Notes and Resources from OC Wordcamp Marketing Presentation

This past weekend I gave a presentation at OC Wordcamp, discussing using a WordPress site for marketing your business, service or product.  As promised, here are the some of the key points, along with links and tools that were mentioned. If anything is missing, leave a comment!

When developing a strategy for your site, the first and most important question to ask is:

Who do you want to come to your site? Who is your target audience?

Thou shall not answer “everybody”!

Get specific since the answer will provide the basis for all aspects of your online marketing strategy.

For more on this topic, also read:
Recharge and Refine Your Marketing Strategy
What Is An Online Marketing Strategy?

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Get Focused With Your Website Marketing – A Reader Example

Sometimes I give some freebie advice to my subscribers and readers by way of a blog post. I received an email from Becky at Classy Sassy Couture who is looking for more ways to market her website and improve her SEO. Classy Sassy Couture sells  custom-beaded clothes and accessories via ClassySassyCouture.com. She also blogs at http://classysassycouture.typepad.com

Here’s a few of the questions/comments she had:

She tells me that she’s not sure what to blog about but that she picks up new followers whenever she blogs.

So first things first – that blog should really be on your own domain, e.g. classysassycouture.com/blog .  It hurts me a little inside when I see people linking out to their blogs. While a popular blog hosted elsewhere can still help develop your brand name, it doesn’t help your site’s search engine rankings very much and it’s not very seamless for the user. One of the benefits of having a blog is that it can attract targeted traffic, and can boost your search engine rankings. But if all that lovely traffic is not going to your own domain, you’re missing out. So I would recommend getting WordPress set up on your site and creating your blog on that. You can export your content from Typepad and import it into a WordPress installation.

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Notes & Resources from WordPress for Business Meetup

The Southern California WordPress Meetup was a lot of fun as usual. Natalie Maclees was our gracious host and even provided dinner for everyone. WordPress provided swag, and Packt publishing gave away a free copy of their “WordPress for Business Bloggers” book. We had a full group of awesome WP lovers at various levels of experience, and with a diverse range of businesses.

We covered a variety of issues under the umbrella of ‘WordPress for Business.’ Here’s some of the resources that came up during the course of the evening. If you’re in Los Angeles and using WordPress, you’ll find this group to be a great resource for information and networking.

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