Growing Your piece of the pie.
Nearly 20% of the internet is built on WordPress. From small Mom and Pop businesses employing WordPress to further their brands, to big enterprises taking advantage of WordPress as a large-scale CMS, businesses of all kinds are utilizing the extensibility and ease of use that WordPress provides to accomplish their goals.
It’s also no secret that WordPress is one of the top choices for internet marketers. The uptick in managed hosting as an industry is proof-positive that the WordPress market and community as a whole are exploding. In fact, about ⅓ of all WordPress installations have been installed in the last year. At last count, there were 145 million downloads of WordPress in the last eight years, and 45 million in the previous 12 months (source in previous link). The WordPress Community is rapidly expanding, and as demand for WordPress hosting goes up, affiliates who have experience in the industry will take advantage of its growth to promote their products.
We spoke with a few top internet marketers last week at the Affiliate Summit West to get some tips about how they use the extensibility of WordPress to build their communities and drive traffic. Across the board, marketers appreciate that with WordPress, you can easily add functionality with plugins instead of writing new code every time. In January 2012, there were 19,000 WordPress plugins. There are more than 23,000 now. That’s incredible.
Marketers use plugins like Ad Injection, which makes it simple to ad advertisements from almost any network such as Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc. Mike Zielonka of Tuna Traffic uses the plugin to inject ads into his content, but also control the number and frequency of ads to maximize conversions.
Syed Balkhi has been using WordPress for years, both as a designer and the marketer behind WP Beginner and List25.com. He knows that WordPress makes it easy to manage affiliate links. On many of his sites, he uses the ThirstyAffiliates plugin to manage all his affiliate links in one place and automatically link them within your post content.
When you’re building and optimizing a landing page, WordPress provides on of the simplest interfaces for making new design and content changes on the fly. By using plugins like Session Cam and Click Tale you can get user behavior heatmaps showing you exactly where attention is directed on your landing pages. David Vogelpohl of Marketing Clique is a mad scientist of analytics with the user behavior data he gets from WordPress plugins.
David also recommends using one of growing list of mobile-ready WordPress themes. As more and more traffic becomes mobile, rather than confined to a laptop, if your sites aren’t responsive, or mobile optimized, you’re literally missing out on engaging a huge segment of your community. Hundreds of WordPress themes are mobile right out of the box, but we always recommend bringing a quality designer on to help you make the most out of your design.
One of the hidden values of WordPress isn’t contained inside the software stack. It’s not the plugins or the themes, but the men and women creating them. More than 20,000 people make their living with WordPress. That means a savvy marketer knows there will not only be a huge number of open-source themes and plugins to add functionality to a site, but that when you have a question, or need some advice, there are literally thousands of people inside the community who can answer your questions and help you build a profitable, and successful WordPress site.
A Community that big means you can focus on what you do best, driving traffic, and partner up with someone who can help you bend WordPress to your will.
What themes or plugins do you find helpful in your marketing efforts?
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