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Get your WordPress Blog Visitors Involved: Five Tips to Get them Participating

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:46:55 +0000

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software platforms available because it is easy to use and easy to customize. You can find WordPress on literally millions of sites across the world featuring topics on jus about anything imaginable. So it is interesting to see what sets apart the most successful blogging sites and makes them more popular in their genre than others in the same category. One of the ways to do this is to encourage visitors to have a sense of community and a stake in the site. This promotes loyalty and entices the user to recommend the site elsewhere to their friends, family and coworkers.

A great way to instill a sense of community is to encourage interactivity by allowing user posts and user comments. If you can get your visitors participating, you can grow your site exponentially. Encourage your users to comment regularly. Encourage them to share posts. You may even want to encourage a select few to become guest contributors for regular posts or columns. Follow these 5 tips for getting your visitors commenting on your WordPress site:

Use your regular posts to encourage comments and opinions from your visitors. At the end of a blog post you create ask some pointed questions that you want your visitors to answer pertaining to your post. Specifically ask your visitors to post their comments, suggestions and feedback. Simply asking for comments will encourage them. Also, make sure you feature some of the top rated comments as well as top rated posts on your front page. When you have particularly interesting posts and comments on your front page new visitors will be enticed to read and participate.
Display comments for others to see. Just looking at your words will likely get the comments starting but when visitors see others’ posts and comments that ill get everyone talking and participating as well. You will have plenty of users commenting back and forth to one another as well as interacting with you. Also, if you have an easy to use way for sharing posts and comments you can use your visitors to advertise for you. Encourage post sharing at social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
Come up with fun polls and encourage discussion of the results. Polls are a fun, quick and entertaining way to get your visitors interacting with the community. You can see poll results and discuss whether or not the results were expected or not and what the outcome means. Use your front page to feature poll results that can be clicked on to see the results and encourage commenting.
Don’t be afraid of controversy. The more enticing the subject, the more people will be apt to comment on the subject. Boring topics will evoke boring comments or worse yet, none at all. However, if you have controversial, poignant, interesting or recent news items you will have a lot of people who want to get their opinion out to the public as well. You may find that a particular topic draws a lot of attention and see a spike in visitors as people share your topic elsewhere.
Pick out a few regular posters who seem to have a following and ask them to contribute weekly topics and posts themselves. You can make them featured writers and give them a forum for their work. You can even get creative with contests to encourage additional participation and even a bit of competition.

5 WordPress Plugins to add Professionalism to your Blog

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:58:11 +0000

Blogs can be created for a wide variety of reasons, and if yours is a professional WordPress blog it could be beneficial to your business to add a range of plugins that have a more serious edge. We all know about rate it and poll plugins, but there is an excellent range of business tools out there as well. We have gathered up 5 of the best, and we will explain why they are the best and what you can use them for.

Google Maps in Posts: We are going first to our friends over at WordPress.org, as we know they have a massive range of resources and guides for WordPress applications. They offer the Google Maps plugin as a download in their download area and can be found here http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/google-maps-in-posts/. This means that posts relating to events can be mapped and specific locations shown, plus you can add a ‘home’ location for yourself should you need to. You need to be running WordPress 2.2 or higher for this plugin to work.
Calendar: We think you are going to see a lot of WordPress.org for these plugins; we go back to them now for their calendar plugin. This is an excellent tool that means you can set up and manage your events calendar and share them with your users. It is simple to use. Have a look here at http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/calendar/ for more information or to download it. It has all the usual calendar features, including a good range of viewing options from monthly view to viewing events by specific category.
WP Newsletter Plugin for WordPress: A proper plugin bundle here, if you want to be able to offer your users a newsletter and be able to handle email subscribers with opt in and opt out facilities then this could be for you. You can easily set up a newsletter then download your contact list and bulk mail the letter to them. For more information visit the lovely people at SendBlaster.com where you can download all you need to get started: http://www.sendblaster.com/WordPress-newsletter-double-optin-widget/
Business Directory Plugin: This really does what it says and provides you with a plugin that allows you to have a directory on your blog that you can either add to or invite your users to add their details to, depending on your business needs. The site offers a good range of supporting documentation and help pages, and you can find all of this and download the plug in here: http://businessdirectory.squarecompass.com/
FAQ Builder: Another excellent business tool for your WordPress is a FAQ section meaning you can offer your clients important information that crops up regularly in a more sensibly structured way than a series of posts to the blog, which gets messy and isn’t very user friendly. The FAQ builder from Square Compass is an excellent tool that isn’t hard to get to grips with and comes from the same people as the business directory people, so again you get a good level of supporting documentation and help pages. Download the FAQ Builder here: http://faqbuilder.squarecompass.com/

Hopefully you have found at least one plugin you can use that will enhance the usability of your WordPress blog. Presenting a professional image will tell your visitors that you are serious about your blog and that you want to give them a good experience while they are visiting your site.

Make your WordPress Blog More Appealing: Top Five Tips

admin — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:02:10 +0000

Everyone has heard the expression, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” With WordPress blogs this is especially true. Millions of websites use WordPress as their mechanism to deliver their blog to the public. The idea is to generate traffic by a variety of means, some including paid advertising. But once you have the traffic visiting you only have a few seconds for that visitor to decide whether or not they want to stay and browse your content. If you pay for advertising to attract viewers to your site you do not want it wasted by turning them off to the design and having them leave.

Instead you want your site to be attractive and appealing so people are enticed to stay. You also want to make it easy to use and have interesting content. If you can make the site more appealing your advertising efforts whether paid or just time will be well worth the investment. Of course, an attractive site has to be backed up with content so make sure you spend as much time on ensuring you have regularly updated, interesting blog posts to share with your community. But the design is a first step. To enhance your site, here are the top 5 tips to make it more appealing:

Make sure your site is clean and not cluttered. If your site looks messy a new visitor won’t even bother to try to wade through it because there are many cleaner options available. Use menus to give overall topics. Do not have cluttered side bars. Only use line items in a side bar or menu that support the actual content categories found on your site.
Make the site readable. You may have a formal site but using script may be too hard to read for some. Get rid of it. Choose a font that is consistent and compatible with all platforms. Also, make sure you use a font size that is neither too small nor obnoxiously large. Do not excessively use italics or bolds. Be consistent throughout the entire site so that all pages and posts are similar looking and the eye does not have to adjust to multiple font styles.
Optimize your site to encourage your visitors to stay on the site as long as possible. Suggest relevant additional reading by using plugins. You can download a plugin that suggests similar posts the reader may be interested in. You can also download plugins that allow viewers to share your post at other locations such as via email, RSS feed or social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the like.
Encourage user participation as much as possible. Encourage users to make comments and read what others before them have contributed. Use an anti spam plugin to help prevent spam from cluttering your comments section so you can make it as easy as possible for even unregistered users to post. Cultivating a sense of community will go a long way in ensuring each visitor to the site enjoys themselves.
Change your design entirely. If you are unsatisfied with the efficacy of your design choose another one. You can download a variety of different themes from a variety of different places. You can get free themes that will likely suit our purposes. You can also find paid themes that are customizable and have complete solutions for your site. Finally, you can hire a professional designer to ensure you have exactly the theme design and functionality you need for your site. You can choose everything from free to affordable paid themes.

When you concentrate a bit on ensuring you have an aesthetically pleasing and easy to use WordPress blog site you will find your visitors will spend a lot more time on your site. When you put effort, time and even money attracting visitors to your site you want them to stay so using the top five tips on making your site more appealing is a great start that can only be enhanced when you add in interesting, regularly updated content.

Getting Your First Blog: Creating a Wordpress.com Account

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:20:02 +0000

Wordpress.com provides a hosted solution for their software. You can obtain a free blog through this service simply by signing up a user account. No download, installation and web hosting is required.

The following steps will guide you through the wordpress.com user account registration process.

Visit the wordpress.com web site by entering the URL: http://wordpress.com
Wordpress.com Web Site
Click Sign Up Now button.
You will be taken to the Wordpress sign up page.
Wordpress User Registration

Key in the following details:
- Enter your username in the username text. Use letters and number only. This username can not be changed for the blog you are creating right now.
- Enter the password of your choice in the Password box the in the Confirm box.
- Enter your email address in the email address box.
- Check the Legal Flotsam check box
- Select either Gimme a Blog! or Just a username, Please. The Gimme a Blog! option sets you up with a new wordpress.com blog.
Click next button
Blog details page:
Wordpress Blog Details Page
- By default, wordpress.com will fill the Blog Domain text box with your username for you. The domain name of your blog does not have to be the same as your username. You can choose any domain name you want as your blog domain name. However, once it is set, you can not change it later. The domain name you enter here becomes the URL address of your blog.
- In the Blog Title text box, enter the name for your blog. You can change the title later using Administration panel.
- Default language selected is English.
- By default, the Privacy check box is select. If you want to run a private blog, uncheck this box. Note: Search engine would not be able to index your blog if this is unchecked.
Click Sign Up button.
Complete Wordpress Registration
You will receive an email from Wordpress.com containing a link to activate your account. Click the activation link to activate your account.
Wordpress Confirmation Email
You are done and you can start making your first post.