October 14, 2015

Authority Site Building Part III: What You Need

Business and Entrepreneurship, Daily Writing Blog, Online Marketing And Affiliate Marketing, Web Design and Development

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Authority Website Building Part Three: What Do You Need, And What You Need To Do

This is the third article in a set of four (for now) articles on building an authority website.

In the first article, I introduced you to the concept of an authority site, and told you about my latest authority site building project, Project I. In the second article, I talked about strategy as regards to authority sites, and I talked about the writing style you need for authority site success.

In this article I’m going to go through what you need to do technically to get your site up and running.

Most people act like building a website is a huge deal. The first time you do it, it definitely is. However, if you keep everything as simple as possible an don’t let yourself get distracted, then you can write a handful of articles, buy a domain name and set up your site within a weekend. That’s what this article will take you through, step-by-step.

 

What Do You Need

People overcomplicate starting a website. I used to be guilty of this too. Really, you need a website which you own, a few social media accounts and you can get by with not a lot else. I’ll give a breakdown of everything I use to get a new site up and running, as well as my process for doing so. It’s about the same process as I used for this site, except for the fact I am already running a business before I started the same site, so I built my Services pages beforehand.

This blueprint is the exact same blueprint as I’ve used to build out Project I.

Build an Authority Site Step One: Get A Domain Name.

A domain name is the address of the site. For instance, “Google.com” is a domain name. JamieMcSloy.co.uk is the domain name for this website. It’s what points the world to your little corner of the internet.

You pay a yearly fee for domain names. It generally costs about £5-10 a year, depending on which domain you get. I’d suggest .com if you’re targeting the whole world, because that’s what people expect your site to be. Nobody is going to look for yourname.org. The only exception is if you’re targeting a particular country. Then you can use the top level domain for that country. For instance, this site is a .co.uk, the top level for the United Kingdom.

I use Namecheap for all of my domains. I have held dozens of domain names for them over the years, and they’ve never given me any troubles. Also, they often have coupons, saving money on domain registration.

Build an Authority Site Step Two: Get Some Hosting.

Web hosting is where you store your website. You point your domain name to your files, and then your site shows up. This is again a yearly or monthly service, and costs a few dollars a month, depending on your packages. For a simple, single site, you’ll pay around $10 a month. I’ve used Hostnine and Hostgator myself, and neither of those companies have ever given me any trouble.

Build an Authority Site Step Three: Set your Site Up

When you sign up for hosting, you’ll be sent an email with your admin password and username (which you’ll have selected.)

Setting a site up is as easy as scrolling to the bottom of your user panel (cPanel) and clicking the “Install WordPress” option, and then following the instructions.

Build an Authority Site Step Four: Get a Nice Theme.

This is optional, but probably for the best in the long run. A theme is a site design template which makes your site look professional. With a basic, free theme for your wordpress site (I’m assuming you’re using WordPress,) you’re going to be limited in what you can do quite heavily. Premium themes are around $50, and are worth it all the way. I’ve used several themes from Themeforest, which have a theme for whatever subject you’re writing on. This site, and a lot of my sites at the moment, use StudioPress themes, which are versatile enough, and can be heavily customised and added to.

Build an Authority Site Step 4.1 Install your Theme.

When you buy a theme, you’ll be given access to a zip file. Save that file to your computer.

To install the theme, simply log in to your WordPress Dashboard, and then click on Appearance>Themes>Add New. Then you can upload the zip file and activate it.

 

Build an Authority Site Step Step 4.2 Install Your Plugins.

In your WordPress sidebar, there’s an item called plugins. Click on that, and go to add new. Plugins are useful because they add extra functionality to your website.

Plugins I Use For Every Site.

SEO by Yoast.

This gives you information about how well optimized your site is for a specific keyword. SEO doesn’t matter all that much, but it’s worth adding anyway.

Jetpack by WordPress.

This is how I get statistics about how my site is performing – It gives you traffic numbers and where the visitors are coming from. This is good because you’ll be able to see whether your social media portals are working as efficiently as they should be.

Limit Login Attempts.

I think this is the name of it, though it might be called WordPress Security. Basically, you don’t want people breaking their way into your site, and a plugin that stops people from being able to do this is well worth installin.

W3 Cache.

This improves the performance of your site by caching things that need to be cached.

Contact Form 7.

This lets you build a contact page so that people (and spam bots) can contact you. The best way to become an authority is to interact with your readers, so until you’ve set up the various other avenues by which you can communicate, having a contact form is easy and great.

Then I use some Genesis specific plugins, such as Genesis Simple Hooks and Genesis Simple Sidebars, which just let me re-organise things on my pages.

Build an Authority Site Step Five: Write A Few Articles. Try 5-10 To Start With.

There’s nothing worse than launching a site and having nothing to go on it. It’s depressing. I planned to launch JamieMcSloy.co.uk on the 1st September 2015. I put this back to the 20thbecause I hadn’t had time to edit the articles I’d already written.

Before you launch a site, write enough material so that early viewers of your site don’t just think it’s empty.

Build an Authority Site Step Six: Create An About Page, A Disclaimer Page and a Contact Page.

Look up on this page and you’ll see the menu. It hasn’t got anything special, just a few links to my other articles, an About page and a Contact Page. This is all you really need. It’ll give readers who want to know an idea of who you are, what the site is about, and a means of getting in touch with you for whatever reason.

Build An Authority Site Step Seven: Schedule Your Posts According To Your Schedule. Set them to Publish.

I firmly believe that you should post regularly to any site you’re trying to build an audience for. You’ll have a different schedule, and different goals for your site than I do, so there isn’t really a one-size fits all approach. However, if you’re planning to post once a week, then set up those posts to publish. This will give you a deadline and make you stick to your goals. (More on a simple schedule later in the article.)

Build An Authority site Step Eight: Get a Twitter And Facebook Profile For Your Site And Use Those.

There’s no point in building a site that’s just a castle of isolation. The goal of an authority website is to help people achieve their goals. They’ll never get that help if they don’t know your site exists. Get a few social media pages and keep the world updated with what is going on on your site. It won’t take long and it will pay dividends.

Build An Authority Site Step Nine: Build A Great Site. Share It.

The rest of your site’s life cycle is basically a re-iteration of the last couple of steps above. Keep posting, keep sharing. If you want more information, keep reading. I’ll give you a sample “What to do” style monthly post structure.

 

 

What You Need To Do: Beyond Strategy

 

In the second article in this series, I talked about thinking of an authority website in terms of long term strategy, and goals you want to achieve.

Now I’ve given you everything you need to get your website up and running, we’re going to work out what sort of post schedule we’re going to stick to, and what sort of posts we’re going to put on our authority websites.

The key thing to bear in mind here is that if you want your website to be successful, then you’re going to have to put in the hours writing at some point. You aren’t going to build authority, traffic and later money by writing a simple five page niche site and hoping for the best.

For Project I, I am writing around 8 posts per month. For this site, I’m starting with the same, though I’ll probably change it by month 3 as I want to do something a little different.

However, 8 posts is a good amount. That’s twice per week, give or take.

The ratio of posts I’ll use on my authority site is as follows:

5 How-To Articles that directly solve a problem.

2 General life advice to Target Market articles.

1 Review of useful item.

 

On Social Media, I’ll post a link to every article on Facebook, as well as a few of the following:

Ask for feedback.

Ask what people want to see next.

Tell them to do stuff occasionally, like follow on Twitter, sign up for an email list, or share the Facebook page with their [Target Market] friends.

Closing Thoughts

That’s really all there is to launching an authority site. As always, you want to do as much of the project as you can before you start. I try and write fifty or so articles, and wait until I’ve done that before I launch a new site. Then, you’ll have a long while before you run out of material, and you’ll also be able to do before and after information posts, which you can’t do when you’re just starting out.

As for why we’re doing all of this, you’ll find out in the next article in the series, which is going to describe how we turn an authority site into a business. See you then!

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