Freeing the Bonds of HTML: The #1 Way To Make Your Business Site More Social

By the end of this article, you will discover the easiest and best way to not only convey your message to your audience, but to also have the freedom and flexibility to have that message spread like wildfire. But first, a question…

“What would you do if your website could do anything?”

The problem is most businesses, small or large, chain themselves in the hopes of being “professional.” Unfortunately, that usually means hiring a large web development firm to create a custom-made website that has all of the so-called bells and whistles that a company needs to play the online business game. That means creating a custom interface to create and modify content in order to keep their visitors informed of what’s going on with the company.

Sounds great, right?

Well, the problem is, things change. A new boss comes in and wants the website to be more social media friendly. No problem, except you now have to pay the developer make it happen.

Next, the marketing director wants to display the latest public relations new releases on the home page. Certainly, with another infusion of cash, the developer can make that happen.

Finally, the sales team asks that every new piece of content have a call-to-action at the bottom to get visitors to sign up for a “free” promotion in order to generate warm leads. No problem at all, fork over the cash and it’ll happen.

You see, for many companies who outsource a majority of their web development, your website really isn’t yours. If it were, you wouldn’t have to rely on another company to make it do the things that you want it to do. You would have the flexibility to make it happen yourself most of the time, free of budget constraints.

Where Power Meets Flexibility

There have been plenty of posts on why WordPress is an amazing, easy, and effective platform for your business, so I won’t go into detail about all of its benefits. However, there is one aspect of WordPress that is undeniably powerful and severely undervalued – plugins.

Much like an iPhone is relatively useless without its apps, wordpress gets its muscle from plugins that do everything from making your content sharable to building sales pages instantly. Yes, this is not new to the average person, but traditional and large-scale businesses have failed to adopt what startups and game-changing companies have embraced for years.

For example, check out a sample corporate blog, this one being the Wells Fargo Blog:

1. They’ve taken a great first step toward more social, but their hands are still tied. Yes, they have all of the viral sharing buttons at the top of their posts, but what about the ability to place a random call-to-action in their content that can be used to generate new leads from those social media visitors?
2. Or how about automatic relevant linking within the content to other Wells Fargo content, so as to better reveal other content in hopes of improving your chances of converting visitors or at least prompting greater social sharing?

It Doesn’t Have To Be a Blog!

The myth is that WordPress is only for blogs. Well, the top plugins used by just about every well-developed website have nothing to do with blogging and everything to do with being found on the Internet.

Google XML Sitemaps – Automatically get all of the pages on your company’s website recognized in major search engines by having an XML sitemap generated. It’s like giving Google a catalog of everything you have so that they easily index it and display for any given relevant search result.

All-In-One SEO – What many companies spend thousands of dollars on a monthly basis on, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), can easily and partially be done for free – automatically – through on-page optimization using this plugin. This has become all the more important lately with the new Google “Penguin” Update.

Google Analytics for WordPress – See where your visitors/buyers are coming from and set up sales funnel tracking.

None of these have anything to do with having a blog! However, they have everything to do with having a flexible and low-cost way of being found worldwide on the Internet!

It’s Time To Be a Little More Flexible

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing with you some of the best plugins for companies that will not only help you to improve your social media and web presence, but will help you to generate more revenue. Just as with any tool, plugins need to be used wisely and have a specific role in your overall social media marketing strategy. So don’t go out, install WordPress, and download every plugin known to man. We’ll start this journey together and by the end of it, you’ll have a powerful web marketing machine!