The Plan for Leveraging Your WordPress Posts with Social Plugins
If you have a website built on the WordPress platform, congratulations on your excellent decision. There are around 100 million or so sites on WordPress, and it is a stable and free environment for a small business website. There are premium themes and plugins out there for professionals, but you can always use a promo code to save on those.
Of course, blogging on a WordPress site for business requires dedication to a plan and frequent posting, that is, if you want to bring in business from your site.
Build a Schedule with Post Subject Ideas
Some call this an Editorial Calendar, but the name isn’t important. What is important is that you commit to a schedule for posting and a calendar with title and subject ideas is a great help. If you’re struggling with new ideas for articles, think about the number of questions you’re asked in the course of business. You get questions in person, via email, and maybe from the website itself through forms.
Every question is a subject for a post, which will be your answer expanded out to make a good article for site visitors and for SEO, Search Engine Optimization. You don’t have to pose the title as a question, though it’s OK to do so. The idea is to put content on your site that will be of value to your visitors, and what could be more valuable than answers to the questions you’re being asked?
Get a Plugin for Sharing by Your Site Visitors
Actually, the latest WordPress versions have a built-in function for adding social sharing icons to your posts and pages. However, there are also free and fancier paid plugins that give you more choices and flexibility as to how and where to display these share icons. You want them everywhere you have content, with every post and every page. If you do videos and/or images to sell or illustrate your products or services, make them shareable as well.
Use Automated Sharing When You Publish
Before you can put this into play, you need a presence on the major social media platforms. Build a Facebook page for your business. Have a dedicated Twitter account, and one on LinkedIn as well if you do B2B, Business to Business articles. Take a look at Google+ as well if you want to do community-related postings for a local business, as a Google+ Community is ideal for this strategy.
What you want to do is to have your new posts and articles automatically posted to these social sites when you hit the publish button to make them live on your site. You may find a free plugin or two for some of this, but it may take a paid one to do them all with one.
You’ll have to jump through some technical hoops to make this happen, as these sites do not just let posts come in from anywhere or anyone. You’ll be given instructions in setting up an API on each social site and you’ll get some secret keys to drop into the plugin(s) to get the social site to communicate with your website.
Once you get everything working, you’ll write your posts, hit that publish button, and they’ll go live for eyeballs on your site. Now though, they’ll also go live across the social spectrum, and depending on how many contacts/friends/followers you have, you leverage your exposure with linkage back to your site.
Now just go out and work to get as many followers and friends across these sites. As you build your sphere of influence, you’ll increase the eyes on your posts and website dramatically. That’s what your business website should be doing, and it’s free or very inexpensive to make it happen.