I believe any serious small business website needs to include a substantial blogging element. It is the easiest way to generate content for your visitors, and the easiest way to keep your customers informed.
Blog style websites have long been the easiest to promote, and blog promotion just got easier. And better.
The AdSense for Content scheme dominates my thoughts, perhaps because, for many sites, it is the main earner. But AdSense Referrals can also bring significant income, and the product list has grown tremendously from the original Google product line.
I have called the first part Essential Plug-ins. These are ones that any self-respecting WordPress web business needs. Some may have alternatives. I have selected ones that I know work. If you know of alternatives that you think are better, please let me know.
I noticed one or two that I rely on, but haven’t mentioned in this blog, so I will mention them now.
Today I found a better forms handler, reminded myself about the importance of backups, and found a potential method for making plug-in management much easier.
Contact Pages are important for any web site, but crucial for a credible web business site. My current method works fine on standard contact forms, but to build a business web site, you also need surveys, polls, and all manner of related feedback mechanisms.
My hosting links article prompted me to add a page describing my link policy.
I find these policy pages a tad tedious, but a necessity. They add weight to your website (when was the last time you saw policy pages on a spammy scraper site?). More importantly, they immediately let visitors know where you stand on various issues.
I’m surprised, but delighted to see that Continue reading
Looking for hosting links sounds like a good idea – but what will you do when you find them?
Many webmasters fall into the trap of trying to build as many links as they can. A common way to do this is to search for links or add url, or similar, together with the keyword or keyphrase that you want a link from (or want to exchange links with).
UTW is a fine, well respected plug-in, but Ultimate Tag Warrior URL rewriting has driven me crazy.
I need my WordPress Tags, and I want them right. I started writing about them in my last post, and I have plenty more to say – mainly from a site management point of view, but also many technical tips.
Standard WordPress does not have tags, but there are many plug-ins to help you apply them. Those that I have seen were born in the days when all webmasters looked to keywords to boost their rankings in search engines.
I discuss the merits, or otherwise, of SEO on my web business site. Keywords for SEO are generally recognized as being unimportant, to the extent that free WordPress.com sites do not have them. However, there is an alternative, Continue reading
You can wait until you have much more content before applying a theme.
I prefer to get it done near the start, partly in case early visitors get disillusioned by a bland interface, partly because I really dislike the navigation options on the default theme, but mainly because I like to get a feel for the site I am working on and identify with it from the beginning.
Creating a blogroll of business web hosting links is the final step in my initial content package.
My installation wizard will package all the starting content, customized for the intended site concept. Doing this manually takes a few hours – the wizard will do it in minutes.
After this step, you can simply continue building content, but the Internet would be a boring place if all WordPress sites used the default theme. I will discuss themes later, along with some more plug-ins that are crucial (or at least helpful) in hosting your web business.
Before that, a few short notes about links.
