In order to start a career as a blogger this guide will give you some insight to prepare a successful website. You’ll learn how you can improve your blog before its official launch to the Worldwide Web and learn how to advertise once it’s ready to go.
Internet hosting along with domain names, as you already know, compose a website and are two core services for anyone who wishes to have a place online.
This chapter shows you the similarities between a Internet website and a local residence house.
Surprisingly, they can be compared very much to real-estate. The domain name is the physical address and the structure, what people see from the outside and know the house for.
Hosting is what you and your users see once entering your house through the domain name.
The decor, the living room, the bedrooms, the couch… Anything you make public to your visitors upon entering your site.
To be reading this, you are, or are thinking about becoming, a webmaster.
And in order to stand as a successful one, your online “real-estate” must bring new guests every day, every time.
After all, it is meant to be an on-going party. People from around the world are invited to your events but they will only stay if you’re providing them a good ambient, nice music and great food, which is, the contents of your site you’re hosting.
So, it becomes clear that the house you’re holding your 24/7/365 party will only turn to be a popular one with the proper preparation, wouldn’t you agree?
If you placed ads on billboards, local newspapers and other listings or, using the online counterpart, banners, advertising networks about your new real estate, supposedly being a new happy trend holding a special event and yet, when the masses went to see what was going on, nothing but an empty house would be shown.
What do you think about this? People probably wouldn’t feel very enticed into staying, let alone returning to that site a second time, right?
Most people wouldn’t. The reason behind that fact is simply because we only have a single chance to leave a good first impression.
It’s very hard to regain one’s confidence after failing to deliver their expectations in those cases.
However…
Why is it so frequent to see new webmasters making these mistakes?
Not an easy mystery to solve as it could be for a great amount of reasons. Everyone has unique plans of their own for their real-estate. Those planes vary a lot and are constantly changing, contributing for the increase of the World-wide Web.
Taking it back to more common terms, I can tell from my experience as a webmaster, the most banal motives are given to their desire to:
- Advertise their real-estate (website);
- Promote other people’s parties (affiliate products);
- Get more people to talk about them (readers);
- Increase the amount of people who receive their mail (subscribers);
- Have more sponsors to their parties (customers).
What the future holds
It may sound an exaggerated point of view but, if your goal is to get noticed as a great blogger, an authority in the niche you’ve chosen or even to turn your website into a business, whether it’s big or small, you will have to treat it as if it were, in fact, true property.
When you first buy a land or a house, depending on which platform you’d like to use, it doesn’t come already with the oven, tables and chairs, a bed and all other basic furniture and appliances, does it? That’s even more evident when you’re about to get a store!
Unless of course, if you’re renting the place or the previous owner left the items behind, but regardless, you’ll have to make some changes before you can use the real-estate as you planned.
Such changes include getting a nice welcome door mat, painting the walls inside and outside with an attractive colour, mow the lawn, clean the house from dust and thrash the dirt, taking out what doesn’t belong there.
All of which are the preparations for the new items you want to use in your freshly bought home.
Giving value to your real-estate
After acquiring the real-estate, your website which is currently empty, you must then populate it.
People usually want to keep it as simple as possible, so they can manage their real-estate easily and quickly, save them the time and effort for any other activity they so desire.
They would start by getting a service that would include the most amount of furniture, for example, with the least amount of investment.
Since the keyword here is manage, a solution called Content Management System was developed to make that possible.
In most website hosting companies, that comes as a default and all you have to do is choose your favourite.
But the package it includes is the same as for everybody else and your website (real-estate) must be unique. That’s where you need to do something people avoid as much as they can: invest.
Why you should invest in your real-estate
You need to be different from the masses if you want to stand out in the sea of internet places.
Professional paint, beautiful wallpapers, curtains, flat screens and couches do cost money, in websites, its exact match are premium themes.
They come with a price tag, yes. But that also lets your guests know you worked hard enough to impress and that’s what people are looking for. Make sense?
The website(s) you’re running must be treated like homes and just like any, investment is a requirement. Not just financially but also the time you dedicate to make it look better.
People craft what is new due to the fact that what is old no longer spikes their interest and, if you can provide them with that, you’ll be on the vanguard, getting more and more followers.
Preparing the house for your guests
Once you get the design completed, together with the furniture or look and feel of your site, now it’s time for the food.
You can think of it as the content of your site that needs to be created. Anything like:
- Static pages
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Picture galleries
- Audios
The first two are requirements for all dynamic websites (blogs), although you should create a bit of everything to give your guests a much richer experience.
Just like the looks of your house, you can either create them yourself or, if you don’t know how to cook and don’t have the tools for it, hire someone to do it for you.
Indeed. In weddings for example, it would take too much time for family members get everything prepared by themselves, as they have to focus on other details so, they’ll just get a catering service to do it for them.
Whether it’s a personal blog or commercial, if you haven’t got a clue what to write about, better get someone who does or you’ll be the single person in your party!
Don’t get ahead of yourself
A typical mistake is going live before everything is finished.
The checklist is as follows:
- Get the real-estate (hosting and domain)
- Personalize the house (themes, colours, look and feel)
- Have exquisite cuisine ready (general content and posts)
Inexperienced Webmasters will happily get started on the first two because those are the easiest to do, but when they bring up the search engine results page and don’t see their site listed, become disappointed.
Not very surprising. After all, there’s nothing to show…
It’s supposed to be a party but with no exotic scents from a very well done dish, your guests won’t have anything to feed themselves on.
Get the party started!
But once you get that corrected and create high quality posts, videos and have a picture portfolio then you may start advertising your presence and begin inviting people to your place.
That shows them and search engines you made an effort into making a great first impression and this way, both are likely to recommend you.
No advertising method is better than the word of the mouth: “I got here because a friend of a friend of a friend told me so, and guess what? It was totally worth it!”
When you get there, it will be just a matter of you inventing new ways to have your audience engaging on your party alone. Traditional methods do work but it’s also OK to make it happen by yourself.
5 Ways to Make Your Party Stand Out
These are rather basic but I will mention them nonetheless because there are still webmasters who forgo these important aspects of their sites.
To finish, I’ll speak in plain words so you can clearly understand.
1- Invest in a good domain name
If you can afford one, buy a premium domain. They’re much more expensive but allow you to gain visitors much faster to your new website.
Premium domains are older, already known to search engines and are likely to rank higher with a skilled webmaster.
Otherwise, get a domain name with keywords that convert well. Use a keyword planner to let you know the search volume for words you want to use.
2 – Get everything ready before going live
99% of the battle is preparation. Get the website completed with unique content like blog posts and more. Ideally, you’d make at least 10 to 50 posts before going live, but for some webmasters, that may not be an option so, 10 is your absolute minimum.
3 – Create 4 posts with 1500 to 2000+ words per month
These get picked up quickly by search engines. One or two per month may work but if you’re a savvy writer, then use that great talent of yours to get ahead of your competition.
When focused, you can write much more than that. But if you’re struggling to reach that number, blogging more often can also help you out.
Try to do 2 or 3 posts per day, every day, regardless of the size. Just make them count by providing useful, engaging content.
4 – For every 3 posts you make, shoot one video
Videos get noticed too. And they can easily get more views than one’s website, not to mention that you can always point back to your site using a link in the description.
Keep in mind: YouTube is also a Search Engine.
5 – Ask for your public’s intervention
Whenever you’re posting your article on Social Networks, ask them to share, comment and like or just to leave their feedback.
Their opinion is important so you can further improve the website and develop new content that is according to their liking.
Today we learned that…
- Domain names and hosting are very much like real-estate.
- We should always try to make our site unique.
- Some investment is never a bad thing.
- Our site must be prepared prior to its release.
- There’s always a way to create new content.
- Using 5 different methods, we can make it stand out.
Conclusion
Having a popular site depends on how much attention you give to it.
There are many ways you can make its worth increase but it’s up to you when to make it public.
If you wait enough and invest on the site you’re maintaining to launch it on the right time, you’ll certainly have a much higher reach!
Hopefully this guide has helped you to have a clearer understanding on how you can improve your site before you go live.