I’ve seen a lot of people recommending social media as an ideal way to create a business online. And that has its place. But don’t overlook an long-term success factor:
An internet home of your own—think of it as your home base.
What exactly is a home base? Well, it’s a site of your own where you can share useful information with your niche audience. It helps you to establish credibility and to develop authority.
It’s where you can discuss the needs and desires of your audience and recommend helpful products and services to help solve their problems. You may choose to represent some of those products as an affiliate.
Speaking of representing products as an affiliate: one type of affiliate marketing, called CPA (cost-per-action), requires that you have your own site in order to be approved by affiliate networks used by product owners coordinate their affiliate programs.
It’s also a perfect place from which to launch your own products when the time come.
So what’s the best place to create your home base?
How about a blog like the one you’re reading now?!
A blog is the perfect type of website to share your insights, to offer a newsletter (allowing you to collect email addresses), to recommend products, and more.
You may be wondering whether you couldn’t just do all that on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.
Sure you can. But if you have a site of your own, you have an important operational asset: CONTROL of the venue.
You need to own your internet real estate of your own, rather than using social media platforms exclusively. This puts you in control of your business. When you take advantage of free platforms, you leave someone else with the power – at their whim – to eliminate your business without getting any input from you.
You could build an account with hundreds of popular niche videos on YouTube and wake up one morning to find your channel deleted. Or build a business account on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter and find it removed because someone decided you violated their terms of service.
You have little recourse—if any–when these things happen. They often result in a permanent ban, and no amount of begging or pleading will change the decision.
Then what?
If you have your own site on your own domain, you’re stuck with starting from scratch! You’ve got to hope your audience can find you elsewhere. You’ll need to redo all of the previous articles or videos, and you lose the interaction and engagement you built up over the previous months and years.
When you own your own domain and house a blog on it, you never have to worry about your account disappearing. Your content will be safe on the web day after day. And all of the comments and shares you got from it will stay intact because nobody else is capable of shutting it down.
Now it’s perfectly fine to supplement your virtual real estate with those social media accounts, because they’re great for branding and free traffic – but they shouldn’t be your sole business presence online.
First Step: Get Your Own Domain Name
You need to buy a domain name and use it to host a WordPress blog. That way, your followers can have a regular place they can turn to, and they’ll be confident that you’ll be there.
Choosing a domain name is something some people overthing, because nothing ever feels good enough. Others choose their domain on a whim, not giving it the consideration it deserves. Try to be somewhere in the middle.
There are a few things to consider when selecting a domain name. Most people agree that you should get a dot com extension. It’s what most consumers automatically type in – not .net, .info, or the many others available nowdays.
And you should pick the shortest name possible that makes sense. If you make a name longer than it needs to be, it’s harder for prospective visitors to remember, and it gives them more chances to make a typo when entering your URL into their browser.
You might decide you want to brand your name as a major leader in a particular niche. An example: Tony Robbins did it with in the self-help and other niches.
He owns the domain with his name – TonyRobbins.com. This will be fine if you plan to brand yourself as a major authority within a niche topic. Lots of people do it in various niches, like deangraziosi.com, widely known in the entrepreneur and investment niches.
You don’t have to take that approach. And if you want to sell your site some day, then you shouldn’t! Instead, you can use keywords to develop an attractive domain name. Brainstorm some common words and phrases in your niche such as:
* Dieting
* Weight loss
* Fat Loss
* How to Lose weight
* Lose Weight After Pregnancy
* Burn Fat
* Healthy Weight
*Get Lean Over Fifty
… and so on.
Then use keyword-based domain search tool such as nameboy.com to find different variations, keeping in mind any drilled down angles you may want to target.
Notice that the phrases above don’t include hyphens or numbers. Neither should your domain. You want your url to pass what’s called a “radio-test.” If you heard the website addressed mentioned on the radio, would you know exactly how to type it? A radio announcer probably won’t spell out a web address character by character (nor should they have to). If you heard this url on the radio: “kettlebell-1source.com” would you know that it has a hyphen and the number one? Not if the announcer spoke it as “kettlebell one source dot com.”
If we take a niche example like fasting for weight loss, you can always play around with the wording and find an available url that fits.
At the time of this writing, FastingFatLossTips.com was available, and the word tips is always helpful to put at the end of a domain URL because it tells people they’ll get valuable insights there.
Depending on the form of products you plan to promote, you might even want to use a different combination of words. For example, if you plant to exclusively promote tangible products like protein supplements as an affiliate, you could find a specific buyer-driven domain like: BestProteinBuy.com. It would instantly tell web surfers that that this is where they’ll find a lot of information about a variety of protein products.
Keep away from vague domains like ProductsThatHelp.com (help with what?) or BeASuperstar.com (superstar what? Entrepreneur? Parent?).
Once you find a good domain that’s available look for a domain registrar to make the purchase. Note: the registrar that nameboy.com sends you to if you decied to buy is pricy and charges extra for domain privacy (domain privacy keeps the domain buyer’s personal information hidden, so you don’t get blasted by spam offers for related services). I use and recommend https://namecheap.com
Now, Get Hosting and Install WordPress on Your Domain.
A web host is the company that will make room for your site on their servers. You could buy your domain from your web hosting company, or you could purchase web hosting from the domain registrar. But I recommend that you don’t. If you want to move your site to another host, it’s better if you control the domain through an independent registrar.
My recommendation: purchase your hosting from hostgator.com. That’s who I use, and they’ve proven reliable. And the customer service rocks. I prefer the chat option, and I’ve got used to creating my request in notepad so it’s ready when I start the chat. Why? Because the support staff often join the chat immediately!
There’s a quick process needed to point your domain to your host. Then you’ll want to install WordPress.
Installing WordPress is fairly simple. Most web hosts include WordPress among their options and you can install it on your domain through cPanel (control panel). It takes just a few minutes, and you can find lots of videos on Youube that demonstrate the process.
After you install WordPress, you’ll want to choose a theme whose design works well for your plans. If you want text-based information to be the primary format of your blog, then choose a theme that’s good for that purpose.
Or, pick one that showcases images, if you want the focus to be on pictures—for example, if you’re in the cooking or food niche, where images may play a primary role.
Go through the theme options and change your settings to those that work for you, in terms of things like how the URL is displayed, whether or not visitors have to wait for you to approve their comments, etc.
Set up some common pages for your terms and policies, contact form, and an about-us page that gives them some insight into who is running the blog. Then install any desired plugins to help you operate your blog, such as spam filters, and so on.
Set up the SEO Plan for Your Site
WordPress is great for long-term SEO. Just by adding fresh content on a regular basis, you’ll start to get organic traffic from search engines. It takes time and consistent content. but if you keep at it you’ll get the traffic.
Lots of bloggers spend a lot of time fretting over search engine optimization (SEO). They worry about getting things wrong and they devote countless hours trying to set things up for dominating the search engines or to trying to game the system.
There’s a simpler way. Be sensible about SEO. Do it for humans, not just for bots that crawl your site. It’s easy to balance the two. For one thing, make sure your blog settings let search engines index the site (the wrong settings can discourage them).
Next, you want to make sure you do some things that help your site get indexed by search engines and found by interested web browsers. To do this, you’ll want to start with consistency.
Web crawlers from the major search engine like it when you blog on a regular basis. Whenever you blog infrequently, like once a month when you happen to have time, it means search engines won’t bother to send their crawlers to your site very often because they won’t see you as a serious niche contributor.
I’ve been guilty of that myself and need to improve. Life gets busy and it’s not always possible to sit down and write. If you find yourself too busy to write consistently, outsource some content through Fiverr.com, Upwork.com, or licensed content sellers. Posting outsourced content keeps your blog fresh, and reading the content you purchased can get your creative juices flowing.
Do your best to ensure your blog posts have sensible keywords and phrases for your readers, but don’t overdue it—don’t stuff too many keywords into each post. Overtime, Google and other search engines have learned to spot—and to penalize—keyword stuffing. Instead of attracting organic traffic, keyword stuffing and other sneaky tactics result in less attention from web searchers. And those who do find their way to your site will find your writing unnatural and unclear.
Keep in mind that your content needs to be topic specific. Such as: 3 Ways To Begin a Fasting Diet Plan. That’s specific for anyone to know what to expect, and then you can use your title phrases and keywords when composing body of the content.
When you pair keyword choices with consistency, you’ll have most of the equation solved for good SEO.
Most bloggers—especially those blogging as a side hustle while juggling a day job and family responsibilities—don’t have time to make a detailed study of SEO tactics. As you write in a natural tone with just enough keywords to let web crawlers identify your topic, you’ll begin to attract organic traffic over time.
Think Ahead About Your Blog Post Topics and Frequency
When you take on the role of a niche blogger, it’s your job to contribute useful information to your followers. Your regular audience will be waiting for each new post, so keep your information both helpful and fresh.
Set up a schedule that’s doable for you. Pro bloggers may publish several posts a day—beginners and side hustlers with regular jobs and families may manage only one post each week. Ideally, your you should aim for two or three posts per week.
You can make the process easier by selecting your topics months in advance, if you like. If you spend time brainstorming topics in advance, then you can research as needed and plan article outlines well in advance. Having a post mostly planned out will help you avoid writer’s block and make the best use of your focused writing time.
Planning your topics in advance makes it easier to keep things fresh for your readers, too. Some topics are broad enough to merit a series. But don’t do ten posts in a row on a favorite topic just because it’s easiest for you to write about—readers who don’t share your intense interest will get bored and surf away in search of fresher material.
If you see yourself doing that, it might be best to narrow your domain down and focus on the one topic you enjoy covering more prominently so that others don’t feel like your site is light on information.
In conclusion….
Creating your own site, with your own blog, is something you can start on even as you establish a presence on social media platforms. The two components of your business will support each other. Link to your site from your social profiles, and vice versa. You’ll have the comfort of knowing that your own blog puts you in total control of a key business component, so you’re not at the mercy of fickle social media platforms.
