NB BLOG

Once you know your market and have a good sense of how to position in your Niche, you are ready to build a blog.

A few years back, a single html page would work for an marketing site. Now, with the increase in requirements to deliver a quality user experience; websites with navigation, helpful articles and proper structure are essential. Thus, WordPress blogs have become the de facto website for marketers.

Fortunately, WordPress out of the box is set up with great structure. Your main focus can be creating useful content for people.

Build a Valuable Resource.

The blog site you will build isn’t only to sell stuff. It should be to offer some useful and entertaining content in advance, helping people.

You want to help people with this site, and sell products second.

So, how are you going to help people? Answer:  Blog posts.  I’ll provide some tips on writing posts in a second, but first let’s talk about a critical decision, your hosting.

Blog Hosting – An important choice.

There are more and more companies claiming they host wordpress blogs. When selecting hosting it’s important to look at the monthly costs and limitations of the hosting service.

Some say $5.99/month, but then require you to buy 3 years of hosting, which will cost you a total of $215 for basic blog hosting. That’s not ideal.

Here are a few other important things to look for when hosting:

Your host should have servers configured specifically for WordPress. If not, you need to configure the server yourself, which most of us don’t have an idea
Here are the reasons for the special server configuration:

Security – That is a big one with WordPress. Your site is likely going to be hacked at constantly, mainly by bots using the “admin” username and password to break into your site possibly send spam emails about Rolexes and viagra.

Hosting Speed – If your site is slow, people will bounce quickly and it will kill your SEO. It’s important that the servers are properly configured for wordpress, which will help with the speed. Sometimes shared servers run slow. If you are on a VPS, you are on a shared server.

Hosting Uptime – You’ll likely be hosted on shared servers, some of which can go down frequently. When you have a $500 a day business going, it can be costly having days of downtime.

Backups – Backups are key, and help if you accidently delete something, the server crashes or gets a virus. Hosting with automatic backups that they store for you is a godsend.

Easy WordPress Installs – You should have the ability to install wordpress on your hosting in a few clicks, or some say “1 click install”. If not, prepare for some technical hurdles, and added costs.

Ability to add plugins –Worpress plugins are magic. Currently, there are over 45,000 plugins for wordpress that provide a variety of functions from adding an ecommerce store, to social auto posting.

It’s important to have a hosting company that allows them, and will help if you have problems installing.

Remember that plugins can sometimes conflict with other plugins and functions on your site. They are a major point of wordpress problems. Only use the plugins you need.

Website Build

Ok, once you have wordpress hosting, it’s time to build your site. This is where those one click installs come in handy…so go ahead and install wordpress by clicking install. Otherwise, download wordpress from http://wordpress.org and install on your server.

It’s best to build on a subdomain first, so you’re “dev” site will not be on your final domain. You can use dev.yourdomain.com

Once you have wordpress installed, it’s time to select a theme. WordPress themes give you a leg up on the web design, and help greatly.

So, you can pick from a variety of themes, many of them have marketing juice added to them.

Overall, look for clean and modern themes. If you are going with and ecommerce store, look for one that integrates with Woocommerce, the main store plugin for WordPress.

So download your theme and install it on your server through wordpress.

Blog Styling

Next, it’s time to stylize your theme. Most themes have settings where you can adjust the color scheme, positioning of header, header images, etc.  Also, add a logo if you want, but at minimum a favicon.

Formatting should be done as well. Blog formatting includes: positioning where blog posts show, how many columns the homepage has, where the widgets show, etc.

It’s best to keep it simple when starting out. You may even require a coder to make some of the theme design changes you desire. You can get help from the outsourcing platform Upwork in a pinch.

Also add your site title and Tagline from the general settings.

Blog Upgrades

Alright, once you have your style and layout complete, it’s time to consider some key plugins and upgrades for marketers.

1. Add Google or some other analytics to measure your traffic properly.
2. Add a social sharing plugin if your theme does not have one. These are little tabs you can put at the end or beginning of articles, and they help you get automatic backlinks and also more traffic from social media.
3. Have recommended stories on, or a plugin installed. This provides a great user experience.
4. Have a contact form in your sidebar, footer or on a contact page accessible from your menu. Many traffic providers(google and facebook) require you to have a contact or about us as a menu option. It also lends credibility and more importantly, allows for interaction between you and your website visitors.
5. Add a seo plugin to help markup and optimize your blog, and get it ranking.

Ok, don’t go too crazy making the perfect blog at first, get the basics done and make the site look clean and presentable. We’re going to move on to the meat of your blog, the content. Sometimes it helps to have a few pieces written before you build your blog, so you can see what the blog will look like with content while building it. If your content isn’t ready, cut and paste in dummy content and photos.

Blog Content

Alright, when making a blog post, the first thing is to have a featured image that is clear and looks good. Your featured image scale will depend on your blog theme’s requirements, but they are always landscape style(more wide than high). On a related note, always hold your cell phone sideways for better pictures on the web.
Next you will be filling your pages with useful text, photos, links, quotes and/or videos for your visitors. I like to type my posts out in Microsoft word before adding to my website.

On a computer cell phone, you can login to your wordpress site and do a speech-to-text dictation of your blog post.

That helps some people with writers block.

Overall, there should be a method to your blog posting. They should be related to your niche, position you as an authority, and support the main theme of your blog…your niche.

Here are some post ideas to get you going:

Product Reviews – You can create a review posts dedicated to reviewing various products in the niche you are promoting.

How to/Tutorials – Visitors and google loves these…and it’s really helpful to show or demonstrate how to do something online. Make posts with text and photos/screenshots to teach anything related to your Niche.

Examples(if your niche was “Artists”)
How to sell art Online – 5 East Steps
Websites for Artists
How to get your art on Youtube

These items can actually be used as a lead magnet or product themselves. A lead magnet is something of value you provide for free, in exchange for a visitors email address. Free PDF guides are an example of a lead magnets. And you want to be building an email list to get the maximum ROI for your effort and traffic spend.

News Jacking  – You can leverage this technique by creating posts on the latest news in your niche, then sharing them on social media. This creates some great SEO and authority within your niche.

Curated Posts – These are blog posts made up of other people’s content, or collections of useful articles, videos and photos from around the web.

You are the curator, carefully selecting what and how to show it. That’s where the value comes in. You are organizing information from around the web and presenting it in an organized fashion. This saves people time and provides a better level of understanding for visitors.

Curated posts are a great way of teaching or making a point.

Podcasts – Interview experts in your niche who have useful ideas or content.

Be sure to have the audio transcribed and uploaded to your site for maximum SEO value.

FAQ’s – Build a list of commonly asked questions and provide answers for your readers.

You can collect questions from forums and competitor’s product pages to provide a useful FAQ page, with Answers to common Questions in your Niche.

The great thing is that you can deliver all these useful forms of content from WordPress Blogs.

Presell Pages

The pre-sell page is where you build interest in your offer before you send them over to the actual offer sales page or optin squeeze page.

It can be an advertorial or a personal letter that speaks to the reader directly and follows a copywriting formula.

When you create the content you want to format it so that you are telling the visitor:

• Who you are
• Why they are here (on your page)
• How you can help themwhat they should do next
• What they should do next

Presell pages are high converting, and will out perform regular blog posts or even review pages.

Blog Starting Formula

1. Create 5 Blog Posts
2. Choose one or a mix of the content formats and begin your blog with 5 Posts or pages to fill out your new website.
3. Create Two Curated Posts –Basically you want to collect some useful and highly share content on the web and present it on your blog.
4. Create Three Text Posts(500-2500) words each – Write these three authority blog posts using keywords. Study some basic on-page SEO before writing these.  The articles are going to demonstrate your authority in the niche, help your site rank, and also support your offer/call to action. They fill your website out, and also educate and/or entertain your audience.So, shoot for 1000 words of useful content for your niche. Then do that 3x. It’s not so hard once you start writing. If you are staring at a blank page and struggling to create original content, find popular content in your niche, rewrite and make better.
5. Create One Presell Page/post – A presell page is where you are warming up your audience for the product. It’s also the page where you tell your audience to take action, so your presell will be your money page, or the page that best converts readers to click your product link or optin to your list. Your product links/banners should be placed in the content of this page, above the fold.                                                                                         Presell Examples: http://www.helpfulproducts.org/ This entire site is full of presell pages for products. It’s just an example, not a format to use for niche marketing.
6. Add Your Product Links and Banners.  You now need to carefully integrate your product link in your text and widget content on your blog. Links/Hypertext: Your custom product link should be appropriately included in your text articles, especially on your presell page. It’s ok to include the link in your supporting articles, so long as the link makes sense where you post it.  You can use a plugin like prettylink to shorten your affiliate and product links, and cloak them for posting elsewhere. With a link cloaker, links will go from http://absforever.com?aid=33465645646 to http://fixmyabs.com/offer
7. Add Banners.  You can show a banner in the widget sidebar. It’s important to add a banner with your product link on your blog to boost conversions. Create a banner that suits your niche.  Use the Nichebuilder banner builder or fiverr to get banners for your blog.  Banners for the blog widget are 300 x 250h or 300 x 500h.

Before you go live with your new blog:

• Have 5 pages/posts on your blog
• Have a presell page, leading to optins or product link clicks.
• Check the styling of your blog after adding all of the content
• Check that the contact form is working, or your optin/lead magnet works.
• SEO optimize your blog.
• Test Your product Links
• Apply your domain(make sure you aren’t using our subdomain)
• Check Google Analytics

So that’s the basics of building an blog site. Nichebuilder has been made to automatically build ideal blogs, with proper plugins, hosting and features. It also has a wizard to walk you though the rest. Check it out.