It’s a platform that powers almost have of the entire web these days. But have you ever found yourself wondering, what is WordPress for? How can you use it to grow and scale your business? Read on for my top 5 tips on how to use WordPress in your business.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that allows users to create and publish websites.
It’s one of the most flexible CMS around because of plugins. Plugins are little apps that add something extra to a WordPress website. A plugin could add social media sharing icons to a blog post, add extra security or even create an online shop.
If you’d like to know more about WordPress plugins check out some of my other blog posts:
9 tremendous WordPress plugins for business
3 remarkable free membership plugins for WordPress
The 5 best WordPress plugins for SEO
This is one of the main reasons that WordPress is so popular. Because there’s almost nothing you can’t do with a WordPress website. If there’s a plugin to do it, your website can do it.
To learn about WordPress in more depth check out my blog post What is WordPress? And why use it for your website.
Blogging
WordPress is probably most famous for being used as a blogging platform. In fact, blogging is where my business started way back in 2016 and where my love affair with WordPress began.
You’re probably wondering what blogging has to do with business. And there are 2 reasons why I recommend adding a blog to your website if you have the capacity.
Authority
Writing blog posts specific to your niche is a great way for you to position yourself as an expert in what you do. If you’re creating high quality content that solves a problem for your audience, no matter how big, you’ll start to become their go to person for your industry.
You don’t have to be solving massive problems, just ones niggly enough for your audience to want to do something about. It could be your top 5 confidence meditations, what to include when onboarding new clients, copywriting tips, pretty much anything goes.
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is probably the biggest reason, for me, to add a blog to your website. There are many elements that contribute to optimising a website. Keywords and the time a user spends on a site in a single visit are the areas a blog can help with.
You can get really specific with the keywords you target. Take this blog post, for example. The keywords I’m targeting are ‘what is WordPress for’. I can build a whole blog post around answering that question, but I’d really struggle to create my home or services pages around it.
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During this 2 hour long workshop you’ll learn how search engines work, and how user experience comes into it. I’ll show you how to make sure you’re choosing the right keywords, how to use them on your WordPress website along with my favourite tools to track your results.
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Shop
With the use of a plugin you can quickly start selling products from your WordPress website. Physical or digital, one off or subscriptions you can do it all.
My favourite shop plugin for WordPress is WooCommerce. It’s really easy to get up and running, it has a great set up wizard which guides you through the different elements you need to start. Think payment processors, shipping (if you sell physical products) and even creating your first product.
It’s free to install and use the main WooCommerce plugins but there are lots of paid extensions that will add extra functionality to your shop. Subscriptions, add gift wrapping options or even to follow up with customers after their purchases.
If you’d like to know more about WooCommerce check out my WooCommerce blog posts:
How to install WooCommerce in WordPress and sell direct
How to use WooCommerce like a boss
Courses
You can create and sell online courses on WordPress too, using a plugin. To be honest, there’s not much you can’t do with WordPress because there are so many plugins.
Often, if you already have a website, using it to host an online course is the cheapest way to do it. There are many free WordPress course plugins out there, but I wouldn’t recommend using. I would go with a premium one like LearnDash or MemberPress. This is because you’ll be able to contact their support teams if you have a problem. Yes there is an upfront cost of around $500, but you’ll have support if and when you need it which can be invaluable if you’re not very tech savvy.
A word about online course platforms
Be wary of false economy here. Just because you can host a course on your website and it’s cheaper than an online course platform, doesn’t mean that you should.
Online course platforms do have monthly fees BUT as part of that fee you get round the clock support, and often their tech teams find and fix problems before you or your customers even notice it. They also are constantly improving their design and user experience to reflect best practice.
If something does go wrong with your website where you host courses and your host or plugin support desk can’t help you, you may need to pay for a WordPress expert to troubleshoot and fix. Costs vary from person to person but you can expect to pay upwards of £80 per hour for someone to do it.
I don’t want to scare you, just give you some perspective.
What is WordPress for? Summary
- WordPress is a content management system that powers almost half the entire web.
- It can be used for virtually anything because of the nature of it’s plugins.
- Adding a blog to your WordPress website gives you opportunities to position yourself as an expert in your industry. It’s also a great tool for search engine optimisation.
- You can add a shop to WordPress very easily through the use of plugins. WooCommerce is the most popular because it’s easy to use and has a lot of paid extensions.
- It’s very easy to host an online course on a WordPress website, again by installing a plugin.
- Even though it can be cheaper to host a course on a WordPress website, don’t rule out online course platforms such as MemberVault or Kajabi on price only, as it can be a false economy.
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