5 Key Benefits of Using WordPress for Your Website

5 Key Benefits of Using WordPress for Yur Website5 Key Benefits of Using WordPress for Your WebsiteDon Campbell is a well-known, highly respected web marketing expert specializing in WordPress website development. In pspecies one of my interview with Don shares tips on developing a WordPress website. WIB Many business owners hesitate to launch a website because of the high cost of having someone design, build, and maintain a website. Your company helps businesses build their own websites using WordPress. Aside from saving them thousands of dollars, how can businesses benefit from building their sites in WordPress? Is it really that easy? Campbell Thats a great question. Many of the businesses I talk to fall into one of two categories They dont have a website, and dont know how much it should cost, or who to trust orThey have a website, but its not really helping their business (its a glorified online brochure.) Maybe they even paid thousands of dollars for a nice looking one. They al so struggle with updating it. Many times, they have to pay someone every time they want to make a change. I recommend to business owners that they try to strike a balance between that costly, high-design website, and a free website that doesnt really present a professional image. What they really need is a basic, professional website that is properly optimized for the search engines and built to bring them new business. I think using a tool like WordPress helps them strike this balance. Since WordPress is free and hosting is very inexpensive, a do-it-yourself small business owner can get going for a very low cost. And with the thousands of themes and plugins available, they can quickly customize the look of the site, and extend its functionality without knowing how to program. And someone who doesnt have the time to set it up themselves can find someone to build them a very professional business website for about $1,000. 5 Benefits of Building With WordPress Here are five key be nefits of using WordPress for your website Themes allow you to change the design of your website quickly. There are thousands of themes available for WordPress.Plugins allow you to extend the functionality of your WordPress site without knowing how to program. There are over 10,000 plugins available that help you add all kinds of functionality to your sites, like social media sharing, SEO, photo slideshows, and much more.They are easy to update. If you can create a Word document, you can publish a new article to your WordPress website. Once it is set up, you can update it anytime you want, and that is important for engagement with your visitors and for the search engines. Google loves WordPress sites. Because they are updated more frequently, and the content tends to be structured well, you can get a WordPress site ranking very quickly compared to a static website. Google has even gone on record as recommending WordPress for business sites (see YouTube video)WordPress is supported b y a thriving, engaged community. A recent study estimates that approximately 8% of the sites on the Internet are run by WordPress. There are thousands of designers, developers and enthusiasts out there to help if you get stuck. Help is just a Google or Bing search away. You can also read Dons series on using WordPress small business websites to get even more tips for your business. Don Campbell created Expand2Web to help small business owners build WordPress websites that rank in the top of local search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Now, Expand2Web creates training and tools for consultants and do-it-yourself small business owners. Balancing Work and Life WIB I read on your website that you play piano and are learning to skimboard - and you have a wife and two daughters. How important is it to maintain a balance between work and your personal life? Do you have any advice to women who are struggling with work-life balance as they build their own businesses? Campbell Yes, I think work-life balance is incredibly important. The reason I left my corporate job is to have less time traveling and more time with my family. I am constantly asking myself - what is the lifestyle that I want to live? And I try to let that guide me. Dont get me wrong, I like to work hard, but it needs to be on things that I love to do, and with plenty of breaks and time to step back, spend time with my family, and recognize what is truly important. I admire how my wife has navigated this along with me. When we met, she had a very successful career, and decide to stay home when we had kids. She took that opportunity to go back to school part-time, and completely change her career to something different, something that she really loves to do. Now she works 2 days per week, and gets to be super-engaged with our kids in their classrooms, and supporting our family. Shes the one doing the backdrop for the school play or running the volunteer art program at the kids school. I have a tre mendous amount of respect for how she navigated all of this, and we both feel like were living a lifestyle we love. And the piano lessons you mentioned Im taking them along with my oldest daughter and were having a lot of fun doing that together Anyway, I could go on and on, but I dont want to bore your readers too much - I think having that balance leads to more creative output and a happier lifestyle all around. Ranking Your Website WIB You offer some really great tips on your blog and in your free booklet on how to get a website ranked in local searches. But what about business owners who have one physical location that serves multiple areas. How can they target a wider area? Campbell This is a very good question. In the Google distributions-mix pages are set up for a business to show up for searches in the city or town where their business is located. But the reality is that many businesses server entire areas of nearby neighborhoods, towns, and cities. There is no perfect answer for this, but what I recommend is that the business claim and optimize their Google Place Page, and other pages like Yahoo Local, Bing, Yelp, etc. And then couple this with a good website. On that website, I have them create a page for each of the nearby cities/towns that they serve, including details about the area. For example, describe why you have clients from the nearby city. Maybe they work at a company located there, there and its convenient to stop by your business on their lunch break. Each page is highly optimized for the city-specific keywords, and linked to properly from other areas of the site and from other web sites too. Heres an example of a city-specific page northvalleyoptometry.com/milpitas-ca-optometristMilpitas, CA Optometrist Don Campbell created Expand2Web to help small business owners build WordPress websites that rank in the top of local search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Now, Expand2Web creates training and tools for consultants and do-it-you rself small business owners. Learning From Others WIB Many businesswomen ask me about whether or not it is worth the time to enter business contests. One of your business ventures, RefMob, was a finalist in TechCrunch 50. What is RefMob and was TechCrunch 50 (TC50) a worthwhile experience? Campbell Absolutely. TC50 was a fantastic experience. The coaching that the TC50 team provided was awesome. We had practice sessions that were videotaped, and were coached by Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington they watched us present and then gave us specific feedback on how to improve, and then had us come back again. Any time you can present in front of thousands of people its a great opportunity. I met some amazing people during that process and built some very important relationships that led to other opportunities. The Importance of Link Building WIB There is a lot of emphases today on building trusted and valued inbound links for websites. How important is this and do you recommen d people pay for links? Campbell Yes, getting high-quality inbound links to your website is very important for ranking in the search engines for the keywords you care about. This is the hardest, most time-consuming part of search engine optimization. There are no shortcuts. Most of the time buying links is not the right way to go. But there are some effective ways to build quality links out there James Martells PAD technique is the very best Ive seen. You need to commit to building some quality links for your site or hire a link building specialist from a reputable SEO agency to help you. Don Campbell created Expand2Web to help small business owners build WordPress websites that rank in the top of local search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Now, Expand2Web creates training and tools for consultants and do-it-yourself small business owners. Keeping Your Site Fresh WIB Your website talks about the importance of growing a website and keeping it fresh by having a content plan. H ow often should people update their websites or blogs if they want to stay competitive in search engines? Campbell As often as possible. Having a good content plan is essential for the success of a website. I know many SEOs that will not work with a client if they wont commit to a content plan. The Google crawler thrives on unique original content published consistently. Every time you publish, Google gets a ping asking the crawler to come back and visit your site. The challenge, especially for small business owners, is that they want to do it, but they are very busy running their business. parte of the content plan should be a realistic assessment of whether the site owner can write the content, or if they should hire a copywriter to help them. Ive found some amazing copywriters to help me with my clients and even my own website, at very reasonable costs. Learning From Web Courses WIB Tell me about training courses you will soon be offering. Campbell I have three training cour ses right now, along with with a membership site, which is a community of web consultants and DIY small business owners all learning, helping each other out and referring business to each other. We call it the Expand2Web Experts Group (It is available to members.) Here are the online courses weve been delivering Building and Customizing Your WordPress Website In this 4-week course students start from scratch and by the end they have a fully functioning WordPress website and know how to build more of them.The Circle of Trust Local SEO process Weve built an effective method for getting results for small businesses called the Circle of Trust SEO process. In this course, we teach how to implement this proven process, which includes website optimization, content strategy, online reviews, local profile optimization, and link and citation building for small business websites. A Social Media Blueprint for Small Business Owners In this course, we teach how to leverage Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter for small businesses. We actually build a business Facebook Page with custom tabs and share our templates. The courses have been a big hit - our students are coming out and building websites, Facebook pages, and doing SEO projects to help small business owners succeed online. The best part for me is building a community of like-minded folks that can all help each other to succeed. Im very excited about where this is going Don Campbell created Expand2Web to help small business owners build WordPress websites that rank in the top of local search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Now, Expand2Web creates training and tools for consultants and do-it-yourself small business owners.