The Creation Shop

There is a variety of quality blogging software that is open source and is pretty intuitive for the average blogger. There are a several applications that TCS prefers, Wordpress being among the top. Wordpress has a lot of “bling,” (i.e. terrific features) to make your blog exceptional. If you are currently using Wordpress, then read on. Here are a few Wordpress features that are invaluable to blogs.

Create Categories

Wordpress is set up so that when you write an article, you can choose a certain category for your article to be posted under. This is very beneficial so that your audience can choose topics they are interested in reading about. Within Wordpress, you can create different categories that you would like to write about (under the manage tab, click on categories). This way you don’t have to always write a post about your products or company, you can change it up and write about other related topics. Try not to stray too far from topics relating to your company though. The idea is to drive traffic to your website and get more business. So, if you sell auto parts and blog about movie reviews, most likely people will not be so inclined buy auto parts from you- they’ll be going to the movies more often! Stay on topics related to your company or business. For example, you and your company, topics in the news about products you sell, movie stars using products you sell, benefits of your products, etc. Another thing Wordpress allows you to do is select multiple categories to post your article under. So, if your article relates to “Tips & Tricks” as well as “New Products,” post it under both categories.

Time Stamping

One frustration that bloggers may run into is being able to blog on a consistent schedule. The great thing about Wordpress is that they have a “time stamping” feature to keep you on track. Time stamping allows you to choose the time and date a blog article will actually post on your website. For example, you could login to your blog on a Monday, write 7 or 8 articles, and then schedule each article to post on your website every day of the upcoming week. It will take some time writing all those articles, however this will be the only time within the week that you will have to spend on updating your blog. Your writing time can be condensed to just one day a week, or month, for that matter!

Plugins

Attracting visitors and comments to your blog is not rocket science (at least not yet). Adding plugins to your blog will help spice up a visitor’s experience. For example, there is a Flickr plugin on Wordpress that allows you to add pictures to your site. Once you have a Flickr account you can upload pictures that you want to show up on your blog. This is an invaluable tool to show clients examples of your work, your products, etc. Another terrific plugin is called the Google Search Widget. Once installed, a search box on your site will appear that allows people to search for information on your site by simply writing in a few keywords.

Wordpress has countless pluggins for blogs. If you think of a feature you want to add to your site but don’t know how to do it, look up the pluggin directory and most likely there is a pluggin for it.

Give Something Away

Brent Spore, one of our own here at TCS, ran a give-away promotion on his blog iboughtamac.com with successful results. In order to make this successful he placed some guidelines on how to win the prize, which was an iPod Shuffle. Readers were to “Digg” his article on digg.com by writing a review about his website. Readers also needed to subscribe to his blog. A number of new, consistent readers were attracted to this site and continue to subscribe to iBAM posts to this day. Why not come up with a fun way to giveaway your product or service that will get people coming back to your website?

These are just a few tips to help you start blogging and get going. For more ideas on spicing up your blog and getting more traffic, check out our blog at TCS.