Make Better Content
How can your website visitors contact you?
It’s a simple question, yet I see so many sites with complex solutions.
Take a moment to put yourself into the shoes of a user navigating your website. For one reason or another, they have decided they want to reach you. This person shouldn’t be forced to find your phone number, dial, wait on hold, and potentially get a voicemail depending on your business hours. That’s just too many steps and not very efficient.
Imagine waking up one morning only to discover an error with your WordPress administrative dashboard.
You contact your web hosting company, and they inform you that the website crashed — the handiwork of a hacker.
In addition to missing out on website traffic and sales, you also lost your databases and website content.
Now what?
I have a major disclaimer before we begin.
A good part of my career has been working for some of the folks in this list.
In fact, I was personally responsible for setting annual revenue goals and hitting those goals while I was the Senior Director of Growth and Product at I Will Teach You To Be Rich. In that case specifically, I’m extremely familiar with revenue totals and what drove that revenue.
Not to mention the affiliate commissions that were paid out to some of the people on this list, numbers that were shared in confidence after a few too many drinks, and second-hand rumors that I picked up along the way.
I started my first blog to avoid getting a job.
I’m completely serious.
I was coming to the end of my undergraduate degree in international affairs and the thought of getting a job at the state department or in journalism sounded like a horrible idea.
So I learned how to start a blog and built one on international affairs with the hopes of eventually monetizing it and supporting myself.
That didn’t really work out as planned. Hah.
But it did lead to a career in online marketing and now I do work on blogs to avoid having a real job.
Whether you’re trying to avoid a job entirely or trying to quit your current job, starting a blog is a reliable path to supporting yourself and your family. It takes a lot of work and some time but it is a well-traveled path at this point. It’s not nearly as crazy as it was when I started.
When it comes to creating your own blog, you have two options: build a website to blog on or use one of the best blogging platforms as your website. Building your own website and blogging on it — this is probably the “traditional” way to build a blog. To do this, you’ll need to use blog software, like WordPress.org, or a website builder, like Wix.
There are pros and cons to these: you’ll need to do a little more work at the outset and you’ll build your own audience from scratch, but you’ll own and control your site completely.
The other option is to use a pre-existing blogging platform, like Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc. With a blog platform, you’ll be beholden to the platform’s choices, settings, changes, and algorithms, but you’ll also have access to a built-in audience and you can launch your blog in literal minutes. I’ll refer to these platforms as blog sites, as well.
In this guide, I’ll break down both ways to set up your blog and help you pick which blog site, software, or platform is best for you. Let’s get to it.
