About five years ago, when I started my first business providing SEO content to businesses, I realized I needed a website so that people could find me. I also needed an online portfolio with samples of my writing, an explanation of the services I provided and my rates. I knew absolutely nothing about building a website, so I asked around a couple of forums and found someone very cheap. I didn’t have much money, so cost was a major factor.The website was a simple, professional design and I was quite happy with it.

A year later, I needed to update the services I provided and my rates. There was just one problem – I didn’t know how to change the content on the website. I had no idea what type of platform she used to build my site. Bottom line: I needed to contact the webmaster in order to change the content. Unfortunately there was another big problem: the webmaster was nowhere to be found. I was stuck with a website that offered clients services and rates that I no longer offered.
So now I needed a new website, and this time it needed to be able to control the content myself. I poked around online and found a free website builder. The pros: My website information was back online and up to date. The cons: My website promoted the sale of the website templates fee-based products, and the site’s coding resulted in terrible SEO ranking in the search engines. I continued to research options and finally settled on WordPress, and I haven’t looked back.

WordPress is one of the best free blogging software programs available to both technical and non-technical online entrepreneurs.

For the purposes of this article, I’m speaking of the WordPress blogging software that you can install from within the c-panel of your web hosting company.

In what follows, you will learn many of the benefits to using WordPress for your website/blog:

1. You do not need to know computer code – such as HTML and PHP to create your own site. This means that you can get your site up and running very quickly, even without this knowledge.

2. WordPress is not only for bloggers – You can use WordPress to create very attractive websites with static pages that don’t even look like blog pages. You can even use WordPress to create a website with a separate blogging section on it. Furthermore, you can use it to create e-commerce sites.

3. Numerous free WordPress plugins are available – These plugins allow you to do so many other things to your WordPress site. For example, there are plugins that allow you to add photo galleries to your site (NextGen), ones that increase your exposure in the search engines (All-In-One SEO), others that allow you to control the appearance of your site (Exclude Pages), and so many others.

4. Excellent paid WordPress plugins are also available – You can find some good paid plugins such as the WP-Estore, which allows you to create an E-store and sell products on your website. Again, there is no fancy code needed to set this up on your site. Pretty Link Pro is another paid plugin that allows you to redirect and cloak your links to decrease theft of your affiliate links.

5. WordPress is used globally – Because WordPress is so well recognized throughout the globe, it is easy to find programmers online who are familiar with it, and can make any desired modifications to your website.

6. It can save you a lot of money – If you have some time and the desire to learn how WordPress works, you can save a lot in hiring a website designer. In addition, once you learn WordPress, you don’t have to hire someone every time you need to update your website or blog.

7. A number of WordPress themes are available – Many themes have been created; some are free while others are not. The various themes allow you to set up the appearance and layout of your site. There are also inexpensive software programs that you can purchase to create your own WordPress themes from scratch, without needing to know HTML.

8. WordPress is SEO-friendly – WordPress contains many built-in search-engine optimization tools. For example, you can use keywords in the permalinks/URL’s of your posts and pages. You can also categorize topics, and use tags in order that search engines can better index your site.

WordPress offers many advantages when building a website and/or blog.  Technical and non-technical people across the globe find it suits their needs and is quite user-friendly.

If you’ve ever made an online purchase, you’re probably familiar with e-newsletters, those corresponding emails you receive from a business that alert you to new products, special promotions, tips about the best way to use products, etc.
Newsletters can help your business keep in contact with customers so that they won’t forget you. Ever heard of that old saying: “out of sight out of mind?” Keeping in touch with your customers on a regular basis is crucial to making sure they don’t forget about you. Maintaining consistent contact results in increased sales and referrals, builds relationships and loyalty.
There are a number of autoresponders you can choose from to help spread your message via e-newsletters. Aweber, MailChimp, ConstantContact and iContact are a few. These services allow you to customize everything from the layout of the newsletter design to the articles. The benefits of emailing newsletters to your customers include:
Being Able to Send Direct Messages to Your Target Audience
The people who sign up for your newsletter are most likely part of your target market. It’s an easy way to consistently communicate your message directly to this group.

Inexpensive Marketing Strategy

It’s surprisingly affordable to send a monthly newsletter to your customers. As I stated previously, autoresponder services range in price from free to an average rate (as of this post) of $19 a month. The only additional expense you may incur would be the result of having a graphic expert design a template, ghost writers to write the articles or a virtual assistant to organize and distribute the newsletter for you.

An Ideal Way of Stirring Up Interest

Make sure the articles in your newsletter are engaging and interesting. You can share what you’ve been up to, new projects on the horizon, or upcoming special promotions. You can also write “how to” articles sharing advice on how to get the best results using a certain product, or provide an advice column and answer customer questions.

Improves Customer Retention

Keeping existing customers makes sense when you businesses spend 80% of their marketing budgets on getting new business. It’s cheaper to retain the customers you already have. Consider these statistics:

• Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
• Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
• It costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer. (Marketing.About.com)
• Nurturing existing customer relationships results in increase sales up to 50% without even increasing your marketing budget.

Marketing experts recommend sending out e-newsletters anywhere from every two weeks to once a month.

Muslimahs Working at Home was created to provide women with a financial alternative to earning an income outside of the home. Our objective is to share resources and tools needed to operate a successful, home-based business.