FACES of WORDPRESS: Alisha Lampley

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Coily Locks is more than Alisha Lampley’s blog; it’s a perfect example of the power and gravitas that WordPress provides for its users. “I started this blog as a way to share my natural hair journey, the craziness that is motherhood and my love of food, fashion and most importantly…wine!”

“I was on Blogger,” she says. “And then I joined a couple of blogging groups. A lot of people told me that if I wanted to make money and monetize, it would make more sense to switch over to WordPress.”

Alisha’s been using WordPress for over two years. She loves being involved in the WordPress community, as well as the free resources, tools, tech support and plugins. Alisha’s constantly challenging herself to learn new tricks and best practices. “There’s still plenty of stuff where I’m like, oh, I didn’t know it did that!”

That’s the beauty of WordPress, just like wine, it only gets better with age.

In fact, learning the basics of WordPress has allowed Alisha the opportunity to start a home business in addition to her blog, selling custom jewelry through Origami Owl.

“I wouldn’t have done that otherwise and it’s where all the traffic to my site comes in,” she says.

For new users, Alisha recommends the following plugins:

  • NoFollow. This plugin provides fine-grained control of linking for SEO purposes, containing a package of tools to increase your control of the rel=”nofollow” tag on every link on your blog.
  • JetPack. Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.
  • Broken Link Checker. This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.
  • Google Analytics. The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata.

And for those of you looking for some expert advice on wine, be sure to check out her blog: http://coilylocks.com/.