Essential Tools for Starting a WordPress Blog Knowing the steps in setting up your WordPress blog is indispensable if you are out to start an online business. WordPress is considered as one of the finest sites to start your online career. WordPress has easy to use CMS, allowing you to work on your account with ease. By following these you will get a decent head start in the world of blogging and hopefully an influx of traffic to give you the motivation to carry on.
Lead Pages
It is the simplest way in the world to put up landing pages that convert. Whether you are doing a simple lead-capture, a webinar or long-form sales pages, Lead Pages has an easy-to-tailor template for that.
Akismet
If you create a blog, you can guarantee that it will get spam. It is one of those rules of the Internet that you just can’t get around. But, rather than wasting hours examining through spam to find the real comments and approve them, you can use Akismet, together with an API key from WordPress.org to reshuffle your spam automatically. Actually, this plug-in comes along with your basic WordPress installation. You will need to activate it by getting your API and setting it up. It will save you a great deal of time.
Google Analytics for WordPress
You will need some way to track your site analytics i.e. traffic, visitors, clicks etc. There are numerous analytics tools to choose from, but Google Analytics is a good choice for most people and it is free. Once you have signed up, you can imbed their tracking code on your WordPress site or you can use the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin which automates and simplifies the process of adding the tracking code. This plugin also provides several additional features to help you make the most of your site analytics.
WP Captcha Free
Akismet is great, but it still leaves you having to check that the spam comments are spam and the real comments are real. Spammers keep submitting with the old timestamp and their comments are deleted. Sincere and genuine visitors get a new timestamp when they open the page and their comments get through.
Yoast SEO
In a world obsessed with SEO, SEO plugins litter the WordPress directory. Yoast is the only thing that is worth using. It is the easiest way to get the basics of SEO done quickly without wasting hours or days trying to figure out what a “title tag” means.
Webmaster Tools
This is a beneficial, free set of tools from Google. It has numerous functions, one of which involves submitting sitemaps to be indexed. Also, it keeps a track of 404 errors, and warns you to malware security problems and even if WordPress updates are available. You could get by without it, but it is a good tool to have under your belt.
You are about to discover how to make a good living online with no technical skills, expertise or sales ability! What’s even better, you don’t even need to build your own website as you will be supplied with an optimized WordPress blog ready for you to start spreading your content.