In recent months, two of my family members – both mothers and budding entrepenurs – are looking to start websites to sell their unique products. In both cases, I’ve encouraged them to use WordPress blogs to run their sites.
Here’s four reasons why mom entrepreneurs should take a look at using WordPress to run their websites:
1. They can easily sell your products using plugins like this. Get a PayPal account and integrate it into your blog.
2. They can get found and ranked in the search engines faster. Google and WordPress love each other. And with some of these essential tweaks you can help them start talking. Additionally, leverage the power of an actual blog on your site to create quality and regularly updated content, something Google looks for.
3. They can make it easy on themselves to update and maintain your site. A while back I gave my 8 reasons why I love WordPress … but simply put: A website powered by WordPress puts the power back in your hands to keep your website fresh.
4. And the bottomline is: They can do all this … affordably. Quality web hosting and a domain name can be purchased for less than $70 a year.
PLUS: Check out our Ecommerce WordPress Themes for a WP template designed for an online storefront!
WordPress is great! It is easy to use, which is a plus for women in business who are new to the internet.
I have to agree a WordPress Blog is a great tool for marketing and is a great way to kick-start and online business. WordPress makes it very easy to set-up a blog and truly does get ranked quickly in the search engines.
A blog is a must and WordPress does it best!
To your success…
Eventhough WordPress and Google love each others, however using WordPress doesn’t mean that you will drive lots of sales.
There are many things to do to make your blog do well in term of marketing and SEO.
I just started using wordpress for my blog. Took about 15 minutes to get everything up and running and I actually enjoyed spending the next hour or two tweaking everything to the way I wanted. I’m not tech savvy and thought it was very helpful.
Entrepreneursjournal
Cory you are totally right about learning to use WordPress. At this point I can’t even fathom building a site with Dreamweaver.
While wordpress does make nice blogs, and I enjoy reading blogs, they have limited use, I believe. I’ve seen plenty of research and articles that claim that blogs in general, while good for marketing tools and up-to-the-minute-information, should not be used in place of a website. Some of the reasons: …pressure on the blogger to keep up with responses; information on a website can stay put for years – blog info tends to be short-term (news-style) info; web info is usually logically organized – with blog info you sometimes have to look through dozens of responses to find what you are looking for; if you stop blogging, your traffic goes away; (there are more reasons I could list).
homeBiz, we’re talking about small businesses …. and what we mean by using WordPress is as a content management for a website.
See http://ithemes.com for what you can do with a WordPress.
re: pressure on blogger …. isn’t contact with customers a good thing?
re: information on a website for long-tern … as long as you don’t delete posts they are there forever too .. plus, WP ‘Pages’ are designed for static content.
re: logical organization … ref. ithemes.com themes
re: stop blogging your traffic goes away …. if you’ve done your work on SEO, it stays …. one of my biggest blogs still gets over 500 visitors a day from past content … and I haven’t blogged on it for over 3 months actively.
Great idea! WordPress is good, very convenient to use. I’m using wordpress for my blogs.
I too think it is a great idea. I now recommend to everyone to build a WordPress blog or website and forget about static html sites.
With all the free templates and plugins available for WordPress even a total non-designer now can compete with the top companies and put out a website that can rival the multi-million dollar businesses without the use of a web designer.
All the information is available on the internet to help you learn all you need to build top quality sites.
In our experience website owners find it difficult to understand visitor behaviour even with good systems such as Google Analytics.
We have recently come across an excellent piece of software that not only allows them to monitor individual user behaviour in real time, but also facilitates direct engagement between visitor and user. This has been increasing conversions by an average of 15% in the websites we have implemented it in.
It seems that the individualised data gives a more enlightening perspective.
And not also for selling products that WP would have its benefits on but also for real estate property. WordPress has been a part of me with my real estate site and I just can’t believe how it helped me.
-Jan
Thanks for the article… WordPress is going to be my blog proivder in the future for my ecommerce site. Blogs are always great for helping your website position higher in search engines… thanks for the template link!
There are a lot of benefits to WordPress, it’s true, but it also has its drawbacks. I’d recommend anyone getting started to research several different options before settling on one.
Homemaker Barbi (Danelle Ice)
WordPress is definitely a good way to go if you’re just starting out because you don’t have to worry about website structure and organizing your pages. Also, it’s much easier to get your pages pinged quickly by the engines resulting in getting your pages indexed faster (maybe just 10 minutes in some cases).
The good thing about wordpress is that it can be a content management system. It is much easier over the long haul to add content and you can also add content on any computer by simply logging in.
I started with static websites, however, I am going to be getting templates done to match the main theme of my main websites and add in a blog and take the content forward in that direction. Plus it will bring better results in the search engines.
WordPress is great for starting individuals but for selling items, i think its not that good. WordPress usually bans a blog that uses their domain to sell products or services. Blogger.com is much convenient for selling. But if you can do your articles right then you might get a chance not to be banned or deleted by WordPress. Talkin’ based on my own experience. More power to internet marketing moms!
I tried wordpress after blogger and noticed that it offers more flexibility and easier to manage that blogger. I also find it more attractive because of the variety of themes to choose from.
It is much better to upload it to your hosting than to host it for free in wordpress blogs. This allows more freedom for monitization.