In this podcast I go over some of Facebook’s BIG changes that are making Facebook arguably one of the best sources for generating leads and sales for any business. 

Session Outline

1. Facebook Exchange Re-marketing

• What is Facebook exchange
• Newsfeed ads now with remarketing

2. Custom Audience Targeting

• Auto dealership targeting recent customers for a trade-in sale example
  
• Tanning salon example
  

3. Unpublished Posts

• Page post ads – in the newsfeed on desktop and mobile

4. Facebook Offers

5. Graph Search

• Enables users to develop connections based on people’s interests and opinions.
• Find an Italian restaurant most of my friends or friends of my friends have liked or checked-in to.
• Get an interview.
• Find an old friend or find someone to date.
• Business pages need to optimize their page to show up.
• Business pages need to get more fans. Use photos more and tag people in those photos.

Podcast 11 – 5 Facebook Changes That Can Transform Your Business is a post from: Keith Kranc, CEO of Dominate Web Media

The most cutting edge ways to increase your Facebook advertising conversions and start generating more leads and sales from Facebook and from your Website traffic. 

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1:48 – Why Facebook is making it easier for businesses to be successful.
3:05 – Why you should be in the newsfeed and on mobile.
4:15 – How to reach more people in the newsfeed.
5:36 – The critical “Placements” section when submitting an ad to get it in the newsfeed and mobile.
7:05 – Facebook Offers – how to generate leads with Offers with a product, service, or a FREE offer.
10:04 – Custom Audiences – how to target your existing customers, email list or database.
11:40 – Ecommerce conversion strategies.
12:35 – Facebook Re-targeting or Remarketing.
13:22 – Why you need to use images with everything.
13:55 – Picmonkey.com for creating images with text.
14:50 – How to get people to be more engaged with your posts.
15:40 – Comment spam issues with Promoted Posts and how to deal with it.

Podcast 10 – 4 Ways To Generate Leads From Facebook and Increase Facebook Ad Conversions is a post from: Keith Kranc, CEO of Dominate Web Media

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Podcast 9 – How to Use Email To Drive Sales is a post from: Keith Kranc, CEO of Dominate Web Media

Building a landing page that converts visitors into subscribers has never been easier with a software like Lead Pages.  You don’t need any graphic design skills, any coding skills, or any technical skills at all!  Clay Collins, the Lead Pages developer, created a wonderful tool that will open the doors to many opportunities for business owners and entrepreneurs to grow their business in faster.

Clay has taken the highest converting designs of landing pages, squeeze pages, webinar registration pages, special offer/upsell pages, countdown pages, live streaming pages, thank you pages, etc. and built them into templates that you can just enter your copy in place of the example text he has on the page and your done!

Its that easy.

The software integrates easily with all the major email marketing software programs like Aweber, iContact, Mail Chimp, Infusionsoft, Office Autopilot, GoToWebinar, and more. All you do is select the email auto-responder service you currently use and Lead Pages does the rest.  No opt-in form design. 

Just Some of The Templates:

Getting your page published is super easy and does not take any technical skills either.  A WordPress plugin comes with the software so if you have WordPress then your pages will show up right inside your admin panel in the backend of your site.  You can use the URL they give you and have it hosted on their servers or paste that URL into an iFrame app Facebook landing page.  If you don’t use WordPress you can still upload the files to your server, but that takes a little tech know how.  

One of the best parts about using LeadPages is that you get frequent tips, advice and updates from Clay about which landing pages are converting the best and why. Some of these design templates have been put through the split-testing of hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Click Here For Complete Transcription

LeadPages Landing Page Template Design Software is a post from: Keith Kranc, CEO of Dominate Web Media

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Transcript:

[Why SEO is Like Poker (And Not Dead) and How To Win]

Intro: Successful people stay on the cutting-edge. Successful people stand out from the crowd. Successful people make a difference. Keith Kranc takes you behind the scenes and inside the minds of some of the most successful people today who push through barriers and continue to grow despite a down economy.

Keith: My passion is to rack the brains of people who are not only successful in business, but are successful in the way they do business. People not just making a profit, but also making a difference. Because success brings success.

Intro: And now, stay on the cutting edge with all things digital media, and learn from top experts how they do it. Here’s your host of Success Mashup Radio, Keith Kranc.

——————————————————————————————————————————-

Keith: Welcome to Success Mashup Radio everybody! I hope you had a great weekend and I hope you had a great new year. And I hope you’re starting off the new year just like you were hoping. I think this is going to be a great year. I would say my 2012 was about ten times better than my 2011 was in a lot of different areas. And my goal for myself is my 2013 to be 100 times better than my 2012. So I’m pretty excited and I hope you are too.

What I want to do is I want to take this first segment. I want to talk to you about something that is a big question that’s hitting my core business all the time. And what it is, is I hear this all the time – and the big question is, Is SEO dead? Now, if you’re listening to this, you’re probably thinking, what the heck is SEO? First of all, I’m going to tell you a story about poker and blackjack. And I’m going to relate that to the question of Is SEO dead? And it’s a pretty cool story. And what I’m going to do is people out there, if you own a business or if you’re trying to start a new business and grow that business, what you want to do is you want to get, obviously, a lot of people. You want to get traffic, you want to get people come in to your business, come in to your website, and it’s a big question for people nowadays is How do they do that? Well, there’s been a lot of changes in the past year to two years with the big behemoth, which is Google. And in the story I’m going to tell you about blackjack and poker is Google is basically the same thing as the house or the casino. Or the other people that you’re playing against.

Basically, SEO, what it stands for is Search Engine Optimization. And because of the big behemoth which we call Google, they’ve made a ton of different changes and they have an algorithm, which is what you call it, which is how they decide which business or which website shows up at the top of a specific search. And they made a ton of changes over the past year – actually, over 30 changes to their algorithm – which has caused an uproar in the industry. I want to explain to you why SEO in 2013 is like winning that poker, and why SEO or getting your website ranked in Google is more like winning that blackjack used to be. If you know anybody that’s a card counter or used to win at blackjack, then you know it doesn’t work anymore, does it? It just doesn’t work anymore. A great book to learn more about this is a book called Bringing Down The House: The story of six MIT students who took Vegas for millions. And it’s a movie now called 21, starring Kevin Spacey. And I actually read this  book about 10-12 years ago, way before it became a movie. And it’s a really great story about these guys that basically learned how to count cards. And by doing that, if you learn how to count cards, you can  basically beat the casino, right? If you know anybody out there that’s counting cards today and beating the casino, I’d like to hear about it. Because it just doesn’t happen anymore. Why? Because the casinos put in systems to basically not let people be able to do that anymore. A lot of different things that basically they now have. Before, they would have a six deck shoe, and they wouldn’t shuffle the deck until towards the very end. And what would happen is, these card counters would basically count the cards and then they would figure out when the deck was stacked in their favor, which is basically having a ton of face cards. And then they would change their betting style, and they would play a ton of hands. And there’s a bunch of different ways they can do that. Basically, long story short, is that you can learn in a very short period of time how to count cards and how to beat the casino. But guess what happens when the casino finds out? You get banned from the casino. Guess what happens when people try to cheat the Google’s algorithm? Their website gets banned. And over the past ten years or so, a lot of people were really successful using these – they call it Black hat techniques, which is what I consider counting the cards in blackjack, and they would get websites ranked very quickly. And for a long period of time they make tons and tons and tons of money, right?

Today, you can actually still count the cards. And you can still game Google’s system and get a website ranked really quickly, maybe within a week or so. But guess what’s going to happen in about a week after that, or a month or two after that? You’re going to get banned from the casino. No, they don’t take you to the backroom like they used to in the good old days. But your website’s going to get banned just like these cap card counters are getting banned from the casinos back in the day.

So how is SEO like poker? Basically in poker, the best players will always win over time. The more you learn in poker, the better you get. And over time, you can always play a game that you can beat. So if you’re playing a table of nine players and eight of the other players – or maybe even two or three or four of them – aren’t as good as you, over a period of time, you’re going to win money. If you sit down for an hour, you might not win after an hour because people will get lucky. Same thing if you caught and try to beat out your competition in an internet marketing type of ways using shortcuts and get-rich-quick schemes. You might do well right away, but eventually you’re going to lose all your money and it’s not going to be good, right? So poker is the same way. The better you get, basically, the bigger game that you can play, the better players you can play against. It’s the same way with search. So like on a local level, small businesses trying to be out, or small business in search, they can use some of these cutting-edge strategies that are working today and they can be pretty well, right? But if they want to go out and they want to beat somebody on the national level, some more competitive keywords like maybe Finance or Pain relief or something like that, it’s going to be a lot tougher. It’s going to take a lot more work, right? So if you want to be good at poker, you have to spend a lot of time learning from experts. You need to play tons and tons, hundreds of thousands of hands, you need to get good. And then over time, guess what? You’re going to win and you’re not going to be able to get knocked off very easily. The same thing with getting a website ranked in today’s environment. It just takes time, okay? So depending on your competition, that’s how much time it takes. And there’s no shortcuts – if there is, you’re going to get banned eventually, I promise you.

So how do I know this? My company actually manages SEO – Search Engine Optimization – campaigns for national, very competitive keyword phrases like Back pain relief and stuff like that, Financial markets. And also I’m in a Mastermind with a guy named James Schramko, who runs over $100,000 a month Search Engine Optimization business. And they’re very, very cutting-edge. They do a ton of testing and things like that to be able to see what’s working now.

And basically, what’s working now – and I’m going to go over that right now. Before I do that, let me explain how this works. First of all, Google is a service. They sell a product. What is it? What’s their product? Their product is ads. Google makes money by selling advertising on the side when somebody is searching for an answer or a solution, right? And in order for them to be able to sell ads, they have to have a lot of traffic coming to their website – which is people like you and me looking to find out how to lose weight, how to find a business located somewhere. There’s a lot of different reasons why everybody searches in Google. We all know we all do it, right? So in order for Google to be successful, they have to have a good product. What’s their product? Their product is offering a solution for somebody trying to find an answer. So that’s doing a Google Search, right?

Of course, what they’re trying to do is they’re doing the best they can to get rid of people trying to game the system – because they want the best results that are showing up and people are searching for an answer to a solution. Or to a problem.

What doesn’t work? What doesn’t work is basically using automated systems, getting hundreds or thousands of links pointing back to your site. Or spinning articles, using software to create a hundred different versions, or five or ten different versions of an article that you wrote. These are things that people are doing and have been doing that have literally shut down a lot of companies – SEO companies, in general – that were using a lot of these shortcuts. They don’t work anymore. So websites are getting penalized and are getting knocked off the search engine rankings. So those kinds of things don’t work.

Do links still work?  What is a link? A link is basically when another website writes something about – maybe either talking about an answer to something – and they refer to maybe your website. And in that referral, there’s an underlying blue line. When somebody clicks on that link, it takes them to your website. That’s a link back to your site. And what that tells Google is basically, it’s like a referral. It’s like that website referring them to their audience. In the good old days, that was the most important factor. That was 90% of the deal. And what would happen is that people would start to game the system. They would get all these different links, using all these automated systems. And that was basically the problem. And now, over the past year, Google has basically put an end to all these short cut systems. So how do you get around it? First of all, you stop worrying about getting to the top of Google and start thinking about more targeted traffic coming from everywhere – coming from Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, press releases, iTunes, articles, traditional media like radio and TV, word-of-mouth. You get the point?

Basically, content is king. If you create good content, and you used all these different tools that we have out there today with social media and creating content, then what’s going to happen is you’re going to naturally increase your rankings in Google. And that’s what will happen and that’s what happens today. How do you do that? What I’m going to do is I’m going to show you exactly step-by-step what my team does for our content that gets created, and for our clients’ content that we help manage these types of services for.

So basically I’m going to run through these pretty quickly, and it’s basically like the top ten things that we do – it’s like a checklist that we do every time we create a piece of content. Because content is king. You hear that all the time, but it’s all unbelievably true. Because what Google wants is they want fresh content. And guess who else wants that? People looking for answers. They want content. What that does is the search engines actually read that text that shows up on your site, or they read, see the video, and it really helps with their rankings. But more importantly, when you’re starting to use all these different branches like I talk about, you’re actually going to get traffic from a lot of different place. So you need to stop worrying about getting ranked in Google, and start thinking about getting targeted traffic, which is visitors, come in to your website or your business from different sources.

How do you create this content? Well, what I would suggest is using the best form of content that works for you. For me, I like to do video. I like to do video. I like to write, also. But for me, in most cases, honestly it’s easier for me to do a video or an audio, and then just turn that into an article. Excuse me, I think I need to drink water here. For some reason I’m out of breath today more than normal. I’m not sure why, but maybe it’s been a big break for me, but I have a hard time breathing.

But anyway, let me go through this list and show you what we do. Basically, you can create a video, you can create an audio, you can write an article. The articles are great because search engines read that. They are able to read that text and that’s a big deal. So that’s what’s so important if you are doing a video or an audio, that you do turn it into an article and put that up on your website. Plus a lot of people like different forms. So some people like to read, some people like to listen to a podcast when they go driving to work or mow a lawn or exercising. Some people like to watch a video on their computer. Some people like to read an article. It just depends. So you’re also hitting all these different types of people. Do what’s easiest for you. I like to create videos and I’ll get into that in a second. And with today’s technology with iPhones, it’s so easy to create a quick video and have it very easily edited and have it up on your site. Obviously, you can take your video to the next level, and there’s a lot of different resources for you if you want to that – and I’ll talk about that in a second. Present company included, the Bruce and Josh, is you guys want to have professional videos, you may want to talk to them and get video recorded and edited. Because that’s what these guys do. One of the things they do.  But if you want to do it yourself, it’s also so easy to do it and just get stuff up there.

Basically, why do you want to do video? Three main reasons: people love video. It’s the best way to get a potential customer or client to know, like and trust you. Once they see you on video, they get an instant feeling that they already know you. It’s weird. Try it sometimes. It’s like when you’re watching TV, you always feel like you already know the celebrities because you’re seeing them on TV all the time. So that’s a big deal.

Number two. Google and the other search engines love video. Google owns Youtube. You’re always seeing the video showing up now when you’re doing the search because it’s easier to get your answers from the video. For example, if you’re trying to read instructions on how to put something together – would you rather watch a video or read ten pages? Typically it’s a video, right?

And the other reason is I think they’re easy to create. But also, they’re great for repurposing and syndicating. That’s why my content creation syndication starts with a video. Because once I do a video, guess what happens next?

I’m going to go through this list of items. For example, this segment right here, when I’m done with this segment, we will turn this into a Youtube video. I’ve already got an intro and I’ve already got an ending, already edited. So it’s easy. Basically I just plug in this little 10, 12, 15-minute segment into my editing software that I’ve already done in the beginning and in the end. Boom. Ten minutes later, the video is done. What I can do is I can upload that to Youtube or I can have my team upload it to YouTube, optimize it for what we’re trying to get the video ranked for or get people to watch it for.

Then, that video gets transcribed into a conversation-style transcription, word-for-word. And we can take that and we can post that up on the site where the video’s going to go.

After that, an article gets written about the video. So I have a team member – she writes an article about that video or about that interview. Next thing that happens is a press release is written and submitted through www.PRWeb.com, which is at the premium level,  with the packs through them. So it’s actually a $369 service to submit it through PRWeb. It goes out to hundreds of different  media outlets – online media outlets and sources like that.

Then, a podcast is created – in some cases – not all cases, and submit it to iTunes automatically once it’s already set, once the set-up part for a podcast is done. After that, all you do is basically just upload the audio to your website and it all happens automatically; it’s pretty cool.

Then everything gets posted up on my website or blog, or clients’ website or blog with the social share buttons. So every blog post that I do has the social share button – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. So basically, when somebody reads it, they can easily share it to their network. And Google+ is important; you want to make sure you have that because that’s going to help for Search Engine Optimization. Google+, I know it’s kind of a ghost town as far as a social network is concerned, but in my opinion it’s very important with SEO. And Google is using the data to figure out if you are relevant. And that’s a big deal. What they’re also starting to do is they’re also starting to build an author rank. Google+ is a big way for them to build that author rank. So you want to start continuing to use that. It’s a big deal. We’ll have more details on that as we test of the next six to twelve months.

So for example, at the time of this recording, my last blog post I did was about a week ago. And it was a video that I talked about my new Facebook advertising checklist. Actually, my Facebook checklist. And I did this process. This recording, it’s been shared 63 times with a ton of different likes, tweets and Google+’s. Because I did that. Then what happens after I do all that – basically I have a blog post, I have embed the copy and paste code on my Youtube channel on to my site. Then I take the transcription that was done or the article, and I can place that below it, then I can do a press release. My team writes the press release and then I submit it. Then, what we do is send an email out to my list, telling everybody about it. So that kind of ignites it. Then I do a manual Facebook status update linking to that post or article, shared on Pinterest, shared on Google+, all that stuff. We do all that manually. I know there’s a lot of automated systems out there where you can Facebook comment and Tweet stuff automatically. I wouldn’t recommend  using those for really anything besides Twitter. Because what happens is, the systems like Google+ and Facebook, they know that you’re using an automated tool and you’re not actually going to the website and making a posting, so they’ll just bury your posts in the newsfeed. That’s just a little quick note.

Then what we do sometimes in a lot of cases to really ignite it, is we run targeted Facebook ads to that post. Okay. Or to that article. But typically, we do it right to the post on the Facebook page because that post has  the link to the article, alright? So we do Facebook ads. For example, the last one I did was targeting people that liked BNI, which is a business networking group and they were 45 years and older. So we do that. Now, we’re targeting for my business highly-targeted individuals and they’re coming and they’re sharing it. Now, you’re getting all these traffic come in to your website from all these different sources. Google sees all that and that they’re spending more time, there’s a video. And guess what happens to your natural search engine rankings? They start to move up naturally, but more importantly, you’re also getting traffic from all these different sources. Youtube is my number one referral. Facebook is number two. So a lot of cases, people are coming from those different areas. So you want to think about all these different things as not just a way to get ranked. Think about as a way to get more traffic.

Then another big juicy way to help your SEO is sometimes rewrite three or four different versions of those articles handwritten. You can have a team do that; you can outsource these stuff, a lot of these stuff. And then you can post that rewritten article on another website – maybe like a third party web 2.0, like a WordPress blog or Blogger.com kind of site. And then you can link back to your main site. That’s a little bit more advanced, but basically that’s the system. That’s what we do. It’s that easy. Anybody can do it. And I promise you, if you start to do this on a monthly basis or weekly basis, just watch what happens.

Now, I’m  going to wrap this up here in about three minutes. If you don’t like video, don’t do video. Don’t stress about it. Start with audio, start with a written article. You can always use photos or slides, and you can turn your article into a video or hire somebody to do it, or just hire Bruce and Josh here to come film you.

Like I said, if you want to do video, hire professional video. I’ll put a link to the show notes here and into this article, this video that will be turned into an article. I’ll put a link to Hudson’s Portrait Design because these guys do really good video, if you want to get recorded, and then have that edited. And the reason I’m saying Bruce and Josh is not just because they’re on the show today and because they do video, but more importantly it’s because these guys don’t just do video. These guys have a marketing background. That’s how I met them – in a marketing world. And they will help you turn that video into a video that will actually help your business get more business. So that is the biggest factor in my opinion. You won’t find that in your videographer out there anywhere.

Another way, if you want to do all these, take a really big shortcut, is come on a radio show. Come on this show. Either be a guest to come on in, or be a call-in guest. So if you get accepted, you have to come to the website www.SuccessMashupRadio.com, fill out a little form there. If we OK to come on the show, we can do call-ins or we can do in-studio guests. Guess what? All that stuff that I just showed you, we’d do it all for you. Basically, you come in, we chat for about 10 or 15 minutes, my team turns it into a video, writes an article, does a press release, does all the Facebook stuff we talked about. And we even have packages for people that want to come  every single month and we do all this content for you. And we’ll even actually, in some cases, run targeted Facebook ads to your specific ideal audience. It’s pretty cool system. Check it out. We’re just kind of tailoring it and tweaking it and fine tuning it right now. But if you want to get all these done for you, and you don’t have to worry about all the technical side of things, or even creating the content, you just come in here and talk for ten minutes and then we turn it on to a video, article, press release and all that. Go ahead and just go to www.SuccessMashupRadio.com. Check it out. Email me at keith@DominateWebMedia.com and I can chat with you more about it. But one at a time now.

So I want to go ahead and wrap up this segment. So please if you’re watching this video, share it, like it, on a later date. If you’re listening live, go to www.SuccessMashupRadio.com. Check it out there. And otherwise, I hope it was really, really helpful for you. And if you have any questions, just comment below on the recorded version of this after I do the little checklist that I just told you about.

So I’m going to come back in a couple of minutes here. We’re going to talk to Bruce and Josh about some of the cutting-edge ways they’re taking their business to the next level, and how they’re helping other business take their business to the next level, and what’s working now in 2013.

[END OF AUDIO]

IMB Podcast #8 – Why SEO is Like Poker (And NOT Dead) and How To Win is a post from: Keith Kranc, CEO of Dominate Web Media

• Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes
• Click Here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes feed)

Talking Points:

• Foundation for Facebook marketing success.
• Facebook Like box on your website instead of a Facebook icon taking visitors to your FB page.
• Timeline cover photo.
• About section.
• Critical custom app images and how to use them effectively.
• Custom landing pages.
• Re-directing people from your Facebook page to your website or offer.
• Why uploading an image on each post is so important.
• How to create pro images fast without any graphic design skills.
• How to use Facebook ads to ignite your page.
• Why fans are important. (And not why you think they are…)

IMB Podcast #7 – Facebook Page Checklist is a post from: Keith Kranc, CEO of Dominate Web Media

James Schramko went from running the #1 Mercedes Benz dealership in Australia to now owning a 7 figure per year internet marketing agency and coaching business.

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Talking Points In This Interview:

• How James was able to double his sales every year each of the past 6 years.
• How to create massive content that Google loves without being overwhelmed.
• How to build a real team and scale your business fast.
• The Truth about SEO and what is working now.
• And more golden nuggets

IMB Podcast #5 – James Schramko Give His Traffic Secrets That Helped Double His Sales Each of the Past 6 Years is a post from: Keith Kranc, CEO of Dominate Web Media

• Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes
• Click Here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes feed)

Show Notes:

How To Set Up a WordPress Blog or Website in 15 Minutes or Less Video

Sign Up For a  Hostgator Account Here

Listen To The Entire Show Audio:

Transcript:

Welcome back to Success Mashup Radio. This is your host Keith Kranc, and I’m pretty excited about this segment because I am going to be recording a podcast for my podcast, The Internet Marketing Boardroom. So for those of you that are listening to the podcast right now, this is actually being recorded live. This was recorded live, and that’s why the intro was Success Mashup Radio. I’ve got a radio show called Success Mashup Radio where we interview successful business owners who are not only successful in business, but successful in the way they do business. And we pick their brains and find out how they’ve been able to be successful.

On today’s episode, what we’re going to talk about is a question that I get asked all the time from existing business owners, people that want to start their own business, or they want to start a hobby or a passion, and turn it into an income. And it’s How do I start a website? How do I set up a website? What kind of platform do I use? How do I start a blog and start creating content? What do I do? How do I get started? I have no technical knowhow or anything like that.

So what I’m going to do right now for the next few minutes is I’m basically going to tell you exactly what I would tell my four and a half year-old son when he comes to ask me – probably in just a couple of years, he’ll be asking me how he can start his own website. Because that’s what I do; I’m on the computer all day long and I don’t go to work. I just work on the computer. He still doesn’t really understand what I do for work, but when he does ask, what I’m going to do is I’m going to tell him a couple of years from now, it’s probably going to be different, probably even easier, but I’m going to tell him what I’m going to tell you right now. I’m going to walk you through basically a seven-step process of how you can get a website or a blog up and running fast, without any technical knowhow and for as little as $3.96 a month to pay for your hosting. So pretty cool stuff.

First of all, this segment is brought to you by Dominate Web Media. And you can go to www.DominateWebMedia.com and you can get access to a free training series on the Seven Critical Steps to Getting More Customers With Online Marketing and Social Media Marketing. It’s a great video training series where I show you how to build your business the right way, how to get more customers via Facebook, Google, Youtube, and a lot of these cool ways, and how to really build your business right from the start instead of getting drawn to all the shiny objects out there that a lot of other gurus out there teach. A lot of people teach the hottest thing like Pinterest, or Facebook or whatever it is. What I try to do is help people really just get started the right way and build the foundation right, and then start to go on to those other shiny objects once you have the foundation set up right. That’s the key. That’s why today’s episode is really for the beginner. If you don’t already have a website, or if you want to start, create a WordPress website. You don’t have a WordPress website. And if you want to start a WordPress blog. Maybe you have a basic HTML static website that you want to start a blog. I’m going to show you how to do that right now.

First of all, there’s a lot of buzz these days about social media – about Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, LinkedIn – and it just never ends, never ends. I know I teach at Facebook. I have a course on Facebook advertising. I have a book called The Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising because it’s a great way to reach people. They’re very targeted, that might be interested in your product or service. Or cause. But first of all, I want to explain to you the difference between these social media sites, and the difference between owning your own platform or website or blog, which is the same thing.

Basically, your business or your passion – or whatever you really deem to call this entity – should be similar to the way major airlines work. I used to be an airline pilot so I’ve got about 5,000 hours. I used to fly all over the country. I got out of that about more than six to seven years ago now. And this is a good comparison because I understand that most people can also understand it. Basically, the major airlines were built originally on a Hub and Spoke model. You can take Southwest out of that with what they’ve done recently, even though their main hub is in Phoenix and Las Vegas. But basically, think about the major airlines that have been around forever like United Airlines or Northwest Airlines. United Airlines has their main hub in Chicago. Chicago, Illinois. And they also have another secondary major hub in Denver. Or you have Northwest Airlines who has their one major hub in Minneapolis. So basically, your business – your hub – should be your website or your blog. And your website and your blog can be the same thing. So don’t try to get too confused over that.

But first of all, let’s start with United. So their  main hub is in Chicago. And that’s where a lot of their flights start out – in Chicago, and then they go out to all these different basis. They have all these different cities and suburbs all over the country, and of course, all over the world. And their main hub is where they have all their main operations. It’s where the bulk of their services and their expenses are – they’re all in Chicago. And that’s where they have tons and tons of gates, they get great rates on all the different gates and all the different services from the airport and go on and on and on. Then they have all these different sub-cities that they fly into. And let’s say they go into Fargo, North Dakota. And they go in there for six months, and then they ended up finding out that, you know what? Not enough people are flying in and out of Fargo. We’re actually losing money every month. So what they do is they just pull out of Fargo – no big deal – and they just go to other cities. It doesn’t really cost that much. They didn’t build a bunch of buildings there that it spent a lot of money. It’s low risk. Think about your social media sites – your Facebook, your Youtube, and all that stuff – as your secondary. There are great ways to drive traffic, to drive targeted visitors and build your brand, and build a following and fans, and brand advocates. That’s where you’re going to want to use Youtube and Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. And they’re great. They’re unbelievable for that. But you have to be able to draw those people back to your hub. Because first of all, any day, you can get your Facebook account or Youtube account closed. And trust me, I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen big, big, big bloggers with 200,000-300,000 visitors a month lose their Youtube site because Google’s algorithm decided to close it down because it had a couple of videos about making money and it’s tagged as spam. So that’s one reason you want to make sure and have your own hub. Another mentor of mine talks about owning the racecourse, not the racehorse. So your website is the racecourse. You want to be in control. You want to be able to build your brand right there and then use all these different hubs. Or spokes. So your little spokes that come out of your hub are basically the outstations that the airports have, and those are like your social media channels and sites. Your platform is your website. That’s it.

Now, let’s talk about the difference between a website and a blog. Real quick. Most people already know that, but I’m going to talk about WordPress today and people sometimes think WordPress is a blog. Originally, WordPress was designed for bloggers but it has massively evolved. Websites like The Wall Street Journal .com are built off of WordPress. It is what the search engines love – Google and everybody loves WordPress. It’s easy to use, it’s easy to add content. It’s got a little thing in there where it looks like a little mini Word Document. It’s called a WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get. And you can just type what you want to type, put your thoughts on there, and you can bold letters and stuff like that. You don’t have to know any code or anything like that. It’s really cool once you get it set up. But basically, you can also build your main website. So maybe you sell a product or a service and you don’t want to write articles, you’re not a writer, you’re not a blogger – you can still use WordPress. You can go out and you can buy a custom theme for $39 or $79. It’s already designed and you can just personalize it a little bit. And that is your main website also. So basically you can do the same thing. You can have your main website. And then you can have a blog as part of that. That’s why I want to try to clear up any confusion there in case there is some – I know there is some out there but a lot of you already understand that. But anyways, I wanted to go over that really quick.

Before we get in to these seven steps. First of all, once you have your own platform, you need to create content. You need to host it on your blog or your website. Then what you do is you link to that content from your other Facebook. You might write an article or post up a video up on your blog, and you’ll go to Facebook, and you’ll post a link to it, and then people can comment on it, and they can link back, and they can come back to your website. Or maybe you can run ads to your Facebook page and then they can go from there to your website, buy your product, join your list, whatever. Come in to your business, get them a [unclear].

So how do you get started? What I’m going to do is I’m going to tell you right now how you get started. There’s basically seven simple steps.

Step one is to determine your hub, or your blog or your website’s focus. Is it going to be a blog? Is it going to be a website? Or is it going to be both? My website www.DominateWebMedia.com is basically both. It’s a website and I’ve got services that I offer, but I also have it set up to be a blog, where I can create posts. A lot of people just create a blog and then some people, they just create a static website. And some of the resources I’ll talk to you in a second here, where you can look at some predesigned themes, then you’ll see what I mean by the difference between just a website or a blog-style.

You need to be clear on your niche or your topic that your blog or your website is focused around. In the last segment, I talked about there’s so many different niches out there – industries that people can actually create an income from. It’s unbelievable. Like quilting or bed rest. Literally, the more narrow your niche is, the smaller audience it is, the hungrier of an audience it is, the easier it is to go out there and build a following of rating fans and maybe sell some product or advertising or whatever it is you end up doing. I’m not going to go into that today, but it’s definitely much easier to create content if it’s very clear. But it can’t be too small, that audience. There’s kind of a little art form there. You don’t want it to be too small. You want to be able to have enough ideas to be able to create content once a week or so. And then you want to be able to have enough audience out there.

Just do a little bit of research there. And once you figure that out, then what you do is you need to select a service. A service that is going to be your website platform. There’s tons of different things out there. But I’m not going to go into any of them. The only one I’m going to recommend is WordPress. WordPress is the only platform that I recommend for a lot of different reasons. And I’m not going to go into all of them on this episode or this segment right now. But like I said before,  the search engines love it, it’s easy to use, it integrates with everything, and it’s pretty awesome.

With WordPress, there’s actually two different versions of WordPress. There’s hosted WordPress and  then there’s self-hosted WordPress. What’s the difference? The difference is a big difference. And basically, if I go and I start a hosted WordPress site – what that is actually hosted by WordPress.com themselves. So they host it on their servers. They own basically everything. And my site, URL, might be called www.keithkranc.wordpress.com. Or it might be called www.underwaterbasketweaving.wordpress.com. They own it. You have  WordPress in the domain. It’s very easy to set up, very easy to start writing articles, creating content. You can have it set up in five minutes. All you need is an email address and it’s free.

A self-hosted WordPress is a little bit different. You have a lot more options, you have a lot more flexibility, a lot more with design, and basically you now own the platform. So you’re hosting this WordPress site on to your server. Or you’re basically leasing the space from a hosting company that I’m going to talk about in a second here – BlueHost or HostGator. How do you know which one to choose? Well you basically need to ask yourself a couple of questions. Three questions. Number one, the most important question is What’s your ultimate goal? Is this just a hobby? If this is just a hobby, you want to start writing articles or creating videos, then I would just use the hosted version. Go get it started, get it set up, and start putting content out there. Don’t get held up with technical stuff. And later on down the road, you can transfer your hosted WordPress site over to a self-hosted domain that you own. If this is something serious, and if you’re serious about building a business or building a platform, then I would definitely recommend using a self-hosted WordPress website. So you go out, you buy your domain, you own the domain, you own the website, you own everything, and nobody can go off and shut it down. Unless you stop paying your hosting fees, which is, like I said, $3 to $8 a month. And that is what I recommend.

Number one, you got to figure out your focus. Number two, figure out what you’re going to use. And number three, set up your WordPress or blog. I actually have a free training video that is up on my site. If you listen to this live right now, it’s not up right now. It’s a new video that will be up the next couple of days. So if you’re listening to this podcast, then it will be live. But basically, you can go to www.WordPressin15Minutes.com or you can go to www.DominateWebMedia.com/Wordpressin15. WordPressin15Minutes.com will actually walk you through step-by-step how to set up a WordPress site, how to get your hosting, how to go out to GoDaddy, buy a domain, how to get it hosted with your hosting account, and then get your website live and create your first post. And I’ll show you how to do it in 15 minutes or less with no technical skills. Just a screen-recorded video. It’s all free, go check it out. And that will get you really started. That’s a self-hosted website. Now, once you have WordPress installed – I don’t go over this in my training video but I want to talk about it now – what you want to do is you want to choose a theme. They have a basic theme laid out and they have a big banner image that will be already up when your WordPress site’s installed. So it looks okay. It looks good. Write an article and start right there.

But the next thing you really going to want to do is you’re going to want to choose a theme. And there are literally thousands of predesigned, professional themes for WordPress sites. There’s new ones being created every single day, and there’s tons of them out there. There’s a lot of free themes; you can have a free theme installed. I would actually recommend using a premium theme. They usually run anywhere from $39 to $79. Some of them are a little bit more than that, but that’s about the range. And  I would stick with one of the major theme developers like Woo Themes – W-O-O – or Elegant Themes. Or Genesis Themes by StudioPress. Or Templatic. And I’ll have the links on the show notes. And if you’re listening live, all you got to do is go to, like I said,  www.DominateWebMedia.com and you can look up the podcast. And this will be in the show notes here in a couple of days. All the links I’m talking about.

But what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to choose a theme. Because these are designed. These look good. There’s so many different ones. It’s really cool. Basically what you do is you select which one you want, then you go back to your WordPress site, and then you just install it. Just one click. Install it. And then it’s in. All of a sudden, your site looks like a $10,000 website that was designed by a website design company that can literally charge a lot of money to do. So you just have to personalize a little bit. You have to upload your own logo and personalize it a little bit once you upload the theme.

One word of warning – don’t get bogged down with making the design perfect. This is the biggest mistake that  everybody makes. And guess how I know this? Because I made the same mistake and still continue to do it. It’s so easy to get stuck on having everything perfect. It’s so much more important to not worry about the design, but start getting content out there. With today’s world, with iPhones and with Youtube and podcasting and radio, it is so easy to create content. You just have to start doing it. Don’t get bogged down. And the thing is, I know how this process can be a huge roadblock to your success in getting the business off the ground. Or growing a business pretty fast. This is one of the reasons why I showed you on my website how to get your website installed.

Even though I show you exactly how to do it step-by-step, I know there’s a lot of people out there that don’t want to do it. And there’s also a lot of people that once they get to the point where they want to personalize it and add their logo, or add some photos, and maybe they might want to customize one of those themes a little bit, what I’ve done is I’ve actually created a service for those of you like that. That they want to just have it done for you. Basically, you can go and pay a couple of hundred bucks, you choose a theme out of all those main theme developers I just named. Each of those ones I ran off a second ago – Woo Themes, Elegant Themes, Genesis Themes, Templatic Themes – they each have about 20 to 50 or 60 different themes to choose from. You choose one of those, my team will do the rest. Basically, my ninjas will go. They will set up your hosting, install WordPress, install the theme, and personalize it to your brand with your images, your logo, stuff like that. For just a couple of hundred bucks. My other website, which is also another brand new website that I have, it’s www. ROIWebsiteDesign.com. And that’s just finishing up development right now. So it’s actually not quite ready yet. If you’re listening to this podcast, it might be, but either way, you can contact me at Keith@DominateWebMedia.com and I’ll be able to help you out. So don’t worry about that.

But the reason why we’re doing it is because I went through this. I know a lot of people that go through this and they get stuck. They get stuck on the technical issues and even though it’s easy, they don’t want to take the 20 minutes to learn it, then they don’t want to customize it themselves so they’d rather just pay to get it done. So we’ve done that. Instead of charging $2,000 for a custom-website, we’re charging $200 or $300 to do it. So it’s pretty cool. And of course we also do customizations and website fixes and all that stuff, if you need that. Or just a complete custom website, we can do that. And it’ll just cost you a little bit more money, of course. Anyways, go check that out if that’s you. Otherwise, do it yourself. And I recommend doing it yourself. I recommend getting in there and adding the content yourself. And even if you do have the very beginning installation done by my team, I recommend you go in there, and you go add the content, you make the changes. Even if you plan on outsourcing it or building a team leader to do the technical stuff, I believe you’re going to be more successful if you really understand how to do it right yourself.

Just a little piece of advice there – even though a lot of people, including myself, are teaching to build a team, outsource as much as you can, but it still pays to understand. You’re going to make better team manager by understanding this stuff. So you don’t have to know to code or anything like that. Just the basics.

Step number four, add your first piece of content. How do you do that? Well, once your website is installed, it’s easy. All you do is you go on to your backend and your admin, and then you just create a new post. It’s super easy. Like I said, it’s a What You See Is What You Get. It’s like this  little mini Word editor and you can just create a post and start writing something and get it up. Or do a video. Grab your iPhone, have somebody hold on to it, use your web camera, or do a screen record video, PowerPoint presentation, and do a video talking about whatever your passion is or whatever you have to educate, create a piece of content, or just say, “Hey, this is my first post. I’m writing about my new website” and tell why you started this business. And get it up there. That’s a big deal.

The next step that you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to sign up for an email service. An email autoresponder service. This is really important. I almost left it off the list because it’s not necessary to get your website going. So I do not want this to hold you back. So if this is something that feels overwhelming, don’t do it yet. You don’t need to right away. However, you need to be thinking about that because you really need to be building your entire business around building an email list and being very careful that. And giving with that. So go to www.AWeber.com or www.iContact.com and set up an account. It’s a dollar trial, typically. And I don’t even know what the pricing is now. Starting on, I think it might be less than $20 a month. So it’s a dollar free trial, but it’s anywhere from $15 to $30 a month, depending on the size of your list. And it’s cool because you can create this little web form that inside of AWeber, like I said, you don’t have to have any design skills. Maybe you offer a free email series or a free video or something for somebody to join your list. Or maybe you just want to have a newsletter and do a post once a week. You can create that in AWeber and it integrates right with WordPress. It’s really easy to do. And then all of a sudden now, people can join your list and you can start getting some automation going. I’m not going to go into that stuff. Too much detail on this segment here. But once you really get to the next level, you can start looking into Infusionsoft or OfficeAutoPilot. I would recommend Infusionsoft for very complex marketing strategies, and maybe e-Commerce, when you start selling products. But that’s a lot more expensive and a lot more technical.

The next step. What you’re going to want to do is make a commitment and get on a content-creating schedule. If you don’t think that you can create at least one piece of content once a week, then you might want to have second thoughts about this niche or industry that you’re doing. Because really, as long as you can get out there and create one piece of content a week, that’s going to keep people on top of mind. You’re going to be able to start building the Search Engine Optimization inside of your site. WordPress really helps with that. There’s some great plug-ins that will help you with your Search Engine Optimization.  One that I would recommend is.. you know what? I can’t remember what it is right off my head right now. After the break, I’ll grab that for you, have it in the show notes. I just remembered. It’s the All-in-One SEO Pack. All-in-One SEO Pack is a great plug-in when you’re in the backend of your website in your WordPress admin. You can just click on Plug-ins and then you search for a new one, and you search All-in-One SEO Pack. P as in papa, then A-C-K. And then you just upload it; it’s free. And then you just follow the directions once you’re in there. And it will help the search engines pick up your site and all of your individual posts a lot better. So that’s a very, very important plug-in starting off. There’s a lot more you’re going to want to get down the road – social share bars and stuff like that. But we’ll hold off on that right now.

There’s three main areas to think about when it comes to content. First of all, number one, what kind of content should you create? Number two, how do you find topics to write about or to do a video about? And then number three, what modality should you use? How should you create your content? Should it be writing? Should it be audio, like a podcast? Should it be a video?

First of all, let’s talk about number one, before we get into the two there. What kind of content? First of all, your content needs to do value. You need to create value. As long as you’re creating value, then people will want to come back and they’ll want to learn more. Create posts like Top 10 Strategies for Case Studies. Lists are great. Lists are really, really great. There’s tons of different things you can do with lists. 5 Worst Ways to…blah blah blah. People are really motivated by fear so sometimes it’s good to write an article on The 3 Biggest Mistakes People Make When… Case studies are great. Your own case studies are even better. Demos – demonstrations – screen records. Those are awesome. They’re super easy to do. And they’re great. You can upload it to Youtube, turn that into an article. It’s awesome. Comparisons – you can compare products, compare services, compare anything. Reviews are great. Interviews are awesome. In an interview, you’re getting somebody else to create the content for you, plus it’s also building on your authority because you’re interviewing somebody else as an expert. And people like to do interviews. Rants. Sometimes if you have a really big opinion on something, do a rant once in a while. So lots of different things you can write about.

Next thing is How to find topics? A great way to find topics, first of all, is you’re going to want to subscribe to the industry blogs – the leading blogs that are out there. Subscribe to their RSS feeds, get their posts into your inbox, follow them on Facebook, start reading. The other thing is Google Alerts and Twilerts. Google Alerts are great; you can go search Google Alerts in Google, and search all the different topics that you’re involved in, or your business is involved in. And what happens is that you’ll get emails whenever there’s an article written about that and it’s posted online. And you’re also going to want to put your own brand in there, of course. In case you hear somebody talking about you, then you’ll be able to get involved in the conversation. Twilerts are awesome too. It’s a Twitter alert. T-W-I-L-E-R-T-S. And what that is it’s similar to Google Alerts, but it’s a Twitter alert. So you just put a keyword in there basically, and if that keyword – that word or phrase – is mentioned in any Tweet, then you’ll get an email about it. And you can check it out and click on it. Awesome ways to start creating content. And if you have a team that you want to have create content for you, then have them set Twitter alerts up – Twilerts – or Google Alerts. And they’ll have tons of ideas; they’ll never run out of ideas to write about.

Now, what modality should you use to get this content out there? My opinion is you use what modality you feel most comfortable with. A lot of people like to write. A lot of people hate to write. Some people like to use video. Some people just like to use audio. Use what you’re most comfortable with, and use what you know you’ll be able to create more content with. This is the most important thing. It doesn’t matter what it is. I know people that hate doing video but they’re some of the most successful people out there. I know people that hate writing, that are creating some of the best content out there. And they actually end up with a lot of articles because that’s the one great thing about starting with doing a video. When I say video, I don’t mean necessarily using a video camera. It could be a screen recorded video using free software or a software like  ScreenFlow for Mac, which is $100, or Camtasia for PC. And you can just screen record a website, or you can do a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation and record that. Boom. Turn that into a video, upload it to Youtube, next thing you know you’re getting traffic on Youtube. Youtube is my number one referral. I get a lot of my leads and traffic and people coming from Youtube. I love it. Youtube is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. In my opinion it’s the best of all of them. When it comes to Facebook advertising, that’s the fastest way you can really reach a targeted audience, in my opinion also. I don’t want to go off in a tangent there, but using those spokes – those outstations – are great. But you got to create the content.  Video is great because what happens is I can do a ten-minute video and then I can just have one of my team members – and you can outsource this to somebody overseas or in the US or wherever you want – and you can have somebody transcribe your video and turn it into an article. Now you have an article. Done. Without even writing anything. You can write a book without even putting your hand on a pen. And a lot of people do it. I wrote three chapters of my book just using audio. And then I had one of my team members transcribe that and then we edited it and turned it into three chapters. So video is great because you can blast it out everywhere. You can put it on social media, you can turn it into articles, you can turn it into press releases, lots of cool stuff. And then of course everything links back to your hub or your website, right? Of course it does.

And if you’re worried about creating content, you can always outsource it. There’s a lot of different resources for outsourcing. Go to Elance or Odesk. Or go to my website; I’ve got some resources on it. And you can outsource content creation. It’s awesome. Or you can create the content, like I’m doing here, yourself and then have a team member reproduce that and repurpose that content. That’s the key. This podcast, this live radio episode you’re listening to right now is going to get turned into a ton of different pieces of content. It’s going to be a Youtube video. It’s going to be a podcast. It’s going to be an article. It’s also going to be a press release. And it’s going to get RSS blasted everywhere. It’s going to go on Facebook, it’s going to go on Youtube, Twitter – everywhere. Pretty cool stuff. You know sometimes you don’t realize it but a ten minute piece of work or video can really be utilized a lot more than most people realize.

With my radio show here, you know one great way to create content, if you’re interested, is come on the show. Or go to the website – it’s a brand new website – it’s www.SuccessMashupRadio.com and fill out the form there on applying to become on the show. When you come on the radio show here, whether you’re in Seattle or not, I’m actually open to doing interviews with people that qualify. You’ll be surprised. We’re looking for successful businesses but our also goal of the show is to highlight businesses that are on the way at doing great things. And we’ll highlight your business. And it’s a great way to get content really created for you because you come on the show, or you call on the show, we do a ten-minute interview. We video record all of our interviews. So this is live feed right now. And this is being video recorded. And then my team turns it into a Youtube video, writes an article about it, writes a press release, the press release gets submitted out to thousands of media directories and online sources like Yahoo.com, Seattle Times, stuff like that. Some pretty cool stuff. Sometimes that could be something you could look into. Get on the radio once a month, talk for ten minutes, the next thing you know you’ve got all your content being created for you. That’s pretty cool. You could go to that website and check it out and we’ll have some more information on slots available and how the whole system works. We’ve got a really slick, cool system that we’ve been developing for a while with a client of mine who also has his own show. And that’s how we’ve been able to perfect the system of creating videos and podcasts and articles and press releases. So it’s fun. It’s pretty cool stuff.

I’ve got some FAQs – some really Frequently Asked Questions that I get asked all the time. And when we come back from the break, I’m going to go over all those, so hopefully I’ll be able to answer one of your questions. If I don’t, make sure you go to www.DominateWebMedia.com and reach out to me, join my list, or just email at Keith@DominateWebMedia.com. And if you’re listening to this podcast, if you like the podcast, please share it, like it, comment on iTunes. If you’re listening to it live, go to my website and join the podcast. Go to iTunes, search for Internet Marketing Boardroom and it’ll be there. And you can like it. Because that helps. The more ratings we get, the more exposure we get. And it just gives us more [unclear] to go out and get great guests. So on the next podcast I’ve got a recording with James Schramko who’s the number one internet marketer in Australia and one of the top three or four in the world. I’m pretty excited about that. He’s doubled his business every year for the last six years. Pretty exciting podcast on that. So join it there and I’ll be back in a couple of minutes to go over some Frequently Asked Questions. Be back with Success Mashup Radio.

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IMB Podcast #4 – Beginners Guide To Launching a New Website or Blog is a post from: Keith Kranc, CEO of Dominate Web Media

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WordPress In 15 Minutes is a post from: Keith Kranc, CEO of Dominate Web Media

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