Your Website Makes An Impression
Trying to market a website that isn’t optimized makes about as much sense as attempting to solve a math problem by chewing bubble gum. Even if you’re primarily marketing on a 3rd party marketplace, like Amazon or eBay, a website is imperative if you’d ever like to be a digital self-sufficient business. Building an optimized, trackable website is the start to your digital foundation strategy.
In my decade of digital marketing experience, I’ve seen a vast number of clients who approach me to market their website and don’t yet have the basics of an optimized website in place. We live in a time where roughly 52% of all website traffic is viewed from a mobile phone. If users are having to pinch and zoom on your website, they’ll bounce quickly. During your entire website building process, build it in such a way that keeps things simple and relevant.
Before you put a dime into marketing I’d at minimum have a mobile-optimized, analytics tracked website that you can A/B test content with. Whether you’re pushing form-fills or selling product, just remember at least half of your customers’ first impressions will come from them viewing your mobile website.
Follow the steps below to get you started on creating a digital first website presence. And as always, feel free to contact us if you get stuck.
1) Purchase a hosing account and install WordPress
First step to setting up your own blog or website is to have a hosting account and install WordPress (the blogging and website building software). There is a range for pricing and performance options to consider, but if you’re just getting started, I’d recommend going with a budget friendly option. You’re looking at something under the $10 per month mark. You can purchase a hosting package here.
This WordPress Basic plan is plenty for a new blog or website. Unless you have more than 25,000 monthly visitors, this will be perfect. These plans set up the basics of your site automatically and take no coding or technical computer knowledge!
You can save a few bucks by lengthening the amount of hosting you purchase up front. If not, $8.99/month it is.
Sign in or create a new account to finish the transaction. During these steps you can also add an SSL Certificate to your site to make it more secure. This is an optional step for blogs, but required for any site looking to sell any type of product.
Once you’ve completed the transaction, you will see your new website being built in the background! Congrats! Wait a few minutes and we’ll be on to the fun stuff.
Here you will start filling out some of the details for your specific brand or blog. Make sure you take note of the Username and Password section here. This is the username and password that you will use to login and edit the content of your website or blog.
NICE! WordPress is installed. Follow the “WP Admin” button to the Dashboard of your website.
This is optional, but I recommend going through the steps as it will save you some time and you’ll learn a few important things along the way. Follow the “Start Wizard” button and know that nothing is permanent and can all be changed at a later time as needed.
The last step here will be selecting a Theme (now it’s actually fun). These Themes are all free, but definitely have some limitations in terms of design and layout changes. If you are looking for a more custom layout, I highly recommend Divi Theme from Elegant Themes!
You’re done! Well, are you really ever done?
Your website is created and you’re now in the WordPress Dashboard. This is the central hub where you can make changes to your site, add pages, write blog posts, change themes and so much more.
Note that the website is setup with a temporary domain name. You can follow the link there in your WordPress Dashboard to either transfer or purchase a new domain name where you purchased the hosting account earlier.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, Chasing This will receive an affiliate commission.