Starting your own blog is a great way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
This post will guide you through everything you need to set up an authority blog.
1. Know Your Audience and What They Want
We can't understate the importance of knowing exactly who you're talking to, and what value you plan to give them. The most effective websites cater to a very specific group of people. Give your target audience – your avatar – articles that will be useful and relevant to their needs and they'll keep coming back for more, devouring your content and buying your products.
On the flip side, if you start a website without understanding your target audience and what they want, you'll be all over the place. It will be hard to know what to write about from day to day, and you'll likely confuse people so much they'll bounce and never come back.
If you are not yet clear about your target audience, you might want to check out our Avatar Training before you go any further.
2. Get Hosting
As a professional, it's important that you OWN your webspace. That means, no free Blogger blogs. In order to make sure you actually own your website and your content, you need to purchase a hosting package.
The good news is, they're relatively cheap and you can get started for less than $4 a month. We recommend starting with Hostgator's Baby Plan, which allows you to host unlimited sites. Use coupon code HAPPYHOUR14 at checkout to get 25% off!
3. Install WordPress
Sounds technical, but it's really just a couple of clicks of the mouse once you've got your hosting set up!
4. Choose a Theme
Having a great theme that's attractive and easy to work with are keys to success when it comes to building a blog. We highly recommend you choose a premium theme – yes they cost you a couple of bucks up front, but they'll save you a ton of headache later.
Yes there are some nice looking free themes out there, but they typically lack support and can have fatal programming flaws that don't show up until later when you update WordPress (which happens frequently). Also, these free themes are often not updated to work with newer versions of WordPress. SO, if you want to avoid the drama of your website breaking later, get a premium theme.
We use and recommend Studio Press Themes, and ThemeForest
5. Set Up Your Pages
There are a few important pages you're going to want to set up right away. These include your Contact Us page, About Me or About Us, a Work with Me page
6. Create Your Lead Magnet
You should ALWAYS be growing your list and collecting leads. That means you need to have a lead magnet – a free giveaway that people get in exchange for giving you their email address. You can learn more about list building here.
Come up with something cool like your top 10 tips for how to do something, or your all-time favorite resources for (clearer skin, faster weight loss etc).
To build your list with a blog you need two tools – an autoresponder and a lead capture page. (NOTE: These are so important, you should have them even if you don't have a blog).
7. Create Content
Now that you have the blog setup, it's time to create some content… aka. blog posts. This part is easy – click on the Posts tab and then click New Post… you'll be faced with a pretty basic looking text editor – if you've ever used Microsoft Word or any other word processing software, this is gonna be easy peasy.
Create 3 or 4 pieces of content before you start sharing your blog… that way people will have a few things to look at the very first time they see your site. Remember, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so give them your best stuff!
8. Share Your Content
Now that you have a few posts up, it's time to share! Now is when you can start sharing your posts into social media with your friends and followers. If you've identified your audience correctly, and are sharing information relevant to them, they are going to LOVE your new site as a valuable resource.
Now your job is to consistently create posts to give that audience more and more value. At first you may want to start out with a post per week. Remember, getting eyeballs on your post is just as important as creating it so make sure you share as much and as often as possible.
Don't forget, you can share the same content more than once – just spread it out!
Want step-by-step video instructions on how to start your own blog?
Our Online MLM Fusion course contains more than 30 how to videos that cover everything you need from start to finish…
