One of the questions that we often get asked is: Why should I use WordPress? Isn’t my old site good enough? Why do I need to switch to WordPress from another platform? If you’re asking these questions, then you’re at the right place. In this article, we will share 6 important reasons why you should use WordPress. We will also cover all the different type of websites you can create with WordPress as well as showcase popular sites that are using WordPress.

Note: Throughout this article, when we say WordPress, we are talking about WordPress.org also known as self-hosted WordPress. Please do not confuse this with WordPress.com which is a hosting service. For details, see our comparison of WordPress.org vs WordPress.com.

One of the most common misconception about WordPress is that it is just a blogging platform.

It is not.

While WordPress started as a blogging tool, it has evolved throughout the years into a powerful website builder and a robust content management system (CMS).

The best part about WordPress is that it’s easy to use and flexible enough to make different types of websites. That’s the main reason why WordPress has grown so much in popularity. According to a recent survey, WordPress powers 32.3% of all websites on the internet.

Due to it’s robust features, many of the top brands use WordPress to power their websites including Time Magazine, Facebook, The New Yorker, Sony, Disney, Target, The New York Times, and more.

Let’s take a look at why you should use WordPress to make your website.

1. WordPress is Free as in Freedom

WordPress is a free software. It means you are free to download, install, use and modify it to match your needs. You can use it to create any kind of website. To learn more, see our article about why is WordPress free?.

While the WordPress software itself is free, you need a domain name and web hosting to install it.

A domain name is the address of your website on the internet. This is what your users type in their browser’s address bar to access your website (for example, wpbeginner.com).

Web hosting is your website’s house where all your website files are stored.

2. WordPress is Easy to Customize with Themes and Plugins

A large portion of people using WordPress are neither web designers nor programmers. As a matter of fact, most folks start using WordPress without any prior knowledge of designing websites.

For non-tech savvy folks, WordPress is the perfect solution because there are thousands of free website templates (themes) that you can choose from. There is a perfect WordPress theme for just about every kind of website (whether it’s a blog, business site, or an online store).

WordPress themes are easy to customize because a lot of them come with their own options panel allowing you to change colors, upload logo, change the background, create beautiful sliders, and truly customize it to your needs without writing any code at all.

You can also add custom functionality to your WordPress site by using plugins. WordPress plugins are like apps for your website that you can use to add advanced features like analytics, contact forms, membership area, and more.

Just like themes, there are thousands of free and premium plugins available for you to use. To learn more, see our article on what are WordPress plugins and how do they work.

3. WordPress is SEO Friendly

WordPress is written using standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic markup. In non-geek terms, this makes Google and other search engines love WordPress.

This is why WordPress sites tend to rank higher than others in search engines.

By design, WordPress is very SEO friendly out of the box. You can also use WordPress SEO plugins to further optimize your website. For complete step by step instructions, see our ultimate WordPress SEO guide to properly optimize your website.

4. WordPress is Easy To Manage

WordPress comes with a built-in updates management system. This allows you to update your plugins and themes from within your WordPress admin dashboard.

WordPress also notifies you when there is a new version of WordPress available, so you can update your site by simply clicking a button.

To protect your data from any accident or hacking, you can easily use a WordPress backup plugin to automatically create backups and store them safely on a remote location.

You can also manage your WordPress site on the go with WordPress mobile apps.

5. WordPress is Safe and Secure

WordPress is developed with security in mind, and it is considered to be a very safe and secure platform to run a website. However, just like the real world, the internet can be an uncertain place.

There are intruders out there who want to get their hands on as many sites as they could. To protect your WordPress site, there are a few simple things that you can do to make it even more secure.

6. WordPress Can Handle Different Media Types

WordPress is not just limited to writing text. It comes with a built-in media uploader to handle images, audio, and video files.

WordPress supports oEmbed enabled websites which means you can embed YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Tweets, and Soundcloud audio by just pasting the URL in the WordPress post editor.

See the full article in wpbeginner

Having trouble ranking high on Google’s search results? How much attention are you paying to the user experience of your website?

In the early days of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you could stuff a page with relevant keywords and call it a day as you shot your way up the search result rankings. Google now looks at more than 200 ranking factors to determine which sites make it to the top of the search results page, and a site’s user experience goes a long way towards achieving that success.

SEO and user experience may seem like opposites, but in reality, one without the other will lead to poor performance. Both share the common goal of getting relevant information in front of users. To put it simply, SEO targets search engines and leads users to your site, whereas the user experience helps answer the user’s questions once they’re there.

If you want your website’s visitors to spend more time on your site and increase valuable conversions while ranking higher in search results, apply these five important user experience goals that should be part of your SEO strategy.

1. Make your site mobile-friendly

It can be easy to overlook one of the most important ranking factors for a site, as most people will design their entire website from a desktop computer. More than half of all web traffic is now performed on a mobile device. With the number of mobile devices forecasted to reach 16.8 billion by 2023, if you haven’t made your website’s mobile-friendliness a top priority, now is the time.

Your site’s mobile performance and structure are also the most important versions of your site in terms of ranking on Google.

Back in 2015, Google made mobile friendliness an important ranking factor, and in 2017 the search engine began the switch to mobile-first indexing for all websites.

No matter how well you’ve optimized your site’s design and SEO for desktop users, your hard work will be lost if those decisions don’t carry over to your visitors on mobile devices. When Google crawls your site, it will calculate the page’s ranking factor off of the mobile experience.

If your bounce rate is high, it could mean users visiting your site from a Google search left due to the page not loading properly on mobile, thus sending a signal to Google to lower your ranking in the SERPs.

Of course, it is still important to optimize your site for desktop users, but if you are not considering users across all devices, the likelihood of Google considering your site in a top SERP placement is quite low.

Steps to make sure your site is mobile-friendly:

• Check your website on a variety of devices, including desktop, laptop, mobile phones, and tablets. If you do not have easy access to a range of devices, most browsers have a way to simulate popular sizes, such as Chrome’s Inspect tool.
• Pay particular attention to the layout of information and the legibility of text on the screen. Is the flow of your site just as effective on mobile as it is on a desktop? Are images taking up too much space on your phone, pushing important content off the screen? Are buttons easy to press?
• Google provides a free Mobile-Friendly Test that can analyze your site’s mobile-friendliness and offers helpful suggestions on where to make improvements.

2. Make your site quick to load

Did you know that just a one-second delay in page loading time can result in 11 percent fewer visitors and a 16 percent drop in customer satisfaction? After three seconds, you could be losing close to half of your site’s visitors.

Google is not blind to this fact either and in 2018 began using a website’s mobile loading speed as a ranking factor in their search results — another reason to make sure your site is optimized for mobile.

If you’ve noticed a significantly higher bounce rate on your site, page speed could be a major culprit. This is especially true for mobile visitors who are likely on the go and are less willing to wait those extra seconds for your page to load.

When it comes to speeding up your website, many common factors could be playing a role. Some issues are easier to fix than others. If you don’t have full control over choosing your hosting provider or have limited editing ability over your site’s theme, there are still a few steps you can take to improve performance.

One of the leading culprits of a slow loading site is its images. This isn’t to say photos and graphics should be removed, but all images should be properly compressed and sized to fit its intended placement.

If you need to include a lot of images, a lazy load script that only loads images as a user scrolls down to them can vastly improve loading time.

Steps to improve your site’s page speed:

• Run your site through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool to discover areas that can be worked on to improve page speed and performance.
• Optimize and compress your images. There are quite a few websites that can optimize your images without negatively impacting visual quality, including TinyPNG.
• Consider serving your images from a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like ImageKit.io to further optimize the delivery of your images.

3. Make your site easy to navigate

If a visual hierarchy or proper linking structure is not in place, it will be difficult for your site’s pages to rank favorably, if at all, in search listings. Your users will also likely get lost and leave your site, resulting in high bounce rates.

Navigation

Cleaning up your site’s main navigation is an obvious first step.

Your navigation, whether it is the main navigation, Call-to-Action’s (CTA), or links in the content, should be intuitive and guide your users onto the next steps through your site. It should be clear to the user where each navigational item will take them.

A good goal is to make sure that any page a user may want to get to is no more than four clicks away.

Having too many navigation menu items not only overloads your visitors with too many options, but also it can reduce overall link authority to the rest of your site and make it harder for key pages to rank on search results.

Clear navigation also increases the likelihood that Google will add sitelinks to your site’s listing in the search results. This will make your listing more prominent, and with the added space, help push competitor listings further down the page.

Headings

While your main navigation guides users through multiple pages on your website, proper heading structure (H1, H2, H3, etc) should guide your users through the content of the page.

Proper headings make your content easier to scan and help to identify the main theme of each section.

Google and other search engines also use this heading structure to better understand the content on the page in order to serve more relevant information to potential users in the search results.

You may have a page with outstanding long-form content, but if there isn’t a visual and logical hierarchy, chances are your visitors will get lost on the page and will not find the information they are looking for.

Buttons / CTAs

CTA buttons are important touchpoints to get your visitors to interact with your site.

This user engagement is a key metric to show Google that users are interested in the content you are providing.

It’s important to understand where a user will want to go next on your site so you can offer up the relevant CTA to guide them there. However, you don’t want to overwhelm them with too many CTAs either.

If additional options are necessary, avoid exceeding more than three buttons. In this case, utilizing different styling for primary and secondary CTAs will help make the most important action stand out to the user.

4. Make your site easy on the eyes

Bad design often results in bad SEO.

Having a clean, well designed layout helps further engage your users and reduces the likelihood they’ll bounce back to the search listings to look elsewhere for their information.

Google’s RankBrain algorithm uses artificial intelligence to better understand user behavior and is designed to look at key metrics of a page where design plays a major role in influencing, such as bounce rate, pages per session, organic CTR, and dwell time.

Google is usually secretive about which factors influence a site’s ranking, but the company did reveal that RankBrain is among the top three ranking signals.

If a user can effortlessly move from one page to the next, click through relevant links, and spend a considerable amount of time on your site, Google will recognize your site as user-friendly.

But what if a user lands on your site and finds the page poorly laid out, hard to read, overly complicated, or simply just an eyesore?

Chances are they’ll return to the search results page that brought them to you and check out a competing listing. This “pogo-sticking” is not lost to the RankBrain algorithm and as a result, Google will continue to push your site lower in the rankings.

Steps to improve your site’s visual appeal:

• Pay attention to the formatting of your text. Fonts that are too small, hard to read, or in poorly chosen colors, will likely push your lead users off of your page. Keeping your text’s line length to 50-75 characters and paying attention to text alignment are important factors when it comes to creating visual appeal.
• Whitespace is your best friend in a page layout. You want to give your images and text room to breathe so that users can better focus their attention and lead to increased engagement.
• Don’t go overboard with too many links in the body of your content. Serving up too many with no clear purpose leads to the perception of clutter and will be overlooked by your visitors.

5. Make your site appear trustworthy

Unlike the previous steps you can take to improve the user experience and SEO of your site, measuring the perceived trustworthiness of your site can be difficult. However, that doesn’t mean it should be skipped because gaining a user’s trust is a key factor in ranking higher in search results.

The perception of quality can have just as much impact on your website’s trustworthiness as the quality of the content itself.

Web users have come to expect a certain level of polish and organization on the sites they visit, and if your website appears out of date or without any attention to visual detail, it will come across as untrustworthy.

Once your users form an initial impression of your site, it will be extremely difficult to change their minds down the road. Regardless of your intent, presenting a poorly designed website will make it appear as if your business doesn’t care and puts little to no effort into your work. It doesn’t matter if this is far from reality.

Steps to improve your site’s trustworthiness:

• Create a style guide for your website and make sure everything adheres to one consistent look. This may seem like an overwhelming task to complete, but just covering the basics of consistent fonts, colors, and visuals can get you on the right track.
• Evaluate your site from the viewpoint of your user. Take a step back and try to think about how they’ll read your content, navigate your site, and find the information you want them to discover. It may help to have someone less familiar with your business to use your website while you observe their actions.
• Study the websites of your competitors. While some may fall into the same trap, chances are you’ll discover a thing or two about what can be improved upon and what should be avoided.

Unlike the previous steps you can take to improve the user experience and SEO of your site, measuring the perceived trustworthiness of your site can be difficult. However, that doesn’t mean it should be skipped because gaining a user’s trust is a key factor in ranking higher in search results.

The perception of quality can have just as much impact on your website’s trustworthiness as the quality of the content itself.

Web users have come to expect a certain level of polish and organization on the sites they visit, and if your website appears out of date or without any attention to visual detail, it will come across as untrustworthy.

Once your users form an initial impression of your site, it will be extremely difficult to change their minds down the road. Regardless of your intent, presenting a poorly designed website will make it appear as if your business doesn’t care and puts little to no effort into your work. It doesn’t matter if this is far from reality.

See the full article in Aronson Advertising

If you want to run a successful business, you need to invest time and resources in marketing. A good marketing strategy would help you get your products or services in front of your target audience, increase sales, and reach your business goals.

However, traditional forms of marketing like television, billboard advertisements, radio, and newspapers can be very expensive. This might not be an issue if you are a huge enterprise with an entire marketing department with millions of dollars budgeted for marketing. But what happens if you are a small business with little or no marketing budget? How can you effectively market your product or service without breaking the bank? Does this mean that you have to pause all your marketing efforts until you can raise money?

In this article, we would see 8 ways you can promote your business without a marketing budget.

1. Start A Blog

Running a business blog is a free marketing tactic to help your business become more visible online and also reach a much larger audience. Research has shown that companies with blogs have an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that do not blog.

To increase sales for your business, you would need leads. You can quickly get these leads by placing a ton of paid ads to drive new prospects to your business. But this method is quite expensive and the leads stop coming in after you have run out of cash.

So, how can you get new leads without spending money? In two words: blogging and search engines.

Every time you write a new blog post, it is one more indexed page on your website, which means it’s one more opportunity for you to show up on search engines and drive more visitors to your website. Your intended customers are using search engines like Google to search for businesses they would work with. The more blog content you publish on your website, the higher your chances of these customers locating you.

The moment traffic starts coming into your site from search engines, you have the opportunity to convert these traffic into leads. Every new blog post you write is an avenue to generate new leads.

All you need to do is to add a call-to-action button to every blog post. This call to action is basically any content asset that would be valuable enough to visitors of your blog that they would be willing to exchange their information. If you sell software, you can offer a free demo as a content asset. If 10 visitors sign up for your free demo and 2 of them eventually sign up for a paid version, that is two new customers and you didn’t spend even a dime on ads.

2. Create Marketing Videos

If you aren’t using videos as part of your marketing strategy, then you’re missing out on a ton of opportunities to promote your business. The popularity of video as a content marketing format has grown in the past few years. In fact, a report from HubSpot research showed that 50% of customers want to see more videos from brands than any other form of content.

The best part about the video is that it can be used by any business regardless of size, team, or budget. Gone are the days where you need an expensive 4k camera before you can make high-quality marketing videos. All you need is a quality smartphone and you can start making videos immediately. In fact, most customers would prefer low-quality videos that feel “authentic” than high-quality videos that feel “inauthentic”.

Before you start filming your video, you need to decide on the kind of video you want to make. They are several marketing video types you can implement into your strategy. Here is a short explanation of some of them:

1. Demo videos: A demo video is used to showcase to the customer how your product works. It can be a video of the unboxing of a physical product or a tour on how your software works.
2. Brand videos: Brand videos are used to create awareness for your business and attract customers. You typically showcase your brand’s vision, mission, products, or services in this video type.
3. Event videos: Do you have a conference or product launch coming soon? You can use an event video to create awareness for the event. It can be in the form of a highlight reel that shows the attendees what they would gain from attending the event.
4. Instructional videos: These videos are great for teaching your audience. They can be in the form of educational or how-to videos that show your audience how to use your business solutions better.
5. Testimonial videos: Customers want to know that a product or service they are about to invest in would solve their specific problem. The best way to show them that your product is valuable is by creating customer testimonial videos where your loyal customers describe how your company helped them solve the challenges they were facing.
6. Live videos: You can use live videos to show your customers a special behind the scenes view of your company. Almost all social media platforms now offer live video capabilities so you can directly connect with customers on their favorite social media channels.

3. Post on Quora

Quora is a very powerful platform that can help you reach a wider brand audience. It is one of the most effective marketing channels you can use in promoting your business or service.

The platform receives more than 300 million visitors monthly. So if you are looking to increase brand awareness, confirm your authority in your niche, and develop your thought leadership presence, you should check out Quora.

What is Quora?

Quora is an international question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, followed, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions.

Why do you need a Quora marketing strategy?

Here are some reasons you should be interested in marketing on Quora:

• The platform has over 300 million monthly visitors so it is a great channel for increasing your business reach. It is also one of the best user-generated content (UGC) platforms in the world.
• Improved search visibility: Your content on Quora is also searchable via Google. What this means is that you can also drive traffic and leads to the site through Google even if the content was written on Quora.
• Several high profile writers use the platform to reach their audience. Even former President Obama answers questions on Quora. You can use Quora to build your reputation as a thought leader in your industry.
• Quora also offers insights into your audience. You can use the platform to answer the questions your customers have concerning your brand and also offer up solutions to difficulties they encounter when using your product; making it ideal for customer service management.
  How to get the most out of Quora marketing:

1. Create a brilliant bio: Regardless of the social media channel, a brilliant bio is essential. What makes Quora unique is that you cannot create profiles for a brand unless in special cases. You would have to create a profile for the individual in your organization that would be answering the questions.

Make sure that you fill out the interest, “About Me”, employment and credential sections of your bio. A complete bio would help people find you faster on Quora. Don’t forget to add an eye-catching profile picture to your bio. Your bio should give off the vibe that there is a real person behind the account; customers would connect with you faster that way.

2. Look for questions that fit your industry/business to answer: The point of Quora is to attract customers to your business. You need to answer questions that you know your target audience is searching for. A good way to do this is by answering questions on a problem that your product/services solve.

3. Find question threads with the highest upvotes: Quora uses the upvote point system to show the most popular questions and answers on the platform. Question threads with tons of upvotes usually have a lot of views. If you offer good answers to these questions, you can have thousands of views fast.

4. Run a Giveaway Contest

Running a giveaway is one of the best ways to promote your business without a marketing budget. It is a quick way to create brand awareness and also connect with your customers.

When done correctly, it would cost you close to nothing. This is especially true when you use social media to run the giveaway contest.

The first step to every giveaway contest is determining the kind of promotion you want to run. There are three main types of promotions you can run:

• Contests
• Sweepstakes
• Lottery

Contests

In a contest, the participants would be required to have a skill or make some kind of effort before they can win the prize. The winners are chosen either through voting or by judges.

Some of the most popular contests are video, photo, or essays.

A good example is this Facebook contest by Eggo held in two parts. The first part is a recipe contest where participants submitted their best recipe for waffles. The second part is fans voting for their favorite recipe. The winner receives $5000.

Note: You don’t have to offer money as your prize. You can give the winner a 10% discount off the price of a product you are selling. If you run an ecommerce business you can offer coupons or free shipping as the prize.

Sweepstakes

In a contest, the participants would be required to have a skill or make some kind of effort before they can win the prize. The winners are chosen either through voting or by judges.

Some of the most popular contests are video, photo, or essays.

A good example is this Facebook contest by Eggo held in two parts. The first part is a recipe contest where participants submitted their best recipe for waffles. The second part is fans voting for their favorite recipe. The winner receives $5000.

5. Start An Affiliate Program

63% of businesses say that their biggest challenge is generating leads and traffic. One method of generating leads to your business is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing involves an affiliate signing up to an affiliate program set up by the advertiser to sell and promote their product on a commission-based model. The affiliate would promote the advertiser’s product or service using a unique link, which sends traffic to the advertiser’s website. If the lead sent to the website purchases a product, a commission is paid to the affiliate.

In the context of this article, you would be the one creating an affiliate program that affiliates can sign up for. Starting an affiliate program can be thought of as a way of expanding your marketing team by hiring people who are paid only after successful sales are made.

The best part of an affiliate program is that you are not losing any money. You only pay the affiliate a commission after they have made a successful sale.

Setting up an affiliate program is also very easy. They are several sales tools you can use in launching and scaling your affiliate program in a couple of hours. But, before you go ahead and launch your affiliate program, make sure you carry out research. Analyze what your competitors are doing before starting out.

Understanding the competitive environment informs your decisions on how you will launch the program as well as your commissions, commercial arrangements, and targets.

6. Submit Press Releases

Press releases can be an effective form of marketing, especially for small businesses. If used correctly, press releases are an efficient way to promote your brand and create goodwill in the local marketplace without paying a dime.

For example, when Green Rivers Adventures was about to launch The Gorge, a high-speed zip line, they issued a press release announcing the launch and a number of publications including The Associated Press and Costco Connection, which reached up to 8 million people picked up the story. As a result of this huge press, the company had a sold-out year before its official launch.

You should note that there are right and wrong ways to create and distribute press releases.

Unless you are a well-known brand like Apple, nobody cares about your company or product. Your press releases should not be in the form of a pitch. Journalists or the media are not interested in promoting you or your business so that you can just sell your products (unless you are paying them to do so).

A strong press release would involve sharing expert advice or opinions on a topic relevant to the journalist and their readers. This is some things you can put in your press release:

• An interesting solution to a popular consumer problem
• Offer a controversial opinion on a popular topic
• Bring attention to your business when you receive an award. This works best for local press releases.
• Piggyback off the news by offering an opinion or information relative to the topic at hand.

You can use online press release services like PRWeb, Business Wire, and PR Newswire to get started.

7. Setup G2 Crowd & Capterra

Setting up G2 Crowd is free and very easy to do. You can set up a profile for your business in minutes and have the opportunity to be seen by millions.

G2 is a peer-to-peer review site headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. It was launched in May 2012 with a focus on aggregating user reviews for business software. The platform compares the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data.

Your future customers are researching their next purchase on G2. So if you sell software, you can reach more customers by claiming your G2 profile.

Capterra is similar to G2 Crowd. It is an online marketplace vendor serving as an intermediary between buyers and sellers within the software industry. The company assists consumers with selecting the best software for their needs.

Both of these services are available internationally so you can reach a very wide audience by setting up your profile. To increase your ratings, ask your users to add a review of your product on G2 Crowd/Capterra.

8. Start a Podcast or Get Featured In One

Podcasts are a great way to promote your product and services. There is a huge number of people listening to podcasts daily. In fact, the proportion of Americans listening to podcasts has increased in the past few years. According to musicoomph, 22% of Americans (approximately 103 million) listen to podcasts, weekly people.

You should take advantage of this trend and start your own podcast show. The best part is that there are a lot of quality free podcast hosting services that you can use to get started. All you need is great content and a good microphone and you are good to go.

The key to running a successful podcast is creating engaging content that delivers value to your listeners. When done well, a podcast can be very beneficial to your brand. For example, given the audio nature of podcasts, listeners tend to hang on to every word, making it excellent for advertisers trying to make their brand known.

Just like with your business blog, create podcasts that are niche based and targeted to a specific audience. When you create content that resonates with your audience, you would receive a high level of engagement.

Another way to boost your podcast is by interviewing other experts. This would bring variety to your show and you also get exposed to their audience that may not have known about your podcasts.

If you don’t want the workload of starting your own podcast, you can get featured in other podcasts in your industry. Reach out to other podcasts hosts and offer to be interviewed in their show. You can use targeted email outreach to connect with these hosts. When you eventually get invited, be sure to deliver immense value to their audience.

Conclusion

It is very possible to market your products or services and create brand awareness without spending a lot of money. With the strategies mentioned in this article, you can promote your business without a marketing budget.

With a little commitment and creativity on your part, you can start generating tons of leads fast.

Which of the tips in this article would you start using first? Leave your thoughts in the comment section.

See the full article in noupe