MBA1037 Do You Need a Personal Website? + Free Ride Friday!

Hey there. Today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode so you can hear who won this week's free ride. Everybody who's left us a rating and review on itunes enters our weekly random draw to win a free ride to one of our programs. This month we're giving away Easy course. It's our 30 day course on how to build an online course in 30 days. It's a $500 value over at EasyCourse Co, but somebody's going to win it for free. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter the weekly random draw and listen in on Friday to see if you won. And once you left this review, you enter the draw every week until you win. It's our way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Real business talk for those who want to get real with their business with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at100mba.net and in today's episode you will learn do you need a personal website? Do you need that your name.com site? Is it necessary? Can it help your business by having a personal website? And if so, what are some strategies to actually get one built and get it out there as soon as possible? I've been guilty of this dilemma and this is why I wanted to do today's episode. I don't have a personal website. I've been meaning to have one to create one. So I'm putting my feet to the flyer and giving myself a deadline. One month from today's episode, I'm going to release my personal website. I'll share why this may be a good idea for you too and how to do it in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is brought to you by Long Tail Pro. A step by step system to help you quickly discover thousands of profitable, easy to rank keywords for almost any niche. Visit longtailpro.commba and use coupon code MBA for a free trial and 30% off your subscription forever. Again, that's longtailpro.commba use code MBA before we get into if you should have a personal website and how to build one quickly and get it out there in the world. Let's just talk about that domain name. Your name. Regardless if you plan to have a personal website today or in the future, I highly recommend you buy your domain name, meaning your name, dot com, net co, whatever is available. If you have a common name, you're going to find this a little bit difficult, but you could probably come up with some variation, like the first letter of your name and your last name, something like that. And register a dot com, a net, a dot co with that name. Even if you do nothing with that domain name right now, I highly recommend you register that name as soon as this episode's over. Why? Because the Internet is becoming more and more crowded every day. People are realizing that the real estate on the Internet and domains is becoming more and more rare. Ten years ago, it was a lot easier to get a dot com extension domain. Now they're becoming extremely rare and you're gonna have to pay some serious money to get it. Now, with your personal name, you might find your name available or again, a variation of that name for any of the popular extensions like.com or.net or.co. so you want to grab that as soon as possible and put it on auto renewal. In fact, recently I bought my nieces and nephew, their name in a domain name, a URL, as a gift and transferred that over to them. Because I believe in a lot of ways this is going to be a part of your identity on the Internet in the future, if not now. So grab your domain name as soon as you can. You could do this on multiple places. You can go to Google domains, you can go to domain.com godaddy all these places register domain names. Now, here are a few reasons why you should consider launching your own personal website. Number one, you do many things. Many of us, we do many things. You might have a couple businesses on your hands. And having a personal website allows a central place for you to talk about everything you do. You might also do something on the side as well, like play for a band, or you write books, or you like to draw. If you find that you can't put yourself in one box and you do many things, you have many ventures. A personal website is a good place to put that all together. That's what's awesome about having a personal website, because it's your name, it's you. So it's acceptable to kind of be a little bit all over the place, different from a business that needs to be super focused. People that Go to your personal website are looking to learn more about you and what you do. So if you do many things, a personal website is a good place to kind of talk about everything you do. Another reason why you may want to have a personal website is if you want to pursue some speaking or a speaking career. If you like public speaking or you like speaking at conferences, this is a perfect opportunity to showcase your skills or talk about what you talk about on stage. We talked about this in previous episodes, but you may want to have a page where people can book you as a speaker and they can maybe watch a video of you on stage at a recent event. So if you're looking to do more speaking, then having a personal website is a good place to showcase your skills as a speaker. And lastly, a personal website is great if you want a place of your own. There's something very liberating about having a personal website where you can blog and write and discuss and share parts of yourself that have no angle, that have no marketing purpose for a particular business. So for me, for example, I have a software company called Webinar Ninja. But I don't necessarily need to write about only webinars on my personal website. I may want to talk about travel, I may want to talk about an interesting conversation I had over the weekend, or personal challenges or projects I'm working on, whether it's learning the piano or picking up cartooning again. So if you want a space for yourself to express yourself, a personal website is great for that, regardless of what other businesses you're doing or or other ventures. Now, when I was preparing for this episode, I brainstormed a lot of strategies and tips that I learned from my mentors and their personal websites so I can share with you. Remember, I'm going to be releasing my own personal website in one month from today. Now, when I was preparing for today's episode, I did some research to find out what are some great tips and strategies to build a personal website quickly. And I took a look at some of my own mentors in this area. Now, remember, I'm on this journey with you right now. I've promised that one month from today, I'm launching my personal website. Now, it doesn't have to be this hoopla, huge launch. I'm just gonna publish a website@omarsinhome.com and I'm gonna share with you some of the things I'm gonna be doing to make this possible, to actually pull this off in one month without stressing, number one, I'm creating a to do list. So on the top of the list is register your domain name. I have my domain name registered already, so that's already crossed off. Number two, I'm making a list of the essential things I want to say on my site. What do I want to communicate on my site? The most essential things. There might be some other things I want to communicate in the future, but I don't want to commit to them right now. My whole goal right now is just to launch this personal website. Let me give an example. I might want to blog regularly on this website, but can I commit to blogging every week right now? No. I have other things on my plate, but that's not going to stop me from launching my personal website. So I'm not going to blog and I won't have a blog on the site. But I do want to share with people what I work on on a regular basis with my businesses and some personal projects. So I'm just writing down the essential information. So I'm writing down things like I just want to have a brief introduction about who I am. I want to include, you know, the businesses I run and what they're all about. I also want to include some information about me as a speaker because I do some speaking. So I want to include that on the site as well. And I just want a simple way for people to reach out to me if they want to contact me. So those are the real essentials. So my main goal is if somebody Googles me, my website shows up and the essential information that I want to share is available. So that's the second thing on my to do list. Just writing the essentials. So, one, to get my domain name. Got that done. Two, I'm writing my essential information that I want to communicate on the website. Number three, I'm going to choose the easiest way to create this website. Now I can challenge myself and code it from scratch with HTML and CSS and JavaScript and all that stuff. Right? I can even commission an amazing designer to create the designs for me and then get a great developer to do it as well. I could do all that, but that's stopping me from my goal, which is get this thing out there already. So I'm gonna choose the fastest, easiest way. Now here on the show, we do recommend Weebly. They're one of our sponsors. It's super simple to use. It's drag and drop. If you want a 15% discount, go to weebly.com MBA but whatever you choose, whatever tool you use, use something that's simple and easy. So you can get going. So that's number three, choose a simple tool to build this website. Number four, schedule time to do this. So I've plugged in my schedule two hour blocks to work on my site from now until one month from now. Now I want to get this out there, I want to make it simple. I'm going to make this clean. I have my to do list, have my four essential to do items ready to go. My next piece of advice to you, and this is what I've learned from some of my mentors, is keep it simple. Don't see launching your personal website as this once and done type of thing. See it as just step one. You can build upon it later on, you can improve upon it later on. You can add pages, you can, you know, beautify if you want. You want to add different animations later, go ahead and do that. But personally I'm going to keep it super simple. Almost too simple to just force myself to just get it out there. In fact, I'm even considering making the whole site just one page. There's only one page, a homepage. Right now I can have menu items on top like about and Contact and all that stuff, but they can just anchor down or get scrolled down to that part of the page. This is kind of like a huge relief for me just saying this out loud because hey, I don't have to carry all these different pages and different designs. I can just keep it simple and make it one page. Lastly, you need a clear goal to what is winning look like with this project? What does success look like when it comes to launching your personal website? For me, I just want to get it out there, completing it, making it live for people to see, that is the goal. I'm not trying to make money. I'm not trying to get a certain amount of visitors or a certain amount of opt ins. I'm just trying to get it out there in the world. And that's the goal. So set your goal so you know that hey, this is what winning looks like, this is what success looks like. And it doesn't have to be this lofty thing. Getting it out there in the world is an accomplishment. I know that for a fact that I've been wanting to do this for some time and now I'm putting my feet to the fire. I have a huge tip when it comes to building your personal website. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. One of the first things you got to do when you start a business is acquire a business address you need it to register your business. You need it to open up a business bank account. You even need it to register for email marketing. Yes, you need an address on the bottom of your email marketing newsletters. But if you work from home, like a lot of us do, you don't want to put your home address and have your customers show up to your door. And you don't want to spend the extra money every single month on having a business office. This is where Earth Classmail comes in. They hook you up with a swanky business address and all the mail that gets sent there gets scanned and uploaded to your account in the cloud. That means you never have to check physical mail ever again. You could see it anywhere, anytime, from your phone or your laptop. Pretty cool. So cool. We signed up. We absolutely love it. And we've been using Earth ClassMail for over a year now. And Earth ClassMail wants to hook you up with a free month so you can get started with your business address. Just go to earthclassmail.com mbamonth and use coupon code MBAMONTH. Again, that's earthclassmail.com MBAMONTH coupon code MBAMONTH. One more thing I want to share with you. When you launch any kind of website, you're attracting a certain audience. People that are visiting your website, people that enjoy the content, read it, learn more about you. Even if it's a one page website and they're watching a video or something like that, you want to build a relationship with those people. Those are your people. Those are the people that are interested in you and you should be interested in them. So how do you build that relationship? Well, you need their email address. So I highly recommend to launch your website, your personal website, with an email capture. Just your name and email address or just their email address form just so they can get on your email list. And it could be something simple like I want to update you on new projects I'm working on or invite you to maybe an open Q and a webinar or whatever. The point is that you don't need to be super obligated or give them something in exchange. You're not trying to make a sale here, you're not trying to build a funnel here. All you're trying to do here is build a relationship with the people that are interested in you. I want to leave you with a great example of a personal website. Somebody I really look up to, somebody who's been a mentor from afar, somebody has really done this right, and that's Derek Sivers. If you go to sivers.org, that's s I v e r s dot org. It's a very, very simple website. And even though it's simple, Derek really goes deep and you really get to know who he is through his website. He's very responsive on his email list, and I've actually had a chance to go back and forth with him on email and get to know him a little bit more. So that's a great example of somebody who's kept it simple but at the same time has given some really good, concise information about himself. Well, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Today's lesson might be over, but the episode is not. Because it's free Ride Friday, we got to give away a lifetime membership to one of our listeners here on the show. Let's see who won this week's free ride. Who left us an itunes rating and review and won the weekly random draw. Let's see who won the free ride. And the winner is. Aaron Yar. Aaron Yar says get a 10x return, 20 times 5 stars. If a typical MBA is worth $20,000, then invest in this podcast and get 20 times that. Omar has stood the test of time and it's the only podcast that I'm subscribed to after three years because of the show. I have a lot to offer the marketing discussions that I have at work without any formal training. Thanks, Omar. Well, thank you, Aaron Yar, and thank you for being such an awesome, loyal listener for three years. We keep pumping out these episodes to help you every day. So thank you so much and congrats. You won the free Ride easy course, a $500 course on how to build your own online course. Just email me over at Omar100- MBA-NET so I can hook you up with a lifetime access to that course. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter this weekly random draw we do every Friday. So go ahead and do that right now. Alright. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes we make certain tasks bigger than they need to be. Your personal website. That's one of them. Keep it simple. I've been making this project so big in my head, it's gonna be amazing. And it's been years and I haven't done it. And I realized I just gotta get started and then I can build upon it. Once it's out out there, once it's real, once it's actually on the web. So wish me luck. I got 30 days to launch this thing. Can't wait to launch it at the end of July. Check it out over@omarzenhome.com. all right, I'll check you in. Monday's episode a must read episode. A great book that I've read that I want to share with you. Its insights. Can't wait for that. I'll see you then. Take care, Sam.