Managing Your WordPress Blog Like It’s A Business Asset?

By Chris Frerecks • October 16th, 2009

managing business blogsOn a daily basis we’re contacted by various small to medium sized business people asking what it entails to manage a WordPress blog for their business. It makes sense they’d ask because, to a large degree, good business blogs add marketing strength where most websites can’t. Some are playing around with free blog solutions. Others work with website companies that throw in free blog services. Most are wondering whether or not a business blog service makes sense. What we have learned over the years is that it is consuming and, at times, difficult [grunt] work.

Regardless, in order to be successful you’ve really got to recognize your business blog platform, it’s accumulated subscribers, feed connections, links and search indexing as a serious business asset. An asset that can bring leads and new business at any time. FREE has no interest in these things, yet sooner or later all assets require time, resources and/ or money. Busy people may also need convenient educational blog resources and service, but let’s look at what the challenges might be when managing WordPress for business.

  1. Customization & Design – Do you want a brand or will you settle for something anyone else can have? If a brand, you’re going to need to do some custom design work.
  2. Hosting – Hosting is not simple! You either pay for it or you get a minimal service. Be sure you understand the customer service obligation, memory, storage, data backup timing and security or you are definitely asking for surprises.
  3. Security – Servers get attacked. Sites get hacked. Your asset needs security.
  4. WordPress Updates – Wordpress updates its software quite regularly and this process must be managed on your platform. If you have custom design, plugin features and any unique code modifications, which is very normal for serious business bloggers, than updates have to be managed carefully. Keeping everything in sync, including adequate load times, can get tricky.
  5. Plugin Updates – Like Wordpress updates, plugin features must be updated. If there are code modifications, they have to be managed very carefully when updating. Again, keeping everything in sync, including adequate load times, can get really tricky.
  6. Plugin Code Modifications – If you’ve created modified or customized plugins, you’ve got to be sure these are not going to undermine your WP upgrade. Shoddy code modification can easily topple everything.
  7. Load Times – Load times appeal to both search spiders and humans. If load times get too slow, SEO suffers and humans get impatient defeating the whole purpose of being there! Any combination of plugins, single plugin or code modification can undermine load times, so management is key.
  8. Page URLs – New page or post URLs should to be set to support SEO, unless you have other specific requirements. In either event, every new pages URL matters, so set them properly.
  9. Avoiding Duplicate Pages – If not set up properly, your [home page] post, that post in its category and in its archive may look to search engine spiders like duplication. Duplication won’t necessarily kill you, but it can lessen the effectiveness of a search engine crawls. Do that, and you may just reduce crucial key word and phrase indexing.
  10. Return on Investment – Do you understand what’s actually happening as a result of your business blogging? Are you generating traffic? Are visitors engaging with your business brand or just bouncing? Are you capturing leads? Adding good traffic analytics is an important step. Understanding what they mean and how to use them becomes crucial to getting a return.
  11. Lead Capture – It’s one thing to get visitors there, but what are you doing to capture them? Giving anything away? And if so, what information are you gathering in exchange for that give?
  12. Training & Support – How much time do you have to understand all of the above? Are you keeping up with new feature possibilities or modifying those you do have? If something isn’t right, where do you go for help?
  13. And lot’s more we’ll add as we go…
     
    At $49 per month Kinetic Knowledge business blogging services make sense because you tend to the above, while adding convenient educational resources and highly accountable human service. 

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Kinetic Knowledge is a WordPress Management Service offering build, design, search optimization, ongoing technology management & advancement, hosting, storage, security, blog marketing education, blog content options and more.

Contributed by Chris Frerecks
chris@kineticknowledge.com


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