Why WordPress is the CMS of Choice for Top Internet Marketers

Nearly 20% of the internet is built on WordPress, taking advantage of the extensibility and ease of use of WordPress to accomplish their goals. Mom and Pop businesses are using WordPress for their brands, large enterprises are taking advantage of WordPress as a large-scale CMS.

It’s also no secret that WordPress is one of the top choices for internet marketers. The uptick in managed hosting as an industry is proof-positive that the WordPress market and community as a whole are exploding. In fact, about ⅓ of all WordPress installations have been installed in the last year. At last count, there were 145 million downloads of WordPress in the last 8 years, and 45 million in the previous 12 months (source in previous link). The WordPress Community is exploding, and as demand for WordPress hosting goes up, affiliates who have experience in the industry will take advantage of its growth to promote their products.

I spoke with a few top internet marketers last week at the Affiliate Summit West to get some tips about how they use the extensibility of WordPress to build their communities and drive traffic.

Easily add functionality with plugins instead of writing new code every time. In January 2012, there were 19,000 WordPress plugins. There are more than 23,000 now. That’s incredible.

Marketers use plugins like, Ad Injection, which makes it simple to ad advertisements from almost any network like, Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc. Mike Zielonka of Tuna Traffic uses the plugin to inject ads into his content, but also control the number and frequency of ads to maximize conversions.

Syed Balkhi has been using WordPress for years, both as a designer and the marketer behind WP Beginner and List25.com. He knows that WordPress makes it easy to manage affiliate links. On many of his sites, he uses the ThirstyAffiliates plugin to manage all his affiliate links in one place and automatically link them within your post content.

When you’re building and optimizing a landing page, WordPress has one of the simplest user interfaces you can use to tweak the page based on customer data you’re collecting with an analytics plugin like Clicky. Clicky tracks heatmaps of customer behavior, and collects user-based data, rather than aggregate data like Google Analytics. David Vogelpohl, of Marketing Clique is a mad scientist of analytics with the data he collects with Clicky.

David also recommends using one of growing list of mobile-ready WordPress themes. As more and more traffic becomes mobile, rather than confined to a laptop, if your sites aren’t responsive, or mobile optimized, you’re literally missing out on engaging a huge segment of your community. Hundreds of WordPress themes are mobile right out of the box, but we always recommend bringing a quality designer on to help you make the most out of your design.

One of the hidden values of WordPress isn’t contained inside the software stack. It’s not the plugins or the themes, but the men and women creating them. More than 20,000 people make their living with WordPress. That means a savvy marketer knows there will not only be a huge number of open-source themes and plugins to add functionality to a site, but that when you have a question, or need some advice, there are literally thousands of people inside the community who can answer your questions and help you build a profitable, and successful WordPress site.

A Community that big means you can focus on what you do best, driving traffic, and partner up with someone who can help you bend WordPress to your will.

Happy marketing!