Marketing with WordPress and More

I like Twitter because it’s easy to use and it helps me with my online business in several ways, which I share in this post. Read the rest of this entry »

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Most marketers put off getting professional help with their online business for months, or years, due to the expense of coaching or because they figure they can do everything on their own.

Yet, successful online entrepreneurs often say that until they had a coach or mentor to advise them about their business, they struggled online.

The good news is that there ARE affordable coaching options, including joining a paid internet business coaching forum like the one I belong to.

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Chances are good that you’re reading this post because of my membership at:

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Laid-back guy relaxing on the beach

OR

Kick A– marketer on his way to becoming a multi-millionaire?

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I focus on WordPress so often in my posts, but I want everyone who reads this to know that one of the reasons I’m online like this is because of web design software that I bought.

I used to think that building a professional looking website was a specialized skill and very expensive.

I’m not a programmer. I figured if I wanted a shot at it I’d have to learn HTML, PHP, etc. and struggle for months trying to understand complex graphics programs.  Because of this, the only online presence I had for years was as a moderator for a free Yahoo group!

Somewhere, somehow I heard about the best website software for beginners (and beyond) -  software that helped people create truly professional looking websites easily.

It also:

• optimized the sites for search engines
• had LOTS of attractive, pro looking templates (not just the usual clunky package you get with other programs)
• had a very friendly support forum
• wasn’t expensive.

I figured this was too good to be true. But after some careful research (I am the careful research queen – lol) AND lots of reading on the friendly forum, it was clear that it was true so I bought it:

XSitePro Website Design Software

Best Web Design Software

After watching several video tutorials, I put up a site for a grass roots political party within a few days.

It was amazing to have a tool that allowed me to do that without knowing HTML. I worked with HTML a little bit, but it wasn’t difficult because XSitePro simplified things so much and tutorials told me what to do.

I also invested in

XSitePro Cheat Sheet

XSite Pro Cheat Sheet

The author, James Schramko, reveals ’secret’ tweaks and techniques that will give your sites an even better edge in the search engines than the default settings in XSite Pro.

James has numerous posts on the XSite Pro forum, and other marketing forums. He has a lot of integrity and brilliance. You’ll see me mention him from time to time.

XSitePro website design software is great for beginners like I was and anyone who wants to put up a professional looking website fairy quickly.

XSitePro has a special focus on SEO and makes it easy to monetize sites with things like Adsense, affiliate links, etc. But if you just want to put up an artsy site it work for that beautifully too.

Is there anything I don’t like about it? I don’t care for most of the free templates it comes with, but I’m fussy and I can edit the templates fairly easily or create my own so that isn’t a big deal.

I recommend XSite Pro and it’s cool companion, XSite Pro Cheat Sheet. They are a beginner’s dream, and beyond. Thank you very much, creators of XSite Pro and James Schramko, for helping me get online in a serious (yet fun) way.

~ Lillea Woodlyns

Unsure about what kind of product you can create to sell online? You can explore your ideas with simple audio recordings.

Recording and organizing ideas with audio is recommended by top marketers like James Schramko. Talking is far faster than writing so this may greatly speed the product creation process. The audio can later be transcribed, edited and turned into a written product like an e-book.

Most computers contain some kind of simple audio recording device. You can also try free recording and editing software such as ‘Audacity.’

You can hire someone to do the transcription if you don’t care to do it yourself. Elance.com is a possible resource. However, if you think you’ll need a fair amount of work done it’s more cost effective to buy professional transcription software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking which I learned about in Brian McElroy’s product creation course. If you’ve done transcription manually like we have you’ll appreciate the value of top-end software.

We’re using the microphone portion of a computer headset to make our audios. (Update: please see note below about the USB microphone I upgraded to in March 2009). We pass the headset back and forth because the mike isn’t strong enough to capture both of our voices if we place it elsewhere. We wish that we could plug 2 headsets into the computer at the same time but that doesn’t work.

You can get a decent headset for under $40. Headsets are great for many things including listening to music, playing computer games, recording audio and using your computer to make free or low-cost phone calls with Skype

The sound from headsets is far better than most computer speakers and the better ones have noise cancellation so you don’t hear background noise in your recordings.

We’re using a Logitech ClearChat Comfort USB Headset It works fine for basic needs.

~ Lillea Woodlyns

* Update: In March 2009 I upgraded to a USB microphone, which you can read about here:  Best USB Microphone?

Purchasing a domain name is affordable and swift. Great! After that’s done you can create your site right away.

Nope!

It takes up to 24 hours for a domain name to be ready. For us, when buying this domain, it was only 8 hours, but by then it was time for bed.

Time aside, top internet marketers like James Schramko wisely suggest that you buy domains for low prices and then transfer the domains to Hostgator for affordable hosting and highly desireable features like Cpanel. Cpanel allows you to easily access important files and settings.

After setting up a transfer, it will take up to 8 hours for it to go through.

For us it was only 1 hour. With relief, we powered on but then-

Even more waiting!

Yes. Up to 48 hours until the site is ready to use. It was less than 24 for us, but we had hoped to  start this blog on the same day.

Domain name buying and setting up hosting is definitely not so fast. No matter which company you go with allow 48 hours at least for a new domain, and up to 1 week if you’ve owned the domain for a while.

You can learn more about domain names and hosting here.

~ Justen & Lillea