Why Is WordPress So Good To Use?
Getting leads and sales to your Online Business is the lifeblood of t is the lifeblood of all online businesses.
If you are building your site on WordPress, then you would be happy to know that creating attractive and high-converting sales pages is relatively easy on this platform.
Having the most stylish and the most beautiful website in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you are the only one who visits it.
You don’t want to be all alone admiring your website. Of course, you can pay for traffic by advertising on social media or other platforms. But, would you want to pay thousands of dollars in advertising fees when you can get highly qualified and FREE traffic from Google? Probably not.
Starting your first blog is an exciting idea. You are going to make your presence known to the world, and you will have an avenue for expressing your thoughts and your opinions.
There are plenty of platforms for you to build your blog on. But, as you already know getting sales and leads are the lifeblood, and therefore, your theme plays a big role here.
5 Easy Steps To Create The Perfect Website
If you run a business, getting leads and sales to your online business are everything for you to survive online. You have to create a website that is attractive enough for your visitors to stay on your page and finally buy something or sign up for your newsletter, a free eBook, report, etc.
To find out how you can create the perfect website that brings your online business sales and leads there are five steps to remember and follow.
- Prepare Your Content – When preparing your content, it is important to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Ask yourself ‘Why would I buy this product?’ Make your customers see just how useful your products are, and the benefits they will get if they purchase them.
Make sure you use words that your audience uses. If you are targeting an older audience, then you don’t want to use slang terms. Always keep your audience in your mind while you write your sales copy. - Upload To Your WordPress Website – Once you have finished writing your content, it is time to upload it to your website. Don’t forget to also upload product-related images/content-related images and videos as these will help your customers in making their decision. Try not to use stock photos. Instead, use real photos so that people can see your product in action.
- Design Your Sales Page – If you are not sure what the best design for your sales page is, you can go online to look for inspiration. With the help of a drag-and-drop page builder, building a sales page is even easier. You can easily drag a content module to your desired location. You can change colors and fonts easily, and do all sorts of customizations.
Best of all, you donät have to imagine what your sales page looks like. These drag-and-drop page builders are also WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, so nothing is left to your imagination. - Link To Your Payment Processor – The most popular payment processors for online businesses are PayPal and Stripe. You will find plenty of plugins that make integrating a payment processor easy. You just need to choose the best one that suits your needs. If you want your customers to have the opportunity to pay with cryptocurrencies, I recommend CoinPayments. CoinPayments hold over 2,000 cryptocurrencies on just one platform.
- Publish Your Sales Page – Now that you have all the important elements of your sales page in place, it is time to publish it and announce it to the world. Don’t forget to check your sales page on the front end, and try buying your products yourself. Make sure there are no errors, and that your customers will have a great buying experience!
Getting Leads And Sales To Your Online Business
You often hear profitable website owners say that the money is in the list. They aren’t joking. The money is on the list.
If you have an email list, you can easily market to your subscribers, and get them to visit your website again and again. If they weren’t on your list, these people probably would never have visited your website again.
So, building an email list should be one of your website’s top priorities. You don’t even have to think about what you are going to sell to your list yet. Just focus on building your email list, and when you get to a large enough size, then you can worry about monetizing your list.
Here are a few tips on how you can getting leads and sales to your online business using WordPress.
- Create Audience-Specific Landing Pages – Ideally, you should be segmenting your email list. If you have a marketing funnel in place, then you should know where a particular customer is in their journey.
If they are just at the top of the funnel, you could use a different landing page with a different lead magnet for them. If they have already interacted with your business before, then they would be somewhere mid-funnel and probably ready to buy from you.
With audience-specific landing pages, you get to make your content relevant. The good thing with WordPress is it is easy to create these landing pages from your WordPress admin. - Write Compelling Copy – Your landing page copy is very important. You can have the most eye-catching photos on your website, but if your sales copy doesn’t speak to your customers, then chances are they are not going to buy from you. If you don’t know how to write copy, then invest in a good copywriter. The expense will be more than pay off when you get people subscribing to your list in droves.
- Use Beautiful Imagery – You know the saying, a picture paints a thousand words. When enticing people to sign up to your site, make it easy for them to do so. Use images that perfectly portray what they are going to get if they sign up for your list.
- Promote Your Landing Page Like There Is No Tnothing- There is no point in creating an opt-in landing page if people don’t visit it. Make a point of promoting your link on many different platforms. If people find your offer attractive, they will be more than happy to sign up for your list.
Getting sales and leads tour Online Business and to your website is not easy One thing that helps is to optimize your WordPress site.
A stylish and beautiful website doesn’t mean a thing if you are the only one to visit it. This is why search engine optimization or SEO is so important for an online business to getting leads and sales.
You may be a blogger, an affiliate marketer, or an entrepreneur, and I think you agree with me when I say that search engine traffic is the best source of traffic.
Here are a few ways you can use to optimize your website for search engine traffic.
- Use A Fast-Loading Theme – There are thousands of themes to choose from when you are using WordPress. However, most of them will be slow. Google loves fast-loading sites, and you will hate it if you find out your theme is causing your site to load slowly on people’s computers.
- Add A Sitemap – Help search engines crawl your website content faster so they can add it to their database. The earlier your content gets crawled, the faster you can get your site to appear on search engine pages.
- Install A Caching Plugin – There are several free caching plugins you can choose from. How they normally work is that it will generate a static HTML file of your web page. This means that your web server will no longer have to serve yp all your website files to each visitor. The static HTML files are lightweight, and this makes your site load faster on your visitor’s browser.
- Use Human-Readable Permalinks – WordPress gives you a few options for how you want your permalinks to appear. The SEO-friendly formats recommended by search engines are those that make it easy for people (and search engines) to understand what your content is about. The most common format used by SEO-optimized websites is the post-name permalink format.
- Install A Good SEO Plugin – Yoast, All In One SEO Pack, and Rank Math are three of the most popular SEO plugins. Choose which one you would like to install, and configure it properly, and you will soon have a niche SEO-optimized website.
If you follow these nine tips, I am quite sure that your website will be well-optimized as well as eye-catching enough to get sales, leads, and visitors.
Why WordPress Is A Great Platform For Blogs
Starting a blog, especially if it is your first one, can be an exciting idea. You are going to make your presence known to the world, and you will have an avenue for expressing your thoughts and your opinions.
There are plenty of platforms for you to build your blog on. However, in this blog post, you are going to find out why you should consider a self-hosted WordPress blog.
Before we begin, I have to clarify that WordPress.org and WordPress.com are different. The main difference is the way your site is hosted.
WordPress.com provides hosting for your blog but also the platform you use to build your WordPress site using the WordPress software. Apart from that you don’t need to host your site on an external hosting provider, and you are also not responsible for any maintenance and security. This means that you don’t have to focus on this, you just can create content.
WordPress.org does not provide hosting, and it is not even a platform, as many thought. You have to choose your hosting provider by yourself. But you have more flexibility with both themes and plugins. It is a website hub that houses information, downloads, resources, and a community. WordPress.org software is open source, self-hosted, and 100% free for anyone to use.
If you run your blog on the WordPress.org hub on the other hand, is where you can download the WordPress software which you then need to install on your web hosting. Most hosting providers already have easy access to WordPress through the one-click installer. This means you can get your blog up in just a few minutes.
Running your blog on the self-hosted version of WordPress means you have full control over your website. You own it, you can design it any way you want, you can publish any kind of content you want, and so much more.
The core WordPress software is already powerful on its own, and it even comes pre-installed with a few themes and plugins. With themes, you have thousands of free and premium themes to choose from, and you can make your site look as unique as you want. And when you add plugins, you can change your website’s functionality.
Even if you just want to blog for now, if you ever decide you want to add an online store to your blog later on, you can do that with WordPress. You can create landing pages, you can add a forum to your site, and you can even sell memberships or courses on it. In short, WordPress.org plugins are awesome.
Other platforms don’t come near the number of themes and plugins you find on WordPress.org which is why it is such a popular choice for bloggers and website owners.
As with most platforms/software, WordPress.org comes with a bit of a learning curve. But my mother +70, and absolutely no technique skills at all had a WordPress.org hosted blog! Once you understand the basics, then it will be easy for you to build different kinds of sites. You will also find an active and global community behind it, so you will never run out of tips and ideas to customize your site.
Which Hosting Provider Should You Use?
The WordPress.org site needs two things to work. First, it needs a domain name and then web hosting. Think of it this way, if your website is your house, then your domain name is the street address and your web hosting is the piece of land your house sits on.
And just like your house, you want to build it on a good piece of land. This is why choosing a good web hosting company/provider is a must if you want your website to succeed.
There are a lot of web hosting companies/providers and most of them support WordPress installation on their servers. But WordPress.org recommends three web hosting providers:
On the other hand, I have both my domains, money-on-internet.com and cattisfriberg.com including the subdomains, with HostGator for several years and I am very satisfied. Another great provider is Namecheap.com. But, with the three mentions, nothing can’t go wrong. All three, including HostGator, offer 1-click WordPress installation so you quickly can have your site up without any hassle or headache. All five offer 24/7 support which is crucial because you may live on the other side of the world so when you are awake, they are sleeping. You can always be in contact if you have any questions about hosting or if you need help setting up your site.
However, there are some differences between all five in the services they bundle up with their hosting plan. Some have free domain names for their plan, some do not but sometimes cheap. So compare them well to see which one will be the best solution for you.
If you want to try out which web host is the best for your site, then you can always sign up if they offer a free 30-day trial or a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you are unhappy with the service, simply cancel it within their money-back period, and you will get a refund. Your 12-month,24-month, or 36-month contract will automatically be canceled. If you want to first try them out, you have to remember that if you choose another provider you have to migrate your WordPress site to the other provider. Most of them help you with it for free but check it up first.
While these three companies are highly recommended by WordPress.org itself, there are many more web hosting companies you can choose from. Just be sure to ask them first if they offer WordPress support, and if they do, then feel free to sign up for their hosting plans.
Top SEO & Security Plugins For Your WordPress Site
WordPress is already optimized for SEO. However, you shouldn’t stop there. With SEO plugins, you can further ensure your website ranks as high as possible on Google and other search engines.
There are plenty of factors that affect a website’s SEO. Using a good plugin is just one factor in optimizing your website for search engines.
Here are the top SEO plugins for WordPress:
- Yoast SEO – In the WordPress community, Yoast is highly recommended and is often touted as a must-have plugin for any WordPress site. This free plugin has been around for years, and it gets updated very regularly too. The plugin helps you structure your website in a way that makes it easy for search engines to crawl your site. It also helps you write better content that search engines love.
Yoast gives you detailed and highly actionable suggestions in real-time. It helps you craft SEO-optimized titles, metadata, URL slugs, and so much more. The plugin is generally easy to understand. However, as a novice user, you would probably find yourself reeling from all the technical terms you will encounter in the plugin’s settings. The good thing is the Yoast community is very robust. You will find people willing to help out and give suggestions to help make your site better SEO-wise. - All In One SEO Pack – The second most popular SEO plugin is the All In One SEO Pack plugin. It has most of the features that Yoast has but in a slim and bloat-free interface. It also has comprehensive documentation, so whether you are a beginner or an advanced WordPress user, you can easily use all that this plugin has to offer.
All In One SEO Pack gives you the freedom to choose which features to activate. For instance, you can activate XML sitemaps, social meta, robots.txt file editor, bad bot blocker, etc. Some people also prefer this plugin’s interface over Yoast. But, of course, that all boils down to personal preferences.
Both Yoast and All In One SEO Pack are useful plugins for improving your on-site and on-page SEO. Whichever plugin you choose to install, is just one-half of the equation. You still need to consider the off-site SEO factors if you want to have your site rank for the long term.
Protect Your WordPress Site From Hackers
Hackers and bots are two of the biggest threats against WordPress websites. If you don’t take proactive measures to protect your site, then you can lose everything – your website files, your email list, your income, everything! If you want to avoid this scenario at all costs, then you should consider the five tips below.
- Make Sure Your Version Of WordPress Is Up To Date – WordPress gets updated pretty regularly, and they do this for a good reason. With the sheer number of automated attacks carried out on WordPress websites daily, the software must be frequently updated to stop hackers, bots, and botnets in their tracks. If you don’t update your WordPress, then it is like you are sending an invitation to hackers telling them to exploit the vulnerabilities in your non-updated WordPress site.
- Update Your Themes And Plugins – Just like your core WordPress software, themes, and plugins get updated from time to time as well. This is important so that these themes and plugins remain compatible with the latest version of WordPress. Also, if you don’t update, chances are hackers and bots will find something to exploit so they can access your site.
- Backup Your Site Regularly – For your peace of mind, it is best to back up your website regularly. There are several plugins you can choose from on the plugin site that offers automated daily backups. More importantly, you would want to consider using a plugin that offers a 1-click restore feature. Even if your website gets hacked, you can still restore your site easily.
- Use A Strong And Hard-To-Guess Username And Password – You don’t want to use the old “admin” username and password combination. That is the first thing bots guess when they attack a site. You are practically giving them free access to your site! For better security, you should use a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. Keep your login details in a secure location, or you can use a password manager to help keep your details safe.
- Hire A WordPress Security Expert – Plugins can only do so much. In the end, bots are programmed by human hackers who can make these nasty pieces of computer code as sophisticated as they need to be. Human WordPress security is at a cost though so keep this in mind if you truly want to keep your WordPress site safe.
Protecting your site from hackers must be the first thing you should do. If your site gets hacked, a great SEO plugin and a super SEO-optimized site are worthless. Everything you have done with your site is worthless, your time, your money, your leads, and everything else. So, install a good security plugin on your WordPress site, there are many good ones to find on the plugin site.
Wrapping Up
Getting sales and leads to your Online Business is really the lifeblood. If you focus on the tips mentioned in this blog post, you will be a lot of steps closer to getting leads and sales to your online business.
Just remember, getting sales and leads takes time, you have to be patient. Working with SEO optimization and marketing your site in the right places will help. I prefer social media because it is free and if it is done right the result will not wait.
When building your email list, a good autoresponder provider helps a lot. I use and recommend GetRespone. Building an email list, and getting leads to your list will also take some time, you have to be patient here too. Do a test to see what is working or not. Slit testing is a good idea to use.
Featured Image Attribute: Image by macrovector on Freepik