Good resources to make the most of your WordPress blog
Be it about your travels, your creative recipes, world news, or even the life of your pet hamster—the great thing
about having a blog is that you have the chance to talk about anything you like. When people want to create a new blog
or magazine, WordPress is often the preferred choice for a number of reasons. Primarily its intuitiveness and simple
interface, and the fact that you can get started very quickly. Plus, it’s a powerful content management system with
enough tools to handle from the simplest blog to complex news and editorial sites. Need evidence?
Here’s a few names of big news websites powered by WordPress: The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Reuters, CNN.
And of course, WordPress is the world’s most popular tool for blogging and managing editorial content for another
reason: it’s highly customizable. There are loads of plugins and scripts that you can install to
improve your blog, from professional SEO features to social media sharing and comment handling tools. Plus, with
WordPress blog themes you can give your online journal or magazine a unique look without spending too much time on
designing it. This is particularly useful if you’re opening your blog as a side project, or if you’re too busy, or if
your design skills are not quite as amazing as your writing skills!
Let’s take a closer look at a few resources that may help you along the way.
- The 10-part course Build
a Profitable Authority Blog gives a great overview of what’s involved not only in creating a good blog, but also
in making it successful. Instructor Tom Ewer covers everything from the best WordPress plugins you’ll need to the
basics of branding.
- If your blog will be part of your company’s content marketing strategy, you may find the tutorial
How to Start a
Blog for Your Business quite useful. Among other things, Rachel McCollin talks about the importance of
editorial calendars and recommends this free plugin
to create one. If you’re looking for something different, check out the tutorial
Set up an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog with Asana.
- Yes, we said content marketing! Don’t know much about it? Not to worry. This Tuts+ article
What is content
marketing? will give you a good idea of what we’re talking about. You can also learn more about how to measure
your ROI with
Content Marketing Metrics.
- In this
Quick Guide to Custom Fields and Post Metadata you’ll learn how to handle metadata and why they are important
when it comes to taxonomy and content structure.
- There’s plenty of themes to choose from in our collection, but you can check out a run-through the
20 Best WordPress Magazine Themes and get started even more quickly.
- Last but not least, let’s talk about the actual content! People consume written content on the internet every day,
and you probably know it’s not easy to catch users’ attention. The topics you choose for your blog need to be
engaging and interesting. That's a fact. But without good writing—you’re not going anywhere. We recommend the e-book
How to Write Great Copy for the
Web by Donna Spencer, and remind you that you can
hire freelance bloggers and editors on Envato Studio!
