Six Proven WordPress Blogging Tips that Actually Work

There are a number of blogging platforms to choose from but among the popular ones, Wordpress has proven to be the most versatile and the preferred platform of many professional bloggers.  If you are planning to launch a blog or a website for business, it is strongly recommended that you explore the features and services that WordPress offers.  On this post, we provide five smart and proven tips for effective blogging in WordPress.

1. Have a clear goal in mind.  Why do you blog and who is your targeted audience?  Knowing the answers to these two important questions would help you to make the right decision about many aspects of your blog.  For example, knowing your purpose and your audience will enable you to choose the right look for your blog. That brings us to the second tip.

2.    Choose a theme that works best for you.  The great thing about WordPress is that you can choose from a wide-range of designs.  We’re not just talking about a handful of designs.  With WordPress, you have literally hundreds of themes to choose from.  These templates are ready-to-use and just in case you’re not happy with the one you picked, it’s very easy to try out a different theme, until you find the perfect look for your website.

3.    Edit the URL of the page.  Here’s another wonderful feature of WP blogs that not many people are making full use of.  You can edit the URL of the page so that it doesn’t have to be the exact title of your post.  Why is this useful?  You can leave out unnecessary words (prepositions, conjunctions) or punctuation marks from the URL and include only the most relevant words in the URL, making it more Search Engine friendly.

You can also shorten the link in just one click of the mouse.  When you create a post, you can find the “Get Shortlink” button right below the title box and the URL editor.  Why would you need to shorten links?  This is helpful if you want to share the URL of your post on Social Sites like Twitter, where you can type only a limited set of characters.   Although there are other URL shortening services that do this, it’s already available in Wordpress so there’s really no need to look far.

4.    Schedule posts in advance.  One of the biggest challenges in blogging is posting on a regular basis. In order for a blog to be successful, you should be able to update posts at least three or five times a week, if not daily.  Sometimes, you might find yourself confronted with too many tasks, making it impossible for you to sit down and write an intelligent post.  Hence, it’s good to create back-up posts for times like these. 

WordPress allows you to publish multiple posts in advance and set the exact date and time when you want each post to go live.  This way, you can make sure that your audience would find fresh content in your blog even when you are away or too busy living your life in the real world.

5.   Take advantage of widgets.  Widgets are small, indispensable applications that come free with your chosen theme.  They are pretty much like plugins.  However, you don’t need to install them as each theme already has its own set of widgets.  You simply drag and drop the ones you like to use them.  Widgets are built to make your life as a blogger a little bit more hassle-free so put them to good use.  

6.  Make use of plug-ins to simplify your tasks.  For WordPress.org users (not the free Wordpress), hundreds of plugins have been created.  These plug-ins are free and each plug-in is designed to do a specific function.  For example, there are plugins designed to optimize the blog, making it easily visible to search engines.  Some plugins are made to help you organize photos on your blog.  There are also Social Network plugins which promotes audience interaction.  And if you are using your blog as a means to promote your business, you can surely find plugins with E-commerce functionality.  What’s important to remember is that installing too many plugins can slow down the website so choose only the essential ones.