers.

Unlike other CMS, WordPress does have options to make your on page SEO strong.

Here are some of the benefits of WordPress in Digital Marketing:

• Content marketing: is a proven digital marketing strategy. Organizations produce content their audience can use and adds it to their website or blog. Then, this content gets promoted through social, email, paid channels and more to reach the target audience.

Marketers can use targeted keywords and phrases in the content to drive search engine visibility. And this useful               content on your website is valuable to your target audience. This value helps to build backlinks – links back to the             website – through social shares and other mentions.

WordPress is an ideal CMS for content marketing. It started as a blogging tool so content marketing is in its blood.             It has been refined over the years to make it one of the easiest utilities for creating and editing website content.

• Website Portal: While not a full fledged Association Management System like iMIS, WordPress has a wide variety of plugins available (including an iMIS plugin) that can help you manage most membership needs.

You can easily manage your members, offer payment and scheduling options for events, sell merchandise, and                 much more. Associations and nonprofits as well as small to medium sized businesses can use WordPress to                       create a community of brand evangelists.

With these plugins and a solid digital marketing strategy, organizations can turn their website into a portal where              their community of members, clients, etc. can gain access to information.

WordPress functionality can also be extended and customized to do just about anything you need. So, you don’t               need to settle for “off the shelf,” you can make your website a custom resource dedicated to the specific needs of             your audience.

This is called Utility Marketing.

• Community Building: With the functionality and strategies mentioned above, you have a powerful Youtility tool as Jay Baer puts it.

Your website will be the hub of a community of clients, members, whoever your target audience might be.

From this hub you can build the marketing wagon wheel (see below) where social channels are the spokes.

The wheel is completed as your community starts sharing and discussing the content, events, merchandise that                lives on your website the wheel hub.

The channels in the outer ring might change over time but the hub stays the same.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): is the process of optimizing your website and the links to it such that Google finds value based on certain keywords and phrases. You can use WordPress to greatly improve your SEO based on the following:

Using a plugin like Yoast, you can easily test the SEO strength of a page or customize the page title and META                     description.

WordPress eliminates any content bottlenecks which means content will be updated more often. This will                           improve rankings.

WordPress allows you to expand the pool of content editors in house. This is an extension of point 2. These                        editors, if invested in the success of the organization, are empowered to make changes on a regular basis which                improves the SEO of the site.

• Conversion: Turning visits into leads/sales  is easier with a CMS. You can track which content gets visits, shares, or comments and which do not. Then, tweak or eliminate the bad content and expand on the good content.

You can also track which calls to action work and which do not. With WordPress, you can try a variety of offers                   and calls to action. So, after identifying an offer/call to action isn’t working, you can replace it with something                     different that could produce better results.

Your website design/development firm can setup callouts and calls to action like buttons, styled boxes and more.             And using a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields, the developer can set these up to be easily editable.

• WordPress vs Other Content Management Systems: There are plenty of CMS options out there. I suggest that before making a decision, you do your research.

The majority of our clients are a perfect fit for WordPress. While other content management systems have similar             functionality to WordPress, there are some glaring differences…

-cost: because WordPress is open source, there is no license.

proprietary system usually has a monthly or yearly fee. Also, the pool of available WordPress developers is vast. Competition means competitive pricing. Of course, price isn’t everything. A large group of available developers also means you won’t be left stranded if your developer goes AWOL.

-Portability: Because WordPress is built on a widely supported

platform of PHP and MySQL, and it’s open source, it can be hosted just about anywhere. And because it’s not tied to any package or proprietary system, you’re not stuck in some agreement you can’t get out of.

-Flexibility: There are so many plugins for WordPress that you

can find one for just about any sort of functionality you need. And any custom functionality not supported by a plugin can usually be developed by the many quality PHP developers out there.

-Longevity: With many CMS’s, an upgrade to the latest version is

a major headache. With WordPress, it’s usually a day at most and sometimes just a flip of the switch. I would always recommend checking with your developer before doing an update.

• Agile Marketing: In 2017, agility continues to be super important. It  means that your team is able to market on their time… not within the schedule of one staff member or your design/development firm.

The time between idea and implementation can sometimes be a matter of minutes with agile marketing. This                     makes the CMS your content superhero.

You can discuss content marketing initiatives and then implement them right away. If you lag at all, you                                coupossibly lose out to your competition.

Branding Your WordPress Website

The best thing about WordPress is that anyone with a great idea for a website or online business can use it to bring that idea to life without the need for any technical know-how or even a large budget.

It’s for this reason that branding your WordPress website is so important – helping you to not only stand out from the crowd in the first place but build the kind of unwavering brand loyalty that keeps your audience coming back to you rather than to one of your competitors.

Branding Your WordPress Website: Seven Essential Steps

• Define Your Style: As soon as the word ”branding” is mentioned, it’s’s easy to get swept up in the excitement that comes with creative tasks like drawing logos and brainstorming clever marketing slogans.

Keep in mind that it is your audience that should be dictating your branding style, not your tastes or the whims of your boss.

If you’re targeting a youthful audience, for example, then vibrant colors and a playful language will make a much more significant impact than the kind of formal voice and corporate design that you might use to appeal to high-earning professionals.

Consistency is key here. Once you have a solid understanding of the kind of style your audience responds best to, check that every new branding element you choose fits that style.

• Choose a Theme With Suitable Branding Options

WordPress themes are the very backbone of your website’s branding, serving as the one tool that brings all of the other tools together into one complete, presentable package.

Some don’t have the option to include a logo while others offer a limited color palette that you can usually only change by diving into some custom CSS.

With that in mind, be on the lookout for a theme that offers all the customization options you need while still complementing your overall style.

If you feel more confident about creating you’re own style: use Elementor and create everything from scratch.

Another factor to consider here is whether your chosen theme comes with a fixed set of fonts or whether it allows you to use a tool like Google Fonts to select a typeface that’s in keeping with your branding.

• Create Your Logo: Your logo matters and can make all the difference in how audiences connect to your brand.

A visitor might not remember a single word of that beautifully-written copy on your homepage, but they’ll remember a good logo, especially if it’s an accurate reflection of your style and identity.

So, how do you create one?

You could always have a go at designing one yourself. Don’t have tools like Gimp or Photoshop installed on your computer? Services like Canva are entirely free and make creating a logo as easy as dragging a mouse around the screen.

Whichever approach you take, keep in mind that you’ll usually need to ensure your logo meets specific size dimensions so that your theme can display them correctly.

From Your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance – Customize – Header. This is typically the place where you’ll upload your logo, and it should tell you what dimensions that logo should be. If it doesn’t, you’ll find them in the documentation that comes with your theme.

• Create a Favicon: It is a small image -usually a tiny version of your logo- that appears at the top of a web browser next to the title of the page.

using one helps visitors to quickly identify your website if they have lots of tabs open or if they’ve saved your site in their bookmarks or favorite folder (favicon is short for ‘favorite icon.’).

WordPress will convert any image file into an icon providing it’s the appropriate size.

How to Upload a Favicon to WordPress

When you have your icon ready, head once again to Appearance – Customize. Most themes will include the option to upload your favicon under the ‘Site Identity’ tag.

• Choose a Color Scheme: For the sake of consistency, the colors you choose for your WordPress website will end up being the same colors used across every aspect of your brand, including your social media channels and any offline marketing you do. So it pays to choose them carefully.

All manner of research has been done to show that colors have a profound psychological influence on a person’s decision making and can trigger strong emotional responses.

You’ll want to do your research to pick out the colors that best reflect your brand, but be careful not to throw too many of them into your design.

As a general rule, three colors should be enough, four at the very most. Anything more than that may end up distracting from what’s important.

• Develop Your Brand Voice: Take away all the design elements of your website, and all that remains is your content. That content may be the words on your blog or the products in your eCommerce store. It may be a video, or it may even be a carefully designed Infographics.

Whatever it is, that content will have a voice, and that voice will make a big difference when your visitors come to decide whether your brand is right for them.

• Consider Your Cross-Platform Branding Options

Your voice is on point, your design looks the part, and you’ve created the kind of logo that puts those famous Golden Arches to shame. As far as branding your actual WordPress website goes, you’ve made a great start

Once your website goes live, you’ll no doubt want to promote, drawing in as many visitors as you can through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

When you do, there are two things you’ll need to consider:

• Choosing the right platforms
• Maintaining consistency across those platforms.

When you’ve chosen the platform(s) that work best for you, make sure that your profiles use the same colors, logo, and voice as your main website.

If you follow WPLift on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll notice that our branding is the same on both platforms and matches the look and feel of our main website.

WordPress is The Best CMS for SEO

WordPress is a popular content management system. Nowadays, users from all over the world build WordPress sites, from small business owners, who want to expand their businesses online to authorities in different niches.

SEO is a big part of the strategy of many online businesses. Some startups rely entirely on organic traffic from the search engines.

The most successful SEO experts use and recommend WordPress

One of the reasons why WordPress is so ahead of the competition is because it works so well for SEO. But what makes WordPress so unique? Well, here are some answers:

• WordPress Allows You to Create Attractive Permalinks

On WordPress, it’s super easy to edit your website’s permalink.

The beauty of being able to edit your article’s permalink is you can plug your keyword into the URL.

This means your permalink doesn’t only look pretty and informative, it can help with your search ranking as well.

The permalinks can affect your ranking in two ways:

-Keywords in the link are an important ranking factor.

-Pretty permalinks can increase the CTR of your posts on the search engines.

CTR is the click-through rate for a link which is also a Google ranking factor. When you get fewer clicks than expected, Google will drop you into lower positions while improving the position of sites with a high CTR.

• The meta description is the major ranking factor across the search engines. Shortly, it’s a brief summary of your blog post or a web page to both – the search engine bots and web audience. You can see it under the page link within a Google search result page. It can improve your position significantly so you need to add it to almost every post and page of your website.

The default WordPress settings allow you to optimize your meta description. What you have to do is to install one of many free SEO plugins and then add them. It takes only a couple of minutes, but you can reuse them all over again. In case you aren’t adding the metadata manually, a plugin like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO will automatically create SEO-friendly meta descriptions for your WordPress site.

• Besides the text quality, your articles should also include images that go along with your content. They should be quality and relevant to the article. Images break up the flow of the text and improve the readability, making your content look more appealing and consistent. However, search engines don’t just look for images as we see them. What they look for, are images with alt text.

With WordPress image optimization, it’s simply a matter of filling in the right fields. Once you upload them to CMS, it’s easy to add titles and alt text to your images. Simply enter the image edit options and fill in the “Alternative Text” box.

• The number of the users, who use search engines from their smartphones and tablets, has increased over the last few years. Entrepreneurs must adapt to this new trend.

If you use WordPress, you have nothing to worry about. Most themes are already optimized for mobile phones. Additionally, when you customize your website, you can check how it looks on all the different devices. While we take for granted that any theme should be responsive, you still can see websites owners who are trying to figure out how to do it.

• Site speed is not a ranking factor but if the loading time of a site is high, your users will get frustrated and it will be bad news for your bounce rate. Also, if your site is very slow, it may get banned from Google.

For those who already use WordPress, site speed should not be a problem. There are many fast loading themes to meet every need. You also can find plugins that were actually created to improve site speed.

The only reason to have a slow site when using WordPress is that you are not using it properly. You can check your site load time on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

How to Make an E-Commerce Website with WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular website builders in the world. The number of E-Commerce sites on WordPress is increasing dramatically, especially in 2020. Then, if you want to set up your own WordPress E-Commerce website. Woonas will show you how to do that.

• Set up your business plans

Business plans are essential for every type of business. Without business plans, you will easily be out of track. Then, building a valid business plan is the first step to do.

• Find your target customers

To deliver the best service and products to your customers, you need to narrow down your audience. After that, you’ll have to learn about them: their behaviours, demography as well as geography. Thanks to that, you will be able to serve them well. Then, you can improve the customer satisfaction along with your revenue.

• Choosing products to sell

You need products to sell on your WordPress eCommerce site. Now, it’s time to select items to sell on your online store. Will you resell products from a supplier, or hand – craft products yourself? Will you sell your items in bulk, or individually. Depending on your segmentation and target customers, you can find the right products and service to offer to them

• Understand your competitor

This is such an important step for your business. Learning about your competitors can help you determine your advantages as well as disadvantages. From that, you’ll be able to set the suitable price. Also, it’s a great way to improve and upgrade your products

• Choosing your brand name

Brand name, tagline and slogan can greatly reflect your business perspectives. Thus, you should think of the brand name as well as slogan carefully.

• Developing your unique value proposition ( UVP)

ECommerce is such a competitive market. Thus, to compete with thousands of WordPress eCommerce website out there in the market, you need to highlight your unique value proposition. Thanks to that, customers can instantly see the value of your products. Then, they will choose you over other website or brands

When to Use WordPress For E-commerce And When to Avoid It

We will walk you through all the details of where you should set up your online store and if WordPress E-commerce is right for you or not

• WordPress is now a decade old and is still the reigning champ for managing sites with a ton of content. If you plan on pursuing an SEO or content marketing strategy for your business, WordPress is the only legitimate choice for your site.
• WordPress is a particularly handy solution for E-commerce websites. Taking everything we previously listed into consideration, it’s surely no surprise this platform is everyone’s first pick, especially if they’re running an online store. And thanks to the free WooCommerce plugin, and all the WordPress themes compatible with WooCommerce, you can have an up-and-running online store in a matter of days, if not hours.
• Because WordPress is open source, its far-flung community of developers are constantly coming up with new plugins and themes. WordPress is made infinitely powerful with the hundreds (even thousands) of useful plugins that allow you to do whatever you want. Many of these are even free of charge.

Here are some of our favorites:

WordPress plugins for content marketing

WordPress plugins for product pages

WordPress plugins for SEO

WordPress plugins for automation

WordPress plugins for e-commerce stores

• WordPress is incredibly versatile, whether you’re a do-it-yourselfer or prefer to leave the website design to the experts. You could get your E-commerce website started for less than $100.
• A Myriad of Plugins and Themes: If you’d like to augment the functionality of your WordPress website and power the whole thing up, simply pick and install some handy plugins. Depending on what kind of website you’re running, you’ll choose the plugins that match your requirements. The WordPress plugin repository counts over 55k plugins, so there’s definitely something for everyone.

Also, with a plethora of online store WordPress themes to choose from, you can easily craft a website for your needs without being an expert.

When to Avoid WordPress E-commerce

• You don’t have a reliable developer: If you’re an E-commerce owner and you don’t have your own developer and you’re not a developer, it will be difficult to keep your WordPress E-commerce store running long-term. Although the store might be running fine after the initial setup, there are frequent updates to stay on top of.

• Complex products:WordPress E-commerce plugins like WooCommerce and Jigoshop are good for quickly adding simple products with a few variations. Creating complex and variable products, however, takes significant customization. For many WordPress E-commerce plugins, you’ll need to add in additional third-party plugins to get what you want.
• When a new version of WordPress is released with updates and security patches, you’ll want to update. In addition to keeping the WordPress core updated, you’ll also need to update the E-commerce system that you are using with WordPress. You’ll also need to update any other third party plugins that you’re using on the site and make sure those are up to date as well. Before you can actually do the upgrading, however, you’ll want to test the upgrades.
• If you’re not a developer or don’t want to pay for a developer’s time when your website’s backend needs updated, WordPress might not be the best choice. Most seasoned WordPress developers know that testing the updates before going live is crucial.

13 Best Content Marketing Tools and Plugins for WordPress

Why Do You Need Content Marketing Tools & Plugins?

These content creation tools not only help you find what to write about, but they also help you see what your users are looking for, and how you can get more traffic for existing content.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best content marketing tools and plugins for your WordPress site.

1. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to properly install Google Analytics and view your website traffic reports inside WordPress dashboard.

MonsterInsights helps you see how people find and use your website. You can see your top content, top referral source, most profitable pages, and more.

Aside from keeping traffic stats, MonsterInsights also helps you track user engagement which is extremely useful in planning your content strategy.

2. AIOSEO

AIOSEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin. Often people don’t understand the full power of this plugin. It doesn’t just add meta tags. It’s a complete content optimization suite with tons of features to help you improve your website.

3. Edit Flow

Having a proper editorial workflow helps you create useful content on a regular basis. Edit Flow helps you add custom post statuses, leave editorial feedback, view editorial calendar, and execute your content strategy like a pro.

4. SEMRush

Used by thousands of SEO professionals, SEMRush is one of the best SEO tools on the market. It allows you to easily gather analytics and competitor insights to help improve your own SEO.

You can learn about your competitor’s top organic keywords, how they get backlinks, their advertising strategy, and more. 5. Ahrefs

5. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another popular tool to find out why your competitors are ranking higher than you, and what you can do to outrank them in search results. It comes with keyword explorer and content research tools, which help you find out what kind of content is ranking for those keywords and why.

It has a powerful crawler that monitors the web. You can use it to track your backlinks, search rankings, competitor backlinks, paid advertising keywords, and more.

6. Canva

Canva helps you create beautiful images for your blog posts like a Pro without worrying about copyright.

It comes with a powerful yet extremely simple image editing tool that runs in your browser. You can select from a large number of templates, graphics, icons, banners, and infographics to use as a starting point. Once you are done editing, simply export the image and use it in your articles.

7. Grammarly

Grammarly is one of the best online grammar checker tools for WordPress users. It works in any writing area, including your WordPress post editor.

Upon installation, it will show an indicator at the bottom right corner of the writing area. Clicking on the indicator will show you the number of errors. Spelling, grammar, and contextual errors will be highlighted with an underline as you write.

8. reSmush.it

reSmush.it is the best WordPress image compression plugin, that can automatically reduce image file size without affecting quality. It also offers a bulk optimization option which allows you to quickly optimize older images on your website.

9. IFTTT

IFTTT is a popular web tool that allows you to automate your social media profiles. You can connect with many popular services including WordPress and all major social networking websites.

After that, you can create recipes or applets for any of these services. This enables you to automatically share WordPress posts on social media, trigger retweets, share photos, and more.

10. Shared Counts

Shared Counts is one of the best social media plugins for WordPress. It allows you to easily add social media sharing buttons to your blog posts. It can also display share counts for each platform as well as the total number of shares for your article.

Unlike other social media plugins which slows down your website, Shared Counts is highly optimized for speed. It comes with only the best social media websites and multiple button styles that you can use.

11. PushEngage

PushEngage makes it easy to set up push notifications on your site, and it even comes with a free plan that includes up to 2,500 subscribers and 120 notification campaigns each month.

WPBeginner, push notifications are  the top 5 traffic source.

12. Revive Old Posts

Sometimes your blog’s old articles will get neglected due to lack of time and resources. Revive Old Posts helps you solve this by automatically sharing your old articles on your social media profiles.

This helps you promote your old articles automatically while actively driving traffic to your blog. It also helps your new social media followers discover content that they may have missed before.

13. OptinMonster

More than 75% of visitors abandoning your website will leave and never come back. This is where you need OptinMonster. It is the best lead generation software that helps you convert abandoning website visitors into subscribers, customers, and followers.

It comes with beautiful optin forms, that you can connect with your email marketing service or CRM software. You use it to effectively reduce bounce rate, increase user engagement, and boost email subscriptions.

WordPress

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a free, open-source website creation platform. On a more technical level, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) written in PHP that uses a MySQL database. In non-geek speak, WordPress is the easiest and most powerful blogging and website builder in existence today.

WordPress is an excellent website platform for a variety of websites. From blogging to e-commerce to business and portfolio websites, WordPress is a versatile CMS. Designed with usability and flexibility in mind, WordPress is a great solution for both large and small websites.

WordPress Features

As a website building platform and CMS, WordPress boasts an impressive feature set. Here are just a few of the many features of WordPress:

-SEO – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) begins at a technical level and WordPress delivers an exceptional code base for SEO. SEO allows your website’s content to be found via common search engines such as Google or Bing. Check out these free WordPress SEO training videos to learn more.

-Speed :WordPress is a lean website framework that is constantly striving to remove code “bloat” that slows down the loading speed of a website.

-Mobile-friendly : Most WordPress themes are now mobile-friendly or responsive out-of-the-box.

-Media file library : WordPress includes a built-in media library where you can upload and embed media files such as images or videos into your pages or posts. You can even perform basic edits to your images within WordPress.

-Easy-to-use user interface : WordPress is very easy to use with no complicated settings. If you can use a WordPress processor, you can use WordPress. WordPress also has a focus on accessibility.

-Custom menus : WordPress makes it easy to create navigation menus with links to your pages or custom links.

-Built-in blog : Adding a blog to your website is as simple as publishing a post.

-New in WordPress 5.0: The WordPress Block Editor – WordPress 5.0 introduced the new Block Editor, also known as the Gutenberg WordPress Editor. The new editor transforms the way you edit WordPress pages and posts. Now you can design and arrange your content with a more flexible “drag and drop” approach.

Making Money with WordPress

New industries have sprouted from WordPress. Today, the possibilities of making money with WordPress range from running an online store to building websites for clients to WordPress consulting.

-Build WordPress websites for clients: If you are a web developer or designer, you can specialize in WordPress websites. Since WordPress is so easy to use, training clients to use their websites is a bonus of specializing in WordPress.

-WordPress maintenance: Often, WordPress site owners don’t have time to maintain their websites. WordPress maintenance includes important website tasks such as software updates, backups, security, SEO and more.