Content may be king, but it’s nothing if you don’t know how to promote it. Even if you write the best, most enticing and most shareable post in the world and update your blog regularly, it means nothing if people aren’t aware it exists. In order to truly drive traffic to your blog, you need exposure. Obtaining it is a dual process of promotion and optimization.

We’ll start with the latter. The best advice I can give you here is to install a plugin like All-In-One SEO. Although it won’t do all the work for you, it’ll greatly simplify the optimization process, and make it considerably easier for you to deal with Meta tags and title optimization. Scheduling is one thing you’re going to have to do yourself – personally, I’d recommend that you update your blog in the morning, as t traffic is usually highest around 11 AM. You’ll also need to figure out your focus keyword (think of this as the primary topic of your post). More than just site and keyword optimization, however, you should also practice topic optimization. Read more

Although WordPress is without a doubt the best blogging platform on the market, how suitable is it if you’re looking to create a site based on user-generated content? It’s an odd question, to be sure, but it’s one that’s been at the back of my mind for some time now. Is WordPress usable if you’re creating a content hub rather than a simple blog?

The short answer is yes – just look at WPeddit if you’ve any doubts. The long answer…yes and no. It’s complicated. If you’ve got the right plugins and enough programming knowledge, you can use the WordPress platform to design just about anything. The problem with that, of course, is that this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s well-suited for the task. At the end of the day, there are plenty of software platforms specifically designed for user-generated content, it could save you a great deal of trouble to simply use one of those. Read more