3 Ways WordPress Makes Life Easier for Small Business Owners

WordPress is great for small and medium businesses who want more control over their company website – and the ability to manage it by themselves, without having to resort to calling a web developer every time they want to add some new content. Here are three ways that WordPress makes things easier for SMB owners.

1. Add new blog posts when you’re on vacation.
   I know – you’re asking: “What’s a vacation?” But if you’re given the opportunity to take one, and you’ve become used to (or even addicted to) posting in your company blog marketing, no need to worry about your absence. You can publish in the future!Write a post and schedule it by changing the Publish date. Click the ‘Edit’ link just above the big Publish button, beside ‘Publish Immediately,’ and you can enter any date and time you like. Your post will be published to the blog on your chosen date. If you write a few posts ahead of time and publish them every couple of days while you’re away, your blog readers might not even know you were gone.
2. Control spam easily.
   No one likes spam, but WordPress has features and plugins that help keep comment spam to a minimum, and also minimize your time dealing with it. First, set up WordPress so that comments are moderated under Settings > Discussion. WordPress will notify you with an email when a comment arrives and give you the option to quickly post it, delete it, or relegate it to the spam folder.

   Then, use Akismet to greatly reduce incoming spam; it’s a plugin I consider essential on all WordPress sites. You’ll need to get a free API key from http://akismet.com/get/ to use it. When a new comment comes to your site it will be submitted to the Akismet web service, which runs hundreds of tests on the comment. Items identified as spam are kept for 15 days then deleted (but aren’t published on your website).

   If that’s not enough protection, you can also use the plugin Bad Behavior (http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/), which plays nicely with Akismet. Bad Behavior doesn’t look at the comment itself, but at the IP address and other information from the commenter. If it’s coming from a known spammer, the comment is blocked.

3. Help your readers help you get noticed.
   Provide them with easy ways to share that interesting piece you wrote last week – use one of the many social media plugins that add icons linking to an ever-growing number of social networking sites to your posts and pages (or your sidebar). If a reader likes your post, he or she can click on the social network of their choice and post a link to your article. Free advertising for you with no additional effort – other than writing in the blog, of course.

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WordPress is my content management system (CMS) of choice for many reasons – the features described here are typical of all the good things WordPress can do for your SMB.

– Debbie