Ok, before I get going on my #1 Internet Marketing tool for 2008 …. I’m up for suggestions. Leave me a comment. What’s working for you in 2008?
Criteria for choosing my favourite tool for Internet Marketing:
- simple (anyone who can send email can teach themselves the basics)
- quick (get started in 3 minutes or less)
- easy to distribute all four types of content (text, photos, video, audio)
- subscriber-friendly (rss feeds allow for subscribing by email or in a reader)
- adaptable (if you don’t like it you can change it in two minutes or less)
My #1 . . . start a Wordpress Blog.
A Wordpress blog isn’t really a blog, it’s really a Web site that you can change as often as you would like, using just one simple skill that most people already have – the ability to send and receive email. That’s right, if you want to write a Web page, just go ahead and do it, and with wordpress the new page automatically shows up in the menubar!
With a blog, you get lots more content than with a traditional Web site… this blog for instance has almost 500 pages of words, photos, video & audio from a little over three years of blogging! My Web site only has 10 pages! Each and every page that is well written will continue to get Web site visits well into the future.
This year we have taught hundreds of tourism businesses how to blog at Internet Marketing workshops and many of them we’ve gotten started with Blogger. Blogger is simple. However, the new Wordpress 2.51 is simple, adaptable, beautiful, stunning, and offers a range of benefits over Blogger ….
Why Wordpress instead of Blogger?
- Wordpress offers thousands of templates, you can radically change the look of your blog in an instant.
- It’s easy to make a customized banner with your photo and watermark your text. You can also change your template in seconds…. really, you can totally refresh your site with a brand new look in seconds.
- Wordpress allows you to publish pages as well as posts. Pages are permanent pages, just like traditional web pages. See my pages in the border at right. Every blog post features links to the things you want your guests to see in these permanent pages.
- For each page or post, you can decide if you want to allow comments. Some pages, might not warrant comments, while most posts will. Just uncheck a box in the posting field and voila, no comments on that page.
- The interface for confirming or editing comments is nice and clean.
- Widgets, hundreds of them are available to customize your web site with things like calendars, tag clouds, feeds, html text and more, without having to edit the template.
- Multimedia is easier on wordpress too. It even provides easy access to linking to audio files like those featured in my podcast posts (unfortunately, Wordpress does not currently support embedded java script like that used for Google Maps or Picasa photo slide shows).
- The interface for managing users is also simple. Add users with a variety of levels of permission from administrators, editors, writers . . .
- Pages can be viewed together in categories or tags…. see the tag cloud in the menubar? Click a tag and all the pages that include this tag will all be shown together. Excellent for Search Engine Optimization over time as the SEO of each tag will grow.
- It is easy to import your blogger blog into Wordpress in the Manage / Import tabs of the easy to use interface.
- Wordpress pages and posts can be post-dated, so your blog can automatically update itself with posts like this one at any date in the future. ( I wrote this post on the 29th of April but wanted an exciting post for today, so I post-dated it for April 30 at 8:55 am)
Once your blog is set up make sure you use my #2 Internet Marketing tool for 2008 – Feedburner. Get started at http://feedburner.com and set up a custom feed for your blog. RSS feeds allow your ideal guests to subscribe to your content without having to visit your blog. For more on Feeds – see the video lesson. Be sure to tell Feedburner where your Wordpress Feed is: (http://yourblog.wordpress.com/feed) and then create an easy-to-remember feedburner feed.
Other benefits of Feedburner include:
- Statistics on viewers, page views, clicks and subscribers.
- Ability to keep your subscribers if you ever move your blog somewhere else.
- Cut and paste code that you can use to add an email subscription form in your sidebar (use the text widget to paste the html code and get an email form like mine at right).
Since subscribers can get your posts by email whenever you create new content, you might want to grow subscriptions to your blog instead of growing subscribers to an email newsletter. Be sure to offer education, entertainment and enticement . . . and your new Web site (wordpress blog) will feed your subscribers all year long.
OK, so I couldn’t stop at #1. My top two tools: Wordpress and Feedburner, like peanut butter and jelly – two great things that go great together… and best of all, they are simple, quick, easy ways to grow your online Web marketing presence.
Care to debate this one? What’s your #1 Internet Marketing tool for 2008? Have you tried Blogger and Wordpress? Which do you like better and why?
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