In my series of articles on How to Win Business with your Blog you’ll have seen just how powerful a blog can be in winning you clients. And you’ve learned some of the key strategies to make blogging work for you.
But there’s often a big gap between information, ideas, good intentions – and actual implementation.
Often it’s tricky to know where to start, and you may be worried about running down a dead end or just wasting your time.
So here are my recommendations on key resources to help get you up and running quickly.
Getting Your Blog Up and Running
Firstly, I recommend that rather than hosting your blog on a free platform like blogger.com or wordpress.com, you host it on your own domain. It’s not that tricky, and it means that the assets you build (for example, the links in to your site) are yours, rather than helping out the blogging platform. And you’re not subject to the whims and policy changes of the platform providers.
To do this, you’ll need to register a domain (or use one you already have – such as running it at www.mysite.com/blog) and then get hosting for the domain.
For domain registration I personally use godaddy.com as my primary registrar. They’re easy to use with good customer support. And because they’re big, no matter what you’re trying to do (for example configure google apps) there’ll be instructions on how to do it on godaddy.
For domain hosting I use bluehost for most of my hosting. If I specifically want the domain to be hosted in the UK I use UK Webhosting (a bit more expensive, but it shrinks load times for UK users and helps a little bit with UK google rankings).
Specifically for hosting for my main site at ianbrodie.com I use WP Hostco. This is high performance wordpress optimised hosting. it’s a bit more costly and most sites don’t need such high performance hosting – but given the amount of traffic I get, I moved to them a few months ago to improve performance and they’ve been brilliant.
Without question, the platform I’d recommend for your blog (and your website generally) is WordPress.
Sure, there are other free platforms like Drupal and Joomla. And other proprietary systems to run your blog.
But WordPress works. It’s got by far the most available themes (to make your site look good) and plugins (to give it functionality like doing backups, adding social media icons, optimising the site for search engines, etc.). And almost everythign is free.
It’s well supported by website hosting companies, so you can install it and have it running with one press of a button.
And there’s no shortage of people who can help you – either with advice, or to do the whole thing for you.
So head over to www.wordpress.org to check it out.
Themes and Plugins for WordPress
Your site needs to look professional – and the best basis for that it to tweak a WordPress premium theme.
On ianbrodie.com I use the Generate Theme. It’s clean, works on mobile devices and tablets, and has a great optin box feature to increase subscription rates.
I used to use the Thesis Theme which is another good looking and very flexible theme.
Studiopress – is the home of some very high quality WordPress premium themes – many designed specifically as showcase sites for consultants and freelancers. My particular favorites are the Executive Theme, Enterprise Theme, Agency Theme and Freelance Theme. I use the Agency theme for the showcase site for my limited company.
Optimizepress is the theme I use to run my membership sites. It’s specially pre-configured to handle sales pages, “squeeze pages”, product launches and membership sites. Thoroughly recommended – this theme has saved my literally days of configuration.
If you’ve got a premium theme it probably has built in search engine optimisation features. But if not, you’ll need the All in One SEO Plugin. I also recommend W3 Total Cache to boost the performance of your site. For all my sites I use Contact Form 7 as a way of creating quick, easy contact forms for people to get in tocuh with me.
Most important of all: you need to take regular backups of your site in case of problems. There’s a free database backup plugin for wordpress. This backs up your blog posts and pages. Your best bet for backup though is Backup Buddy which backs up your whole site – database, themes, plugins, images, audio files – anything on your site. You do have to pay for it though – but it’s such a time saver and also allows you to transfer sites easily between hosts – a task that normally takes hours.
Email Marketing
I highlighted the importance of Email Marketing for nurturing relationships with potential clients.
Personally, I use Office Autopilot. It does both email marketing and CRM, has a shopping cart, affiliate system, etc.
Office Autopilot is quite pricey – although well worth it in my view.
You may remember I used to use Infusionsoft. Great system with similar functionality to Office Autopilot. But Ofice Autopilot is much easier to use – has saved me hours of messing around.
For lower cost options if you don’t need the CRM and super tracking options, I recommend Aweber. I still have an account with them and use it for some sites. They have pretty much the best email deliverability in the business and it’s easy to create forms and campaigns. They beefed up their security recently too and I’m very pleased with what they’ve done.
That’s it – these tools and services should be really helpfully to you. But most important of all – just get going. You’ll learn as you go along.
Tom Peters recently said “No single thing in the last 15 years has been as important to my professional life as blogging…and it’s the best damn marketing tool I’ve ever had by an order of magnitude”.
’nuff said.
* Some of these links are affiliate links. In other words, if you eventually sign up and buy these products via my link I’ll get a commission. This has in no way influenced my recommendation. I use all these products myself as my primary tools (as you can see from the site and my emails).
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- How to Win Business with your Blog – Part 7: From Subscribers to Clients
Really enjoyed the blogging series and all the info shared. Having a system is key to building momentum.