WordPress for Business Bloggers provides advanced strategies and techniques which will help you to take your WordPress business blog from average to extraordinary. Regardless of whether you already have a blog, or are still in the planning stages, this book will show you how to use WordPress to create a highly successful blog for your business.
This is a practical, hands-on book based around a fictitious case study blog, which you will build using a development server on your own computer. The vast majority of tutorials and examples will be applied to the case study blog. The case study grows chapter-by-chapter, from the installation of your local development server, right up to the finished blog. You will be installing and configuring a selection of WordPress plugins to improve the functionality of the case study blog.
You are provided with clear instructions and detailed screenshots, so you can see exactly what to do at each step of the build. When you have completed the case study, you will have the knowledge and confidence to apply all the techniques you have learned to your own WordPress business blog.
The author assumes you have basic experience with WordPress, already know how to set up a self-hosted WordPress blog, and are familiar with the basics: creating posts and pages, configuring blog settings, and so on. By the time you have finished the book you will have moved forward from WordPress novice to an advanced user of the software in a business context.
Chapter 1, A Blog Less Ordinary What Makes a Great Blog?; will allow you to examine many different types of business blog. You will be shown a selection of great business blogs and see what you can learn from them.
Chapter 2, Introducing our Case Study WPBizGuru introduces you to the case study blog, and takes you through the process of developing strategic goals and your blog plan. You will learn that the planning process is important, even if your blog is already up and running.
Chapter 3, Designing your Blog will teach you the basics of blog design. You will work through a brief introduction to HTML and CSS, and see how easy it is to create your own custom design using the Thematic theme framework.
Chapter 4, Images and Videos teaches you some advanced image and video handling techniques, including setting up an image gallery and using video from third-party sources, such as YouTube and Google Video.
Chapter 5, Content is King focuses on the different techniques and methods required for creating the best possible content for your business blog.
Chapter 6, Search Engine Optimization covers some of the most important SEO strategies and how to apply them, as well as how to submit your blog to the search engines.
Chapter 7, Supercharged Promotion will teach you some advanced blog promotion techniques, including: advanced RSS with FeedBurner; submission to blog search engines, such as Technorati; using social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter; and using social bookmarks, such as Digg and Delicious.
Chapter 8, Connecting with the Blogosphere talks about the importance of connecting with other bloggers and playing an active role in the blogosphere to promote your business blog.
Chapter 9, Analyzing your Blog Stats will teach you how to analyze your blog's performance using tools such as Google Analytics and WordPress.com Stats.
Chapter 10, Monetizing your Blog introduces you to a variety of strategies to help you generate revenue from your blog, like using advertising and affiliate programs.
Chapter 11, Managing Growth will show you how to manage the growth of your blog by optimizing it for high traffic, and introducing multiple authors by setting up a network using WordPress Multisite.
The main thing you need for this book is a self-hosted WordPress blog. We will be using some other open source software and a local development environment for WordPress. Full details of where to get this software and how to set it up will be covered in the relevant chapters. All the open source software used in the book is free to download and use.
This book is for anybody running or starting a business blog using WordPress, whether you plan to use your blog for PR and marketing, or want to profit directly from blogging.
The book mainly focuses on a self-hosted WordPress installation, but some of the advice could also be applied to blogs on WordPress.com.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts
through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
#footer {
border-top:0px;
margin-top:22px;
}
#siteinfo {
color:#b7c4cf;
font-size:11px;
line-height:18px;
padding:22px 0 44px 0;
}
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
#primary {
border:0px;
padding:18px 0 0 0;
margin-bottom:22px;
}
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click Save the Replace Posts option and view your home page".
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