The WordPress arsenal
We've seen that successful blogs need clearly defined strategic goals and these goals will often determine the type of blog that will work best.
WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging platforms available, and it makes possible a number of techniques and methods that will help you put your strategic goals into practice. The tools, techniques, and methods you pull out of the WordPress arsenal will depend on your blog's strategic goals.
We'll be covering these techniques in detail throughout the rest of the book, but here are a few of them to give you a taste of what's to come.
Good design
Whatever your strategic goals may be, design is going to be an important consideration—you must come up with a design that facilitates your strategic goals.
Luckily, WordPress gives you almost unlimited control over the look and feel of your blog. You may have already experimented with ready-made themes, of which there are thousands available from various sources. However, we'll be looking at how to modify WordPress themes so that you can develop a unique design that fits your purpose perfectly.
Maximizing usability
This will be closely linked to the design of your blog. Ensuring that your blog is usable and accessible to everyone is a key to its success. Your readers must be able to navigate your blog and find the content easily.
WordPress has many built-in features that help to maximize usability. There are also several plugins that can be used to improve this. Throughout the book, we'll be looking at a selection of the best plugins, so that you can choose the ones you really need.
Promoting your blog
Again, whichever strategic goals you are aiming for, a key factor to your blog's success will be getting it out to as big an audience as possible.
Promoting blogs is a wide-ranging skill that involves many techniques. For example, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is central to any promotion strategy. There are many ways that you can use WordPress to improve the findability of your site and we will be covering these in detail.
WordPress also enables you to take advantage of social networking and social bookmarking. We will also be looking at syndication and submitting your blog to the various indices, such as Technorati. Chapter 6, Search Engine Optimization and Chapter 7, Supercharged Promotion will give you all the details on promoting your blog to the search engines and beyond.
Analyzing the statistics
It is essential to monitor the progress of your blog, and WordPress offers many tools that enable you to do this. We will also look Google Analytics, a third-party statistics tool.
We will be looking at the various statistics that are available to you and examining how you can use the data to push your blog forward.
Managing content
WordPress is a powerful content management system and we will be looking at the ways you can manage all types of content within your blog. Depending on your strategic goals, there may be many different types of content that you need to create. From static pages to image galleries and multimedia content, WordPress gives you the control you need.
We will also be developing the skills you need to create engaging and relevant content, including copywriting techniques, and how to manage categories.
Monetizing your blog
WordPress provides you with a variety of options to develop revenue streams from your blog. There are several plugins and widgets that help you to do this.
In Chapter 10, Monetizing your Blog, we will be looking at creative methods of generating cash via your blog, which could go a long way towards covering its running costs or even develop into a significant revenue stream for your business.
Measuring success
To ensure that your blog is a worthwhile use of your resources and is providing benefit to your business, you need to measure its success. It's also useful to be able to assess other blogs against yours, and against others within your market sector.
There are several tools that can be used to measure the success of blogs.
This is an algorithm that Google uses to rank web pages in its index. In very rough terms, the PageRank of a web page is assessed by the number of other pages that link to it. Google gives a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each web page on the Internet. The higher the PageRank, the higher up it appears in Google's search results. So, having a high PageRank helps you to achieve a better ranking in Google.
Taken on its own, it is a matter of some debate how important PageRank actually is. But as a general rule of thumb, PageRank is a good indicator of how well a page is doing. You can see the PageRank of any web page by installing the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/).
Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/) is a company that measures websites based on the traffic they receive. You can look up any website in Alexa to see how well it ranks. The higher up the list a website appears the more traffic it receives.
