Now let’s take a look at Plug-ins. Plug-ins add some functionality to your website or blog and improves your website visitor’s experience, or a lot of times, it improves your ease of use and management of the website itself. A lot of plug-ins are absolutely free. The overwhelming majority of plug-ins I know of are free. Some of them will ask you for donations to support their cause. If you really, really like a plug-in feel free to donate to them, and encourage them to continue making improvements to it. But installation of plug-ins with the newest version or WordPress is also extremely easy. All you have to do is go into the plug-in section of your admin control panel, it’s one of the tabs along the side. You click on that, and you can sort through the different plug-ins they have available, read what they do. And then, usually with one or two clicks, you click on a plug-in and click on install, it installs the plug-in for you and you can start using it immediately.
So let’s talk a little bit about some of the plug-ins that I recommend when you’re setting up your website, and kind of what they do. If you have your own site already and you’re using WordPress, these are some great ones if you have not yet installed them, if you’re brand new and you’re about to set up your website and you’re trying to get all that ready, I would strongly recommend that you do these. And of course if you have us to set up your website for you, I will install these for you.
Okay, so all-in-one SEO pack. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” And all-in-one SEO pack is a plug in for WordPress that allows you to some really cool features that make your web more likely to be found in search engines, or more likely to be optimized to come up higher in search engines, if you actually use the plug-in. And so it does some things to affect key words, meta tags and how it uses those, in order to make your pages more likely to be found in search engines. It’s just going to give you a small boost if you use it correctly. If you abuse it, it’s going to give you a big down-boost, if you don’t use it at all, you’ll kind of be neutral there. But I would recommend installing the all-in-one SEO pack, as a plug-in.
The Google XML sitemaps, XML stands for the Extensible Markup Language, and this creates a site map. A site map is nothing more than a list of all the pages in your website that you want Google to index. If you want somebody to be able to type in a search word, and find that page in the Google search engine, you can make a site map and list all those pages along with what you think the priority of that page is on your list. So if Google only indexed these four pages, then I would be good. But they indexed these other 100 pages I’d be okay with that too. So you would list the four with a much higher priority, and they’d list the other pages below that with lower priority, and then Google will tend to look through and spider the pages they list with a higher priority more. And what this Google XML sitemaps plug-in for WordPress does, is it will automatically take all the pages and the content you put into the WordPress and it will spit out a completely formatted site map for you automatically, that you can then take the address of the sitemap from, and move it into your Google webmaster tools accounts, we’re going to talk about later, and that will actually allow Google to find all of your web pages very quickly and very easily from your site. Extremely powerful plug-in, but once you get it set up its value quickly fades away. But if you’re a brand new site, it is very powerful and its really powerful for ongoing stuff, but it’s so fire-and-forget that you forget how powerful it is.
Remember I told you before that you should always backup your website? And that I get mine backed up daily? Well what I use in order to backup my website daily is this next plug-in. It’s called WPDB back-up which stands for I believe, WordPress Database Backup. And what that does, is you can setup frequency at which you want the database backup to be performed, and emailed to you. And what it will do is in the morning, between 3:00 in the morning – I guess it does it somewhere around there, it’ll go and backup your entire database of all the posts and contents, stuff you have on your website, it’ll zip it up into one file, and it will email you a copy of that zip file to your email account. How I deal with my backup files is I have a backup done on my web hosting provider, they actually do their own backup besides the this, and then this backup is also sent to my email account. My email account is Gmail. Gmail has a 8 GB worth of email storage or something like that, and so each day that I get this I just archive my backup of the entire website content, and I store it there. So I’ve got a backup both on my web server, and also on my Gmail account from all of these emails that come in. So if I had a failure, if there was a failure of the website hosting provider and they lost their backups for some odd reason, which could possibly happen, or if Gmail went down and I had a failure, I had the backup in the other place. So I have redounded backups going on with these things. Then I occasionally, once in a while, will save another backup to my local hard drive.
Okay, one-click plug-in updater. Occasionally with all the different plug-ins you have on your WordPress installation, they’re coming out the new versions. So you know they may come out with the new version of the database backup that’s more efficient, or that does another feature, or that has something else added to it. And what the one-click plug-in updater does is it’s constantly checking once a day or so, to see if any of the plug-ins you have, have been updated. And if they have, it’ll say “click here to update all of the ones that have been updated and we’ll do that for you automatically.” So you don’t really have to worry about it, once you have the one-click plug-in updater installed on your WordPress site.
The next plug-in I talk about is Google Feedburner Feedsmith. Google Feedburner, which we’re going to talk about later, is a tool for having a way for people to follow what you’re posting on your website, the RSS feed. And the Google Feedburner Feedsmith will actually take all the posts you already have and feed them right into Feedburner for you, and it makes it easy. So, I think that’s exactly what that one does, although I haven’t looked at it in a little while but I’m pretty sure that it actually takes the feed from your website and exports it to Feedburner for you automatically. So I would definitely install that plug-in for WordPress as well.
The “Thank Me Later” plug-in is actually a really cool plug-in. When people come on your blog and they make a comment on your post, which by the way is good for you, for search engine reasons, and for interactivity, you want people coming on and commenting about what you’re doing, what you’re blogging about, and so the more people that do that the better. But a good way to encourage people to do that is to have this Thank Me Later plug-in. What the Thank Me Later plug-in does is, if you had a blog and you had a blog post, and I came on there and I wrote a comment in response to your blog, like “I really like that you’re helping people with the free pumpkins on Thanksgiving. Thanks for doing that, by the way I’m looking to finish my basement next month. Give me a call and we can talk more about that.” When I post that comment on your blog, you automatically get notified that the comment’s up there, you can go read and reply. However, automatically with this plug-in, a day or two later, you get an email from the system, saying “Hey I just wanted to thank you again for posting that comment on the blog, if there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.” And it automatically does that day or two out, so that it’s staggered and you get the added benefit of a couple of days later, an automatic follow-up system. So extremely powerful, especially if you’ve got a lot of people commenting on your blog, and you need to do that work.
Okay, the next one we’re going to talk about is “CommentLuv.” And what CommentLuv will allow you to do is it’ll integrate with your blog, so that when other people are on your site leaving a comment, they can reference what they were last posting about on their blog. It’s a way to grow interactivity between several blogs that you’re running. So, what’s nice is if you were on another blog and they have CommentLuv, it’ll automatically go to your blog, and find out some of the blog posts you were recently posting about for you, and link to your blog, from their blog too. So you want to find people that have CommentLuv, and comment on their website and you want to find people that are commenting on your site that are using CommentLuv, and then both of you guys together can add links back and forth, which we’ll talk about during link building, as to why that’s a strong strategy to explore. So I would definitely look at that as well.
ShareThis, if you go to my blog and you look at the bottom of the each post, there’s a whole bunch of little icons that allow people to do some social bookmarking type sites, where if somebody wants to recommend my blog post to some friends on another social bookmarking site, they’ve got all the links they need to use right there on every blog post. And ShareThis the plug-in ShareThis for WordPress, will allow you to automatically add all of those links to the social networking, social bookmarking sites, at the bottom of your blog post automatically.
Subscribe To Comments – that is a another blog, that’s another tool that allows people who want to receive any updates to a particular blog post you have where people are posting comments to receive notifications that those comments have been updated. So that’s a tool if you want to kind of engage people who are used to replying to, and going back and forth with each other via comments on your blog, if you want to encourage lots of comment sharing you can use tools like that.
TinyMCE Advanced – I don’t even remember why I recommended that. I’m not sure which one that is. Let me go pull it up on my site here. I’m sure it is good enough to recommend, I just don’t remember what it is. The name is not reminding me what it is. Let me pull it up here. Okay. The TinyMCE Advanced is the upgraded editor, the what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor of WordPress. It has bunch of extra features that make it easier for you to write content in your blog, and do some formatting things. So it’s an upgraded tool from the generic WordPress editor that they have, it has bunch of extra features. So you can install that, and it will help you when you’re writing your blog posts editing exiting blog posts. Sorry about that, I forgot what it was.
The Viper’s Video Quicktags, that’s one to use when you want to do videos in your blog post, if you are sharing a video from Youtube, using the Viper’s Video Quicktags plug-in allows you to use a smaller snippet of code, in order to share the Youtube video right in your WordPress blog, rather then have and then go and grab whole bunch of extra code, and format it, and do all bunch of crazy stuff like that. Viper’s Video Quicktags will allow you to format it very nicely.
WP-Spamfree Anti-spam – you’ll notice that once you start running a blog, you’re going to get what is called “blog spam.” People go and find new blogs that are in search engines, and to try to improve the ranking of their websites or promote their proxy services, they will use automated tools – and by the way, don’t do this. I am not telling you this to get an idea, I am telling you how to prevent people from doing it, it’s just really bad. So basically, don’t do this. But people use automated software to go to blogs, and spam blogs by writing automated blog posts. And they’ll read something like, “I really like what you said here in your blog post. Oh by the way, you may want to check out this Viagra site I have,” and they’ll have a link to Viagra on there. So it’s very generic, bland information that they’re adding, and they have links to a variety of get-rich-quick, Viagra, adult-entertainment type sites which are clearly inappropriate on your website. And so the WP-Spamfree Anti-spam thing is one of the best tools I’ve found for helping cut down and the amount of that stuff you get. It’s very, very effective but occasionally something still gets through and you still need to manually remove that. It’s easy to do, and all you need to do is click on delete on that comment, or do not approve the comment if you’re manually approving comments. But basically, this tool will help cut out a lot of that, automatically flag it for removal. And I believe it has some artificial intelligence feedback loop, where the more spam it sees, that is like a certain type of bug or spam, it actually learns from that and improves over time. So that’s my understanding of how it works.
Last one on here: the last recommended plug-in for WordPress is Google Analyticator. And what this plug-in does is, it helps you to integrate your WordPress site with Google Analytics, which is the tool I am going to recommend here next for keeping track of who’s coming to your site, where they’re coming from, what they’re looking at, how long they’re staying on there, what the bounce rate is, and we’ll talk a lot about those strategies when we talk about Google Analytics. However, that is a great plug-in for making it very, very easy to integrate analytics in with your site. And that is a summation of my recommended plug-ins, some really, really good ones there. I strongly recommend that if you are going to install WordPress, you install those plug-ins, it just takes a couple of minutes each to do.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” to take your handyman business to the next level.
Alright, so here we go – Themes. Themes you get change the way your website looks, if you’re using WordPress they are really easy to do. With themes in general you can change the way your website looks. But is really easy to do on WordPress. WordPress right from your admin control panel, you’re going to log in there, there’s a place where you can go on a look through literally thousands of different themes, they are all pre-designed for you. The overwhelming majority of them are completely free. There are some that they’re going to ask you for a nominal fee in order to do it, and then there are some premium themes that cost you $50 to $100 in order to get, if you’re looking to do that. But there’s some really great free themes for your blog.
And you can go and try on different themes, go through your website when you’re setting it up. You can try one , put it on there, it’s basically one or two clicks. It shows you what your website would look like in that theme. You click “Save” and it actually save the theme to your website for you and makes the whole thing look that way throughout. So a really powerful tool for doing themes, and you can use a variety of them and you can change it later if you want, if you get tired of it, you want to upgrade, you want to look at new ones, you want to make a different one every week, you can do that. I don’t recommend making a different every week by the way, but you can. So you can use different themes to do that, you can always upgrade your theme later with minimal work if you’re using WordPress, and you’re doing some standard formatting stuff. So, instead of manually formatting things inside your editor when you make new post, if you use relatively standard “Heading One,” and instead of big and bold and things of that nature, it will actually go and update your theme for you across all of your posts and make it look really pretty. It’s a really powerful tool to be able to use themes if you format your website correctly.
Insulation themes – really easy, like I said. You log into your admin and control panel for WordPress, you go to the theme section, you can literally look trough hundreds of them, it shows you a little thumb images, you click on the one you want, it’ll show you a bigger picture, if you want to apply it to your site you click another button, it applies it to your site, you click on “Save.” That’s really how easy it is. So themes are very powerful, and great ways to change the look of your website.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn how to use your website to effectively market your own handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, let’s move on to the next slide: website creation software. We have been talking little bit about WordPress, and talked about WordPress is a blog so why blogging software? We talked about this. Search engines like really fresh content. So you’re going to be writing some articles and content for your blog. And blogs allow you to easily add content by filling out a web form, with no need to learn programming in HTML. So the nice thing about WordPress is you go into the admin section in which you usually type in your domain name, forward-slash something, something, something, which has admin in it, usually it’s like “wp-admin”, or something like that. You can access your WordPress admin control panel. It is got a really easy interface to operate. You can click on the left-hand side to add a page, or add a blog post, and you can add content just by typing in the title of the blog post, and just typing out in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type editor. And you can do highlighting , you can do bold, you can throw a picture in, you can put a video in, you can do links, you can do all that stuff just like you are almost typing in a word processor, all right using WordPress. So it’s really, really easy for you to add content once this thing gets set up, which is what you want.
And another reason to use blogs is search engines tend like the blog format. Blogs will automatically cross-link your post, and if you kind of think about the categories you want to put in your post in, or write some keywords, tags or things you do there, blogs will automatically compile that data and categorize it and organize it. So that when someone comes to your website, if they want to see all the blog posts about kitchens, they can click on “kitchen” and it’ll show all the different posts you ever made that had a kitchen as a keyword. Or they want to see ones about bathrooms, or rental properties, or real state agents, or selling your house, or whatever is your going to do on there, people can go and easily sort all that data and do it all in a really nice format. And search engines like that, so they kind of give blogs a very natural boost toward to top of the search engines, compared to some other static websites there aren’t nearly done as well.
Okay, so the other nice thing about the blogs is, how much was WordPress again? WordPress is free. So they’re extremely inexpensive and they’re easy to use, which we talked about, you know their editing features and all sorts of stuff like that. So I highly recommend that when you are talking about your website creation software, that you consider using a blog. By the way, WordPress is not the only one out there. It is, in my opinion, the most popular one and the one that I would recommend to people use and I have no incentive of telling you that, you don’t give me any money or anything, they are free. So I would definitely use them. I do use it for the site I run. There are other software packages out there though that you can get, I mean there is professional stuff — Adobe has got a whole website creation package, and stuff like that. Microsoft got one Frontpage whatever it is called – but you don’t need them. You can get by with WordPress, and I would recommend you get by with WordPress. And I put the wrong address on there. It supposed to be www.WordPress.org instead of www.WordPress.com. www.WordPress.com is the free version of their free application where they sometimes put adds on your site and other things like that. You don’t want that. You want to actually have your own hosting account and your own WordPress installed on your site. Partially because you want to do these next two things which are plug-ins and themes. Plug-ins are little mini programs that are attached to WordPress that provide certain functionality or improvability for you, and I am going to talk about those in a minute. Themes are more like graphical designs, and how your website looks and feels when people are navigating. And I will talk about those here in a moment.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for effectively using a website in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Let’s jump right into website hosting providers. Alright, let’s talk about cost. Usually website hosting providers — by the way, a website hosting provider, if you don’t remember, is the company you’re paying a monthly fee to in order to keep your website’s pages up and available on the Internet so when someone types in your domain name, the website actually appears. So let’s talk about the cost of website hosting providers. A lot of website hosting providers are going to charge an upfront-setup fee and monthly fees. The website setup fees, in some cases, are waived if you commit to a long enough contract, or if you pre-pay six months or a year out or something like that. That’s very common. It’s not always, but it’s very common, or they’ll run specials of that nature. Setup fees can run somewhere around $20 per month. Hosting fees can be $10 to $15 per month. You’re not going to need much more than a $15 account. Now, you can buy dedicated servers and get really high-end accounts. But for most websites, most handyman websites, you’re not going to need anything more than the low- to mid-level plans, because you’re not going to be doing a ton of traffic. Most of the extra features they’re going to be offering for these upper plans are not going to be worth while for you to pay with. So I don’t necessarily recommend it. So somewhere in the $10 to $15 range, I think is pretty reasonable for monthly fee for web hosting plan, for most businesses. And the setup fee is going to be probably around $20. So yes, those are the costs for doing that. If you want to get the specific recommendations for what we recommend, go to LearnToBeRich.com, and there is a downloads link, and I have a recommended email and web hosting providers link on there, where I actually have the ones that I recommend right on there.
Alright, the next one is the software needed. So your web hosting provider is going to need to provide you with certain software, that you’re going to want to have on there. Both to run WordPress, which is the software to update your website with content and be able to manage it, and things of that nature. So you’ll need that. Either you’ll need to have the ability for them to automatically have WordPress on there, which a lot of web hosting companies do, or you’re going to definitely need some prerequisites in order to be able to manually install WordPress on your website. So, software needed: you definitely want to have PHP. PHP is a programming language that’s designed run on web servers — very powerful, very flexible, open-source, free type of software package. It’s not going to cost you anything extra than your hosting fee. By the way, it won’t cost you anything extra besides your hosting fee for any of these: PHP, MySQL, PHP MyAdmin, and WordPress. They’re all free right now. I expect at least PHP MySQL, PHP MyAdmin to remain free forever; WordPress, who knows. I expect it to be free, but you don’t really know sure, but it’s free right now.
So basically, you want to go and get a web hosting provider that’s got a PHP, MySQL which is your database — that’s going to be what stores all of your data from your blog posts, and articles, and contents, and keeps the structure in data of your website stored. So it’s called MySQL. And then the last thing is PHP MyAdmin. You’re probably not going to use this very much at all, except when you’re configuring your website, or if you’ve got to do some backups of your database, or things of that nature. You want to have something that really easy to use and PHP MyAdmin is a great resource, that if your web hosting provider, if you’ve got a choice between two, and one of them offers PHP MyAdmin and the other one doesn’t — I would go with the one that offers PHP MyAdmin because it’s that important.
The next thing is WordPress, and we talked about that. Some web hosts and providers will actually provide WordPress for you right on the server, because it is so popular. Where you basically, its already installed, you click on one button or a couple buttons, and it automatically installs the basic version of WordPress for you. There is some configuration you will need to do to it. Or, if they don’t do that, if your web hosting provider has PHP MySQL and PHP MyAdmin, then you can manually take WordPress from www.WordPress.org, and then install that on your web server. In most cases right there, as long as they have those other things.
Let’s talk for a moment about whether or not you need a dedicated IP address. For most businesses, you are not going to need to pay extra to get a dedicated IP address. If it’s free, great. If it’s not free, I probably would not necessarily recommend that you get dedicated IP address, unless you plan on doing more than just local marketing for a relatively local business. If you are going to go and do business nationally, or you really focus significantly on your web site business, then you may want to go and spend the extra dollar or two a month, or whatever it’s going to cost you, in order to get a dedicated IP address. By the way, the price for a dedicated IP address varies significantly from hosting company to hosting company. Some of them don’t even offer it, some of them will charge you a dollar extra, some will charge you $5 per month extra, so just realize that you don’t need it if they offer it. It’s totally up to you whether or not you get it. It’s kind of nice, if you’re doing some fancy stuff with domain names, and you want to have a dedicated IP address to work with. It’s also, some people thought for a long time that it gave you a slight boost in search engine ranking. I think that the more recent update to that is that it doesn’t have nearly the impact that people once thought it did.
Alright, let’s talk about the amount of hard drive space and bandwidth that you would need on your account. For the overwhelming majority of people on this particular webinar, the handyman business owners, the amount of space and bandwidth you’re going to be need on your accounts is not going to be anywhere near what you would automatically get with your starter- to mid-size-type account. In fact, if you’re paying $10 to $15 per month, I would venture to say that the overwhelming majority of you, like 99%, would not need anything more than what they’re offering. You know, most of these guys are offering ridiculous-size packages now. You know, 100 GB of a hard drive space, 3,000 GB of bandwidth, or ridiculous amounts of space and bandwidth. That’s really not going to be an issue for you in most cases. You can get by with relatively small-size hosting accounts, if you’re doing just a WordPress-type site, as long as you’re not uploading huge audio and video files to your server. And we can talk about, when we talk about using video marketing later. We’ll talk about having your videos hosted on Youtube anyway, which doesn’t take up any of your space or any of your bandwidth. So, you’ll want to go and do that. Space and bandwidth are not really going to be a major issue for most of you. If you have 100 MB, and I know that really small, you probably could get by with most accounts doing that. Bandwidth, you’re not really going to have an issue. So, if you were thinking about taking notes on that, I wouldn’t even bother. Just go ahead and skip it over, and realize that most accounts are going to be fine.
The one thing I will point out about web site hosting providers is, you either want one that’s going to make regular backups for you, and then insist that they send you the backups, and that you check them and make sure they’re good. Or, you’re going to want to have a system in place for making backups yourself. There are few things more frustrating in life than spending a year or more building a website, writing contents for it, optimizing and getting everything set up, only to find out that a hard drive crashed or something happened where your website is no longer available, and you do not have a recent backup or a backup at all. So I will save you some of that pain, by trying to tell you right now, make backups of your website, and make them often. How often? I have a backup of my main website, the www.LearnToBeRich.com site, sent to me via email every night. Okay? I’m going to talk a little bit about a plug-in you can get for WordPress that’ll do that for you. I strongly recommend that you do that, because it will make a backup of any new content you put on the site. And then you’ll have a stream of backups. And then of course, you need to figure out how you’re going to save your backups locally on your computer. But you are going to want to go and do that backup very often, so that if something happens, you can restore it and get all or at least most of your content and your website back up as quickly as possible, with as little headache as possible.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, so here is your website setup guide and five easy steps. Step number one would be domain name. So you’re going to want to get a domain name where somebody goes on the web and they type in something in order to get your website, like “handyman.com.” I doubt that’s available for you, I think someone else probably already has it. But it could be your handyman service, and I will talk little bit about selecting your domain name here in a minute. But domain name, step one, your website hosting provider that is the company that’s the company that’s going to actually host your website, where are all your web pages will exist and be online, and you pay someone a monthly fee to do that. Domain names usually pay a yearly fee in order to register that. Website hosting, you’re usually going to pay a monthly fee. Your website creation software, I told you before, we’re going to want to use a blog software and in order to do the creation where you actually have the blog post content up there. And I’m going to recommend WordPress for that one. So WordPress is completely free right now. I don’t think they plan on charging anything for it in the future, but that is what we’re recommending, and it’s free in order to create your web site. So you want to do that.
And then website tracking software, let’s talk about that too. I also have a free recommendation for your website tracking software, which will help you to find out what is working what is not working and your website, how to make improvements, and things of that nature, and we’ll talk about that here in a minute. And then a last one is your email broadcast software, which we talked little bit about how to use earlier in the webinar. We’re going to talk about what I specifically recommend here, and getting that setup as well. And there are some low-cost and free ones of that too. I’m going to recommend to use those.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, let’s take a look at the domain names. In order to get a domain name, you’re going need to use the domain name registrar. If you go ahead and contact me on the web site, I’ll show you the domain name registrar that I recommend. Domain names can cost anywhere from, if you’re buying a whole bunch of them in volume, a little less than $10, if you’re doing one at a time, $10 to $20 per year is probably about the range you should except to pay for a domain name. Now, of course you can go and try to buy a domain name that someone else took the time to register, and they’re willing to sell it to you for much larger dollar amount. That is not what I am talking about. What I am talking about is going and getting a brand new domain name directly from the registrar, and it’s going to cost you $10 to $20 per year just to get your domain name. And for those of you that don’t know the domain name is, the domain name would be what people type in on the web in order to find your website. For example, my domain name for my website is “www.LearnToBeRich.com”. So when someone wants to come to my website, they go to their favorite web browser, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and they would type in “www.LearnToBeRich.com” and that would pull up my website. Yours would be probably something related to your handyman business. Or your name, I would probably recommend that you, well let’s get right into name selection tips. I would probably recommend that you get something that is easily understood when spoken on the phone, having registered, oh boy, probably thousands of domain names over my Internet career, I will tell you that it is extremely important if you are doing any type of offline marketing or any type of marketing you are going to be talking to people on telephone, that you have a domain name that is easy for someone to understand and spell. That may not necessarily be your name. I know that some people have much more complicated names, and they end up spelling that name over and over again, and people mishear them on the phone, and all sorts of stuff like that. So if you have a name like that, don’t use your name. If you have a business name that’s like that, or names that have common misspellings in them, don’t use a domain name that is commonly misspelled, because if you tell someone to do it on the telephone, then you’ve got to tell them how to spell it. So I don’t recommend that. You want to find one that’s really easy to understand when spoken. And I think my domain name has that, although I could be wrong. My impression is that when I say “LearnToBeRich.com,” people know it’s relatively easy to spell, not a lot of hard words in there and people know what to type in. The most confusion I get with my name is some people like to think that it’s got some weird number “two” or just the “B” instead of word “Be,” but it really is spelled out completely Learn-To-Be-Rich-dot-com. Okay, so if you want to have that.
Another way to look at your domain name is, you may want have key words related to what you are doing. So if your primary focus in your handyman business is, “I am a basement refinisher, I finish basements for people,” you may want to include that key word in your domain name. Specifically, if you’re doing it in a certain geographical area, you may want to have your business name (or at least your domain name) be “DenverBasmentRefinishers.com” or “FinishYourBasmentInDenver.com” or something like that, in order to have key words that are relevant to what you would want someone typing into a search engine to find you, As well as words are easy to understand and put in there.
The extension — there is no doubt in my mind that you do not want a “.net,” you don’t want a “.org,” you don’t want a “dot-this,” you don’t want a “.info,” you don’t want anything other then a “.com.” Get a “.com” domain name. Even if you have to go and pick something less than ideal, it is better to have “Joes-handyman-business-in-Denver.com,” that it is to have “JoesHandyman.info.” In my opinion, you want the “.com.” The “.com” is the defacto standard and what people normally associate with domain names, and there’s been an ongoing debate for nearly decade now about, “oh you know but .nets are just as good,” or “.info is just as good,” or “.biz is going to be just as good.” Nope, nothing is just as good as “.com,” get the “.com.” They don’t usually cost you any more to get the “.com” than anything else. They just tend to be the ones that get used up fastest, because those are the good ones. So go after the “.com,” get a good “.com” name, so yes. So use key words, you want a “.com” extension, you want something easy to understand when spoken, no fallen key characters. You don’t want to get, “learn-to-be-rich.com.” You want to get “LearnToBeRich.com,” or you want to get “JoeFix,” or how about “UpgradeMyBathroomInDenver.com,” or “DenverBathroomUpgrades,” or “DenverKitchenUpgrades,” or “DenverFlooringSpecialists,” or “DenverFlooringHandyman,” or something like that. Wherever it is that you are, you may want to do physical location, you may want to do something like that with the key words that you want to come up with.
And by the way, I don’t think I have mentioned this too many places elsewhere, but I’ll take this time to go for it now. And that is the concept of multiple websites and multiple domain names. I have mixed feelings about this subject, so I’ll give you some of the pros and cons and let you make a decision. There are advantages to having a website that focuses only on one type of specialty. However there are disadvantages to having a multiple websites to maintain and multiple websites when trying to rank multiple websites well in search engines. There are people that will tell you, you should have separate websites and separate domain names for each specialty or niche that you’re focusing on. So, if you’re doing some marketing, and you’re targeting real estate agents, and you’re trying to go after the home-preparation, detailing-type business for getting houses ready to sell, you might want to have a website that specializes in that. You may want to have a domain name that specializes in those key word. And when they go to your website, you may only want to be talking about that particular part of your business. There are some benefits to that, I will concede.
However, there are other people that will say, “No, what you need is more of a generic website with your business name, or some of the specialty that you do.” And then you can market to all these different niches automatically, and have all of them go to that one website. There are advantages doing that as well. And I will tell you, my normal feeling, up until six months ago, my normal feeling was: separate website for each niche, separate domain name. You end up owing a lot of domain names, you end up owning a lot of websites, you end up having to maintain a lot of websites in doing that. I tell you, one of our business models, we actually went out and registered 280 domain names for 280 U.S. cities, so that we could focus certain marketing on certain cities that we are doing in a national lead generation campaign. And there were some significant advantages doing that. However, the major downside was that we had to maintain 280 websites, we had pay for 280 domain names, we had to pay for hosting for all those different sites, although we did some combinations and tricky stuff with that. But you needed to do all that. Plus, search engines were trying to index each one of those differently, and that becomes a problem. Because if you have got, and I’m going to get into this later with link-building and things to that nature, but I’ll just give you really basic overview. If you’ve got 280 websites that you’re spreading your marketing out over, well they’re 1/280th as popular as if you have one website was all the marking going to one and all the people linking to one, all the people promoting one. And so there are benefits to having one website, where you’re combining your forces and combining your marketing, and laser-focusing, and really promoting just one.
So, about six months ago, I decided to go to a single website, a single domain name, and so everything I do now is on one domain name. It’s on www.LearnToBeRich.com. So for instance, this particular marketing course, The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing course — you might think I’d go register “HandymanMarketingCourse.com” or something like that, in order to promote that. And there are some of the advantages to doing that, if you came to the site you’d think, “This guy only does handyman marketing courses.” Now, you go to www.LearnToBeRich.com. This course is on there, all the information I have about my business on there. You see that I focus on not just this niche industry, but I also teach marketing to a couple of other of industries. I also do real estate investing personally. So there’s also stuff on there about things of that nature. And you’ll find that it looks more diluted, but now I get all the benefit of all the marketing I am doing for all the different products and services that I offer, all going to that one site. So that one site in itself becomes more popular.
So whether not you decide to do multiple sites for yourself, get multiple domain names, get multiple hosting accounts, or combine them on the single hosting accounts (which you can do in some cases), you should consider whether or not to do that. If it were me, and you were asking me personally sitting down one-on-one, for the overwhelming majority cases I would say get one domain name, get one website. And then you can actually write about everything you do related to that, on that one website. So that’s the multiple-domain-name, multiple-website question and answer, and there are pros and cons. I have done both. Right now, I am doing one and there is a reason why I am doing one. It’s easier to maintain and better for popularity, that one site. So that’s what I would recommend.
Alright, so we talked about name selection tips. Once you get your domain name, you need to configure it to work with your web hosting provider, both the web site itself and also your email. You’re going to want to use your domain name in your email. So, and by the way, I will try to tell you when I am breaking my own rules. And I am breaking my own rule with this one. I do have my email configured to go, so that I think if you email james@LearnToBeRich.com, it comes to me. But when I send out email, I do not send it out with my domain name. Well, most of the time. There are exceptions to that too. Most of the time, I use a Gmail-based account, and it’s for a variety of reasons, but I wanted to keep the emails generic enough that if I’m not doing something specifically related to my business, I could do that. For you, for the most part, you’re going to want to have your email address set up so that you can use “john@DenverHandymanServices.com” or whatever your domain name is, so that it’s customized and you’re promoting your business as you do it. I do have my email address set up so that I can do that; I don’t always remember to do it. But you can set it up and do it all the time, and it’s really not that much work. And I’m probably moving toward that, so I should point that out too. So you want to able to configure your domain name to work with your website, so that when someone types in the domain, it actually points to the web hosting provider and specifically to your website. And also so that it’s configured to work with your email, so that when you want to send and receive emails it’s coming in under your name, or “info,” or “admin,” or “support,” or whatever you want to use at your domain name “.com,” or whatever it is you’re going to do. Okay, so that’s the domain name selection process.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
