4. What is WordPress?
What is it?
How can you use it to create your own brand?
Achievements
Creativity
Previous work & experience
Theme
How have I used WordPress?
Livi Wilkes, 20, 2nd year of studying PR & Comms at Southampton Solent.
Explain logo
Livi Wilkes, 3rd year PR student, blogger at Live Love Laugh PR – a blog aimed at PR students, and Editor of the Solent PR blog where I create content I and also attend events around the uni and take photos and do interviews
I started blogging in 2012, random blog about anything and everything, then when I joined uni and started contributing to the solent PR blog I realised I had loads of pr-y stuff to talk about so decided to re-brand myself! Since then, I create posts on tips and advice for pr students, interviews with PR pros, blogging about events I attend
Achievements – in a book
- best pr blogger
What I’ve achieved so far – interviews with PR professionals across the country and one from the U.S.A. Started out as just a little summer project so I didn’t forget about PR over the 4 month summer, but turned into something big and really successful. Most of the views I get a day are on these interviews. I’ve interviewed people from various sectors and even the head of comms at the BBC which was cool. I also do a similar feature on Solent PR – Solent PR Student of the Month. Interview a student from any year about their favourite bit of PR, what they want to do in the future etc..so future students have an idea of what they will be doing.
Before you set up a blog – work out what you want to write about! I went in at 100mph and wrote about random things for a few months, but couldn’t sustain that! Found PR etc…
My personal blog niche is PR – could be fashion, travel, food. To get more regular views need a niche – know what they’ll be reading about!
Solent PR blog site objectives are to
- Reach out to prospective students
Reach out to more current students to post onto the site
Attend events across the university and write them up into a post
Ask for a show of hands about knowledge of wordpress
Wordpress is one of the top blogging sites, a lot of businesses actually run their websites through wordpress. You can buy the domain so, unlike blogger or blogspot, you can have .com or .co.uk etc instead of .wordpress.com. And it costs £10 a year to buy!
How can you use it?
- showcase talents/achievements/how you can help others businesses/what you’ve learned at uni
- Photos! Depending on course
- Creativity – through the wide variety of wordpress themes
- Theme – make it relevant - theres themes available for photography focus and word focus, depending on course
How have I used it? Examples of what you can do, too!
To meet other PR bloggers – they got to know me too!
Sent it out to potential work experience placements – a lot of them seemed impressed with it
Doing interviews with PR professionals
Got a job as Editor of Solent PR blog after learning the ropes from setting up my own blog.
Show how to create a site – URL CANT BE CHANGED!!!! Then log into live love laugh
Here are a few of my tips and hints on what makes a good wordpress site.
Have features. If you have a blog series and throw them out on twitter, people are more likely to come back and see the next one. Interviews, or maybe the 101 about your course/topic of interest where you tell students a bit about a different aspect of the course each week, for example.
Use hashtags. On both the blog post and when you tweet it out.
I recently bought the rights to my personal blog so it is now Live, Love, Laugh PR.com. This has increased my SEO loads! I would advise building a small following and making sure you’re going to really make it worth while, first. You can buy it on different websites, but Wordpress do it for $18 dollars a year which is roughly a tenner.
Follow similar blogs and network.
Choose your tone
About your course
In pairs, interview them about their favourite unit, what they want to do in the future, what they enjoy doing outside of course
Write on a word doc, or piece of paper and keep them and use as a monthly feature to get your blog going
OR whatever blog post you want to do
