Its open source and thus the platform itself is free to use and develop on – starting on WordPress is like less than half the cost of custom developing from scratch or using any other robust CMS.

2. Additional Functionality with Plugins:

WordPress community is huge and developing everyday – they contribute in the form of plugins which gives you additional functionality at ease and most of them are free or really low cost. Try to only use plugins which are regularly updated as it means the developer is active and it was not just a onetime thing.

3. Simple to Develop:

In comparison to any other robust Content Management Systems present out there, WordPress has the simplest of the code and is very documented – makes it really easy and simple to start developing on wordpress for anybody.

4. Beautiful Design for Branding:

Because of the flexibility of its code, the framework has no limitations in terms of design as most other CMS’s has – you can do anything to it in terms of design – no limitations really.

5. Fast Launching:

All the above factors makes the site development really fast and save you a lot of valuable time.

6. Themes – multiple prebuilt websites/blogs:

There are a huge bunch of themes available for use – free or low cost. If you are starting with a new concept then you can start with one of them rather going custom to start with – and as you grow and know your business better then you can start customizing – all depends on your business model. Just make sure that the theme you are selecting is not only just good to look at but has the simple management of the functionality in the backend so you can manage it simply (themes are not simply designs but a complete site but most of them available in the marketplace focus only on the design as thats the only thing an average person understands – the frontend).

7. SEO friendly:

It is built to be sear engine friendly – pings every time you do any update on the site. Apart from that there are multiple free plugins available for you to extend the SEO functionality and manage it easily all by yourself.

8. Updated very easily:

WordPress has regular updates and you can simply implement that with click of a button. Even the plugins are the same. So your website is tuned to the latest developments.

9. Easy Content Management:

Writing content in the backend is as simple as writing in MS Word. Also, you can play around with the placement of the features and add new features yourself mostly all by yourself – just make sure that the developer utilizes the power of wordpress when working on your site (making the sections widgetized to the extent possible).

10. WordPress as a Company itself is run by smart innovative people and though it is open source it has a huge funding behind it for them to push developments on the platform itself – if you are a business owner you will understand the importance of this – its not only the product but who is behind it and how much money they have as its not a one day use thing

© rajat for Blog Design Studio, 2011. | Permalink

Also, a very creative infographic on WordPress Facts, Figures & History:

© rajat for Blog Design Studio, 2011. | Permalink

In our earlier post we discussed that how we can add a custom tab on a facebook page and in this post we’d discuss that how can we popularize that facebook page to ensure that our brand name spreads and we can find targeted users. Of course, there have been many blogs that have already spoken about it and we’d like to ensure that this blog post will feature the best of techniques to ensure that you’d be able to promote your facebook page in the best of ways.

Lets start with the basics

1. Invite your amigo : There will always be friends who’d be close and will be always ready to help you. If you have few friends like that in your list, why aren’t you inviting them? Invite them, ask them to spread the word, ask them to further invite their friends. This should help in spreading the name pretty quickly.

2. Updates are must – In order to ensure that your facebook page becomes a Rock Star, you’d need to keep it up to date. More over, if anyone would interact on your facebook page, its activity may appear in their timeline and thus will help in attracting more eye-balls. You can always use following applications for automating various tasks -

• TwitterFeed – Using this service you can setup your blog feed and publish the updates on Twitter & Facebook. So whenever you’ll write a blog post, its link will automatically be published on these networks. This will ensure that you’ll get more traffic on your blog plus it’ll engage the fans as well. Since its the feeds that you can setup – you can easily setup feed from YouTube, Digg, Flickr or other services that you use.
• Twitter Application – This little application displays your tweets on facebook and also lets you publish all your tweets on facebook. So even if you are posting updates on Twitter, they will be pushed on Facebook too. Thus keeps your pages active with fresh content.
• HootSuite – I think it’s one of the best applications around as far as pushing the content on multiple networks. This wonderful service lets you schedule your tweets and with least amount of efforts you can easily manage Facebook pages, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts. So to ensure that fresh content is posted at all the times, you can schedule the updates easily using this.

Some Free Viral Marketing is on your way

Now that we’ve ensured that the content on your Facebook account is all up to date, its time to ensure that we can try and increase the fans for your business page. There are manual and tiring methods as you need to engage in conversation with new fans. Lets check them out -

3. Search New Users – Facebook’s search displays results from updates across facebook. So if you have a business page about Custom WordPress Themes then do a search for “WordPress” and you’ll surely find lots of users that you can target. Engage in conversation with them and try to add them on your network.

4. Add friends of friends – You can also try to engage in conversation with friends of your friends and then add them on your network. This is a slow process however a darn effective one.

5. Add Facebook fan widget on your blog – Its not that you can only visitors from Facebook to your blog. You can also add Facebook fans from your blog. There will always be many visitors who’d come on your blog from search engines and they can become the fan if you give them the option of becoming one. Simply add a widget on your blog and see it in action.

Spend money and market your page quickly

Above activities would require decent amount of hours and efforts, however not everyone is blessed with that much amount of time. So if you can shell out some money, you’d be able to attract thousands of users for your business page. Here are some of the ways -

6. Giveaways attracts new visitors – Even small giveaways like e-books, books can help in generating lots of visitors to your account. If you have a product that you can afford to give away, then go ahead and do it. Just ask your current fans to share your specific update and the luck winner can win. This can get pretty viral depending on how excited the fans are about that particular giveaway.

7. Social Ads – Facebook gives great advertising options. You can run various ad campaigns and attract users on your facebook page. Facebook’s social ads are pretty effective and you get to decide that how much money you want to spend. It’s quick and effective for sure!

8. Impress the visitors with custom landing pages – Well, if you can spend some money then get a custom tab designed and coded. An impressive landing tab page will always attract users and they would love to spread it as well.

Engaging with fans is important

Once you’ve added lots of fans, its important that they don’t forget you. We’ve already discussed that how you can keep fresh content coming on your pages, however if you won’t engage in conversation with your fans, all the efforts will go in vein. To avoid that here are few things you should keep on doing -

9. Comments and messages – Make sure that if a user comes and posts updates on your page, then you should thank them by sending messages. Leave comments on their updates regularly, this would keep them active.

10. Help them and they’ll help you – If your fans have blog around same industry then promote it on your pages. This will build a stronger relationship. After all thats what social networking is all about, isn’t it?

Caution – Don’t try to spam. Its good that you want to promote your business, however you shouldn’t forget that there may be many friends of yours who won’t be that much interested in knowing about your business every single hour. Make sure that your idea is to have the positive PR and not to be in the bad books of your close network.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

1. Two minds think better than one.
2. The partners can have complementary skills (i.e., one can be a good programmer, and the other one a good marketer)
3. The partners can cover for each other in the face of emergencies or periods where one of them will not be able to work for some reason.
4. When the company has no employees, two people will be able to do more work than one person alone.

The question arises that why am I writing all this over here? This blog is all about blogging tips and not about business. Well, this blog is actually about blog and business both and we can call it a blog that provides tips on building blog business. I’ve even written various blog posts on business blogging too.

There have been many startups that have done extremely well in both the cases (while having partners and while doing it alone) however, I’ve always been a supporter of having a partner in the business and the above mentioned reasons are just the tip of all the benefits that a partner brings in to the business. Rajat & I co-founded Blog Design Studio and I know for sure that without his experience and client interaction skills, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to think about running this business all alone.

I won’t say that this blog business of ours is a success story, however I’m confident that soon there’ll be the day when you’ll see it as one of the success stories in the blogosphere.

There have been some great examples of partnerships around blogosphere and here are some of them that you should certainly look at -

1. Brian Clark & Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme.
2. Darren Rowse & Chirs Garrett’s Book on Problogging.
3. Smashing Magazine, Boing Boing are some of the greatest blogs on the internet and all have multiple authors.
4. Can we forget Twitter in this case? (I know its a micro-blogging service; none the less, it’s still part of blogging)
5. and many more….

Is there anyway you think you’d be able to build partnerships with others? What skills would you like to have in your partner to ensure that your business can take off and be a success? or are you one of those who think that it’s better to run the business alone than run it in partnership?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Andrew has taken up the comments of Matt Mullenweg -

“Blogs will become aggregation points, they will become our personal hub. Places where we store all our personal media content such as our flickr photos and Twitter posts.”

Good thing with Andrew’s post is that he’s not just spoken about Blogging in general, however has commented on how blogging is evolving itself. Although, he doesn’t seem to agree with what Matt has to say about blogging.

Although, I agree to Matt and have similar thoughts – however there are other few things that I would like to add, however before that I would like to take the excerpt from WikiPedia that tells us that what exactly is a blog -

A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Keeping the above definition in mind, I’ll discuss this particular topic and will discuss the future of blogs and blogging in detail. I’ll will try to bring some factual side of it to support my statements. Most of the guys are now saying that blogs are dead and believe that social networking websites is something that’ll rule the web.

“regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video” – Is it possible in Facebook? The answer is YES. So, can’t we say that Social networking websites are just another form of blogging and Facebook like sites are just another tool like blog softwares? So that means, we can call ‘your personal facebook profile’ as ‘your personal blog’. With all that, it means that Personal blogging is not dead!

That was one side of blogging i.e. personal blogging. Then we have another side of blogging and that is business blogging and when we talk about that, it really becomes a vast topic to discuss. I would love to keep it short and will try to explain it in one shot itself – Blogs are now used by Fortune 500 companies, major publications, business schools and just about every one else you may think of. Guess what, even politicians maintain a blog to ensure that they can communicate with their readers with ease. So, can we say that Blogs are dead? I guess the answer will be NO.

Talking about factual information. Technorati comes up with State of the Blogosphere and they’ve posted some really nice facts as well. Here i’ve brought just a tiny part of it -

Blogs are here to stay.. Bloggers have been at it an average of three years and are collectively creating close to one million posts every day. Blogs have representation in top-10 web site lists across all key categories, and have become integral to the media ecosystem.

If we can say that both the forms of blogging exist then how can we say that blogs are dead? The question arises though, what will be the future of blogs, will they continue to evolve like this or will there be a point when we’ll experience the saturation. I personally believe that blogging is going to stay and will stay forever, in one form or the other. Blogs are just tools that empower a user to publish their ideas, events, happenings etc. and if we are talking about tool, then they’ll surely evolve and will take a different shape, however if we are talking about blogging then it is always going to be there.

What are your thoughts about the same? Do you think blogs are dead, if so – then I would welcome you to discuss this topic in detail with us in whatever way you want to discuss. If you tend to agree to what I feel, then you are invited for a cup of coffee at my place :)

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

This is a directory of recently updated weblogs and tools for tracking interesting weblogs, in the spirit of services like weblogs.com and blogtracker and blogrolling.com.

Ma.tt announced this on his blog and interestingly wrote that Yahoo Inc. gave this property to them and didn’t mention that it was sold to them by Yahoo Inc for an undisclosed amount. Toni at Automattic, also didn’t mention the price and has just said that they were able to structure a deal with Yahoo Inc.

This will be an interesting property for WordPress as they are building/acquiring more and more services in blog industry (and making it difficult for me – one of my main goal is to develop a CMS that’ll be able to compete with WordPress) and will be able to come up as a complete solution to various enterprises or small businesses in future.

I was surprised to find out that in how many projects, Automattic is working on these days. Of course, this answers that where exactly the funding money is being used by Automattic :) It’s a very very impressive list and clearly a wonderful example of a brilliant and successful startup story.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Alex King, founder of Crowd Favorite and one of the pioneers in WordPress themes, plugin development has announced a new service called WordPress Help Center. Jeff has already mentioned about this on WPCandy and has come up with few wonderful points that Alex will surely be listening to. Here’s what Jeff (his interview with us) thinks about this service -

While I like the idea behind the WordPress HelpCenter, I wonder why we need one in the first place. Has the WordPress.org support forums which are supposed to be the go to place for support become such a pain for end users that it would be much simpler to just pick up the phone and give these guys a call?

So will the HelpCenter knock other forms of support out of the water? I don’t think so given their inherent limitations. However, I do think Alex King is on the right track creating a service where people can simply pick up the phone, answer a commonly asked question, and provide immediate satisfaction.

I completely agree with the points that Jeff has made however, I do have my opinion and some ideas that may attract someone else to start the idea at a larger or a bigger scale.

My thoughts on WordPress Help Center

Honestly, I liked the idea of WordPress help center – while most of the professional bloggers have already done and read about WordPress there are many bloggers who really don’t care about all that and want quick solutions as they want to stay focused on their writing and believe in things that work out of the box.

Other than that, there are situations where one may not want to get his hands dirty, I remember an incident where I merged two WordPress blogs of mine and wanted to ensure that the search engine should not penalize my domain and that all the indexed pages of one blog should get replaced by the new blog’s URL. The solution was pretty simple, however I literally spent more than 5 hrs. to find out that solution. If WordPress Help Center can help me get these kind of solutions in less than 30 mins., I’ll be much more happy to spend my money on this service! While everything is there, I’m sure there will many businesses who are using WordPress for their blogs and they may not have a dedicated IT team to support them, they’ll definitely find this service pretty useful.

Shortcomings of the service & few suggestions

I’m not sure if Alex knew about the fact that a call from Skype to a toll-free number in US & UK is completely free of charge from any part of the world. So, he could have covered a bigger userbase if they would have used a toll-free number instead of a local US number.

Another point that limits this service is that it is not available for 24×7. I can understand this step, as this is just a new initiative and the business can be scaled depending on the demand of the service. I think it was a wise decision in a way. And who knows, that someone in other parts of the world may be interested in starting up a service like this or may want to partner with Alex to offer the support at times other than 9am-7pm Pacific time.

What do you think about having such a service? Do you think that it can be a viable business model or you think that the support on the web through forums, emails etc is enough? Please share your thoughts with us.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

We all can see that how social media marketing is increasing and how various tools are bringing us closer to each other. Be it blogs, twitter, facebook, youtube, digg or just about any other tool – there is some social element that helps us connect us with our known ones and those who are not known to us, however are authority in one or the other subject. Now, the question arises that why exactly social media marketing is booming?

Peter Bergman hits the hammer at the right spot -

We simply don’t trust companies anymore. We trust people. And in big companies, it’s hard to even find a person to trust as we scream “operator” into our telephones only to get transferred to another menu whose options have changed.

So true! Call it Word of mouth marketing, referral marketing or just about anything – we all are seeing this trend increasing as we lose the trust in those big corporations. In today’s world we all are interested in solutions that are catered for us and we all seek personal attention for every single penny that we spend. We are getting sick of those long queues over the phone and various different answers that lead us to no solution but lot of headache. I agree that it is not true for every aspect of the economy & industry and is more focused towards service industry.

If you’ll ask the question from yourself, that when was the last time you were really happy from the service you received from a large corporation then I’m sure you’ll get the point that Peter, Jim and now I’m trying to convey over here.

Being a small business owner, I certainly have my own experience to share as even we are in a position to expand our venture from 4 people to more. I myself have got lots of new clients just because one of our old client’s referred us to them. There are already lot of large web design firms however, its small companies and individual wordpress theme designers who are getting the attention in the space of WordPress theme designs. Why is that? Because, those client’s trust their friends who referred us to them.

Small is the new big. Sustainable is the new growth. Trust is the new competitive advantage.

This very small line says almost everything that you’ll see is happening in the market at the moment. Small is becoming big because small businesses can easily manage to give the right amount of attention to its customers and if a business can sustain that, then they’ll surely grow as well as they’ll get the referral that they deserve.

I’m sure that this trend will only increase as more and more people will interact on the web and will chose to trust the person they know and not just the advertisement they’ll see on TVs, website or radios. We’ll surely see more and more small businesses and will see many new entrepreneur’s until those big corporations decide to get back to basics and start giving enough attention to their customers.

Or should we say that today’s customer has become much smarter and demanding that small businesses have been able to handle as compared to large corporations? What are you thoughts on the same?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

We’ll roll out more contests to ensure that Blog Design Studio community’s members (I guess, my marketing skills have improved as otherwise I would have referred all the readers as “you” :P) will win various wonderful prizes like this one and the last prize that was a custom wordpress theme. You never know that you may be the winner of such prizes, so keep participating.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

All these examples on the top were of branding, where Ankur managed to brand himself as “the tatoo guy” and was easily able to draw Matt’s attention and then the team “technospot” & “instablogs” were good enough to draw people’s attention towards their work.

Lets try to build this post as one of the “resource” for how to build your own brand, be it Personal brand or your company’s brand -

1. Get t-shirts printed with your venture’s logo or name and wear it often (if you can’t wear your own brand’s t-shirt then who else will?)
2. Get temporary tattoo’s built for your brand (everyone loved WordPress tattoo’s at WordCamp India)
3. If the founder of related event is around – wear his brand’s tattoo. (kudos to ankur banerjee).
4. Do some charitable work, that helps in improving your personal brand and if you offer certain services then help NGOs with those services.
5. Try to print unique business cards, they always leave impact.
6. Send free t-shirts of your brand to your blogger friends or probably the ones that are really established.
7. Take a session at any of the conferences/un-conferences, write articles and send them to established blogs or media.
8. Be a great communicator and networker. Pass your business cards to people you meet.
9. Don’t forget to take testimonial from peers in your network, that improves the credibility. Imagine that Michael Arrington says that your blog is one of the few Web 2.0 blogs that he reads. How will that impact your readers mind?

Well, here are some very cool links that should definitely help you in finding more about personal branding and branding your product or company -

1. 10 Ways personal branding can save your from getting fired.
2. 8 tips for creating your personal brand (slightly tech oriented – however you can always use it according to your needs.)
3. Personal brand organization tips. (one of my fav. posts).
4. 9 Branding tips for small businesses.
5. 25 branding tips.

If you come across any wonderful article on personal branding or branding in general then either email it to me or leave the link the comments section.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink