Angela Wills is an official WordPress FANATIC.
She has sworn off all other methods of website design and builds everything, yes everything (blogs, salesletters, download pages, thank you pages and full websites) in WordPress. She has built a business based on serving her customers and providing value.
Angela’s WordPress experience spans dozens of website and blog designs for herself as well as close to one hundred clients over the last six years. In this session she’ll share how to use WordPress and Social Media to work WITH your market and still have time left for ‘real world’ socialization!
Learning WordPress can sometimes be a bit intimidating. Angela understands this and has created a full guided WordPress website design program that leads you from zero to a fully functional website.
Check out all the details at http://www.WebsiteDesignMojo.com
Now let’s get right into how to get hooked up with WordPress and Social Media!
The buzz word for the last few years has been social media – what is it?
Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Many people are using a program called WordPress – what’s the big deal?
Wordpress is a piece of software you can use to build a website.
- It’s FREE!
- It’s easy to install
- It has hundreds of free add-ons
- It has hundreds of free and premium themes
- It easily integrates with social media
Why is it a good idea to combine wordpress and social media?
Interaction gets your audience involved and invested. A dialogue transfers ownership to the audience.
Trip down memory lane – Remember high school? What classes did you love most? What teachers engaged you? What happened to get you engaged and learning?
I’d be willing to bet it was the teachers who did case studies, projects, conversations, etc.
My law class was an example of this! We did a court case in the classroom.
Can you give us some real examples of social media sites?
You probably know them:
- MySpace
- Squidoo
Social Bookmarking:
- Digg
- StumbleUpon
Let’s talk plugins – what are your top wordpress recommeded social media plugins?
Comment Luv:
http://comluv.com/download/commentluv-wordpress/
Sexy Bookmarks:
http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/wordpress/search-meter-wordpress-plugin/
Share This:
http://blog.sharethis.com/?p=33
Social Media Page:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-media-page/
Tweetable:
http://www.webmaster-source.com/tweetable-twitter-plugin-wordpress/ -
WordPress Facebook Like:
http://blog.gunnjerkens.com/2010/04/facebook-like-plugin-for-wordpress
Photodropper:
http://www.photodropper.com/wordpress-plugin/
Podpress:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/
WordPress Gravatars:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-gravatar/
Wp-Polls:
http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
Any tips on how to use social media without getting trapped in a time suck?
Know why you are using social media. Don’t just be on all the sites because someone said you should.
It’s so important to design your business around your life!
How do YOU use social media?
For me, simple is best.
Twitter: I only use Twitter for business social media. I don’t spend a whole lot of time chatting on Twitter but I do use it to tweet out my newest blog posts and my email newsletters.
Facebook: I don’t use Facebook for business at all, it’s strictly a personal, fun tool for me.
LinkedIn: I have an account but barely ever log in.
What I DO focus on: Building links to my site, guest blogging, article marketing, list building!
WordPress helps me build my business much more easily because I create systems to do things faster: scheduling blog posts, systemizng my site, putting up sales pages, building multiple sites, updating sites easily.
In case you haven’t noticed – I LOVE WordPress!
If you’ve enjoyed this post I’d like to invite you to sign up for the Website Design Mojo preview audio for free. It’s here (scroll down and click the graphic to sign up and grab your copy):
http://www.WebsiteDesignMojo.com
