Product Description

In Detail

Blogging has been part of the web landscape for over a decade and has matured into a ubiquitous mode of live communication. The power of blogging has been recognized by the business community, and canny marketers view it as a powerful weapon in their digital arsenal. Done well, blogging can bring myriad benefits to businesses of any size. Done badly, it can cause more harm than good. Central to the success of any business blog is a thorough understanding of the technology. This book will give you a competitive advantage by helping you to create an engaging, effective, and well polished business blog.

WordPress allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with many outstanding features. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users, who have created a large and diverse collection of plug-ins. It has various features that can help business bloggers to boost their business strategy.

This book will take you beyond the basics of WordPress, helping you take full advantage of its rich and powerful features to transform your basic blog into a more advanced and professional blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. You will learn everything you need to know to extend and grow your business blog. You will learn to mange the content including images and videos, which will make your blog more appealing. You'll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools. So, if want to transform your business blog to give a kick start to your business this book is for you.

This book deals with using WordPress and third-party tools to manage and optimize your blog, focusing on the business aspects of blogging. It is not an introduction to WordPress and does not cover the basics such as installation or how to post. Most readers will already have an established WordPress blog or will at least be in the advanced stages of planning one.

What you will learn from this book?

• Develop a `blogging business plan': clarify your blogging goals and sketch out a process for achieving them in WordPress
• Build a custom theme: so that the look of your blog immediately communicates your brand to visitors
• Engage with the blogosphere: create beneficial relationships with other bloggers, making the most of each other's traffic and customers
• Optimize your site for search: incorporate good SEO practices into your blog posting and planning
• Use social media marketing such as Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and Del.icio.us to drive traffic to your blog
• Monitor visitors and analyze their activity using WordPress.com stats, Feedburner for your RSS feeds, and Google Analytics
• Manage adverts and implement revenue-generating features using Google AdSense with the Adsense Manager plugin
• Incorporate multimedia on your blog, including video and image galleries
  
  

Approach

This is a practical, hands-on book based around a fictitious case study blog, which you will build on a development server using WordPress. The case study grows chapter by chapter, from installing your local development server, right up to the finished blog.

The book starts by looking at the important features that make a successful business blog: adding value to your products and services, providing proper customer service and support, driving traffic to your website, and so on. It then shows how to implement these features in WordPress. It provides clear instructions and detailed screenshots, so you can see exactly what to do at each step of the build. You will install and configure a selection of WordPress plug-ins to improve the functionality of the case-study blog.

When you have completed the case study, you will have the knowledge and confidence to apply all the techniques you have learned to your own WordPress business blog.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for anybody running or starting a business blog using WordPress. Whether you plan to use your blog for PR and marketing, or want to profit directly from blogging, this book offers you everything you need.

As we want to get into the specifics of business blogging as quickly as possible, we don't cover the WordPress basics. So it's best to have some experience with WordPress before you start with this book.

The book mainly focuses on a self-hosted WordPress installation, but most of the advice also applies to blogs hosted on WordPress.com.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38784 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-11
• Released on: 2008-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 356 pages

About the Author

Paul Thewlis

Paul Thewlis has worked as a web communications professional in the public and private sectors. He is currently E-Communications Manager for a multinational transport company based in the UK. He began his web career as a Technical Editor, working on web design books for a well-known publisher. He has extensive experience of many content management systems and blogging platforms.

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Customer Reviews

Nicely Done
This book explains how to take your WordPress blog and turn it into something special, a blog that sets it apart from the tens of thousands of other blogs online. Using as its example the "Chiliguru" blog, Mr Thewlis explains how to produce a blog that readers will take notice of and read every time you post new content. He starts with the basics, like setting your goals for the blog, designing it, incorporating image and video files, then goes on to offer "blog writing tips." With so many bloggers, it's important to incorporate good writing into your blog. Even though he stresses there aren't any "set rules" to blogging, few people will read a blog that is boring or poorly written.

Search engine optimization is a hot topic in the blogosphere these days and Mr Thewlis devotes an entire chapter to this topic, discussing keywords, permalinks, tags and site maps. He also touches upon other ways of promoting your blog, how to analyze your blog stats, and more importantly ways of making money from your blog. There are also lots of good screen shots throughout that help explain different procedures.

I found this to be a highly enjoyable book. It's clear Mr Thewlis put a lot of effort into showing the reader how to create a stand-out business blog.

This is the first book on web building that got me excited about what I was learning!
I have purchased and studied many technical books, this is the first book I felt a need to write a review. I find it well organized and understandable. The information concerning plug ins and the proper process is extremely valuable. I have only read about half way through the book, but I understand more about WordPress than I thought possible. The ability shown how to design the blog on your own computer and then upload it to your host is priceless. I highly recommend this book!

Wordpress Beyond the Basics
Touted as a `beyond the basics' book targeted towards business bloggers, WordPress for Business Bloggers delivers a wealth of WordPress and blogging knowledge in the context of a fictitious case study. I picked up this book as a way to jumpstart my involvement with WordPress after several years of involvement with other blogging tools. I was not at all disappointed with the results.

Based upon my experiences, I can confidently assert that no experience with WordPress is necessary to benefit from this book. The book states the assumption of such knowledge up front and, after that, never returns to WordPress basics. Ample materials on WordPress installation, operations and configuration can be found online and I appreciate that the book didn't spend any time rehashing these items.

Instead of focusing on simpler procedural activities, the book weaves together the challenges of solving business issues for Chiliguru, a fictitious business blog, with advanced WordPress operations, guidance, and plugins. The book manages to bridge the challenges of running a day-to-day blog with WordPress-specific knowledge in a unique style. One would be hard pressed to cobble together the information and knowledge this book imparts from the web-based tutorials currently available on the Internet. Examples of the unique content covered in this book include:

* Search engine optimization, including coverage of keywords, permalinks, and sitemaps supported by a variety of WordPress plugins
* Integrating social networking content from Twitter and Facebook into WordPress blogs
* Blog statistics analysis with both WordPress stats and Google Analytics
* Integration of Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate programs into WordPress-based blogs
* Coverage of advanced technical topics including: increasing scalability via WP Super Cache, using WordPress MU for multi-blog environments, and backing-up, restoring and moving WordPress blogs.

If you're looking for a beginners guide to WordPress, this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you've accumulated some basic experience with WordPress or another blogging engine and you're looking for insight and knowledge to take your WordPress blog to the next level, you really can't go wrong with this book.