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Unedited Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello. And welcome back to the channel today. I’m going to show you step by step how to start a business blog. So let’s take a look and figure out exactly what we’re going to talk about today. So some of the things that we’re going to cover are I’m going to talk about a business blog. I’m actually going to provide a few examples.
[00:00:14] I will talk about niching down or picking a niche within the business because that’s a very general term. And why it’s going to be critically important for you to niche down when starting your blog. The next step is to pick a platform and get a domain. Now you can get started with that by clicking the first link in the description.
[00:00:30] I’m going to talk a little bit more about what a platform is, web hosting, and a domain name and why all of that is important to your blog. After that, we are going to install WordPress. Now, WordPress is the content management software that we’re going to use to write blog posts on and why it’s so important that you need WordPress and a WordPress theme.
[00:00:48] Also, I’m going to walk you through steps and changes that you absolutely have to make to get your website seen by Google Yahoo, and eventually, your audience. Make sure you watch this entire video to learn everything you need to get started with your business blog. After that, we will talk about starting writing and how you can get started and start finding success relatively easy.
[00:01:11] After that, we’re going to talk about different ways to make money or monetizing your blog. And we’re going to talk about social media and why that’s going to be important in the very beginning. So after that, you’re going to want to. And then, of course, check out the link in the description if you want to get started.
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[00:01:24] So first things first, let’s talk about it. What is a business blog? Now, when I get out of this, I’m going to show you an example. This is a business blog. Basically, you will take a part of a business, whether it’s your small business or. The business niche in general, and you are going to create content where you are conveying information. You’re solving problems.
[00:01:45] You’re helping people out. For example, if we look at this website, it’s called both sides of the table.com. Now that’s the domain name. I’ll get into that just a little bit, but they’re talking about various aspects of business, and you can basically do the same thing. For example, how I gamified my own brain to lose weight and improve fitness.
[00:02:01] That’s more fitness, but let’s say you have a business where you’re helping people lose weight. That could be a good opportunity, but basically, you’re going to do something or say something or write about something within the business niche. Now, as I mentioned, the business niche is large.
[00:02:18] Complicated. It’s going to be competitive. Suppose we jump over to the keyword tool that I use to help me find keywords. When I’m writing for my blogs, if I look up business, it will be really competitive. So I’m just going to get over there real quick. I’m going to type in business, and I’m going to hit enter, and you’re going to see the keyword difficulty on a scale from zero to 100 is 98.
[00:02:39] So it’s going to be incredibly difficult. For a new website or a new blog such as yourself, start writing and gain traction. If we look at the matching terms, these are all different terms that have the word business and if you’re going to see. There’s just a lot of dark red and orange. Now, the darker the color, the more difficult or competitive it will be to find success.
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[00:03:00] So that’s why it’s going to be important for you to niche down. And the very beginning. In fact, you’re probably going to want to niche down a few different levels. For example, if we look at let’s pick one here, small businesses, most small businesses will be pretty competitive. And that’s just a portion of the business.
[00:03:16] So if we type in small business, okay. Spell these words right here.
[00:03:24] And if we look at the overview, it’s going to be almost as competitive. So that’s why it’s going to be very useful, important to niche down now, different ways that you can niche down. It really all depends on your niche. You can talk about different aspects of your business. Maybe you want to talk about marketing.
[00:03:39] We can just type in marketing here. Marketing is going to be competitive as well. It probably won’t be as competitive as just business. Now, if we go back up to the overview, it looks like 84. So we’re slightly getting less and less difficult. You probably want to niche down. Maybe let’s talk about social media marketing.
[00:03:59] So we’ll type in social media.
[00:04:05] All right. So we typed in social media marketing. And if we go back up to overview here, 89, it’s still going to be relatively difficult, but we’re getting that we’re getting less and less difficult as time goes on. As you can see, you can actually see some green before it was just all orange and red, but here you see some green social media marketing near me.
[00:04:24] Probably not. Social media marketing agency near me. But as you can see there, there is some opportunity. Now what you’re looking at on the screen are 212,000 monthly searches and over 35,000 keywords. So you should be able to find something. If we change the keyword, difficulty to zero, there will be more opportunity, but probably fewer actual keywords.
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[00:04:44] You want to make sure that you spend time and get a list of a hundred keywords that you would like to write. Now you’re not going to write on all 100 in the beginning, but it’s just. It’s nice to have options. So first. Concentrate down and figure out exactly what you want to write about your target audience and what you want them to know.
[00:05:01] So if we go back over here to our slide deck, let’s see, go back up here, pick a niche down. The next step is to pick a platform. Now what you need to start a blog is you need something called web hosting. Basically, web hosting is renting out a server or hard drive space from a third-party company.
[00:05:21] Now, the first link you click in the description is my number one recommendation. A server web hosting company so that you can get up and running for beginners. What you do is you click that link. You’re going to go through the process of signing up. When you sign up, it’ll be, you’ll get a free domain for the first year.
[00:05:37] Now, that’s important because that’s how visitors will access and reference your site. So, for example, this is the domain, both sides of the table.com. That’s the domain name. That’s how people reference the site. And so you actually get that for free. Normally it’s 15 bucks, but you’re going to get it for free when you sign.
[00:05:53] With the first link in the description. When you click that link, you’ll be taken to this website, where you’ll go ahead and click get started. What I recommend is to click the first one on the far left, the basic plan. If you’re just getting started with a website, as you can see, there are several options, but click that click select, and then move on here.
[00:06:09] You’re going to create a domain name. If you have one in mind, you’re going to type it in here. Like you see that I do. What I recommend is to try and find a domain name. It’s going to be related to your niche. Now, what I do is type in a domain name that I know is already taken. When it’s taken, you’re going to get this error where you can then go back and try different domains.
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[00:06:27] Now make sure again, you want to pick one that’s related to your name. Click next. And then you’re going to see a green box that says that it’s approved. The next step is simply to go through and enter your contact information. Make sure that you, when you scroll down here and make sure that you leave all of the settings on but again, entering your contact information, the settings right here, where it says domain privacy, leave all of this checked.
[00:06:49] If you don’t leave a check, you’re going to get people reaching out to you. Spamming you, emailing you, trying to get you to sign up for. Web hosting. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and sign up and then jump back to you once I sign on. So I moved to the next step. All right. So I’ve signed up, and I’m going to go ahead and set up my website.
[00:07:07] Initially, just create a simple username and password. Make sure it meets the requirements. And then move on, make sure that you write it down to write it down in a safe spot so that you have it. And you remember it because it can be a pain to go ahead and get everything back. You will have to enter in some vital information, but just make sure that you write it down.
[00:07:25] It’s straightforward and effortless. Now, one thing that I do want to note is that this part is not sped up. This is actually real-time. And you can see that you’ll go from absolutely nothing to a complete website in less than probably 10 minutes. And once you click submit, you’re going to move on to the next step, where you get to log in. So here is where you’re actually going to start creating your WordPress website.
[00:07:47] Now, the great thing is Bluehost really does everything for you. And it’s straightforward. So again, I’m not speeding this up at all, and I want you to see what it really takes to create a website. So blue host is going to do a little bit of work in the background for you. And we’re just going actually to click on skip this step.
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[00:08:03] This first one I clicked on, I start a blog, but for the next step, just click, skip, because we know what we’re doing. And I’m actually going to tell you what to do so that we can get up and running. So click get started right here on the left-hand side. And then move on. Just click, skip here and click. Skip.
[00:08:22] And then just pick the first one in the far left, make sure that you’re picking a free theme because they’ll charge you. They have both free and premium themes, which we’ll talk about in just a moment. So right now, it’s actually creating your WordPress website in just a few moments. You’re going to click on log in to WordPress on the right-hand side there.
[00:08:37] You’ll see it in just a second. And then we can actually start looking at some basic configurations. All right. So we click log. And now we actually have a WordPress website. What may need to happen is you may need to click refresh a few times to get it to work. But now we have our website. As you can see, what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to log in and delete a few plugins because right now, it has coming soon.
[00:09:02] And so if someone tried to get to your website at this moment, it’s going to say coming soon to them, even though we can see it, this is what your WordPress website looks like, but for everyone else outside of your network, it’s going to say coming soon. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go down to plugins eventually, and we’re going to delete some of the plugins that we don’t need.
[00:09:20] Now, I talk a little bit about plugins later on, but plugins add additional features and functionality. We are going to deactivate the blue host as well. Other plugins that are already activated, and then we can go through and make the necessary changes, which I’ll cover in just a moment. So we’re going to deactivate them and then delete them.
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[00:09:37] Now, you want to make sure that you only have the plugins that you’re using on your website. The more plugins you have, the slower your website will respond and function, and you’re going to lose out on ranking. So make sure you have a lean setup, very few plugins, and then move on. As you can see right now, I simply believe some stuff you don’t need.
[00:09:57] If you want to, you could keep them, but obviously, you don’t need this other stuff if you’re just getting started. What’s more important is the themes that we’re going to talk about in just a moment, as well as getting writing. So I’m just going to go ahead and delete those deactivate them. The reason why we want to use WordPress is it makes our life much easier.
[00:10:13] And we can just focus on writing. We ended the focus on those other things. Once you get your WordPress installed. On your website, you’re going to have a back-office that looks just like this. It’s going to be relatively blank and what you can do. And what I recommend that you do is install a premium WordPress theme.
[00:10:32] Now there are free themes out there, and there are premium themes. Now a WordPress theme actually changes the way your website looks and feels. So, for example, if I go to my website and even look at this one, this is a WordPress theme. This is one theme. If we look at my website, this is a completely different theme.
[00:10:49] You want to make sure that you pick a theme relevant to your business. What you can do is you can use a website like themeforest.net, and you can find a WordPress theme, though. They offer premium themes. So this theme is going to cost you probably 60, 70 bucks. But what we can do is we can just type in business, and we can search different themes.
[00:11:08] Now pick one that. You like and you think will be attracting or will attract your audience. But as you can see, so basically what you can do is you’re gonna pick one. It’s gonna cost you about $70 when you add it to your cart and you buy it. It’s going to give you a download button. You’re going to download a zip drive a.zip drive.
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[00:11:27] You need to unpack it. Zip drive. And it’s going to give you another zip drive. What you’re going to do is you’re going to go over to a parent’s go-to themes, and we’re going to install our new WordPress theme. And to do that, we’re going to click on, add new right here. And then after that, we are going to click on upload theme, and then you’re either going to drag and drop that second.
[00:11:46] Is that drive that I just referenced here, or can you click on this button and upload it that way. But when you upload your theme, you’re going to click on activate, and that’s going to activate your brand new thing. And then we can move on to some things that you absolutely need to change. So now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go over to settings.
[00:12:02] And again, this is absolutely mandatory. If you don’t do anything else, make sure that you install the settings. So we’re going to go to general. And the first thing that you want to do is you want to change your site title. You want to change your site title to something again relevant to your niche. You could be, it could be.
[00:12:18] The marketer’s blog or the marketer’s website, and then your tagline is going to be the number one place for all things marketing or the number one place to learn marketing. Then make sure you leave all of this as is, and then go down and change your time zone. Now, this is a personal preference. You don’t absolutely have to do it, but it’s great because you’ll see things in your time.
[00:12:37] Next, you want to click save after general, we’re going to go to writing underwriting. We don’t need to change anything. We can go to reading, and in reading two essential things, you want to make sure that your homepage is your latest posts. So anytime you upload a new blog post, it’s going to show up at the top of your homepage.
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[00:12:55] And then also you want to make sure that the search engine visibility is on the check. Do not check this. If you check it, your blogger website is not going to be visible to Google. Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo. You won’t get any visitors, and you’ll be frustrated. So make sure you leave this unchecked and click save.
[00:13:13] The other thing that we need to do is go down to permalinks. Now, the reason why permalinks are important is that right now. It’s set to plane. You want to change that to the post name so that your blog post will show up here. The title of your post is going to show. After your domain name, for example, my domain name is web hosting.
[00:13:31] Remind web hosting, rewind.com. And if I were going to write a blog on social media marketing, it would say social media marketing after that—a good example. Suppose we look at both sides right here if we click on this one. And let’s see, they actually, this isn’t a great job, but as you can see, the title of the post is also the name of their blog posts.
[00:13:55] So this is how you would want it. I Deely this. Isn’t done. Great. Yeah. It’s done good enough to as a good example, as you can see, the website is post name. This is the title. That’s exactly what you want. This helps with search engine optimization. If we go over to our keyword, we will put for the title, social media marketing icon, if that’s what we want to discuss in our blog posts.
[00:14:21] So make sure that we go back. Let’s see if we can find it. Make sure that you changed the post name, click save. Now those are the settings that you absolutely have to change. The next thing we want to do is we want to start writing and then start writing. We’re going to click on it. Then we’re going to click on add new.
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[00:14:37] Now, when you write, do you want to make sure that your title is something that you discovered through search? Do you want to be discovered through search? And so you would use, for example, social media icons, social media, marketing icons. That should be the title of your blog posts because that’s what your customers or potential customers are searching for.
[00:14:57] So what we’re going to do is I’m just going to copy this to make my life a little bit easier. And I’m going to paste this over here. And when I paste it, obviously, I want to change this to upper case. And then. You’re going to start writing. Now, one of the biggest questions I always get when writing a blog and what should I write?
[00:15:15] I’d like to start with the who, what, when, where, why, how method, just because it helps me with brainstorming, who’s going to be looking for social media marketing icons. What is it? Why is it important? Why isn’t it important? And I’m simply going to go through, and I’m going to answer those questions.
[00:15:29] Another question that I get often is how long a blog post should be? A blog post should be as long as it needs to be like the social media marketing icon. So it probably doesn’t need to be 4,000 page or 4,000-word blog posts. But at the same time, you probably want to make it, make sure that it is at least a thousand so that you are accurately answering the question.
[00:15:48] The final step is to click publish. Once you are satisfied with your blog. Now I do recommend that you install this free plugin. It’s called Grammarly. That’ll help with your spelling, grammar, punctuation. It basically does the squiggly lines under Microsoft word. But it’s right in your web browser. So let’s go back over here to our guide.
[00:16:08] We have installed WordPress, we’ve installed a WordPress theme. We’ve made the necessary changes, and we’ve started writing. The next step is to figure out ways to make money. Now, the way that you make money really all depends on you. On your website, there are many ways to make money. So let’s talk about a few of them.
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[00:16:24] The one, the most obvious way in the way that most people do it is with Google AdSense. And it’s simply just placing ads right on your website. So if we scroll down here, let’s see if this guy does it. He actually doesn’t appear to have. It doesn’t appear that he actually has ads, but you can use something like Google ad sets.
[00:16:43] So we typed in Google AdSense, and this is a free service that you can add right into your blog to make a few pennies. Now, when you first get started, you can use AdSense. So Google AdSense will allow you to place these ads right on any website, as long as it meets the minimum. Criteria and you don’t need a ton of traffic in the very beginning, but I recommend that once you start getting serious traffic, I’m talking about like 5,000 pages per month, you start wanting to look.
[00:17:09] You want to start looking at things like OIC media, vine.net ad thrive some of the other larger ad networks out there because they’re going to pay you a little more, but this is just one way to make money. Another way that you can make money is with affiliate marketing. So, for example, let’s say you’re targeting or you’re writing to.
[00:17:28] Small businesses. And one of the things that small businesses need is they probably need some bookkeeping software. So you could be an affiliate for QuickBooks to go to the quick books affiliate program. And you can see they have an affiliate program where they’ll actually pay you a commission when you refer customers.
[00:17:46] So that could be a good way to make money, and you’re hoping your audience solve a problem. Maybe there, they have no idea what to do when it comes to bookkeeping or accounting. So you get them involved with QuickBooks. You get paid a commission if you’re helping solve a problem. Another thing you can do is you can sell your own physical and digital products.
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[00:18:04] Maybe you have a marketing book, and you want to. Teach people about it. You can sell that right on your WordPress website that will require additional plugins. That’s not something that we’re going to cover in this video, but that’s an option as well. If you have physical products, maybe a t-shirt or something you want to sell, you can also do that.
[00:18:21] So, there are several ways that you can make money from within your blog. So let’s go back over to our handout here. All right. The next thing you want to do is make sure that you shared it on social media. The reason why you want to share it on social media, in the beginning, is because it’s not going to be picked up by Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or Bing right away.
[00:18:40] In fact, it can take six months before. After that, it gets picked up and ranked in the search algorithms to help speed up that process. We want to share our blog posts on Reddit-relevant subreddits. We can share it on Facebook groups. We can create our own Facebook group. We can share it on Twitter and Instagram.
[00:18:57] If we have a YouTube channel, we can share it there. I recommend that you share it anywhere and everywhere to get picked up and potentially start. Ranking. Now I want to let you know that most likely, your friends and family aren’t interested in your blog. So don’t get upset or frustrated when you share it with them, and absolutely nothing happens.
[00:19:15] And then once you get in a group, get in a process, you want to make sure that you continue right. No, ideally, you want to write at least 50 blog posts to give yourself enough opportunity to succeed. If you write 50 blog posts and you’re not getting any traffic, that might be a sign that you’re doing a few things wrong. Maybe your keyword research, you’re not targeting.
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[00:19:36] Audience, maybe you’re just not writing very well, but you want to make sure that you write at least 50 blog posts to find some success. Now, if you want to get started with your first blog, click the first link in the description and go through the process. You probably will want to watch this video a few different times to follow with me.
[00:19:52] Step-by-step. But go ahead and click that first link in the description to go ahead and get started. This is a web hosting rewind. Hopefully, you got value out of this video. If you did, be sure to like, subscribe and ring the bell. So you’re notified when I upload a brand new video. Thanks for watching.
[00:20:06] And we’ll see you then.
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