WordPress for Content Marketing: Plugins and Content

October 15, 2012 | by | Category:

“How to Launch and Optimize your WordPress Blog for Content Marketing”

Plugin recommendations

Recommended WordPress Plugins
Plugins are available for most blog platforms and help tune the software, add functionality and features.

wordpress-plugin

Here are a few WordPress Plugins we recommend to optimize your content so that it is more discoverable by search engines and readers:

  • Optify WordPress Plugin. Automatically enable Optify’s inbound marketing software on your WordPress site.
  • Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin. A full-featured SEO plugin to help with customizing posts for SEO. Includes breadcrumbs, XML sitemaps, canonicals, customizable title tags/meta tags and more.
  • SEO Friendly Images. Allows easy updating of alt-text and title attribute for the image itself.
  • Google Analytics Plugin. Generates the code on every page for you to track your performance with Google Analytics.
  • Disqus Comment System. A great way to encourage engagement with your readers and to keep visitors reading your content by showing them related posts on your blog to what brought them in the first place.

Content considerations

Start by defining the audience with whom you want to have a relationship. Presumably they are your customers, partners, suppliers and your broader industry as a whole. Think about what kind of information they would find valuable. This is an easy task if you have already created a buyer search persona. You should also try to talk about something that is differentiated from what other blogs in your field cover, even if your approach is just slightly different or new.

Make sure the topic is something that you’ll have a passion for writing about on a regular basis. If you’re not going to keep up with your blog, you shouldn’t start one in the first place. It’s a commitment. If you pick a topic that relates to your customers, but you’re not that passionate about it, then you may have a bigger problem on your hands!

Blogging Content Ideas
Sometimes the roadblock to starting a blog is not knowing what to write about. Here are five types of blog content you can write about:

  • How-to’s – Ask your audience what their major problems are, do the research, and solve them.
  • Expert interviews – Reach out to influencers in your industry to collect their opinions and feature them on your blog.
  • Case studies – Listen to customer service calls, sales calls, media, etc. to see what relevant issues and topics you can discuss.
  • News stories – Keep an eye out for what is hot in your industry and blog about it. New laws, new regulations, new products or services are all fair game.
  • Insight posts – Collect pieces of information that are interesting and blog about them with your perspective.

Blog Writing & Management Ideas

  • Have one or two people who are the lead bloggers on the site. – Let them set the tone, voice, and personality of the blog.
  • Make sure your bloggers are writing under their own names, not a pseudonym. – Sign up for Google Authorship in four easy steps to link your name with the content you create to make it feel more personable.
  • A thumbnail photo of each post’s author can have a big impact. – We connect emotionally with faces, even if they’re just images.
  • Blog with personality and an attitude – in the sense of expressing some kind of emotional reaction to what you’re writing about.
  • Keep the tone conversational. – Passive voice, corporate jargon, financial buzzwords – lose them in favour of plain language. By all means, use appropriate technical terms if you’re talking to an audience that uses them too… but ask yourself if this is the kind of language friends might use over coffee (and by coffee, I mean beer).
  • Share a little. – Hint at having a personal life: pets, hobbies, interests outside of work; BUT understand there are boundaries. – Don’t overdisclose – chances are any blog post that begins “Wow – I got so trashed last night” isn’t going to end well for your or your organization. And don’t disclose personal details you wouldn’t want splashed all over the web.

Stay tuned for the next post: Promotion, Promotion, Promotion!

Already using WordPress? Optify has a WordPress plugin to get you up and running with an Optify account in a few clicks.