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We all know that one of the most important things that we can do online as network marketers is to “Brand” ourselves. We need to differentiate ourselves from the competition and get our fellow network marketers to get to know who we are and why they should join us. There are many ways to do this (ask Mike Dillard!) but what I want to talk about today is creating your Brand online with a network marketing blog.

It is imperative that anyone who takes their online network marketing seriously have one. There are many themes to choose from, some are free and some cost money…some look better than others, but the key is getting your blog seen by others. If you are the only one looking at your blog, then it’s doing you no good! You want your blog to generate traffic, and in turn help to generate network marketing leads for your business.

I am not an expert by any stretch, and I am not a SEO master. My Hubspot Website Grade is 87 (it’s increased to a 97 since the writing of this article!), good and improving but not 100…yet!  What I am is a motivated learner and I am someone who takes his business very seriously. I have learned a lot about setting up a blog properly in the past 2 months and want to share what I know.  My experience is based on using WordPress, which I believe is the most popular blogging platform. There is much more to know, and it’s an ever changing landscape, but what I am going to share with you will help get you off to a great start.

1. Self-Host Your Blog. You want to get your own domain, preferably with your name in the title since you are branding YOU, and host it yourself. You do not want to use the free wordpress internet version or blogger. You want to have control of your site and your content. You are limited with the free sites of how much “promotion” you can do and you could get shut down.

2. Choose Your Theme. There are a ton of WordPress themes to choose from, with many different looks. You will want one that is customizable and relatively professional looking — I’d stay away from a Jonas Brothers theme (can you tell I have a 12 year old daughter?). Also, and I’m honestly not completely sure why or what to look for, but some themes are read easier by the search engines and rank better. This one, for example, grades on HubSpot about 30 points higher than my prior theme, and I’ve only made minor modifications. I’ve only been using this theme for about 2 weeks.

3. Submit Your Site to Search Engines. You need the search engines to know you exist so you need to tell them. I just manually submit my site through a free website submission service. This submits my site to the the major search engines as well as a lot of smaller, independent search engines. You can also pay for this service but I’m honestly not sure what the benefit of doing that is.

4. Get Your Site Verified. You also want to get your site “verified” by both Google and Yahoo. This is free to do and helps the search engines to index your blog pages by crawling your site. Both Google and Yahoo explain how to do this.  When you get to the point when you need to place the meta tag on your site’s homepage, this can be difficult to place it exactly where they want you to. If you have problems verifying your site because of this, download the Ask Apache Search Engine Verify plug-in. I did and it worked like a charm!

In Part 2 (CLICK HERE to read Part 2), I’ll discuss how to properly set up your “Settings” in your WordPress back-office, how to customize your permalinks, and which plug-ins to install that you absolutely must have. See you then!