This is Part 6 of my Beyond the Words series exploring the various and sundry ways in which you can add multimedia such as images, videos, audios, and downloadables (PDFs) to your website to spice it up.
We’re coming down the home stretch with our multimedia series here. So far we’ve explored some in depth recommendations on how to prep and include images on your WordPress posts and pages, looked at a couple of alternatives for easily embedding YouTube or Vimeo videos, and delved into some creative ways to use plain audio (MP3) files on your site.
But did you know WordPress offers a whole world of things you can easy-peasy-lemon-squeezey embed in your blog posts in order to make your content more interesting, more engaging, and more interactive?
It’s as simple as pasting a link on a blank line.
With all of the examples below, it really is as simple as copying the URL from the address bar in your web browser and pasting it onto it’s own line (no formatting, no indenting, no nothing) in either the Visual editor or the Text editor. (I prefer to do it in the text editor so I can make doubly sure that there isn’t any extra code around it, but that’s a personal preference. It really should work just fine either way.)
Take a gander at a few of the possibilities:
Share a tweet
I’ll admit that the practical purpose for this eludes me, mainly because I’m not a huge twitter person. But I do think it’s kind of cool that you can pull out and share a specific tweet right within your blog post.
I’ve seen this in use on other blogs, and you could possibly use it to share a positive review of your product or service someone has tweeted about or as a way to give attribution to someone who shared something that sparked a blog post for you.
On about my 5th cup of coffee today. Should be nice and jittery for my presentation at the Seattle WP Meetup tonight https://t.co/ktknbgBOJ7
— Nichole Betterley (@NBetterley) September 20, 2016
Take a Poll
Have you ever wanted to find out what your readers think about something? Polldaddy (which is owned and operated by Automattic, the fine makers of WordPress) is a way to do that. And lo and behold, you can plop your poll right into your blog post so people don’t have to leave your site to weigh in.
Post your Slides
Slides that you put up on Slideshare (owned by LinkedIn – what a handy way to tie your professional presentations into your LinkedIn profile!!) are equally as easy to share. Below is the presentation I gave at the Seattle WordPress meetup last fall that spawned this whole Beyond the Word series.
Connect in Person
Meetups are fun, and if you’re a solopreneur like me, it’s kinda healthy to get out of the house every now and again. Gives you a reason to put on your fancy pants (a half-step above yoga pants for me) and meet some other nice people.
I volunteer to help organize and occasionally present at a local meetup called Tech it Easy with WP where we focus on helping small business owners use and leverage their WordPress websites. If you want to promote a particular meetup, you just have to paste the link to it right in your editor.
For instance… at Tech it Easy, we’ve got a meetup coming up in a few weeks where we’re looking at plugins that are specifically for local business owners. If you’re in the Seattle/Bellevue area, we’d love to meet you there!
These are just the tip of the iceberg. You can see the full list of what’s embeddable by pasting a simple URL into your blog post here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds
I’ve got one last little tidbit to share with you next time when we’ll take a look at how you can add PDFs, Word docs, and other downloads into your content to handily share files with your readers. Until then, happy embedding!
