MBA1052 Starting a Blog From Scratch P2 + Free Ride Friday!

Hey there. Today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday, we do a weekly random draw with anyone who's left us a rating in review. Every Friday, somebody wins a lifetime access to one of our programs. This month we're giving away Easy course, a $500 course over at EasyCourse Co Ezcourse helps you build and launch your own online course in 30 days. Today somebody's gonna win it for free simply by just leaving us an itunes rating and review. When you leave us a review, you enter the draw until you win. It's our way to say thanks for leaving us some love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Because you can build a business empire on your own. That's why we got your back every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar's at home. I'm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And today's episode is part two of our two part episode on starting a blog from scratch. If you haven't listened to part one, check out part one first hit pause on this episode, listen to part one, yesterday's episode and then come back and listen to part two. It'll make a whole lot more sense. In part two, we're going to get into the tech of blogging, what platforms to use, how to choose the right platform, how to make sure that you can publish on time regularly, and how to wrap your head around the whole tech of blogging. That way you can launch your blog without a hitch. I purposely made part two the tech of blogging and not part one, because the content of your blog, the articles that you produce, that's really what's going to make or break your success. The platform is just a tool. You got to choose a tool that's going to allow you to produce the content easily. Let me show you how 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 supported by Podia. Podia helps thousands of creators earn money from their passion. It's an all in one digital storefront that you can sell courses, memberships and digital downloads in one place. It's the most creator friendly platform on the market with zero transaction fees and a super friendly 247 life support team no matter what plane you're on. So they're going to take care of you even if you're just getting started. What's great about Podia is that it eliminates all the technical headaches. It takes care of every aspect of selling your course or membership or digital download. If you've got video courses, they do the video hosting for you. If you want an easy way to charge your members on a reoccurring basis for a membership, putty takes care of it. You want a secure way for people to download your products. When they pay for them, they take care of that too. They also offer free migrations on their Shaker plan. Best of all, Podia puts their money where their mouth is. They have a 30 day free trial with no credit card required. So if you don't love it, you don't pay a penny. If you're looking to start a online course, sell any kind of digital product, or start a membership site, check them out and support the show by going to podia.com mba that's P O-I-A.com mba let's get into the tech of blogging. When choosing a platform to blog on, there's a few factors you need to consider. Number one, your existing website. What are you building your website on? The website that your business is all about, the website that you're the blog is going to be tied to. If you're already using a platform that has a blogging feature, just go with that platform. It's just so much easier to manage one platform for your website and your blog right? Rather than doing two. The only exception to this rule is that it's super hard to use and it's super confusing for you to use the built in blogging platform. But if you're using something like Weebly or Squarespace or WordPress, then the blogging features are pretty straightforward. Now if you're blogging not for your business for another reason, maybe you're trying to test pilot a book you're thinking about writing or it's just a creative outlet, then you don't need to worry about this. Step one because you really don't need to tie your blog to your business. Now from a technical standpoint, the reason why I recommend if it is part of your business to use the same platform is because you want to be on the same site, on the same URL, the same domain name, so that any of the articles that you write will refer back to your site and increase the traffic and increase the SEO or, or the search engine optimization for that business site. So any of these platforms that you build a site on has a blogging feature. Just use that if it's tied into your site and your business. Now if you're blogging outside of your business again for different reasons, then you're gonna have a few more options. The first option I wanna recommend is Ghost. Ghost is a non for profit, it's an open source platform and I actually met the founder recently, John O. Nolan. First of all, John's an awesome guy, super creative guy, very interesting person and he used to work for WordPress and he started Ghost on his own. And it's a very, very popular blogging platform. In fact, a lot of huge businesses and brands use Ghost. This is, we all know, like Tinder and DigitalOcean, Ghost is a very fast and easy to use platform that, that is great for blogging. So I highly recommend you take a look at it. Plus it's open source, so all you need to do is take care of the hosting and they offer hosting plans over@ghost.org so you can easily get started at a very low price. So with Ghost you can use your own domain. So say for example, you're building your own site and you're going to be blogging as a personal blog. You can have like your name.com if it's available of course. So you want to make sure that it is available or a version of your name is available if you're going to be doing that. But that option is there with Ghost. Another option if money is super tight is Medium. Medium is a blogging platform. Now Medium cannot be hosted on your own domain. So any kind of search engine optimization will not go to your own site or your own URL. It's like Facebook, right? Any post you put on Facebook goes on facebook.com but. Except this is blogging. But Medium has grown a huge audience because of its simple and easy to use interface. And it's improved over time. Actually they've improved a lot of features and you can do things like schedule posts in advance and all that kind of stuff. If you're looking for a straight up easy to use free option, Medium is a good place to look at. But for me it is a deal breaker that I can't use it on my own domain and that all the traffic goes to Medium and not to me. But if it's just purely for writing and you just want to write blog posts, I guess Medium is a good option if you're that type of person or that's the reason why you're blogging now. Whatever you use, make sure you understand how to optimize the SEO for that platform. So say, for example, you're using WordPress. How will you make sure you have good SEO for each blog post that search engines can find it easily? One of the easiest ways to do this is to install a plugin called Yoast. Yoast is a great SEO plugin that allows you to know how to actually optimize each blog post, and it gives you hints and tips. It'll also show you what your blog post will show up as, what it look like in Google when I search for it. Now every platform will have its own SEO options. Make sure you understand what they are and they do exist on your platform. So you got to take a look at that. Because every time you write a blog post or you copy and paste it from your Word document, one of the things you're going to have to do is cross the t's and dot the I's for search engine optimization. This is not applicable if it's on Medium, because Medium again is not on your site. It's on Medium's platform. You don't own the domain, but when it comes to having the blog on your own domain, you got to make sure SEO is on point. Now you might be thinking, what are you talking about? What are the things I need to make sure? Well, you got to make sure the title shows up when people search for it. You need to make sure keywords are that you're searching for or trying to rank for. Say, for example, I'm running a blog post on webinars or what's the best time for a webinar. Then I need to make sure that my keyword best time for a webinar shows up in my title. It's in my meta tags, it's in my description, and it's going to display nicely on Google. You want to make it easy for search engines like Google to find your article. SEO is a behemoth of a topic. I can't cover it all in today's episode, but if you want to learn more about how to optimize your blog posts via SEO, check out Brian Deans site Backlinko. Love Backlinko. It's one of the best resources that I recommend for search engine optimization. The other thing about the tech of blogging that we want to talk about is scheduling. Make sure you know how to use the scheduling feature on your blogging platform. This allows you to write and actually line up your blog posts before it's the day to publish. This is great because hey, what if you go on vacation? What if you take a holiday? What if you're traveling? You don't want to have to publish your blog post on the day it publishes. You want to make sure you can schedule it so it automatically goes live when it's time to publish. In theory, you could publish a weekly blog and have it all lined up a year in advance and you don't have to touch your blog for a whole year and things get scheduled automatically. What else? When it comes to blogging, there is the big question. Should I have comments on my blog? Comments are a hot topic because like, if I open up comments, will I have the ability to answer every. Sometimes the comments won't be always great and rave reviews. There'll be some haters, there'll be some nasty comments or some tough questions. But at the same time, comments really grow an audience. Comments really get the conversation going. And it's great for search engine optimization. So my recommendation is definitely have comments if you're going to dedicate the time to reply to them. And at the start you may not have a lot of comments and that's okay. And it's not going to require a lot of your time. But as your blog starts to get traction, you're going to get lots and lots of comments. So make sure you schedule time for it. And if you don't have the time for it, then you may need to shut it off. Just something to consider. Every blogging platform has a commenting system. If you're using WordPress, I actually recommend using the plugin Discuss. That's a dis qus. It's a great little plugin that makes commenting much better than the native commenting system on WordPress. Guys, I got more on today's topic, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Are you struggling to get to sleep? If so, the fine people at Mattress Firm want to help. Mattress Firm is here for you when you're looking for ways to improve your sleep. These are the mattress experts here people, and they're just not mattress experts. They can help you build your bed. From headboards to adjustable bases to sheets. They even have a bedroom decor. They've got you covered, literally and figuratively. Plus, if you go to mattressfirm.com podcast you can save 10% with code. Podcast 10. That's podcast 10. Mattress Firm offers a 120 night sleep trial so you can rest assured you'll love your mattress or your money back. And they offer a 120 night low price guarantee so you know you paid the perfect price. With more than 3,000 stores nationwide, not only are they in your backyard, but this means they have the ability to offer you the deals that nobody else can. And that's on top of the 10% savings you'll already cash in on. So go to mattressfirm.com podcast and start sleeping better tonight. I want to remind you that the blogging platform and the tech of blogging is here to help you. There is going to be some sort of learning curve when you're learning how to use the tech, but I want you to choose what's easiest for you so you publish consistently. So take on the advice that I laid out in today's episode as well as the advice in part one when we talked about the content of your blog and get started. Put yourself on a deadline. Tell yourself, I'm going to launch my new blog from scratch on this date a month from today. That's plenty of time for you to start writing a couple articles and launch that blog. Hold yourself accountable, even get a buddy if you want to get involved so that you can hold each other accountable to launch each other's blogs for that deadline and you can have a launch party. And the launch is just the beginning. Blogging is one of those things that grows over time and you really reap the benefits of blog posts years after you've launched them, years after you've published them. I have a blog post that I published about five years ago and it's titled how to Self Promote Without Looking Like Donald Trump. Now, whether you're a fan of Trump or not, back then I had no idea who's going to be the President of the United States. But it's gained traction now, five years later. So sometimes you push out things and they don't gain traction till later. The point is to push out content consistently. All right, that's the end of today's lesson. But today's episode is not over because it's Free Rider Friday. I gotta announce who won this week's Free Ride. Who won Free access to easy course, our 30 day course over at EasyCourse Co on how to launch your own online course in 30 days. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Zeppel159 from Canada. Zeppel159 says the $100BA is a great resource for small businesses. Their vast library of topics is incredibly valuable. It's great when you need specific information on a specific topic. Keep it up. Omar. Love your work. Well thanks Zeppo159. Really appreciate that comment and showing us love on itunes. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me over at Omar100- MBA-NET so I can hook you up with that free ride to Ezcourse. Guys, we do this every single week. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review. No matter where you are in the world, you enter the weekly random draw and listen in on Friday to see if you won. And you enter the draw every Friday until you win. Alright, that's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Blogging is one of those platforms that has lasted the test of time. It's not a fad. It's not something that's just going to go away. It's writing, it's journalism, it's literature, just in digital form. So it's definitely worth investing in. Alright, I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care, Sam.