the competitive online market you must brand yourself as a knowledgeable, serious businessperson, and in order to do that it is imperative to have your own site – NOT a replicated company site and NOT a free blogging platform.
You are about to get your very own branded website to direct people to your business and advertise the opportunity of working with you rather than using your replicated site to advertise for your company. This is one of the most essential pieces of information you will learn throughout this entire course – don’t gloss over it!
Remember setting up your domain and hosting accounts for your Lead Capture page? Well, we’re going to go through all that one more time. Pick a domain name for your website first. This domain should have your name in it – remember self branding is important. This is attraction marketing; you want people to remember you, not your primary opportunity.
Once you’ve chosen a domain, register it at GoDaddy and get it hosted with Host Gator so that you can install WordPress. (If you don’t remember how to do this, go back to Section 2 and watch the videos again!) Now that you have it set up – let the fun begin!
The next thing you are going to want to do is transfer all of the posts and articles you have written previously for your business into your website. This would include any articles you have been submitting and, if you had started a blog previously, any of those posts.
Your website will work just like a blog (because it is a blog) so just go to Posts “Add New” and copy and paste your text and/or pictures into the body of the post. If you would like to use the original dates of publication simply go over to the right-hand side of the screen under publish. Where it says “Publish immediately” click edit and select the date you want it to be submitted on.
This will work well because even if you have just one or two posts to begin with it will help you to see how your layout will look like when you begin posting.Once you’re finished transferring your articles go to the Appearance tabs and click on “themes”. Under “Install Themes” search for a theme you like and install it. After it’s installed go back to your “Manage Themes” tab and click activate. To
look at your blog click the domain at the top left-hand corner of your screen.You are going to want to pick a theme that doesn’t look too much like a blog. In fact, I think if you search “not a blog” under themes it will show you a few pages of themes that are designed specifically to not look like blogs. To see some examples of home business websites created this way go HERE (Antisnews Theme) and HERE (Flexibility 3 Theme).
Once you have a theme selected, you are probably going to want to customize it to fit your business, personality and various needs. Many themes have the ability to change color and other options. Usually under Appearance you will find “Theme Options” or some such tab, click it and see what different options it gives you.
Because each theme is different, I cannot give you step-by-step instructions on how to work with your specific theme, but it really should not be too difficult, and your theme should have a support page you can access.
I have found with many of the themes that it is helpful to have pictures with your posts; if this is the case it is easy to edit your posts to add a relevant picture. If you Google “free pictures” you can find several websites that offer royalty free photos to add to your blog posts; simply download them to your computer and upload them to your post.
If you notice on the sidebars and possibly the header or footer of your home page there are empty spaces called “widgetized areas”. If you go to Appearance and Widgets you will find a page that will allow you to easily put things in the empty spaces on your blog. Again, different themes will have different widgets available so see what your theme supports and try out some combinations.
One thing you will want to do for sure is to add social media buttons to your home page so that people can connect with you on the various networking sites you belong to. Not only will this give you traffic to your profiles, but it also legitimizes you by showing that you have a vast online presence. Right now we have only set up Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You will be getting more accounts, but for now just do these.
To make your own social media buttons you can Google (the site+button) and go to pictures. You will want one that is about 50×50 or smaller in size. Download all the buttons you want to use to your computer and then go to add a new post.
Insert one of your pictures into your post and then go to the HTML tab. Copy the code and paste it into a Word document or some place you can get to it again.
Delete the code and repeat the process for all three buttons.
When you are done go to the admin part of your site under widgets (don’t worry about saving the post, as it will be blank anyway). Insert a text widget into the column or sidebar you want to put your buttons in and use the html code from your post. You should now have three “paragraphs” of code in your text box. To link them to your profiles find the link for your specific profile page and replace the FIRST link in the html code with your profile link.
Save your work and then look at your site to see if they are set up properly! You can use this method to add any picture you like to your website, such as if you want to make your own advertisement to link to one of your capture pages, etc.
You must have an opt-in box on your site, and it should be positioned “above the fold” so it can be seen by visitors without having to scroll down. The purpose of the opt-in box is to capture your leads names and email addresses so that you can build your list.
What you provide back to the lead in return for their name and email address can be a newsletter, free video series on recruiting, network marketing training, your own product…the list goes on. Just make sure that you are providing value back so that you develop a positive relationship with your list.
You need to have banners on your blog (the right side of your blog is recommended as it’s been proven to convert better than the left side for some reason) for some of the affiliate programs that you are involved in. We all want to sign people up in our primary business, but as crazy as it sounds most visitors will not sign up for your primary business.
Network marketers are always looking for productivity tools and training though. These are the types of products to promote with banners on your site. Personally, I change mine up from time to time depending on how well they are converting and I would recommend that you do the same.
After your home page looks like you want to, it the next step is to add more pages. You will want at least three to start off with. Your Home page should be mostly done at this point. The theme really will do most of the work on that for you. The next page you will want is an About page, or something similar. To create a page go to the admin part of your site (which you can find at http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/) and under the pages tab click “Add New”.
Your site should already have an About page, so just click on that and edit it. You can refer back to the websites from earlier to get ideas for your About page. I recommend just a short welcome, a blurb about yourself and your business and a picture of you. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy or elaborate. You can always edit it later to make it better if you’d like; right now we just want to get it up and running.
The next essential page to have is a “Join My Team” page where you can put your primary opportunities down for people to view. Notice this page is secondary to both your home page, which features the articles and information you have published and to your About page which introduces them to you. YOU are the main feature of your website, your business opportunities are of less importance, contrary to what most network marketing strategies would have you believe. This is one of the reasons why it is so imperative you have your own site rather than just the replicated site your business gives you. Their goal is to grow their business, not yours. You can always add more pages as you decide what you want the focus of your website to be and the different resources you want to offer people.
Your website should be a place people want to go to get new information and resources to learn how to grow their business. If it’s a valuable resource, people will keep coming back!
Whew! And that is all folks. What a lesson, but now you have your very own website! Congratulations!! I know we talked about backlinks briefly yesterday, but tomorrow I am going to show you how to use more networking sites and even free blogging sites to drive traffic to the website we just created today. And it’s all free! (I hope you love that word as much as I do.) See you there!