Working at Home on the Internet

Two WordPress Plugins That Will Greatly Improve Your Home Business Marketing Effectiveness

Guest Writer: Chris Cree

I am a huge fan of effective communication. Growing up my father told me over and over that clear communication skills, that ability to share an idea in a way that passes on what you see in your minds eye to your intended audience, is one of the critical keys to success in life. Dad helped me understand that even the most stunningly brilliant idea can loose most of its shine when it isn’t communicated effectively to its target audience.

A desire to learn those communication skills is the primary reason I chose a business major in school instead of going into one of the engineering disciplines that the guidance counselors said I was best suited for.

And I am constantly learning improvements in my communications. In fact, just this past week I was reminded that the words we choose to use make a difference.

Home Based Communications

For those of us who work at home on the internet those communication skills are paramount. When we are restricted to a text only environment we loose so much ability to convey meaning through non-verbal cues.

That is one of the reasons why blogging is such an effective promotion tool for our businesses. The very nature of the ongoing dialog of blogging helps us refine our message and compensate for those potential shortcomings in the medium.

For many of us our blogs are the only marketing we are currently doing for our businesses. So we have to do everything we can to make them as effective as possible.

Give Search Engines a Hand

There are two WordPress plugins that can really help improve the ability for the various search engines to find our content and present it to our potential audience. And if the search engines are returning our content higher, then we have a much better opportunity to communicate with our intended audience.

Ultimate Tag Warrior - Tagging is a simple way to get relevant key words highlighted in your posts, making it easier for the search engines to find them. (If tagging is something new to you, here is a quick tag explanation.) Ultimate Tag Warrior is tremendously powerful, hugely flexible, and simple to use. It will add a field beneath the area where you type in the text of your post where you simply add a comma separated list of tags. Then when you hit “Publish” your post is tagged with your relevant keywords. Then you can use those key words yourself to arrange all of your wonderfully useful content in new and exciting ways for your readers.

(One note: If you are using WordPress version 2.1.2 you should download the plugin from this location so that you won’t have compatibility issues.)

Tags in the Head - Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tremendous way to organize your blog’s information. But in order to truly see some big gains in Search Engine Optimization (and get our message in front of the right people) we want to add this plugin. Tags in the Head will automatically fill in much of the traditional meta data that the SEO folks work so hard to get right for web sites.

Using these two plugins in tandem will greatly improve our ability to get our message in front of the right folks. And talking to the right people is a huge hurdle crossed on our way to effectively communicating our message!

Bonus Tool

As a bonus I’ll share a tool I use to measure the effectiveness of the blogs I set up. HubSpot has a Web Site Grader that will give you a wealth of information about any URL you input. It can give you a pretty good general idea as to how effective your blog is from a marketing perspective.

Chris Cree is a writer and career operations professional who helps businesses fuel growth through blogging in his SuccessCREEations consulting practice.

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March 24th, 2007 at 06:29am | Posted by Joe | Guest Writer's Articles | 5 reader remarks | Print This Post