Getting Started

What we are doing here is to educate people on the basics of Internet site building, which then moves right onto ecommerce.

This is nothing you will find in any online “Internet Coaching” which is being currently foisted off through modern scams and  by self-styled “guru’s”.

By now, we’ve been introduced and you know I’m giving this info to you gratis – and why. And as I’ve said: the best way to achieve something is to give it away in advance. Helping you helps me, after a fashion. Like I said, it’s just the way things work out.

These Lesson Plans will mostly follow the book. You should get a copy for yourself if you don’t have one.

We can all learn from these scammers and guru’s. They are a great example in what not to do. So let’s get on with what we should be doing…

I. Sheer basics

Get through the steps of How to Roll Your Own Blog. This has been posted here as well, under the category of Blog Lessons.

Now, some revisions to that – to  know as you go:

Now I suggest people start two free blogs – one on Blogger and the other on Store Blogs.

There are two reasons for this -

1. To get you in the practice of using Analytics on your blogs, and also to start internetworking with other bloggers – which StoreBlogs does very well.

   Storeblogs also gives  you a better idea of the capabilities of WordPress as a blogging platform. And that one platform is recommended above all others because a) Lots of community support, b) Incredibly easy to adapt to anything you want to do.

   Free blogs are a step before you commit to personal hosting, which is ultimately what you’ll probably want to do.

2. When you set up your blogs, get Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools installed on each. Can’t do this with Storeblogs right now, but you can with Blogger.

   Analytics and Webmaster Tools will tell you what your traffic is and what search terms they are looking for your site. You should be using these and others when you build your main site (your hub). But this Blogger blog will get you practice.

Broadcast and Syndication 3.0

Another change is including OnlyWire.

In that Roll Your Blog lesson series, I told you to promote with Ping.fm – and this is still the case. But you will be also promoting other people in your network, and you use OnlyWire for this.

There are other syndication efforts coming up, but the rule on social media is that you never mention yourself, only other people. The places ping.fm goes to are those which are “all about me” sites – you are creating a lot of places where you update “what you’re doing now” and also mini-blogs where you can do excerpts of your main blog posts.

You sign up on OnlyWire with some alias, not your real brand. But you brand yourself with Ping.fm by taking your name or something you want to be known as, and setting up accounts with that phrase on all those places.

So when you post to OnlyWire, you aren’t duplicating what you do on Ping.fm – because these things will echo to each other and people will see think you are only self-promoting.

Sign up with as many possible social media sites on OnlyWire with one username. Sign up with all possible Ping.fm sites with a different name.

The next caveat is to not do your OnlyWire posting and your Ping.fm posting the same day. Reason being is that some of these social media do cross. And the bigger sites track by IP address, so they can suspend your account if they think you are spamming them.

Search Engines going social

Next, oddly, isn’t worrying about content – it’s considering others’ content. The search engines used to be able to be gamed by getting links on other sites. With social media, this became easier (and a certain fulfillment center made this their primary goal). However, the search engines have been onto this for some time – and both Google and Bing are turning into primarily social engines instead.

The point here is that shortly, search engines won’t rank by incoming links, but by votes and bookmarks (another form of voting). Most of the Internet, actually, don’t really understand this point – and they aren’t prepared to make the shift.

This is where our little network will shine. While I’ll tell you more of this later, we will essentially vote our little network up with all it’s blogs – while also taking the opportunity to vote down any Utah scammers we find (good target practice…) When the boom finally lowers, our little network will already be in good shape. That shake-up will give then a nice Google slap – sending them quite down the rankings. The forums and boards will do much better, since they are basically social networks.

After this, content, monetization, etc.

And we’ll get back to the book and its layout. From time to time, I’ll change things around.

Feel free to send me comments and emails about what we are covering. The idea is to either post the questions and revise the text to make it clearer, do some more research and post it, or create a FAQ where the data can be made available.

OK so far?

Here comes the next lesson…

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