When I joined the funded sponsoring system Second Income Coach, I had some experience with Internet marketing, and I had my own domain and various blogs (some on my own domains, and some hosted for free at blogger.com). However, I didn’t have my own domain with my name.
As I started reading through the check list in the Second Income Coach members area, I realized that it is very important to start your own blog site on your own domain. The reason for doing this is to brand yourself. You want to improve your KLT (know, like, and trust) factor because people buy from people they know, like and trust. Having a blog is a way for people to find out what you’re all about.
On the Internet, it can be easy to hide behind a wall of anonymity and send people to systems without ever contacting them. While some people will go through the system and earn you commissions, you won’t have long-term success. Systems are needed to train people and get others to duplicate what you’re doing, but you want the people who join with you in a system to stick around. To do that, they need to know, like and trust you.
Here are the basic steps for starting your own blog site to brand yourself:
1. Get a web host and host a domain that contains your name. If your name is common and already taken as a domain, try prepending or appending something to your name to see if it’s available. A couple suggestions would be to prepend whois to your name, or append online to your name. For example, with my name the alternatives would be whoisderickyung.com or derickyungonline.com
2. Setup your blog on your web host. For blogging software, WordPress is great because it’s very flexible with all of the different plug-ins and can be optimized for search engines. I went through the blog training at Second Income Coach to get my blog setup with plug-ins.
3. Put up a form in order to capture the name and email of visitors to your blog. This way you can follow up with them using your autoresponder.
4. Start posting articles on your blog regularly (an empty blog is pretty useless).
If you’re already a member, login to Second Income Coach to learn how to get your WordPress blog setup on your own domain.
