Plus One Plugin for WordPress
Google’s been making strong moves lately with the Plus One button and Google+. It’s hard to say whether either of these will reach critical mass – ahem, see Google Buzz.
That said, it’s probably not a good idea to wait to incorporate the Plus One button on your WordPress site, mostly because it takes two minutes to install.
Not surprisingly, there are at least three decent +1 plugin options already. The one with the most unanimously positive reviews is called — wait for it — Plus One.
Search for Plus One in your WordPress account plugin page, install and activate, and you’re done. It automatically gets added at the end of your posts. I may have exaggerated — it probably only takes 30 seconds.
Given that Google has decided to incorporate Plus One data into Webmaster Tools, it’s betting that it can build reliance on it. Unlike Buzz, which seemed to exist in a vacuum, Google has connected the Plus One button to search results and Tools, making it an extension of its current offerings instead of yet another new application or platform to adopt.
Let me be clear — I ain’t saying +1 is going to make it big time. The Interwebs is a big place with lots of wires and tubes, and I’ve never once seen a result that someone in my network has plus one’d. In short, it’s never done for me what it aims to do, which is provide recommendations and leverage my network to facilitate decision making.
That said, it’s so easy to install in WordPress that you kinda hafta. And if it does go large, you’ll be in good position.
Why WordPress Rocks As a Website Content Management System
For anyone held hostage to a developer who isn’t responding to requests for changes or additions to their website, WordPress is a life saver. It has matured from a basic blogging platform to a fully functional content management system (CMS), allowing for website content to be added and edited at any time through a very easy-to-use interface. This saves money while allowing a website to be used how it was truly intended: for marketing pros and entrepreneurs who want to do their comm when they want, not when their developer wakes up after a three week coding bender.
Though the sky is the limit with WordPress, and it can get rather sophisticated if you want, the beauty is how simple and easy it can be. Here are a few basic features:
Pages
Using the main CMS navigation and selecting the Pages option, you get a handy list of all your website pages. Pick a page you want to edit, then make your edits in the text area. Though more limited than what you might see with Word or any other word processing software, you can bold, italic, underline, use bullets, and link to other pages. You can insert images, video and audio.
Posts
While this is your blog post area, it can be used for company news, white papers, or any other content that fits your content marketing strategy. With posts you have the same editing capabilities as pages, and you can publish in advance so you don’t have to worry about interrupting your hard earned PTO. You can save drafts and preview your work, and publish when you’re good and ready.
Users
For organizations with multiple people creating or editing content, the Users section is crucial yet simple. As the page administrator, you add a new user by filling out a form with the user info, then selecting the level of access you want them to have. Administrators have access to the entire site, editors to all posts, and authors to their own content only. User names and passwords can be sent to new users automatically through the system.
Though WordPress is often associated with blogging and design templates, it has become so much more. You can manage all your site content, drop custom designs, optimize for social media and search, and take control of your communications initiatives. Best of all, since it leverages open source plugins, it doesn’t have to be expensive either.
My Brother the Sailor – Building Links through Good Content
Matt Cutts and other SEOs often say that the key to good SEO is good content. They usually say this cryptically, and some of these talking heads seem to be regurgitating the company line without knowing the rationale behind it.
My brother the sailer, who I discussed in an earlier post about Facebook and blogging, has hit upon this concept somewhat accidentally. I may have mentioned to him that getting back links to his site is a good thing for SEO, but it doesn’t take an SEO master to deduce that getting your sailing blog excerpted on the well-trafficked site Sailing Scuttlebutt is good for business, which is what he did.
Checking out my brother’s analytics account this week has been a trip. His traffic is up 886%. He also scored a link from another industry site a few days later, which helped to drive even more traffic.
Short term, he gets a nice traffic boost. Long term, he gets two very juicy links from high quality sites that each have a page rank of 5.
Matt Cutts has not been shy about saying that high quality back links are the way to rank well. What my brother is doing is what Cutts and the other experts mean by good content. Good content and the pitching or promotion of that content results in links. Links from high quality sites are votes for your site. These votes are how Google decides that your site will rank ahead of the competition.
My Brother the Sailor – A Social Media Success (so far)
My brother is a professional sailor. Yes, a pro sailor. He gets paid by wealthy boat owners to help race their boats in regattas in St. Martin, Charleston, Italy, and anywhere else in the world where there’s a competition afoot. Right now he’s sailing from Newport, RI to Bermuda on a 3-day overnight sail on a mini-maxi called Bella Mente.
My bro started his professional sailing company a few years back and just started up a WordPress blog integrated into his site to keep people posted on his whereabouts, and also to help raise his profile among local Minnesota yachtsmen (he gets a decent chunk of income from local sailing lessons). His formula is simple and has worked very well so far after only a few months of blog work.
First, he started up a 42 Marine Facebook page. He has a built-in community of people who are naturally interested in what he’s doing, so it was just a matter of establishing a connection on Facebook. Right now he as just under 100 followers and it’s growing fast.
Second, he blogs pretty well. He’s got a bit of a tell-it-like-it-is voice, nothing too flashy. The stories are pretty entertaining on their own and don’t need a lot of flair, and he’s good at letting people draw their own conclusions.
Third, he promotes his blog posts. He’s got Feedburner set up for email updates and he posts a link on his Facebook page whenever a post goes up. Simple but effective. His Google Analytics account shows nice little peaks on the days he posted a link on Facebook.
Time will tell how big this thing will get. He’s starting to get long tail organic traffic from his posts very quickly because using Feedburner tends to get posts indexed in search engines right away. If he continues circumnavigate the globe and report back in his style of voice I’m sure he’ll be just fine.
