The Basics You Need for Your Website
Setting up your website doesn’t have to be difficult and it can be a lot of fun when you have all of the basic needs in place beforehand. Whether you have an author website, marketing business, service, or an eCommerce shopping site, the basics you need are still the same.
When you start out right you don’t have to keep upgrading, saving yourself a lot of time and hassle. Follow these tips to get the right tools and get your website off to a great start!
Website & Hosting
You know you can’t rely on social media or free platforms for your audience – you need your own space where you can interact and engage your audience. You also need to build your email list to nurture your relationship with them.
Yes, you can get a free blog, but you’ll be limited every time you turn around. Just get your own domain with hosting and don’t waste your time with a freebie site.
Try bluehost first, you’ll thank me later.
Type in a search for your domain name in the box below!
WordPress
Back in the day I used to create my websites from writing out my own HTML, and while that got fairly easy, it was still quite time consuming and I got to where I wanted to do more with my websites. At first I tried shopping carts, forums, galleries, contact forms, chat rooms, and all sorts of other things that you just add-on to your site – it worked pretty well, but got to be difficult.
Later I tried both Joomla and Drupal, but then I found WordPress and have been using it for years – I love it. You can read more of why I recommend WordPress here.
WordPress, hands down, is the easiest and most versatile Content Management System – ever. You can have a website with just a few pages, just a blog, just a shopping site, or all of the above on one site with WordPress.
WordPress is free to install on your own domain – and with bluehost, you can install it directly from your back office. There’s no reason to use any other CMS for your website or blog.
Content
You can use WordPress to create all your pages with your own personal awesomeness for free. But, sometimes creating content with WordPress can be a little time consuming and if you want to add videos, special graphics, or anything creative it can slow things down for you because you have to find a plugin that “does that” for you.
Want to fill your site with great content the easy way? The easiest, and best, WordPress content creation available – Thrive Content Builder. It’s just awesome.
With Thrive Content Builder you can skip plugins that slow down your site or conflict with each other, speeding up your site, while being able to add any kind of content you want to your website. Create beautiful tables in WordPress, add videos or any kind of media within your pages, create any kind of page, fast and easy.
With Thrive Content Builder you also get Thrive Landing Pages free – which means you can create any kind of content, fast and easy within your WordPress site – it just doesn’t get any better!
If you need a writing or editing of your website content – see here.
Email Marketing System
When people come to your site what are they doing? If they love your blog and want to keep reading it they may bookmark it, but then forget about it later and then you’ve lost them. I have been to several websites where I wanted to read more of their content and searched all over the site and never found anywhere that I could subscribe via email – it was highly disappointing to me, and they lost my business because I forgot about them!
You absolutely need to capture your visitor email addresses so that they can easily come back for more. It doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult. Currently I use a WordPress plugin from MailPoet – it’s super easy and I love the fact that I don’t have to go to another website, login, and manage my subscribers – it’s all on my WordPress site.
There are a ton of email marketing systems available – some of the top ones include MailChimp, ConstantContact, Aweber, GetResponse, and there are hundreds more. Many of them have a plugin that integrates your list and subscriber box with WordPress. Most of them also have a free trial so you can test them out and see which one you prefer.
Lead Capture Page
This is an often misunderstood, overused, or underused tool for your website. Many people think that a Lead Capture Page is only useful for big businesses or network marketers. Many of the largest businesses don’t even use them, while others over use them and create annoying amounts of irrelevant popups all over every page – and that it drives people away.
With a system like Thrive Leads you can show the LCP’s to specific people who come to your site and you can create a wide variety of styles to fit your audience, hopefully, without annoying them.
Instead of one visitor coming to your site and seeing five different popups, sliders, and in-your-face things asking for their email, you can offer a timely LCP to the right visitor who fits a criteria and will likely be interested in the particular offer.
Many businesses are familiar with LeadPages for this, but I prefer Thrive Leads because it has all the features I wanted with LeadPages except that I can do more with it since it’s within my WordPress site.
Compare LeadPages with Thrive Leads here.
Website Tools
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Literary & Business Services for Your Website
