4 Things You Need to Install on Every WordPress Website for Marketing Purposes | EP 651

4 Things You need to install on every WordPress website for marketing purposes

1. Google Analytics 01:35
2. Facebook Pixel 02:35
3. Search Console 04:41
4. Email Subscription tool 06:05

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:25 David Blackmon: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast brought to you by WP Gears. I’m David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:37 David Blackmon: Today in episode 651 we’re going to talk about four things you need to install on every WordPress website for marketing purposes. Obviously there’s a lot of things that you’re going to need to do to your website to optimize it and make it awesome. And most effective but there are four tools that Tim and I believe you need to make sure are installed on every single one of your websites. And it’s for marketing you know, regardless of whether or not you’re selling products on your website, currently or you know booking events or clients through your website, you’ll want to have these things installed, because if you don’t have these things installed nothing is retroactive.  But if you’re  capturing data and all of a sudden one day you decide “hey I want to start selling my services on my website”, these tools are going to help you dial that in optimize it and be the most effective that you can be. So Tim get us kicked off.

01:35 Tim Strifler: Yeah and that’s exactly right this is not a super extensive list because that’s going to depend on what you’re trying to do, but these are the four things that we’ve identified, that no matter what you’re doing you need to do and the first one on the list is install Google Analytics. Now, as David mentioned, it’s not retroactive. So you have to install it from day one in order to get the data from day one, and so in order to track who’s coming to your site, what pages they’re looking at, how they’re getting to your site. All those sorts of things are very very
important and it’s not just about knowing those things, but it’s also about helping you to make decisions on things you do in the future too. Using your analytics to be able to make marketing decisions moving over or moving forward. And so if you don’t install that from day one well then you’re just putting yourself at a disadvantage because you’re losing out on data, so even if you don’t plan on opening it up, or looking at it you want to put it on day one. So it’ll start tracking and gathering all that really important website analytic data.

02:35 David Blackmon: Yeah absolutely, you want to know where your where your website viewers are coming from, you know. Where is your audience at, who they are, and stuff.. And it’s really important. Number two on our list is the Facebook Pixel. If you’re not familiar with that term Facebook, the Pixel it is a tracking code that you put on your website, which is going to allow you to retarget people on Facebook. So if you’ve ever visited a Website looking for a new car for example and then you go hop on over to the Facebook and all of a sudden you see a lot of car ads in your Facebook feed. Well guess what’s happening? You’re being retargeted to by that car company that you were looking at cars on their website and stuff, and they’re basically trying to get you to buy their products and services, and that’s okay it’s just part of marketing and stuff, but that’s how it’s done? You want to have that Facebook Pixel on all from the beginning as well just like Google Analytics. So that you can start capturing that data you may not use it immediately you may never run a Facebook ad in your business career and that’s okay, but should you choose to you’ll at least have that data to know who came to your site looking for you, or your services, or products, and you can start marketing to them whenever you decide to do that. If you choose to.

04:00 Tim Strifler: Yeah exactly. Because they a Facebook Pixel that has weeks or months or better yet years of data. Your ads are going to be so much more effective than a Facebook Pixel that’s brand new. So if  you decide to do Facebook out of the blue, and you have no Pixel no data well you’re starting from complete scratch on every level. But if you have a Facebook Pixel has a ton of data it’s going to be smarter and so it’s going to know what type of website visitors will what types of people visit your website and what types of people buy and all sorts of things, and so you can literally tell Facebook “go find me more people like the people that have purchased already”. And Facebook is that smart, but if you don’t put that Pixel on there you can’t do it. 

04:41 Tim Strifler: The next one on our list is a a site map tool. So this kind of goes hand in hand with Ggoogle Analytics. You want to set up
a sitemap tool and then submit it to Google Webmaster tools, or is it Google Site Console now Site Console..

05:01 David Blackmon: Search console..

05:40 Tim Strifler: …Search console! Man they always change the names of all their products! G-Suite, Google apps, Search consoles… uh Webmaster Tools all those things.. It’s currently called Search Console and basically that is your connection to Google. And so you submit your sitemap there, and then Google can start indexing your website more effectively and then anytime you add more content to your site, your  Sitemap updates automatically. And then Google has that index so it knows “oh hey there’s a new web page on this site” and they don’t have to, you know, find it. From some other way they’re finding it directly uh through you and so the way you do that is through an SEO plugin, David and I are big fans of Yoast. Always had good success using Yoast there’s other plugins like All-in-one SEO and SEO Framework and all that I’m  pretty sure they all have the site map built in too,  but that’s how you do it and then you just take that sitemap url plug it into the search console and then. . Yeah that’s something that you need to do on every WordPress website for marketing purposes. 

06:05 David Blackmon: Yeah and I will throw this out there as a bonus tip. In august WordPress 5.5 is going to be released that is an update to WordPress. One of the default features that are going to be put into WordPress is a sitemap tool you’re going to be able to do your sitemap from directly within WordPress because it’s so important. I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for WordPress to actually put it into the basic you know the core product itself.  So um look forward to that in august you won’t even have to use an SEO plugin to do it. Should you not choose to fourth on our list and definitely not least for marketing purposes is some type of email subscription tool. The de facto go-to for most WordPress websites when they get started is Mailchimp. Mailchimp is free up to the first 2 000 subscribers, so most people that build a website they don’t have a tremendous email list, but you want to start building this list from day one. Because you want to be able to market to those customers I  can tell you and I think Tim’s going to agree with me, email marketing is by far the still the most effective marketing that you can actually do. People think “oh I don’t read emails anymore, who the heck uses email? Slack is an email killer, you know we don’t even use it anymore!” Well let me tell you if we could send an email every hour, guess what we’d send an email every hour because every time we send an email  regardless of the fact that it’s a sales email or a tutorial or any type. Whatsoever our Sales go through the roof. So email marketing  is still extremely effective. People still read emails. I still read emails, so you want to start building that email list immediately! So get yourself set up with something like Mailchimp. It easily integrates with WordPress, just about any WordPress theme in the world. And it’s free for up to the first 2000 subscribers which is huge. By the time you get to 2 000 subscribers you can probably start making enough money off of that email list to cover the cost of Mailchimp’s paid plan. 

08:22 Tim Strifler: Yep absolutely email marketing is extremely effective, and just like we said previously, even if you don’t plan on really doing a lot of marketing right away, if you start kind of building those emails and stuff like that, you can, you know, save yourself a lot of time later when all of a sudden you want to send an email, but you don’t have anyone on your list. However one thing I recommend is if you’re not gonna be actively sending emails least set up an autoresponder or welcome email when someone responds,  just saying “hey thank you so much for
subscribing to my, list I’m not going to be sending emails actively yet, so you might not hear it from me for a while, but if you have any questions reach out  type of thing”. That way people you kind of like setting that expectation so then later if when you do emails and start email marketing they’ll remember “oh yeah he said he was going to be emailing me for a while and then now he is it doesn’t seem”  so out of the blue because you warned them that you weren’t going to be sending him an email right away.

09:20 David Blackmon: All right! Well this concludes episode 651 for things you need to install on every wordpress website for marketing purposes. We hope you’ve gotten a lot out of this. Tomorrow we’ve got another great topic for you. Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

09:38 Tim Strifler: Take care bye-bye.