Once you have your business blog set-up it’s time to create content. Which isn’t always as easy as you might think.

What should you blog about?

The answer depends upon your niche and the needs of your customers/clients.

Ask yourself, “what is the purpose of my blog?” For many business owners, one or more of the following reasons apply:

• To generate new business
• It’s part of an overall online marketing strategy
• To demonstrate knowledge and expertise
• To drive traffic to sales pages/products
• To keep my website fresh
• To build a community
• To enhance communication between my business and my clients

One important thing to remember about a business blog and its content is this - It’s not about you, it’s about them: your clients.

Giving your readers what they want, and not what you want to give them, is what makes a blog successful.

Do this by answering questions and providing solutions to common problems and niggles. Show examples of your work and use your blog as a platform to sell yourself.

Some of the services where blogging works well include:

• Freelancing – Writers, photographers, programmers, sales, marketing
  
• Creatives – Graphic designers, web design, logo design, branding
• Health and fitness – Personal trainers, nutritionists, weight loss, sport fitness
• Consultants – Business development, project management, construction, demolition

(There are many more…)

Why do they work?

Because the people behind the blog have a chance to show off their expertise and skills, and the people looking to hire them have a chance to assess their ability to do the job in hand.

Creating content for your business blog

Back to the question at the start of this post – what should you blog about?

Here are a few general ideas for blog topics:

• Case studies
• Tips
• How to guides
• In-depth product reviews
• Industry news
• Product/service comparisons
• Trade shows
• Experiences
• Lists
• Interviews
• Recommendations
• Tools/services

Brand new blogs require quite a bit of work in order for them to be useful. This means putting in a lot of work at the start to fill out the pages. Once you have 10-20 posts you can slow down a little and develop a more robust editorial schedule – once or twice a week, once every day – whatever is good for you.

Blogs use categories to group together content. In the beginning, create four or five categories and produce content that fits neatly into one of those categories.

Finding ideas for blog posts

The great place to find ideas for content is from clients. What are their woes, their concerns, their niggles? How can you help them?

Blog about the solutions.

Keep a eye on industry news sites, see what people are saying on Twitter, monitor Facebook pages, are there new products on the horizon, new services, new tools?

Subscribe to RSS feeds, email newsletters and create Twitter lists to stay in touch with the people/businesses that are important to you.

Inspiration

When bloggers hit a stumbling block they often take to the web in search of  inspiration, usually from their favourite blogs, their Twitter feed or Facebook.

Often it takes just a sentence or two generate an idea.

A walk or change of situation does a world of good too.

At the start of the blogging process, the most important thing to do is create and publish something. You can always change or delete it later. Just take the first step.

As your blog grows you will develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t. This enables you to plan ahead and create useful content.

Picture – daniel_feldt

There have been plenty of embarrassing news stories about businesses that ended up being associated with the inappropriate comments or the actions of employees on social media. This is always a risk. Most businesses make an effort to lock down their social media pages very tightly to make certain that they aren’t used for malicious purposes.

There are some real benefits in allowing your employees to have independent voices on social media and allowing them to associate themselves with your business, in some instances.

Reporters

If you run a blog that makes its money publishing the news, you may want to consider letting your reporters associate their social media profiles with that of your business. Quite often, reporters build up a following of their own. They may not always say the types of things that your business would say in a social media update, but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily disadvantageous to give them their own voices. Remember that the Internet is not a place where people are forgiving to those who err on the side of being too bland. Adding a little bit of spice to your Internet presence may do use some real good in terms of promotion.

Experts

If you have a company that produces a specialized product or product that has a lot of technical aspects to it, allowing the experts in your company to interact with people on your social media accounts might be a good idea. For example, if your company produces software and one of the engineers is able to interact with people and answer their questions, it gives people a tremendous amount of access to the inner workings of the company in a very positive way.

There are plenty of ways that you can leverage this to improve your social media presence. Using the example of a news site, allowing people to interact with reporters could allow reporters to clarify points they made in their original reporting, to add updates to it and so forth. You can do many creative things by allowing your employees a bit more freedom in interacting with the people who follow you on social media sites.

Word from the Top

Some CEOs and high ranking corporate officials become celebrities in and of themselves. Steve Jobs is an excellent example of this, as is Bill Gates. Having such individuals maintain their own social media profiles is a great way to tailor the image of the company that you’re putting out there. It’s also excellent for quashing rumors.

One of the big disadvantages of the way the Internet works is that it allows silly rumors to get publicized so many times and so quickly that they become commonly accepted as truths. Having one of the senior people in a company make a statement via social media that something being said about the company is absolutely untrue, is a great way for the company to control information and to control its image.

On Your Site

Don’t forget to carry this over into the one venue where you have the most power: your own website. Many WordPress templates allow the administrators to set up different authors with different profiles and, using some social media services, you can actually get these authors associated with their content on search engines. This makes it easier for the public to get information on your company and, importantly, it makes it easier for the press to get information on your company and to source that information to somebody without sending emails or doing telephone interviews.

Sometimes, offering a bit more freedom to your employees actually gives you tighter control over messaging.

About author
Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates original WordPress templates, that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.

Photo – Rob Bouden

It’s not for everybody, but if you are trying to decide if your business should be releasing digital content as part of its marketing strategy, to help convince you, here are four ways a business in any niche can benefit from blogging.

Blogs generate traffic

A Hubspot report from late 2012 highlights the benefits of business blogging and how regularly doing so generates more traffic and more leads. Here are some stats from the report (the data comes from Hubspot members):

• Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5 times more traffic than companies that don’t blog
• Companies that increase blogging from 3-5 times per month to 6-8 times per month almost double their leads
• An average company will see a 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50
• The average company with 100 or more blog articles is more likely to experience continued lead growth

The biggest advantages of a blog is that they are really easy to run and publishing new pages is simple. All you need is a browser and an internet connection. This means you can publish new content whenever you want to, which, if promoted properly and optimised for search engines, will bring people to your site.

Traffic generates leads

As you can see from the Hubspot stats above, generating leads in the early days of a blog is quite tough. But, once the blog grows to a certain size (21-50 posts) it should start seeing a growth in traffic, which in turn should generate more leads.

However, traffic doesn’t guarantee leads. And the reasons for this include poor content, poor company perception and poor page layout. You can fix these things over time; improve the content, change company perception and test page layouts to to see which ones generate the most leads.

To keep hold of the traffic you have, and to create more, it’s a good idea to put together a publication calendar and stick to it as best you can. This ensures a steady release of new content that will hopefully correlate with a steady increase of traffic and leads. As you add more content, don’t forget to revisit the old stuff so you can rewrite and improve on what you already have.

Leads generate sales

When a regular reader of your blog contacts you to provide services to them, the sale is almost closed. They already know a lot about you, they know from the things you say on your blog that they want to do business with you. They know about the services you provide, they may know about your prices and they know you are knowledgeable in your field.

It’s just a matter of closing the deal.

People who come across your blog through a search engine, a referral, a tweet or another method, can quickly and quietly establish an opinion of your company and consider if they would like doing business with you. If they like what they see and read, chances are they will contact you and become a lead.

Sales generates cash

You don’t need me to tell you that sales generates cash, and if you are doing it right, profit.

A good blog, with great content and an efficient way to capture leads can provide you with a steady supply of new customers/clients, who may become loyal customers/clients and come back to you whenever they need your products or services.

But, what if you don’t want to write about your industry?

What if you are too busy?

There are two possible solutions.

Click here to find out what they are.

You may or may not be surprised to know that most websites aren’t mobile friendly, even those owned and operated by large corporations. At a time when tablet computers and, more importantly, smartphones are being used in ever increasing numbers to access the internet, it is imperative to start making plans to develop a mobile friendly site or switch over as soon as possible – the timing depends upon your customer base and how they use your website.

This infographic further emphasises the importance of becoming mobile friendly and has a few tips on taking the DIY approach.

via: How To Optimize Your Website for Mobile Viewing [INFOGRAPHIC]

We use the Genesis framework, which allows us to change the number of sidebars on a page-by-page basis, and we can create sidebars for specific pages.

These sidebars typically hold different widgets which display different information based upon the page content.

Confused? Read on to see a few visual examples which should clear some of that confusion.

At the time of writing, this site uses a mix of page layouts, which is dependent on the type, style and purpose of the page.

In the blog section, we typically use a three column option, with two sidebars to the right of the main content.

If you look closely at the picture below you will notice that each sidebar element has a light grey background. The information for each of these elements is held within a widget, which is then placed inside a sidebar.

On other pages, such as landing or sales pages, we use a two column option. Here we created a sidebar widget which contains no links or escape routes, just a contact form and our ‘phone number.

And on our home page, above the fold, we currently use a one column layout. (We are thinking of changing this and adding more content beneath the fold.) You could do this with widgets, but we hard-coded this page.

This level of flexibility comes from using the Genesis framework, the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin (to create sidebars for specific pages) and WordPress.

However, this theme allows for another option – a sidebar placed horizontally across the page. At the time of writing we are not using it, but this is what it looks like:

This additional sidebar appears on every page by default and is good for holding adverts, a call to action or promotional material.

The final sidebar to mention is the footer, so called because it is typically located at the foot of every page.

I know it’s a little confusing calling a horizontal container a sidebar, but the term exists for coders, as they have to ‘register’ a ‘sidebar’ in the code to activate it.

In the WordPress admin area, sidebars typically have more descriptive names.

What to put in a sidebar

Sidebars usually contain adverts, links, a search bar, newsletter sign-up forms, a list of recent posts, categories, recent comments, recent tweets, Facebook widgets and all sorts of other promotional and/or social elements – usually the kind of content you want to display on every page of your site.

Most WordPress themes use sidebars on every page by default, but with Genesis and similar themes, it’s possible to switch them off or change them around at page level. So, you set a default layout for the whole site, then change it for particular pages, if you want to.

The usual train of thought for page layout is to keep it consistent across the whole site. This is something I agree with, but there is no reason why you can’t use a different layout for certain sections, or pages of your site.

For example, high-definition videos might look best on a page with one or no sidebar, legal documents such as a privacy policy or terms of use might look best on a page with no sidebars, a page that attracts a lot of traffic may make more money or convert better if you use two sidebars.

Testing and tracking results helps you decide upon the best layout for your site(s).

Widgets

So, sidebars are containers, to make them work for us we have to add widgets.

WordPress comes pre-packaged with a few widgets. Here’s the list, complete with official explanations:

• Akismet Widgets – Display the number of spam comments caught by Akismet
• Archives – A monthly archive of your site’s posts
• Calendar – A calendar of your site’s posts
• Categories – A list or dropdown of categories
• Custom Menu – Use this widget to add one of your custom menus
• Links – Your blogroll
• Meta – Log in/out, admin, feed and WordPress links
• Pages – Your site’s WordPress Pages
• Recent Comments – The most recent comments
• Recent Posts – The most recent posts on your site
• RSS – Entries from any RSS or Atom feed
• Search – A search form for your site
• Tag Cloud – Your most used tags in cloud format
• Text – Arbitrary text or HTML

The widgets you use depends upon the style and format of your site. It also depends upon your personal preferences, and those of your visitors/readers.

Perhaps the most useful of the widgets is Text.

You can use this widget as often as you want, in as many sidebar containers as you like (this isn’t the case for some of the others). You add text to this widget and it is best used for displaying adverts, a newsletter sign-up form or any custom information you want to put in there.

Available and inactive widgets

There are two large boxes on the widgets screen. These contain available and inactive widgets. As you add plugins the list of available widgets expands, and as you develop your site you will likely remove widgets you no longer want to use. By placing these into the Inactive Widgets box, you can save them for later use, should you change your mind.

(Click on the images to get a better view, the two important sections are highlighted with blue arrows.)

This is the widgets screen from this site, running Genesis and eleven40:

The widgets screen from the default Twenty Twelve theme:

How to use WordPress widgets

Access the widgets through Appearance > Widgets

Over on the right hand side of the screen are the sidebar containers used to house the widgets. The containers exist at theme level, so what you see there depends upon the theme you’re using.

Twenty Twelve is one of the default themes, this is what the containers look like:

These are the containers in the theme I’m using at the time of writing:

To move the widgets into the containers, click on the drop-down arrow in the top right hand corner to open the container, then drag-and-drop the widgets to where you want them. Bear in mind that the order you place the widgets in the container is directly transferred to the page; the information in the top widget appears at the top of the sidebar.

This is what the containers look like with widgets inside:

A 2006 study found that people typically read a webpage in a roughly F-shaped pattern. From this information you could decide that the left hand side of the screen is the best place for important calls to action, however, as we have become used to sidebars on the right hand side of the screen, I wonder if a new study would find the same results? The only way to find out what works for you is to test the options. The great thing about WordPress widgets is the flexibility. It’s very easy to move them around to find where they perform best.

I hope this post has given you a better understanding of WordPress sidebars and widgets?

One of the biggest advantages of using a framework like Genesis by StudioPress (aff) to build a website on WordPress, is the amount of high quality child themes available to customise it. They cover a lot of styles, work for just about any industry, and if you want to make changes to the design, layout or add or remove certain functions, it’s quite easy to do, if you the technical knowledge.

This makes Genesis + WordPress a great solution for business websites, business blogs and personal projects.

The Genesis Framework for WordPress

If you haven’t come across the term framework in this context, here is a simple explanation of how one works:

A framework is simply a theme that designers and developers can build upon. Usually they are quite bland to look at and come with very little styling (although Genesis looks good on its own – see the image above). A framework usually consists of its own hooks, commands and features based upon the WordPress code. A framework is known as a ‘parent theme’ and any theme based upon the framework is called a ‘child’.

If you would like to read a more detailed explanation of a WordPress framework, click here.

The Genesis Framework theme settings

You install Genesis in the same way as any other WordPress theme. Once activated, there are a few things to set up.

The settings you define here remain the same whichever child theme you use, and you can export the settings to another site.

Access the settings for Genesis through the link in the vertical menu on the left hand side of the screen:

There are three main options – Theme Settings, SEO Settings and Import/Export.

(This post only covers the theme settings section.)

Information

At the top of the page is the information box which shows the version number, release date and a couple of options you can enable or disable.

Color Style

Many StudioPress themes allow you to select a colour scheme from a few options. Select the one you want from the drop down menu:

Custom Feeds

If you use Feedburner to manage the RSS feed of your site you can force Genesis to use it too; just enter the Feedburner URI into the box, then, when you display the RSS feed icon on your site using Genesis (see Navigation Settings – Enable Extras on the Right Hand Side below), it will link to the Feedburner feed.

If you tick the Redirect Feed box, WordPress should redirect anyone who lands on the default feed links to the Feedburner link.

Default layout

This is a great feature of Genesis. You set a default layout for the whole site, but you can change the layout on each post and page. This makes it super easy to experiment with different layouts to see which work best. It’s also useful if you want to switch off sidebars on certain pages.

There are six layout types available by default:

These options carry through to most child themes.

Navigation settings

Custom menus in WordPress are fantastic. They allow you to have full control over which categories, pages and custom links appear in your menus.

You can also choose to enable fancy dropdowns and secondary menus should you wish to use them.

When using the Genesis Framework you have to use at least the Primary Navigation Menu. In its default state it has a link to “home” and nothing else until you add some pages, categories or custom links.

You can also choose to enable one of the extras ‘on the right hand side’. The exact location on the right hand side of these items depends upon the theme. From the drop-down menu, choose which one, if any, you would like to use:

• Today’s date
• RSS feed links (posts and comments)
• Search form
• Twitter link

To set up the Twitter link just enter your username and the text you would like to display. StudioPress doesn’t access your Twitter account, it just links to your page.

Breadcrumbs

If you take a look at the top of this page you will see breadcrumbs navigation: Home > Category > Page Title. I like breadcrumb navigation as it helps with SEO and it helps readers navigate around a site. In Genesis you can choose to have this on or off, and you can choose which pages or sections display breadcrumb menus.

Comments and trackbacks

Control sitewide comments and trackbacks. Don’t feel obliged to allow comments on your blog or website just because most people say it is a good thing to do, it’s purely down to personal preference. This function enables to you make a decision at the top-level.

Content archive

This is where you create the layout for your archive (this is ours) pages. There are several options available – choose to display the post excerpt or the content, include a featured image (and specify the size of the image) and select the post navigation wording – older/newer, previous/next or numeric.

Blog page template

Use a blog page template whenever you want to make a page out of a blog category.

Header and footer scripts

Almost everybody using Genesis adds at least a couple of scripts to their installation. It could be Google Analytics, a verification code or something else. These two boxes make it easy to add any scripts you use.

That just about covers it for the basic installation and set-up of the Genesis framework.

Why Genesis?

What the Genesis Framework, and at least one child theme gives you, is a fantastic looking and easily configurable website that doesn’t require you to mess with any code as everything is set-up through the WordPress admin area.

Compare that to the cost of hiring a professional web designer and waiting for him/her to come up with a concept and go through the build process, and the Genesis Framework really is a no-brainer. Spending a fortune on a fancy-dan website is not always cost-effective, especially when you can buy with something just as good and have it running in next to no time.

Final Summary

I’ve used Genesis for a long time now and I really can’t recommend it enough. The framework is fantastic, easy to use and there are plenty of great child themes to choose from. The plans for StudioPress/Genesis look good too; each theme will eventually be recoded to work on mobile devices, seamlessly integrate into bbPress and work with the WooCommerce plugin so you can turn your WordPress powered blog/site into a fully fledged eCommerce site.

When it comes to brand new installations of WordPress, always change the username to something other than admin.

To add some substance to the argument for deleting the admin user, here is an image from another site we run. It shows how often somebody tries to gain access to the site by assuming the admin username is active, it isn’t, and by assuming the password is in the dictionary, again, it isn’t.

Click on the image for a better view.

The plugin we used to record this information is ThreeWP Activity Monitor.

Using a very secure password alongside the admin user may make it more difficult to hack your site, but if your password is in the dictionary and/or you have changed common letters such as e, o or i for numbers such as 3, 0 or 1, you may still be open to attack. Switching numbers for similar letters is called Leetspeak, it’s an alternative dictionary for use online. It’s well known in the hacking community and provides little resistance to software designed to guess passwords at the rate of thousands every second.

Switch post author

If you have an established site with many posts assigned to the admin user, never fear, WordPress can re-assign the posts to another user.

If you don’t have another account with admin rights, you will first have to create one.

How to create a new WordPress user account

In the left-side menu navigate to Users and click on Add New. You will see a screen like this:

There are four steps:

1. Think of a username and enter it into the username field. The username cannot be changed and it’s only used for logging in. Each user can choose an alternative name to display publicly, if the site is set up to display the author name.
2. Enter the email address for the user. This address is used to send password reminders and contact the user.
3. Enter a new password.
4. Change Subscriber to Administrator so the new account has full control.

Now you have created the new account, log out of WordPress and log back in using the new details.

How to delete the admin user

Navigate to the Users screen via the left-side menu. If you only have two users the list looks something like this:

Click on the Delete link for the admin account.

On the next screen you get the option to delete all posts by the user or re-assign them to another user. As we want to re-assign the posts, we click the radio button next to that option and use the pull-down menu to choose the account to assign the posts to.

Now hit the Confirm Deletion button and the account is gone, but all posts are assigned to the new user.

I’ve done this several times now and each time it’s worked flawlessly. However, you should backup the database in case something goes wrong. Use a plugin like BackWPup.

About passwords

A Lifehacker post from 2011 makes the argument for using common phrases as passwords instead of “complete gibberish”, as they take longer to crack. The post is interesting and the comments enter the realms of geekism most of us avoid.

The point of the article is that a phrase like “this is fun” (including spaces as part of the password) is more difficult to guess than a password made up of a group of letters and numbers, and it’s much easier to remember.

It sounds crazy, but according to this site, which tests the strength of a password, it’s true.

To find out how secure a password is, type it in and the site tells you how long it would take a desktop PC running hacking software to guess the password.

In the WordPress scenario it already knows the username (admin), the URL of the login page (if WordPress is installed in the root directory), so all it has to do is guess the password.

Here’s the results of some passwords I tested:

• t1m3tabl3 – 7 hours
• wimfsiltc*** – 178 years
• iutla164*!” – 1,000 years
• i!love!winter – 7,000 years
• i love winter (spaces included) – 24,000 years

I’m sure none of us will need a password for 24,000 years, but at the other end of the scale, using a password that takes just seven hours to crack is very risky.

I hope you find these tips helpful? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Do you know what your site looks like on a tablet or smartphone?

If you don’t, it is probably a good idea to check as you may lose traffic, and customers, if it isn’t displaying properly and it is difficult to use.

The larger screened tablets are less of an issue than their smaller screened counterparts, but checking is fairly straightforward, even if you don’t own any of the major players in the mobile devices market.

The best way to check is to ask a friend if you can borrow their device. This gives you first hand experience as you can use your site instead of just looking at it.

The next best option is to use an online emulator.

Using one gives you a good idea how a site looks, but not how it feels to click links and navigate through to other pages. And this is where the biggest problems lie, as some sites are very awkward to use, especially on smartphones (which are far more popular than tablet devices).

Online emulators

Below is a list of websites you can use for testing. Each of these emulators connects to the rest via a ribbon at the top of the screen, so you can see how your site (or your competitors’) look on a mobile device, without opening another browser tab:

• iPad
• iPhone
• Android
• Blackberry
• Tablet

iPad emulator:

These emulators are good at what they do, but they don’t replace a real ‘hands-on’ test.

What should you do if your site is not tablet or smartphone friendly?

Firstly, check the numbers – how much traffic is coming to your site via a mobile device? Are these people just browsing or do they give you income?

Google Analytics includes a report which shows how many people use mobile devices to access your site. It is quite detailed as it shows the device they used including brand, the exact model and, if you click the camera icon, a picture.

Here is a sample report:

Access it through Audience > Mobile > Devices.

Your site might not be receiving enough traffic to warrant a design upgrade, but in twelve months this situation will probably change. Now is the time to start putting some plans into place for when the time for an upgrade arrives.

If you use WordPress to power your website you could consider installing a new mobile responsive theme or a plugin like WPtouch, which is available for free, or for a fee for the pro version which comes with more features.

Either option is a good choice, the pro version of WPtouch is relatively cheap ($49 for a singe license) and is a decent stop-gap should your site need a quick fix.

Deciding whether or not to upgrade at this time depends upon the return you will get from the investment. WordPress sites are easy and cheap to make mobile-friendly, all it takes is a new mobile-responsive theme, non-WordPress sites may be more difficult and more costly.

What is a  mobile responsive theme?

It’s a theme that displays web pages based on the width/resolution of the browser/screen the user is using. This site uses a responsive theme – if you are reading this post on a site other than Digital Internet, this might not work – to see the responsiveness in action, make your browser narrower and watch as the page elements all remain visible and the page length increases.

Here are a few screenshots of the process…

This is what this site looks like using a mobile responsive theme at standard width:

This is what this site looks like with the browser slightly narrowed, see how all the page elements remain visible within the width of the browser?

This is what this site looks like with the browser narrowed even further, and almost inline with the size of a smartphone. All the page elements are still visible in the browser, but they are further down the page.

Blogging about your industry is one of the most popular ways to market your company online. But, what should you do if you don’t like blogging? Or you just don’t have the time? There are at least two obvious answers – outsource or create an in-house management team…

Outsource

If you are a one-person business and just don’t have the time or inclination to manage a blog, you could outsource the running of it to a freelance writer or marketing agency. He/she/they could do everything for you – generate content ideas, create publication schedules and promote your posts through social media channels. Handing over this process wouldn’t cut you out of the loop, any professional writer/agency requires input from you to ensure they create the content you want and drive your blog in the right direction.

The process of putting a blog post together and publishing it is not at all difficult, especially for experienced bloggers who have used the medium to build up their own business. Tapping into their experience may prove to be a sound investment in the long-term.

Some freelance writers/agencies can handle the technical side of running a blog too, but if they can’t, you could also outsource that.

In-house

If your business is large enough, you could, and perhaps should, create a team specifically to run the blog and exploit other marketing opportunities that stem from it; social media, video marketing, guest posting. How much time your staff spends on these activities depends upon the frequency you want to post and the depth and quality of the content you want to put out.

Publishing short posts once or twice a week will only make a small dent in the search engines, but lengthy posts, videos and infographics published more often, could soon bring in more traffic and business than you can handle!

For many businesses it’s best to find some middle ground.

A good starting point is three posts a week, each between 500 – 1,000 words in length.

What should you blog about?

Definitely not office gossip! People visiting your business blog want to know about the services you provide and/or the products you sell. They want to find out more about your business; how well do you know your industry, how do you handle the customer services side of your business, are you trustworthy? Prospects visit many more pages than the average visitor. They look at the pages that define the company – about, terms, prices, returns, but they also read your blog posts as they provide a further insight into your business.

Successful blogs provide a solution, shares valuable information or demonstrates how to do something. Whilst in the process of creating content, think about the other places where it could be used – could you turn it into a short video?, an eBook?, a PowerPoint presentation? You can use all of these formats to promote your business.

If you don’t know what to write about, ask your customers what they want to know. Find out where your customers’ experience problems and provide solutions on your blog.

News is good too, but by the very nature of it, it only has a short shelf-life. There are times when posting a newsy blog is essential; trade shows, a new product or a TV appearance spring to mind.

Shareable, evergreen content is the ultimate goal for your blog. You want it to last and work for your business for months and years to come. You want people to share it on your behalf.

If you can get it right, a business blog will pay for itself over and over.

Picture – DavidMartynHunt

The WordPress dashboard is what you see when you login. It gives you a quick overview of what’s happening on your site, draws in some information from official WordPress RSS feeds and is very easy to customise.

It looks like this (click the image for a better view):

To the left of the screen is the main navigation menu, which is collapsible – just click on the Collapse Menu link at the bottom.

To the right of the screen is a set of eight panel widgets.

I’ll go through each of them starting from the top left. To make it easier to follow this tutorial it’s a good idea to open up your dashboard in another browser tab so you don’t have to keep scrolling up. Alternatively, open the top image in a new browser tab, the image is a screenshot of the WordPress dashboard in version 3.4.

Right Now

This is a brief summary of the status of your site.

It shows the following information:

Content

• The number of published posts (1)
• The number of published pages (1)
• The number of categories (1)
• The number of tags (0)

Discussion

The discussion section relates to comments, as you can see, there are no discussions on our demo site.

It shows we’re using a theme called Twenty Eleven which is using 6 Widgets.

At the current time we’ve blocked search engines so the warning notice link is visible.

And finally, it shows which version of WordPress we’re using.

Here is the same panel widget from an established site:

The extra notices are for the anti-spam plugin Akismet, which has blocked 11,431 spam comments and a call to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

Recent Comments

This widget shows the most recent comments, pingbacks and trackbacks to any page on your site. The default setting is five. You can change this by clicking on the Configure link and entering a more appropriate number.

WordPress encourages discussion by allowing readers to comment on posts and pages, when somebody leaves a comment on your site you get a notification. You can then approve or delete it.

Pingbacks and trackbacks are different to comments, but they too show up in this section.

Pingbacks

A pingback is notification that a website or blog is linking to you.

Trackback

A trackback is slightly different. The people at WordPress explain it best, here it is:

• Person A writes something on their blog
• Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog
• Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog
• Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment has a link to Person B’s post

This is how the widget looks when it’s full of notifications:

There are two comments and three trackbacks.

The options for each appear when you move your mouse over the space at the bottom of the section. From here you can approve or delete each notification.

At this stage all comments, pingbacks and trackbacks are pending. They won’t appear on your site until you approve them, and when you do, they appear at the bottom of the linked to, or commented on page.

Generally, I don’t publish pingbacks, I do publish trackbacks and I do publish comments if they are not spam – which means the person commenting must talk about the article the comment relates to. “Great blog, you are doing a wonderful job” type comments get deleted, and usually, so do comments from people with names like payday loans (as demonstrated in the image above; not yet deleted, but pending).

At the very bottom of the widget is a comments summary and links to each section so you can click-through and manage the comments. It’s also linked to from the menu on the left.

Incoming Links

Using Google blog search, WordPress looks for incoming links to your site and displays them here.

The default number is 10, but you can change it by clicking on the configure link. The text in the “Enter the RSS feed URL here:” box is the search string WordPress uses to query Google.

Plugins

The last widget in the left hand column displays the current most popular plugin and the newest plugin on the official WordPress site. There is a brief description, a link to the plugin’s page on WordPress and an install link.

QuickPress

Moving over to the right hand column, the top widget is QuickPress. This is a mini-editor which you use for quickly creating posts.

Complete each field in the usual way and hit Save Draft or Publish.

Saving it as a Draft generates this view:

And publishing the post generates this view:

Recent Drafts

This widget displays up to five recent drafts. The title is a link to the post. Clicking the View All link opens up a list of all draft posts.

WordPress Blog and Other WordPress News

The last two widgets display links to the latest blog posts on the official WordPress blog and other WordPress/Automattic properties.

That’s it for the widgets.

Layout and Options

The good news is that this window is customisable. In so much as you can switch off some of the widgets, change the number of columns and move the widgets around.

In the top right hand corner of the screen is a Screen Options tab:

Clicking it opens a window where you can switch off widgets and change the number of columns to display the widgets you want to use.

(Click the picture for the bigger version)

Changing the number of columns from the default 2 to 4, causes this to happen:

(Click the picture for the bigger version)

Two placeholders have appeared in the new columns, to move a widget to either of these locations, simply drag and drop. Move your mouse over the header of a widget until the mouse turns to a cross shape, then click and drag it to the new location.

To minimise a widget, move the mouse over the top right hand corner until the down arrow shows, then click the arrow.

Open:

Closed:

That’s it for the dashboard. I hope you have found this tutorial useful and have a better understanding of the WordPress dashboard? Have a play around with the layout options to find the best layout for you. It’s fully customisable, so you can change it again at any time.