Sky Insurance

If you are just starting out with your online marketing efforts and are looking for ways to build an online presence, now is the perfect time to leap frog your competition by using WordPress.

WordPress is simple to use, easy to install and fantastic for automating processes - including marketing. But we will get to that.

WordPress is free to install although initially you may wish to pay someone to install it for you and set it up.

So why should you use WordPress?

There are a couple of reasons why this is the best option for a new online venture.

Firstly, WordPress is heavily used and supported. There are a huge number of designers out there that can put together a great looking website for you at a low cost. Uploading a new design or changing a design is a simple case of uploading files to your web server and that's it. One change and it will be implemented across the site.

Secondly, if you can cut and paste - you can use WordPress. Adding content is simple using their own interface which means that you can add content without the need of worrying your web designer every 5 minutes. This gives you the added benefit of getting stuff published quickly. New product info, new events in your area can be easily and quickly added. Also being online, it means if you have the login details you can update your website from anywhere!

Thirdly, and in our minds more importantly, you can install plugins. Plugins are like small bits of code that carry out tasks on your website. There are plugins that allow you to have enquiry forms, there are plugins that create sitemaps and submit them to Google for you each time a post or page is added to the site.

This means that you can set up these plugins to take care of a lot of the marketing activities you would normally spend time doing yourself (or rather you would forget to do consistently). The main marketing plugins we recommend to our clients can:

· Auto Tweet any posts as they go live on your Website

· Block upload a whole years' supply of Content to your website ad have it drip feed for the next 12 months

· Auto post your content to your Facebook Profile or Fan pages

· Auto bookmark your content to a range of social bookmarking sites

Just these 4 things alone will save your lots of time and allow you to really maximise the benefits of your website.

There are even plugins that can turn a website into a classified ads site, an article directory, a membership site or even enable you to run your own social networking site. Investing in a WordPress site and learning how to use it properly will allow you not only to run a single website for your business, but will empower you to run several sites, all out there driving leads to your business.