I have been admiring professional authors, speakers, consultants, and bloggers for some time now. They all seem to be able to position their company, products, and personal brands successfully. I kept asking myself if there was something that they had in common or was their something special about them. I came to the realization that their commonality is sharing. They all promoted their brands by sharing some of their expertise. For free.
They didn’t share everything otherwise they would have no business model. They share just enough. They do this to gather a large base of followers. If every-time someone visited their websites and a credit card order form came up, followers would get quickly discouraged. By giving followers a taste and valuing them enough to provide quality content, the professionals start to develop the relationship.
Realizing that this was the key to a successful brand, I sought out to create this blog and with today’s technology was able to get it up and running in hours.
How I created this blog in less than 1 day
- Choose your domain name, purchase it, and set up your hosting. I went with GoDaddy.com because of their customer support and because of their scalability. If this blog starts to amass a larger volume of traffic, I knew they could grow with me. There are thousands of companies to choose from but if you want to follow what I did, I’d recommend them. Pick a domain name that’s available and choose a fairly basic hosting. You can always upgrade later.
- Install Word Press on your hosting server. Another advantage to GoDaddy.com is they’ve figured this part out for you. If you want you can “Launch” your hosting setup and “Install” the WordPress application. They upload all of the files in the folder you choose (I chose the root folder) and get it up and running within a few minutes. The alternate way is to go to WordPress.com, download the files, and then upload them via your FTP software.
- Install Your Word Press Theme. There are hundreds of thousands of themes to choose from. Some are free and others cost money. I paid a nominal $49 for a theme from TemplateMonster.com. I believe they will even install it for you if you want. I bought it, downloaded it, and uploaded it to the /themes/ folder withing 15 minutes.
- Customize Your Word Press Theme. Now that you have it installed it’s time to make it your own. This is the beauty of Word Press. You can do everything through web interface after you login at www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/. You can even change the code of your CSS or theme files.
- Add Your Graphics. If you’ve got Photoshop (or equivalent) then you’re on your way to quickly making the blog yours. Create a logo and place it in the header section of your theme. Add your social media icons and some special images around signing up for RSS or email alerts. On your first post set a ‘featured image’ that’s 150 x 150 pixels in dimensions.
- Add your content. Now that you’ve got the some of the graphics set up… Write your first post. Write your first page. Add an about page. Add a contact page. Add some value to your blog. Start to think about your target audience and who they are going to be. What do they like to read about?
- Fill in the gaps with plugins.Now that you have some content and it actually looks like a website, you can start to go back to some of the basics of your website. If you’d like it to load quicker, download the plugin “W3 Total Cache”. If you’d like a cool contact form that pops up download “Slick Contact Forms”. Download “Google XML Sitemaps” and set up your Google Webmaster Tools account to get into the search engines quickly.
And that’s it. Your blog is up and running with full hosting, complete WYSIWYG editing, and content that can be created by you from anywhere (including your iPhone if you have the WordPress App).
