LOVEfluencers Training: Websites and Blogs

Hey everybody, it is Noelle Russell. I am coming to you live. This is our Lovefluencer training night, Thursday night. It is my favorite night of the week where I get to hang out with all of my friends and talk about some ways that we can bring our authentic voices into the world. There are so many of us who have incredible ideas or experiences that we should share. And so what I did a few weeks ago is I created a brand called Lovefluencers. Which was all about really creating personal brands for people and not necessarily like, how do you create the product? So I do help people with that, but really more like, what are the technical pieces? You know, most of us already have a story. We have the thing that happened to us today. We have the thing that happened to us 10 years ago. But how do we share that with the world? And so over the next— we are now in week 2. So over the next 5 weeks, we're going to talk about all the technical components that you can use to build your brand and share your message. I really don't think most people, when I talk to them about personal branding and I'm like, oh my gosh, you should go and you should tell people about this. You should go live on LinkedIn or whatever. They often look at me, A, like, no, that's crazy. No way. But B, like, nobody wants to know about me. That's their instant kind of gut reaction. Who wants to know the story of like the craziness that I deal with on a daily basis or the, you know, the weird situation that I had, or even a traumatic experience that I went through and how I overcame it. And I'm just here to say that so many of us are hungry for this type of authenticity in the world. There is so much out there that just doesn't feel real. And so my hope with Lovefluencers is to encourage all of us to just step into being real and be willing to share with each other like this, right? I'm talking to a camera, but I actually feel like I'm talking to you. And with all the comments and questions and things that I get, I just feel like we build friends this way every day. And some of my best friendships came from me just being willing to say out loud, here's how I got through something hard. And so I want that for you as well. So today what we are gonna focus on, actually just thought about this, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to— let me think, how am I going to be able to do screen sharing? All right, we'll have to see. Let's see how it goes. So I will tell you right now, we actually are doing this training inside a Facebook group called Lovefluencers. So you can go on out there, you can actually go to my Linktree, which some of you use to find me and find this broadcast, or you could just go to the— go to Facebook and just search for Lovefluencers Bootcamp and join right in there, because I think I'm gonna have to end it. I'm gonna talk to you broadly about what I'm going to do, and then I'm gonna end the live broadcast across all of these beautiful channels, and then I'm gonna go into the Facebook group and actually do a live screen share where I can show you step by step what I have done to build a couple websites over the last few weeks. And what I've done consistently over my career to populate those sites with meaningful content. So that's what we're focusing on tonight, is building websites and building blogs so that we can attract— using our written word, we can attract people to our message and to who we are and what we represent. Now, just to give you a sneak peek, next week we're going to focus on podcasting, which is using the same idea, using the word, but instead we'll use the spoken word. The week after that, we're going to focus on building a video channel, whether it's YouTube or TikTok. I'm a big fan of TikTok, and thanks to all my TikTokers who followed me over here, my TikTok fam, and who decided to join me tonight. And then the week after that, we will have at that point, right, a blog, a podcast, a video channel. Then I want to show you how you can monetize your brand. I don't think you should be focused on monetization as a love fluencer. We are focused on sharing our message and letting the right people and the right business opportunities be attracted to us. But I do know that oftentimes some of us are like, this is the thing I want to do this for a living. And so I do want to give you real tangible ideas about how you can make that a reality. And then the last thing I'll do, which is week 6, I will share with you what we can do to start getting you out there. So where you could be a guest blogger, where you could be a guest on podcasts. I have so many different resources that I've used to build my brand and I want to share those with you. And of course I have a Lovefluencer podcast. So all of you have the ability to actually be guests on my podcast as a beginning, right? It's not like an A-list podcast, but it's a start. And that's exactly what we need to do. We just need to start. Every amazing brand that I know started somewhere and it started in a place that doesn't look like where they are now. So I want to encourage you, a lot of this is just about getting started, just about putting one foot in front of the other and building your brand one day at a time. And so I'm going to give you the technical steps to do that today and I'll talk through what those are. And like I said, I'll we'll do a ready break and we'll head over to the Facebook group and I will go live on Facebook inside that group and share with you all basically the step-by-step instructions on how I built a couple of blogs that have been really successful for me. Okay. So let's get started. First of all, thanks to all of you. I always do this late in the game. I always want to check to see all my friends on LinkedIn and YouTube. Thank you so much. There is the opportunity for you to share to people if you want to do that. That, give me some hearts, let me know that you were, you know, watching and thought what I was saying was maybe a little bit interesting. But mostly it's just my chance to make sure that what I'm doing is working. So I just go into platforms really quick now that I've given you a bit of an intro and just check to make sure that you can see me. And of course, in the off chance that we actually— and of course LinkedIn has changed the way that the look and feel of the site. So it's gonna take me a tiny bit longer to look it up, but I think I found it. Oh yeah, this happened to me last time where it was a little bit loud. Hopefully it's not as choppy as it looks. So hi, Jen Fitzgerald! Oh, hi! So good to see you. Great to see all my friends here, and thank you so much again for the support. So let's talk about it. It's so cool to see you guys. Okay. Hi. So you're welcome to chat it up. I think I'm live on like 6 different platforms. So wherever you are, feel free to send me a message. I may not be able to answer it live, but I promise you I will be able to answer it eventually. So I'll go around after I get offline through this training and I will offer it. Okay, let's see, what shall we do? Let's talk about websites. So one thing that I've noticed, and I've built hundreds of websites, hundreds, I've also had hundreds of websites hacked. So part of the, the solution you'll see me demonstrate in Facebook Live tonight is because of those vulnerabilities and the time I have to handle them. So I started The first thing I encourage you to do if you have not done this already is to grab a URL with your name. I have noellesilver.com. I've had multiple names in my life, so I have multiple versions. I just kicked off a new one, which is noelle.ai. The one— the reason I encourage you to do this is because I had a very interesting experience where when I first got into the technical industry and I wanted to advocate for my brand. I'm the type of person that when I start to work for a company, I become that company. I put it on like a blanket and I, I want to just embody everything that that company is, including the branding. But the challenge with that, though, is that I branded myself. So, for example, I was working for Red Hat and they had bought a company called JBoss, and I was a JBoss Solutions Architect. And I created this whole brand, JBoss Girl. I created a website, a logo, swag, you name it. The challenge, though, was that when I left JBoss to go do other really cool things, bigger and brighter and amazing things, what was I going to do? Like, oh no, my brand, all this work that I did is wrapped up into a name that wasn't authentically mine. And so when I got to Alexa, actually about 7 years ago, maybe 6 years ago, the VP at Alexa sat me down and was like, you need to just create. It just needs to be you. Your name, first name, last name, whatever it is. Because as you evolve the way you think and as you evolve the products you're interested in, as you go from being passionate about children with special needs because I have my son, or elderly, you know, elder care because I have my dad, or the products that I'm in, or edtech because now I'm in edtech, as I evolve what I care about, I don't actually have to change anything. Like, it's okay. I can show the world who I am through the evolution of my thought. And what a great piece of advice this was. So I started at that time the creation of all of my content that was irrespective of the brand or maybe inclusive of the brands that I was working with, right? So my JBoss content was part of my, my brand. And when I went to VMware, all the stuff I did there was part of my brand. All the stuff I did at Amazon and Alexa was part of my brand. Then I went to Microsoft and did things. And all of it now can come together in this symphony of who I've become over the last 10, 15 years, which is a journey. It's just an interesting journey to watch. And if I didn't document it, I don't know how I would really be able to even describe what I've been able to do over the last 10, 15 years of my career. So this is what I encourage you to do, no matter where you are, just start documenting your career or your vision of the world you want or your entrepreneurial idea. But just start documenting what you think, who you are in this moment. Because as you continue to document, you're going to watch not only you watch yourself evolve your thinking, but the world gets to watch with you and find a sense of empathy and a sense of hope that I can watch someone do a thing I never thought I could do. And so I just see it work really, really well for so many people and I just want that for you too. Okay, so the first thing I would encourage you to do, as I mentioned, is go out and get your name as a domain name, reserve your domain name. If it's not available, find something similar. Hi, Christina! Find something similar. So if that is the case, like I have noellesilver.com and I have noelle.ai. And both are actually different, right? NoelleRussell.com is all about like my— it's basically my speaking website. And then Noelle.ai is all about my AI work. Now I have Lovefluencers and I haven't really branded that with Noelle at all. It's more about the idea because I don't want it to be about me. I actually want it to be about you. So it's a little bit different. I'm again evolving my thinking about it, but I definitely think fair minimum, get a website or get a domain, your name, and that's where you're going to start. Once you have it, I'd recommend— I mean, I'm a GoDaddy person. Bluehost is also awesome. Namecheap is also another place you can go. I'm a GoDaddy person, so I go to GoDaddy. I bought way too many URLs. I'm one of those people, I have hundreds of domains. I'm one of those people, as soon as I get an idea, I'm like I'm gonna go buy a domain for that because I might build a business on that. And very rarely do I actually build a business on the thing, but I have the domain just in case I ever decide I want to spend time there. So that's the first thing I'd encourage you to do. The next thing I'm gonna encourage you to do is then go find a way to build your site. There are some of us, let's call us developers, who would go and build a site from scratch, build it with HTML and CSS and build with you know, different technologies that are available. You can do this, feel free. I am not telling you not to. You could just get a hosted, right, you could actually do this on Amazon S3. You could build a static website right on S3, super cheap. Do that if that is something that speaks to you. I am speaking to those who may not be as technically inclined, um, but still want a beautiful web experience. So if you go out to Noelle to ai. I built this website in about 2 hours, 3 hours. Lovefluencers.com, I built in a couple hours. The benefit, it's basically there are 3 different types of sites you can build websites with. One is the super easy, no, no knobs or levers that you can change, super easy, like templated website, very little customization. Then there is on the other side of that spectrum a server that you can then code to have a website on it. Then in the middle, which is where I live, in the messy middle, I live in the middle where I get a little bit of both. I want the templates that provide— I am not the beautification UI creator of things. So I leverage the power of companies like GoDaddy who create templates for me, but I want the ability to customize them. I want to customize fonts. I want to customize colors. I don't need code to do any of that, but I also then I want to be able to integrate some code snippets where I, where I'm limited. And so there is this middle ground on all platforms, Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy. There's another application or website called ClickFunnels that build— that you can get a domain name and build a website around. But that, that's the thing I would encourage you to do is go— I say GoDaddy because it was so simple and I have now proven that I can build an SEO-driven website in less than couple hours, and that is time well spent. So I am— once you do that, here is, I think, probably the gold nugget. If you are interested in building a brand, the golden nugget I will give you tonight around the spoken word is when you build a website, the very first page, only give your customers one, or your audience, one thing to do on that page. It is the biggest thing that you can do to increase the engagement of people with your brand on your website is not give them more than one option. A confused mind says, no, I'm not going to click on anything. So instead, when you have your website, have one thing you want them to do: join your list or follow you on Twitter or follow you on TikTok. I would encourage you 100% to build an email list. That is your friends. Those are people you can talk to via email and you can send messages to and you can tell them the products that you love or you can tell them the book you just read. Social, I have found, is very hard to get real engagement from, right? Because it's the masses. It's kind of like for those of you watching me on LinkedIn. Hey Craig, what's up? There is for those of you on LinkedIn, Right? I have 10,000 people I'm following on LinkedIn and that are following me. There's no way I would know the intimate details of the lives of all 10,000 of those people. But my email list, I know those people. I know their names. If they hit me up in a DM, I know that they're on my list. And those are the people I want to care about and I want to take care of. And so that's the thing I want to encourage you to do. If you do nothing else, buy a domain name with your name, not your company, because I know you might think your company name is gonna, you know, you could do your company, but also you. Who are you? You are the most important thing, um, because companies will come and go and big ideas will come and go. Brand ideas like Lovefluencers, I hope it stays, but it could come and go. But Noelle, Noelle's here to stay. So I want you to have that same kind of stake in the ground, right? The old idea of going to the West and like marking your territory. Do that and create a mechanism for you to share your journey, your journey as a person with the world. And part of it will be your career, part of it will be your family, part of it will be the things you love to do when no one's watching, you know, like writing books or doing artwork or making, you know, mixology cocktails or whatever it is. It gives you a vehicle for hosting that information. Once you do get your domain, build your website. Once you build your website, only have your users do one thing. And my encourage— what I encourage you to do is have that one thing be join my list. It's the only thing I want you to do. Go to Lovefluencers and join the list because that's where friends are made. And that's what I want to encourage. I don't want to have you come to my page and there's a button that pops up to Join my list. And then another one that pops up that says contact me for this. And another one that pops up that says here's my 15 social icons to connect with me on. I want one thing. And so you'll notice when you go to Lovefluencers, that one thing pops up right away and it says join us. And that is my way of implementing that. There are social links on other pages. That's my way of like focusing everyone into the single action I want them to take. So thank you. I think that's it. That's all I wanted to share with you guys tonight, but it is way better if you can see it live. So if you haven't done so already, come join me over in Facebook land. Don't judge, just join. Um, and I am, uh, it's a Lovefluencers or Lovefluencers Bootcamp group on Facebook. You can find us, you can join. It is private, you just have to give me your email address to join so that I know who you are because that's how we become friends. Um, and then once you're in, I'm going to take about 5 minutes and jump over there. And then once I'm in there, I'm gonna actually do a demonstration of how I built a website. I won't take 2 hours, but I will quickly go through the steps I did to build the 2, lovefluencers.com and noelle.ai, within GoDaddy, just to give you a taste of how easy, really, I think pretty sophisticated websites are to build today. And then I'm gonna give you some homework and hope that you will be able to follow up on it. And then we get to meet next week. And move into podcasts. So it's been so fun. I really enjoy talking to all of you. Hey, Oscar, so good to see you online. Thank you for all of the support, even just joining and listening to me. This is a passion project of mine. I do it kind of at night. It's not super late on the West Coast. It's, you know, it's like 9, almost 9:30 here on the East Coast. But it's important to me. And if there is one person out there that's like, I might build a website. It doesn't sound terrible. I might say, you know, I might talk about what happened to me at work yesterday. I know that that one story could change someone else's life, and I believe it with everything I am. So if I can help you get to a point where you tell your story and you document it and you create, like, not the rose-colored Instagram version of you, but like the real you, the real me, like sweatshirt wearing, you know, no lipstick me. So I just, I wanna be an example for just, it's okay to be exactly who you are. I will certainly support you. All the Lovefluencers will support you too. So join us, head on over and I will see you all later. Thanks so much for watching. And I hope you guys have a fantastic, wonderful, amazing, rest of your week, which is only one day. Happy Friday for tomorrow. Okay, bye everybody. I think you're amazing. I'll talk to you soon. Okay.