There is no doubt that WordPress is the best CMS software available in the market today. Apart from being free & open source, this is also the simplest & the easiest to use CMS software that require no technical knowledge on the part of the user. It has been used by bloggers from 2004 & now WordPress is also the software of choice for marketers & bloggers who need to run websites for making money online.

The default WordPress installation is good enough for all blogging needs. However, for Effective Blogging & to make the best out of your marketing website you need to make the best use of your WordPress software. Luckily help is at hand & most of the time such effective marketing tools are quite cheap or sometimes completely free.

10 Ways to Make an Effective WordPress Website for Marketing

1. Customizing WordPress for Marketing & Money Making Blogs

Customizing WordPress for business is the best way to adopt the free CMS software to your business needs. This is not only a design customization but also customizing the business data. As an example, Best Buy runs their online retailing website on a very customized version of WordPress, thus turning the software into a powerful inventory management, sales, invoicing & logistics management software.

2. Getting an Off-the-Shelf Marketing WordPress Theme

Business Themes are now available off the shelf & all you need to do is to purchase them, install them & configure them from the WordPress Admin Panel & you would have a creative marketing & business website in minutes. These effective WordPress marketing themes are designed & tested out by experienced affiliate marketers & online retailers so that their efficiency is proven. These WordPress marketing themes are simple is design but very effective when it comes to selling & promoting products online.

3. WordPress Marketing Plugins

These Business & Marketing Plugins add features to your WordPress CMS system that could automate a lot of your daily activities, keep your website clean in the eyes of search engines like Google & also help you market your content effectively. As with the business themes, these marketing plugins are mostly designed by experienced online retailers & hence are proven to be very effective in what they promise to do.

4. WordPress Housekeeping Tools

WordPress also recommends a lot of plugins that will help you become productive in managing your WordPress marketing websites & blogs. These include SEO plugins, Backup plugins, WordPress optimization & cache plugins, WordPress database manager plugins etc.

Note that the WordPress housekeeping plugins are integrally tied to how WordPress is designed. We would recommend only those available from WordPress official website or those released by WordPress approved developers.

5. Integration with Social Networks

Today online marketing is highly entwined with social marketing. Ability to have your products out on larger social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc is essential to sustain and grow your online brand reputation, sales & profits. Though there are lot of tools & plugins available for social network integration, we have seen that effective social marketing campaigns is best done in a combination of automated & manual updates.

Since social media can highlight comparison shopping, free plugins like the Popularity plugin, Post Rating plugin have gained considerable importance amongst online affiliate marketers. They now form the basic elements that must be present on any marketing website, along with the Facebook Like button & the Re-Tweet button.

6. Niche Marketing & Effective Search Engine Visibility

The mistake that new affiliate marketers & new bloggers make is to write about everything! In the eyes of search engines, a Jack-of-all-trades is alright, but a master-of-none is just not acceptable. WordPress has the simplest ways to create websites in specific marketing niches by using effective customized templates, categories & tags.

In addition, WordPress allows you to publish in 2 ways – either as a post or as a page, making it easy for marketers to stick to their niches & publish for better search engine visibility. By design WordPress provides friendly, easy to remember URLs (using the Permalink feature) & makes it easy for search engines to mine the data for content.

7. Effective Website Searches

The built in Search function of WordPress is not that strong. There are several customizations available to manipulate the search capability of WordPress but the best option to build an effective search function on your marketing website is to integrate it with Google Custom Search of Lijit Custom Search.

These search tools not only mine your data better than WordPress but you can also display contextual advertisements on your search results for extra income.

8. More Relevant Content to Your Customer

WordPress, being a complex content manager, has tools to provide your customers with more relevant content. These are tools to engage your customers better, market more products & sell more. Much like what you have seen on Amazon or Best Buy, WordPress can be customized to show up “Similar Products” or “What other Customers have Bought” or “Customers who Purchased this also Bought These” products from your list of products.

9. Mobile Usability

While setting up an online website little do we think of how many customers would view our websites & try to buy something from our marketing website from their mobile devices. Mobile advertising spend is on the rise & more & more shoppers are using Blackberry & iPhone to buy online.

It is very easy to customize a WordPress marketing website to be as effective on a mobile browser. You can either create a custom mobile theme or simple use one of the mobile plugins that automatically adapt the design to an iPhone or a Blackberry among other phones.

10. Frequent Updates & Optimized Content

Nothing beats solid, meaningful & original content. Most marketers are not great content writers, but as long as you publish original content with a regular frequency you would be well off. Content optimization is important if you are not employing the top class copywriters.

Read our tips on Simple Content Optimization for Effective Blogging. The top 3 tips being:

1. using the right targeted keywords or phrases for your niches & repeating them a couple of times
2. using simple HTML tags like H1, H2, H3, em, strong etc to emphasize keywords & portions of your content
3. using images with SEO friendly names, Title tag & ALT tag for search engines

Write for humans though. If people coming onto your website do not find the content relevant to what they are looking for or find it misleading, they would never come back, no matter where Google shows your pages in search results!

WordPress has been a game changer in the last decade & continues to deliver more & better with every release. COmparatively we have found WordPress to be better & more effective for marketing than Google’s Blogger or Typepad. And among other CMS tools, WordPress is far better than either Joomla or Drupal when it comes to use for online marketing for small business.