Showing posts with label Wordpress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wordpress. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

8 Ways to Connect with Your Audience and Market Your Brand


When the Internet was made available to the public, few businesses and brands could have anticipated the powerful effect it would have on the ability to personally connect with a consumer audience population. Today, brands are able to metaphorically reach into the homes of consumers, evaluate their preferences and actions, and communicate with consumers on a very personal and intimate level. 

This type of communication is personalizing brands and making them more accessible to consumers. If your website is still struggling to connect with audience members, implementing a few of these strategies may help you market your brand.

Take Questions and Provide Answers

Questions and answers are one of the most popular content types for generating a positive brand image and establishing a business as a reputable source of information. Consumers are filled with questions about their favorite brands, products, services, and subjects, and if your brand can effectively answer these questions, you will generate some serious “fan affection.” Allow consumers to post their questions on your website or blog, and answer the questions as directly as possible.

Host a Contest

Hosting a contest for your consumer population is a great way to stay connected with consumers. People love contests, especially contests that offer a valuable prize such as a free giveaway, valuable discount, or high quality information and recognition. By regularly hosting contests on your website, you will improve your brand’s reputation and keep consumers coming back to your website for more opportunities.

Redesign Your Website

Sometimes, redesigning your website is all it takes to connect with your audience and market your brand as a forward-thinking, modern, and relevant entity. Adding a brand new WordPress template to your blog, for example, will show your readers that your site is continually changing and updating. Implementing new design features on your website will ensure that the site doesn’t become visually stale, too.

Create a Popular Blog

Creating a popular blog is a highly effective way to connect with your target audience. Consumers love blogs because they are simple and accessible sources for high quality information. Be sure that the content on your blog reflects the industry in which you want to make an impact. If you’re trying to sell men’s clothing, for example, a recipe blog isn’t going to allow you to cover much ground with your target audience population. The more you update your blog with relevant information, the more effective your brand marketing efforts will be.

Interact with Consumers via Social Media

Don’t neglect the affordable power of social media when attempting to connect with consumers and market your brand. Most social media networks offer free marketing efforts that simply require the investment of time and energy. You can attract consumers to your social media pages and use links and feature posts to direct them to your website.

Share Images and Video Content

Highly shareable content, like images or video content, are great ways to attract consumer attention and communicate something of value about your brand. You can use infographics, entertaining videos, product promotion videos, or other types of visual content to ensure that your brand remains relevant.

Create a Content Series

Anticipation is a great influencer amongst consumers. If you can create a highly anticipated content series that features “episodes” of content released at regular intervals, you’ll be able to attract incredible amounts of customer attention. Your target audience members will continually check back with your website to see when the next content installment is due to appear.

Treat Your Audience Like People

One of the biggest marketing mistakes that big-name brands make today is treating their consumer population like a massive group rather than a collection of individuals. This problem is increasing because of the massive number of ways that the Internet offers to connect with consumers. Because brands are able to create e-mail blasts delivered directly to consumer inboxes, advertising campaigns that are displayed on computers around the world, and even social media marketing campaigns that reach impressive volumes, it can be difficult to remember that consumers are individuals with individual needs, desires, preferences, and styles. 

Treating your audience members like people is a great way to connect with your audience as a whole and market your brand as something different than your run-of-the-mill business or organization. A brand that communicates directly with its consumers is refreshing and appreciated.

These are just a few of the many strategies that your brand can use to effectively connect with audience members and expand your brand’s reach while simultaneously improving your brand’s image. The Internet offers a myriad of opportunities, and all that is required of you is an investment of time and energy. The results of connecting personally with your audience members will be staggering for your brand’s popularity and reputation, so try implementing one of these great strategies today.

About author

Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates original WordPress themes that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology  tips.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Attract More Visitors To Your Blog - 9 Strategies...


Attracting more people to your blog is essential for improving your individual brand and monetizing your blog. In today's guest post, Korah Morrison shares her helpful traffic generation tips. Attract more visitors to your blog with these simple steps: 

1. The first method you may wish to think about is simple advertising. Advertising works and there are many methods you can use to advertise your blog--both online and offline. It will cost you a little bit of money, but its expense all depends upon how badly you want people to see your blog. 

2. You can try a guest post on someone else’s blog. This is where you add quality content onto someone else’s blog in return for their blog linking to yours. This will bring you direct traffic from the readers of the article who follow the link, and will help you to appear higher up in the search engine results pages. If you do wish to appear even higher in the search engine results pages you should consider the aspects of SEO. This is the act of making your blog post easier to read by the search engines, so that they list you higher up in their search results. Submit a sitemap to Google so that they list you in their search engine results. 

3. Do not be afraid to talk about it on social media. If you have followers or friends on social media platforms, then talk about your blog and encourage people to go and look at it. Talk about its topics and the angle you took on certain issues. 

4. Add a link from your email to your blog. Have one embedded at the bottom of your emails so that every single email you send out has a link to your blog from it. You may also add a link from your website if you have one. 

5. Allow people to link from your comment section, if you want them to comment and to keep coming back. Links are handy for rising higher in the search engine results pages, so people will happily keep coming back and commenting every week if you allow them to post links. 

6. Have an exciting or interesting title for your blog posts. A dull or boring one will not attract many visitors. Make sure that you write about the title you choose. Don’t add a title that is exciting and interesting if it has nothing to do with what your blog is actually about. Do not make your title misleading, but do make it exciting or interesting enough to grab people’s attention. Sometimes it is only the title of a blog that encourages people to even bother reading your blog.  

7. The use of social bookmarking. Put the plug social bookmarking. It is quite possible to get targeted traffic from these services. 

8. Compile lists. People love to read lists of any rules, tips, techniques, relating to important questions. Very convenient when all useful tips collected in one place. 

9. Commenting on other people's blogs. It is desirable to leave comments on popular blogs. And not just comment, but clever and useful comments. It could allow you become noticeable and get attention. Traffic from popular blogs is very useful. 

If you're struggling to generate traffic to your blog, consider these helpful hints.  Over time, by taking small actions in the direction of your goal, traffic will start to build.  Stick with it!


About the Author: Today's guest post is by Korah Morrison, writer on essay writing service and she likes to write about seo, blogging, social media and internet marketing.

Friday, March 16, 2012

How to Install a WordPress Blog


This past week I tried to install WordPress on a new domain via a "quick install" feature on Godaddy.com. Guess what?  It didn't work.  The good news is that with some back and forth with Godaddy support, I finally got the real instructions.  If you're struggling to install WordPress on a new domain, follow these instructions.

Installing WordPress using Go Daddy Hosting Connection is the easiest way to get WordPress up and running on your domain if it works (it didn't for me).

However, you can install it manually into your shared hosting account using the following instructions.

To accomplish this, you will need the following items:
-A compatible hosting account which supports PHP and MySQL
-Your FTP account login information. This includes the FTP User Name and Password for your hosting account.
-A MySQL Database for WordPress and the Database information.
-The latest version of WordPress which you can download from Wordpress.org
    NOTE:This article assumes you already have a compatible hosting account and your FTP login information. If this is not the case, obtain these items and then return to the article.

    The next step is to create a MySQL Database for WordPress.  No one ever told be this about installing WordPress but trust me - this is what gets your installation actually working.  Follow these specific instructions and you'll be up and running in not time.
    -Log in to your Account Manager 
    -Click Web Hosting.
    -Next to the hosting account you want to use, click Launch.
    -In the Databases section of the Hosting Control Center, click the MySQL icon.
    -Click Create New Database.
    -Enter a description, WordPress for instance.
    -Enter a user name and password.
    -Specify your MySQL version.
    -Specify whether you want to allow Direct Database Access.
      NOTE: Direct Database Access is a less secure way to manage your hosted databases which most users do not require. If you do not need to access your database remotely, then you should not enable Direct Database Access. For more information, see Why Connect Remotely to Shared Hosting Databases.

      Verify your MySQL database settings. If everything looks OK, click OK. It may take a few minutes to create your database. Click your browser's Refresh button to check if your database is ready.

      Once you have set up a database for your account, you can find your host name information by clicking the Pencil icon next to the name of your database. Note the following items, as they will be needed later in the install process:
        1. Host Name
        2. Database Name
        3. Database User Name
        Now, you need to download the latest version of WordPress from their servers. This can be found at WordPress.org.

        -Install WordPress
          Unzip the file from WordPress, and then upload the contents of the WordPress folder to your hosting account using an FTP client. This directory can be stored anywhere in your account, in this example it will be in the root (http://www.coolexample.com).  NOTE: Do not upload the wordpress folder itself, only its contents.

          Begin the WordPress installation by going to http://www.coolexample.com/wp-admin/install.php.
          -Click Create a Configuration File.
            Click Let's go!

            Complete the following fields, and then click Submit:
              1. Database Name — Enter your database's name.
              2. User Name — Enter your database's name.
              3. Password — Enter your database's password.
              4. Database Host — Enter your database's Host Name.
              5. Table Prefix — Do not modify this field, unless you want to run multiple WordPress installations.
              Click Run the install.

              Complete the on-screen fields for your blog's details, and then click Install WordPress.

              That's it! Your WordPress blog is now installed. For assistance in the set up and maintenance of your blog, see the Getting Started with WordPress page at WordPress.org.  Also, be sure to search online for help from people who are experiencing the same issues you might be having with WordPress as a full site or blog.  Happy blogging!

              For help with additional blog resources visit blogdash.