3. Blogs & Social Media presence: Here I’ll take you step by step through setting up a blog thats your very own and carving out a consistent and killer presence on all the major social media platforms with the least effort! Best of all you’ll get the entire frame of your business set up for less than $100 bucks!
- Searching domain names, choosing one
- Buying hosting
- Using wordpress, free templates, premium templates and must have plug ins
- The main social media platforms you need to be using
Why you should be blogging now!
Firstly blogging is fun when you are doing it about something you love (note: remember that passion we talked about earlier?) secondly you don’t have to be a good writer to blog. If you are, more power to you. If you hate writing try podcasting (just record your voice using a decent microphone (try the blue snowball) and audacity which is free! If you hate podcasting do videos (by a flip cam or use the camera embedded in your laptop or buy a web cam and upload directly to youtube) and if you want to have a written blog but don’t want to do the writing pay someone or get your voice transcribed. Something important to remember when you begin blogging (or vlogging or podcasting) is to keep your site’s theme intact. That means pick a theme, say copy writing, and stick to it. Don’t mix it with your love of knitting or your freaky fascination with feet. Keep on topic!
Now that we’ve decided who you are, what you want and where your passion lies (as well as what your brand is) lets get started!
Follow this guide step by step and you should be as good as gold in getting your online business started for under $100 bucks!
- First of all think of about 5-10 ‘keywords’ you are going to use to describe your brand. Going back to the Dan the hyper active, fun loving, rock climbing guy we’d chose: rock climbing, rock climbing guide, how to rock climb, crazy rock climber, or high risk outdoor sports. Go to www.instantdomainsearch.com and toy around with some titles to see if they are taken or not. Something like ‘escaping the 9 to 5‘ described to me exactly what it was I was doing when I started this blog that is why I chose it, first I wanted ‘escape the 9 to 5′ but it was taken so I chose the former. Dan may chose: rockclimbingdan.com or dan-the-climber.com. If you have a brand based around moms and blogging you may chose mommyblogosphere.com or mommyblogger.com (taken by the way). Look around at some of your favorite sites and see how they chose their URLs. Take time in choosing yours, even a week is fine. Just make sure whatever it is you LOVE it because you’ll be stuck with it for a while.
examples:
www.entrepreneurs-journey.com > A website that tracks Yaro Starak’s (super blogger) journey through entrepreneurship, he now makes $500k a year through his online business and blogging.
www.ittybiz.com > A website that states “marketing for businesses with marketing departments”. Its made by and for small business owners.
www.smartpassiveincome.com > A website that teaches you how to build passive income streams, the smart way.
www.abc-of-rockclimbing.com > Teaches you just that.
www.travelblog.org > A website dedicated to world travel and focused towards the blog reading demographic.
www.beaprivateeye.com > Want to know how to be a private eye? This site can help.
As you see its much better to have a website that’s name explains what its all about. This makes branding a whole lot easier and also makes ranking in search engines for your chosen keywords better down the line.
3. Alright so you’ve picked your blog name, bought your URL and hosting… now what? Well make your blog look nice of course. What I am going to suggest is using WordPress.org a free platform for blogging and one that is highly optimized for SEO (you’ll be happy about this down the line). Bluehost allows you to easily install wordpress just like this:
4. Once you install wordpress you still need a theme to make the site ready for the world. Think of a theme much like a cell phone or computer skin. Its a one size fits all, slightly customizable free thing that fits over your wordpress account and allows you to look pretty to the world. For now a free theme is fine, but if you want to go above and beyond check out www.woothemes.com which is an awesome place to find premium themes that are highly customizable. Note: if you have NO experience whatsoever with wordpress, don’t want to learn how to tweak it, or are just lazy you can contact me at marenkate@gmail.com tell me what theme you want and what tweaks you want done and I’ll send you a quote, which means I can do it for you for a reasonable price as long as your requests aren’t insane like “make my website look like www.dreamworks.com” because no, I can’t do that
5. Perfect plugins. In this video I am going to show you exactly how to install the best plug ins in a simple manner. These will help your site look and function better.
6. Social media you should be using. Here is a video of all the social media sites you need to be on.. with a brief description of why and which kinds of businesses/brands each will do the most for. Also here is a list of them with links for those of you who don’t want to watch a video (lazy!).
Super Start Up Secret
Want to know the number one way to get more people clicking on your blog? Comment on other people’s blogs. This is a highly effective strategy that is highly underused. Comment on blogs that have to do with your topic, are your competitors, etc. Be relevant, be short & sweet but also be sure that you position yourself as a person of interest and expertise. This will not only get you on the radar screen of the blogger (who maybe later you can guest post for) but will also allow you to get other readers clicking through your profile to see what you write.
Action Step: comment on this post to get in the hang of commenting on everything you read! Feel free to ask questions, tell me my grammar sucks or that I have a bunch of run on sentences (sad but true!). Then keep on reading by going to section 4
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