“WordPress Strategies,” eh? Sounds high-falutin doesn’t it? I mean, WordPress is just a blogging website platform, right? Where does this “strategy” idea come from? Well there any more ways for a business to leverage WordPress than just launching a website that uses it.
1.) Offer a WordPress “Plugin“
With there being over 13 million self-hosted websites running on WordPress, and rapidly growing, one great WordPress Strategy is to offer “plugins” for some of those sites. Much like how business people today are falling all over themselves to launch an iPhone App, a B-to-C strategy, launching a WordPress Plugin is analogous but as a B-to-B strategy. And some businesses can reap huge rewards for doing so.
What types of companies can benefit from offering plugins? Franchisors, Software-as-a-Service companies, Newspapers and Magazines, Real Estate Brokers, Distributors, and more. Any organization that can benefit from integration with other organizations in their industry, especially data aggregation across-like companies can potentially benefit from offering or using WordPress plugins.
Want some examples? Here are just a few:
- Salesforce.com offers a WordPress plugin that implements a contact form that feeds directly into the website owner’s customer database in their Salesforce.com account.
- Publish2 is offering a WordPress plugin that allows leading bloggers to make their content available to newspapers. (This it the company trying to make the Associated Press obsolete!)
- Get Satisfaction is offering a WordPress plugin that automatically content from a WordPress site as a topic on the website owners Get Satisfaction account.
- Diverse Solutions is offering a WordPress plugin that allows integration of multiple listing data for real estate properties on a website.
- Atlanta’s own Evoca is offering a WordPress plugin that enables people visiting the website to verbally record comments and suggestions and more.
While companies have been doing website integrations for years, offering a WordPress plugin means that it’s usually no harder than a point and click endeavor for a non-technical WordPress website owner to incorporate into their website.
2.) Host Websites for Your Businesses’ Constituents
A second WordPress strategy is to offering hosting for websites for an organization’s constituents using the new multisite feature of WordPress, especially when they would rather spend their time running their businesses instead of maintaining a website.
For example, a franchisor could offer all of their franchisees a websites with tons of functionality specific to their business. A restaurant distributor could offer restaurant websites for their customers that have ordering integration built in. A real estate broker could offer all their agents their own websites, but aggregate all their content on the main site. A newspaper could offer all of it’s columnists their own online magazine brand, and sell advertising on top of them. A vehicle manufacturer could offer websites for it’s exclusive dealers. And the list goes on.
Got more examples? Let us know!
So there you have it; two strategies for existing businesses wanting to either leverage the huge installed base of WordPress websites or to leverage the multisite features of WordPress. If you have more examples of businesses that are 1.) offering WordPress plugins or 2.) leveraging WordPress multisite among their constituents, lets us know in the comments.
Turns out that Tungle also has a WordPress widget:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tungleme-official-widget/
Hi
Number 2 has legs. Target some vertical market players. Interesting
I’m looking at targeting WordPress users from WordPress.com that need to come to a better platform such as we are building.
regards
Steve Wyman
Cloud Ventures Group
Steve, thanks for commenting. Your service looks interesting and will be one to watch.