WordPress turns 15 this year, and in those years, it's become the most dominant content management software in the world. Currently, WordPress boasts more than 75% of CMS market share globally. It also powers more than 27% of all websites—that's more than Joomla, Drupal, Shopify and Magento combined.

The Marketing Power of a WordPress Blog

Featuring a blog is one of the best ways to generate new leads for your business and drive traffic to your WordPress site. It's one of the reasons more than half of marketers say creating blog content is their top marketing priority, and with good reason. Consider for example these metrics from HubSpot:

• Businesses that post 11 or more blogs a month on average get three times more website traffic than those that blog just once a month
• Companies that blog 11 or more times a month generate 4.5 times as many leads as companies which blog 4 or fewer times
• Almost half of all internet users say they read blog posts

Given the power of blogs to generate leads and drive sales, it's not surprising so many WordPress users have created blogs on their sites. Since its inception, WordPress has helped more than 130,000 users start a blog (according to WPBeginner).

WordPress Gives You the Tools to Make Your Blog a Success

One of the chief advantages of having a WordPress site is the number of plugins, tools and other resources it makes available to its users—and blogging is no exception. Following are 8 of the best WordPress tools to manage and grow your blog:

1. Keeping Your Blog Secure with Sucuri

The number of hackers and cybercriminals surfing the internet looking for vulnerable websites is on the rise. They don't care how big or small your business is—they only care about whether it's secure, and whether they can successfully launch a malware, ransomware or denial of service attack.

WordPress is aware of that threat, and so provides its users with Sucuri, which monitors security threats and provides real-time alerts. For example, over one recent 3-month period, Sucuri successfully blocked almost half a million WordPress attacks.

2. Optimizing Your Site with Yoast SEO

Your WordPress blog isn't going to do your business much good if your customers can't find it. That's why it's critically important to optimize your site so it appears near the top of search results. Yoast SEO is a powerful, feature-rich search engine optimization (SEO) plugin. It's easy to install and set up and provides comprehensive SEO services.

3. Keeping Your Blogs Organized with Edit Flow

Especially for businesses with many blogs and multiple authors, it's important to have an effective workflow management system, and Edit Flow is one of the best. With Edit Flow, you can easily provide feedback to your bloggers, see you're your editorial calendar and post custom statuses for your blogs.

4. Getting Customer Feedback with Polldaddy

If you don't offer outstanding customer service, your business won't be around for very long. Certainly, you can look at marketing intelligence data to find out what's working and what isn't, but one of the best ways to find out what your customers think is to ask them.

Polldaddy makes it easy to post customer surveys and polls on your WordPress site, and to embed them directly into your blog posts. With Polldaddy, you can learn quickly and efficiently how to improve the service you offer your customers, one of the best ways to grow your business.

5. Sharpening Your Writing Style with After the Deadline

If your blogs are replete with misspellings and grammatical errors, it's going to reflect badly on you and your business. Of course, there are many tools that will ensure your copy is grammatically accurate, but After the Deadline is one of the best. In addition to catching these kinds of mistakes before you publish your blogs, After the Deadline will monitor your writing style and enhance each post's readability.

6. Mastering Email Marketing with OutreachPlus

Email marketing is among the most effective (and cost-effective) marketing strategies available to your business. For example, almost 60% of B2B marketers say that email marketing is their top strategy for generating revenue and return on investment—and B2C customers who purchase products through promotional emails on average spend 138% more than those who don't.

Of course, effectively leveraging email marketing comes with its own set of challenges. As your business grows, for example, it becomes increasingly difficult to personalize your emails to a growing community of subscribers. OutreachPlus makes email marketing easier. Among its many features are automated replies, the ability to respond in real time to customer actions and ensuring that every email is personalized based on customer data.

7. Generating Quality Leads with OptinMonster

Your business can't grow if you don't generate a constant supply of new, high-quality leads. Unfortunately, lead generation (along with driving site traffic) is the number one challenge for marketers (according to HubSpot's State of Inbound 2017 report).

Because of its importance, WordPress offers several plugins to help with lead generation. Of these, OptinMonster is arguably the best. With OptinMonster, you can boost your lead generation efforts with quality customized forms. In addition to making it easier for site visitors to provide their contact information, OptinMonster has a powerful analytics program and makes split testing easy.

8. Keeping Your Passwords Strong, Secure and Organized with LastPass

How many passwords do you have (if you answered, “too many,” you're not alone)? Are you confident your passwords are sufficiently strong to avoid detection? Do you remember all of them, or at least have a safe location where you can find them?

Managing passwords has become something of an intolerable chore for many businesses, and the bigger your business, the more cumbersome it is. That's why WordPress offers LastPass. Using LastPass, you can easily create Passwords strong enough to ensure the security of your information. In addition, LastPass will store every password in a single and secure location, making them easy to find when you need them.

Conclusion

Blogging is among the best ways to show customers your human side and give them the kind of relevant content which will build trust and grow your business—but blogging can be complicated. WordPress will give you the tools you need to make blogging easier and increase the odds it will help you achieve your marketing goals.

To learn more about how to start a killer blog for your business, download your free Blog Starter Kit eBook, or check out these additional blog-building resources, today.