This lesson is quite a bit easier to write up than the previous but there is just about as much work to get set up. In this Lesson, you receive instrution on building your own web site and blog to promote your own ideas and products as well as those of the vendors, you have selected in Lesson I.
I recognize that at this stage, your choice of vendors and your website subject matter may be a bit haphazard, but as you continue with the set up described in these lessons, you will get more insight and ideas and you will be able to focus your site and vendors.
Naturally, as time progresses you will be able to create multiple web sites and blogs each with a different theme and different vendors, but for now, stick with one web site and one blog to get the set up clear.
What is the difference between a website and a blog?
A website has more static content and therefore is a good place to describe your basic philosophy and orientation. However, a blog, is a site with more dynamic content through the addition of multiple posts from yourself and your readers. Search engines tend to be more interested in blogs because they are aware that web surfers prefer the dynamic content.
pbralich.com
pbralich.com
a web-marketing institute
a marketing institute
How do people learn about and get to my blog?
This is largely up to you. The first thing to recognize is that once you create and publish a website or a blog, it is pretty much "just sitting there" on the web and search engines and users have no idea that is there. You and the people you inform that it is there can find it, but no one else can.
For that reason, you must announce both the website and the blog to search engines and individuals so that they know where and what they are. To do this you need to get the word out to search engines through search engine submitters and to individuals through emails, articles and so forth.
This in itself is still just the beginning. Through the emails and articles individuals may become interested in your sites and log on, but the search engines, even if you have published your presence to them, also will rank your ad according to popularity. The more your website or blog is being mentioned (by you and by others) on the Internet, the higher your rank will be. There are essentially 2 ways to do this on your own: a) multiple postings to search engines and b) multiple postings through emails, articles and ads.
How do search engines find and rank my sites?
Once you have published your site to the search engines, they will send out web crawling "bots" called spiders which will go to all the sites that were announced to them, grab the key words and summaries annd then publish them in their databanks. When users of those search words type in your key words, all sites that have used those key words will come up. The most popular sites will be listed first, and this is where your effort comes in. If you publish just once to one search engine, even if a user types in your best key word, your summary and website information might be on the 20th or 30th page, and if you are like pretty much everyone else, you know it is rare to look beyond the first page of results. For many people the first two or three listings is all they notice, and they generally can get what they were looking for there.
So, the importance of driving traffic to your website and blog becomes apparent you recognize that in order to get customers you must be found near the top of the results pages for any search that a user in your area makes.
A full discussion of methods to drive traffic to your website and blog is presented in Lesson III on this site. However, you now have the basic idea. The rest of this lesson provides a bare bones description of how to get your first website and blog up and running.
Creating a website:
Creating a Website is not as difficult as many imagine because of the support sites and tools that are currently available. There are many places that offer free domains and websites, but these are somewhat limited in your ability to edit and create. A free site might be worthwhile for an early experiment, but a paid site which you usually charges a monthly fee would be most versatile.
I am going to recommend Homestead.com for the purpose of these lessons because that is the site that I personally use and one which I find particularly useful and full purpose. They can be found at
They charge about $25.00 per month, offer beautiful templates, very attentive support (you can easily speak to support personnel if the on-line information is not sufficient enough or clear enough), and an off-line editor that coordinates well with your site and theirs and has a very complete set of functions for the latest in website editting.
I will also be using this website to describe more advanced features of website use and coordination of websites, blogs and vendors, and thus, a website from Homestead will be the easiest to work with for these lessons.
To begin:
You will need a theme for your site. You may have many in mind already, but choose one for the purposes of these set up exercises. You will need a domain name. If you don't have one already, this can be done very easily through homestead.
1. Register with a website host.
2. Choose a Domain name.
3. Go to their templates and choose a template for your website. Very little graphics design is required by you through these templates. This is especially true at Homestead.
