It's very difficult to overstate the importance of Internet marketing.
With the advent of powerful and effective tools (like WordPress) that make it easy for anyone in the world to put up a website, it is now more important than ever to carve out a niche for yourself.
The online world requires its own unique set of marketing skills and techniques that, while based loosely on the principles of traditional marketing, require a broader range of knowledge, specialist skills, and plenty of finesse. It's as much art as it is science and is heaps of fun to learn.
Having solid Internet marketing knowledge and skills will enable you to outcompete hundreds of millions of other websites, and potentially enjoy fantastic rewards. This book seeks to give you the real world marketing knowledge and practice that you will need to succeed online.
Chapter 1, Introduction to WordPress Marketing: Get an overview of how traffic moves around the Internet and how to prepare for a new marketing campaign. Learn how Internet marketing is the process of creating content in order to drive targeted traffic to a blog or website and convert it to meet defined business objectives. In addition, if you weren't already familiar with general marketing lingo, you will be.
Chapter 2, Creating Content to Attract the Target Readers: Understand the importance of analyzing your business objectives as well as your target market. Knowing who to write for and how to reach them forms the basis of how to create quality content that can drive traffic, enhance your reputation, and ultimately allow you to meet your business objectives.
Chapter 3, Building Traffic I: Search Engine Optimization: Enjoy a holistic grounding in the fundamentals of SEO. In particular, you should feel that while SEO is an important and integral part of the success of any blog or website, it is not the be all and end all. Adhere to the basic guidelines with the understanding that SEO practices are there because Google and other search engines want to encourage you to create good quality content.
Chapter 4, Building Traffic II: Socializing WordPress: Here you will get a solid grounding in social media. In particular, you will learn how to use each of the major social networks to further your business objectives. Along with providing useful and interesting high quality content, it is also important to contribute to the social networks by getting involved in discussions and debates, following other people, and generally getting your name out there.
Chapter 5, Building Traffic III: Building Relationships: Get a refresher on how to leverage the WordPress community to create relationships and trust that can help to increase your reach and generate traffic. We will also look at how RSS can help to tie people into your site by offering them an easy way to access the main headlines and teasers, how feedburner can be used to monetize and enhance the traffic generated by your feeds, and how to use advertising with caution.
Chapter 6, Converting Traffic: Discover how to leverage your quality content and make it very easy for people so stay within reach of it through RSS, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other appropriate services, and learn how to drastically improve your chances of converting visitors into fans, followers, and customers using powerful landing pages.
Chapter 7, Analyze, Refine, and Repeat: By understanding traffic patterns and using that information to identify weaknesses and strengths in your strategy, you will be able to implement sophisticated and well-tuned marketing campaigns to out-compete your competitors and drive revenue, reach, and success.
Work smart and hard, not just hard.
This book assumes the reader has a basic working knowledge of the WordPress content management system. Coverage is given to both hosted and self-hosted versions of WordPress.
This book is for anyone who wishes to promote or market their blog, products, or services online through their WordPress blog.
In particular anyone who wishes to learn how to effectively use their blog to market online without requiring a large advertising budget will find plenty of value here.
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: "Self-hosted WordPress users may want to edit their robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content from appearing in Google's index."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
<ul> <li style="display:inline;"><a href="path_to_email"> <img src="email_icon_file_url" alt="contact me via email" /></a></li>
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 on Connect to Facebook and then click on Authorize connection in Facebook button that appears in the pop up."
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