In case you’ve been living somewhere under a rock or you are really, really new to the web you may not have heard of WordPress. WordPress is an open source blogging platform that is incredibly powerful and surprisingly easy to install. Millions of blogs on the internet are powered by it and if you aren’t familiar with it you owe it to yourself to go and check it out. The WordPress platform is also very versatile. There are thousands of plugins that have been written for it that extend its already impressive list of features. If it sounds like I’m a WordPress fanboy it’s because I am. I would highly recommend that you consider using WordPress as your base for building websites for your clients.
Why use a blog for promotion?
A blog tends to rank very well with Google. Google understands that blogs tend to have good quality original content on them and that is what its human users are really seeking when they get online. Because Google algorithms have been designed to think like a human being blogs tend to do very well in its ranking system. That’s one of the major reasons that I recommend that you establish a blog. When Google crawls your website it will very soon start to send you free traffic based on the keywords you use on your website. It is also for that reason that I recommend that you be intentional in your use of keywords in your articles. You don’t want to try to game the system but you should keep each post as much as possible focused on one topic per post.
You’ll also want to use your blog as a way of establishing yourself as an expert to your clients and prospects. Don’t be afraid of publishing good quality content. You want to seek to educate people and provide good content because that will build your expertise in the eyes of your clients as well as project the fact that you aren’t just trying to take their money and run. You are looking to provide them with legitimate advice and support. Don’t worry about putting too many of your ‘tricks’ online that your clients might learn from them and do the work themselves. The majority of your clients won’t have the time to learn how to do everything themselves. A positive side effect of providing lots of free content is that the ones that do decide to do it themselves will often be your problematic customers who demand a lot and also bicker and fight with you for every penny. Life is too short to play that game.
Over time I’ll share much more about how to make the most of your WordPress blog to promote yourself but for now, go over to the WordPress site and happy installing!
I’d love to hear your comments on blogs, WordPress, promotion below!