Social Marketing with Ease Using WordPress

Social marketing is a term that seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue lately. Whether positive or negative conversation, it can’t be denied that the web is in the midst of an evolution right now. That evolution is the social web. The public is clamoring for it and if your not giving it to them, your competitors will be.

The biggest issue with social marketing is the time involvement and the fact that it is often trial and error to find what works for your niche. It has meant endless hours spent commenting on blogs, posting to a blog, signing up for account upon account. It could bog one down in no time and almost require the hiring of a team of people to run it. The ROI if time is valuable was crazy if not non-existent at times.

Thankfully all that is changing. While there is still time involved and accounts to sign up for, there are ways today to automate much of the stuff that ate up invaluable time and productivity — and it doesn’t mean you have to steal content or repost others stuff.

Social Marketing 101 with WordPress

One way you can make this happen is through a WordPress blog. There are specific plugins for WordPress that allow you to free up your time. That’s not to say it can’t be done with other platforms, this is simply one the fastest and easiest.

The blog can be installed as a main site or in a /blog directory for an existing site. It makes no difference. Once you have installed and designed your blog — free themes are okay to use if you are able to customize them so check rights on any you use to make sure there are no restrictions on modifications — you need plugins. Below is a list of necessary plugins to implement a quality social marketing campaign.

WordPress Plugins to Make Your Life Easier

• All in One SEO Pack 1.4.6.8 - Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog — by uberdose
• Commentluv 1.92 - Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commentors blog in their comment. Just activate and it’s ready. It will parse a feed from most sites that have a feed location specified in their head html (provided the hosting of the target site isn’t too slow so that the script times out) — by Andy Bailey
• FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1 - Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all the ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber — by FeedBurner
• Google XML Sitemaps 3.0.3.3 - This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page by Arne Brachhold.
• PingPress.fm 2.1.4 - Allows you to spread your wonderful blog to 10+ social networks via ping.fm — by Sold Out Activist
• Smart Update Pinger 2.0 - Replaces the built-in ping/notify functionality. Pings only when publishing new posts, not when editing — by Christian Davén.
• WP Auto Tagger 1.2 - Automatically finds tags based on your post content — by iDope.

These can all be found at WordPress.org. Don’t activate them until you have set up accounts for them to access each other properly.

Social Marketing with Ease Using WordPress

Social marketing is a term that seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue lately. Whether positive or negative conversation, it can’t be denied that the web is in the midst of an evolution right now. That evolution is the social web. The public is clamoring for it and if your not giving it to them, your competitors will be.

Are you hiring?    Post your job today ($45 for 45 days)!