BLOG | Custom Web Design 11 Ways Marketers Can Use WordPress More Effectively

What is WordPress?

According to a definition from an article on blog.hubspot.com about How to Use WordPress: Ultimate Guide to Building a WordPress Website, “WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows you to host and build websites. WordPress contains plugin architecture and a template system, so you can customize any website to fit your business, blog, portfolio, or online store.”

In other words, WordPress allows you to manage a website, as well as publish and edit content even without technical knowledge about creating a website.

Why is WordPress significant to a business’ online success?

Content marketing is just one way of boosting your website traffic. This can commonly be in the form of:

• Blog

  It increases organic traffic or as a way to rank a website high on SERP (search engine results pages). This works by inserting and optimizing relevant keywords in a blog article.

• Social Media Posts

  Social media marketing widens customer reach and eventually turns them into leads by creating engaging posts. It also helps businesses present their products or services upfront to their target market.

• Videos

  Video marketing is now a popular method to attract customers’ attention, therefore, boosting brand awareness and generating more leads.

• eBooks

  Writing long-content eBooks is a method to gather more leads. This works by prompting visitors to give the details asked to download the eBook.

Going back, WordPress is a convenient web application to easily manage blog contents for SEO purposes. Relatively, it’s a must-have tool for content marketing. As a marketer, it could be your best friend.

How to effectively use WordPress for digital marketing?

Here are 11 ways marketers can apply WordPress to push their company’s products and services:

1. Publish quality and relevant blogs

   As you are speaking to your prospect customers, you have to produce professional and appealing contents containing helpful information. Make it as though it is the solution they are looking for their problems.

   When creating blogs, make sure to include:

   • A catchy headline: a brief description of what the blog is all about but eye-catching enough to urge readers to proceed to the content.
   • Brief yet weighty introduction: the first paragraph of the blog should be powerful to convince readers to read the second paragraph.
   • Appropriate subheads: use it as a sectioning method to break down the subpoints of your blog and easy reading for readers.
   • A body that excites and informs: this is where you can talk about what the readers expect from the headline and a chance to achieve your goals in writing the blog at the same time.
   • Relevant and catchy image: Add in imagery to attract your readers and let them rest from long blocks of text.
   • Business-wise conclusion: Wrap up the whole blog and insert a CTA (call-to-action).

2. Choose a responsive template

   It can be a confusing task to choose one among thousands of templates WordPress has. Don’t let it overwhelm you and just focus on something that would appropriately present the line of business and can efficiently work when accessed through various devices. Usually, a multi-purpose theme template works well.

   The very first thing you should do is identify your purpose of using WordPress. This way, you can picture in advance the look and function you would want, and the elements you will need to achieve that particular look and function. This is much like a custom web design.

3. Opt for minimalist site design and arrangement

   The “simple yet elegant” concept is also applicable when building a website. It is actually better if you can create a WordPress site as simple as possible, but still pro-looking.

   Again, do not be overwhelmed with the WordPress’ broad selection of themes and styles. You might overdo it and end up with a cluttered website with complex navigation menus, too many icons or lots of unnecessary landing pages. Furthermore, keep the content of your website pages direct and clear. The lesser elements, the better.

4. Group content accordingly

   Surely, you’ll be talking about diverse things related to the industry the business is operating in.

   Your website visitors don’t like to spend a lot of time searching. Yes, they can use the search button. But as a marketer, you have to let them stay on the website as long as it can be by offering easy navigation. Thus, categorizing your WordPress contents is now considered necessary. You can classify them based on the keywords they share or the topic tackled about. This way, visitors will not have a hard time finding what content they want to read. Just a tip, keep the concept of custom web design in mind.

5. Do guest posting

   Register to other WordPress sites as a guest author where you’ll be allowed to publish content. This will give you the opportunity to reach a wider audience. If a visitor didn’t click on your site but clicked on a site where you do guest posting, you can still present your content to that visitor. It can also be used as an opportunity to prompt visitors from other sites to visit your WordPress site. Yet, you have to understand that it takes time to get evident results with guest posting.

   Here are some tips you can apply when writing a guest post:

   • Include your conclusion as a subheading. You can use words or ask a question that would indicate the end of your blog.
   • Don’t forget a clear CTA.

6. Promote a WordPress blog through email marketing

   Make the most out of your email marketing strategy. Since you have an email list and continuous generation of leads, you can promote a blog from your WordPress site from time to time. Also, this could help you have diverse email marketing content because recipients in your email list wouldn’t probably like to see advertisements for your products or services all the time.

7. Promote a WordPress blog through video marketing

   Video marketing is one of the most popular methods to support a business’ digital marketing strategy. This is because more and more people are now drawn and entertained with the concept of moving visuals. As for YouTube, the most famous social video site–it has more than one billion users worldwide. Moreover, data presented by HubSpot obtained from the State of Inbound report 2018 shows that 48% of marketers are considering to use YouTube as part of their digital marketing strategy for the next 12 months.

   How to use YouTube to promote your WordPress blogs? You can create a summarized version of a blog to end up with a short video. Just include the whole link of the blog in the YouTube description box and prompt the audience at the end of the video to visit it.

8. Social bookmarking

   Social bookmarking is another method to generate traffic. This works by adding icons of popular social media sites at the end of your WordPress posts and optimize them by using a plugin tool, so visitors can share your content to those sites. Consequently, more people will get to see your contents, which will eventually lead them to visit your website and generate more traffic. However, you should create shareable contents first.

   Additionally, social bookmarking helps you build a good brand reputation and form a group of the target market. Yet, this will take place if readers find your content helpful enough that drives them to subscribe to it.

9. Publish content regularly

   Don’t lose your online presence even for a while. Stay active by creating and publishing content on a regular basis. You don’t have to do it daily. To drive SEO traffic, you can either post three to four contents a week or even more if your competitors are posting more. For this setup, you might want to get more content writers.

   Moreover, Google gets to decide. They can determine if you update regularly, and gives you better chances of ranking higher if you do so.

   In most cases, quality is compromised when there’s a higher demand for contents. You should never do this. Keep quality high as much as possible to show a good online reputation, consistently.

   To do this whole publishing task effectively, we suggest you schedule blog posts beforehand. Yes, WordPress has a feature that allows you to do it for specific days and specific time of a day. For example, you can schedule five blogs for the next week for daily posting. Just a reminder, though! Be aware of what is the right time to post of which your target audience is most active in browsing the internet.

10. Promote a WordPress blog through social media

    
    If social bookmarking is an indirect way to use social media to promote your blog, you can easily and directly post your WordPress blogs to your social media accounts as well. It is also great if you already have established profiles across different platforms with quite a good number of followers.

    Create a regular social media post introducing a new blog from your site. Do your best to create a catchy caption relevant to the blog and that the post appears with a visually appealing image. Make sure the link to the blog is clickable directly routing visitors to the blog itself.

    Or you can also promote on your social media account the YouTube video you’ve posted summarizing a blog post.

11. Generate monthly reports

    The digital world is growing and improving. Thus, you can expect that there are lots of online tools that will help you generate reliable data on how your WordPress strategy is doing.

    Find that right analytics tool to help you keep track of what’s happening to your content marketing using WordPress. It can guide your decision of what is the next step you should take to leverage your content marketing strategies. You’ll get to see in what channel or method you’re gaining greater traffic and what are the keywords that rank high on search engines. Therefore, you can focus on improving it and stop wasting time on other methods that are not generating at all.

    Clearly, there are numerous means to use WordPress as an effective channel in achieving your digital marketing goals. You just need to do a little tweaking and be patient to get positive payoffs. Explore every nook and cranny of the web application and know every way you can use it to your advantage as support to boosting traffic to your main website.

    There are some points you should remember, though, before building a WordPress website:

    • WordPress hosts two sites which are WordPress.org and WordPress.com. If you want to have total control in customizing your website, you should use WordPress.org. But if you have limited technical knowledge in creating a website, you can let WordPress.com do the complex things.
    • Be aware that you should use dashes and not underscores for the names of your WordPress files. This is an SEO-wise detail.

    One great thing about WordPress is that you can also customize your website according to its purpose, which is a great way to get great first impressions from visitors. You should also apply the same method when creating your main website.

Find a professional custom web design service provider. At Proweaver, we always take pride in our extensive experience of providing business-wise and user-friendly websites to businesses and professionals. It has always been our mission to help them achieve their digital marketing goals with our custom web design service.