With around 75,000,000 websites using WordPress to host their content, it’s easy to see that it’s the most popular publishing platform – and for a good reason. WordPress is incredibly flexible in its approach to design, offering fully customizable layouts and templates, and works hard to be user-friendly – even for the absolute beginner. It’s by far the best platform for professional bloggers, but how can you make sure you’re getting the most out of your site? We’ve got four top tips to help you maximize your blogging productivity on the best platform around.
Plan Your Content Effectively
To run a successful blog, you’ll need to work hard at your content; whether you’re writing about politics in the USA, or fashion in Paris, you should be scheduling ahead to make sure you have a regular stream of posts and updates. One good way of doing this is to use paper planners or digitalized apps such as Asana – but you can also automatically schedule blog posts for publication once you’ve drafted them in WordPress. This allows you to benefit from peak traffic times, which is particularly handy if most of your traffic comes from a different time zone – nobody wants to get up at 3 am to publish a blog post!
Back Up Regularly
One of the most costly mistakes any blogger can make is not backing up their website regularly; failing to do this can mean you lose weeks, months, or even years of work. Luckily, WordPress has a selection of excellent plugins which do the job quickly and efficiently for you. Updraft is the most popular and is also completely free – it creates a complete backup of your site and stores it on your computer, and offers the option to backup regularly or manually. There are also paid options which offer more in their packages; Jetpack starts at $39 per year for a personal plan, while Blogvault is slightly pricier at $89 per year – but it also allows you the option to migrate your blog, should you wish to do so.
Consider Your Costs
If you’re working as a professional blogger, you probably spend most of your time at home, which means you could see your utility bills soaring. It’s worth keeping track of your energy usage, which is something you can do via the WP Energy Calculator plugin – simply add the code to your site. And you’ll find you can add appliances to the list to check how much energy they’re using. It’s also worth doing a residential and business electricity comparison to see whether you could be eligible to apply for business rates – it could save you money in the long run.
Learn SEO Or Utilize A Plugin
Any professional blogger should absolutely have a basic grasp of SEO; making sure your content is optimized for search engines will result in your site appearing higher up in search results, which means an increase in traffic. SEO can be tricky to get to grips with, though. And there’s a lot of conflicting advice on the internet about best practices – you can avoid months of reading and mistakes though. By adding an SEO plugin to your WordPress site. WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most downloaded plugin of all time, and will help you every step of the way – and it’s completely free!