You’ve decided you want to start a website.
Maybe you want to start a blog to build an audience to you can build a business around it. Or maybe you want to start a membership site around a niche.
And it’s difficult not to get started right away. When you decide to pursue your idea, you’re excited. It’s tempting to just get your website up and running and start posting right away, but that’s a huge mistake.
Launching your site the right way – by building a launch plan – will allow you to succeed more quickly than if you launch right away. Knowing how to launch a website is a skill that will give you a clear edge.
When I started my first website (an eCommerce store) in 2008, I spent a day loading product into the Yahoo! Website Builder tool (big mistake), and was up and running the next day. I thought that if I just put the website up and ran a couple of ads to the homepage, I would start making sales.
But that didn’t happen. I ended up selling all of my product to somebody at less than 25% above my cost because I had no idea how to run an online eCommerce business.
I’ve learned quite a bit about launching and business since then, and when I launched Unsettle on January 5, even after making several mistakes with my launch plan, my brand new blog saw 3,267 views.
If you’ve ever started a blog, you know that’s pretty good for its first day. Over the next few weeks I’m going to walk you through exactly how I did this.
Much of my tribe has gone through the free course that I created to help people find the perfect lifestyle business idea. This is part one of a series of articles about launching your website.
This is a super process based tactical article, but it’s necessary as first steps. The not-so beginner information will come later.
I post every Monday, but because some of you are at the point where you need the information more quickly than once per week, I’ll be posting part two of this series on Wednesday.
If you’re part of the course, you’ll receive a full report with all of the portions on the last day. Check your email.
Why You Need to Build a Launch Plan
Launching your site the right way will help you know your audience ahead of time, which maximizes the impact of everything you do when you do launch
Launching with a bang gives you an edge. A launch is “buzzworthy”, and a soft launch falls flat. By launching the right way, you’ll get people talking about your blog or website
It helps you grow far faster than if you were to do a soft launch, where you don’t actually build up to your launch. Consider what it would be like to launch with a small audience, rather than launch to nobody. If you’ve already built a small audience, those people will be the jet fuel to get you off the ground.
Think of your website like an airplane. A launch plan is your runway. Without a runway, it’s really hard to get a plane off the ground. The longer the runway, the more speed you can get, and the more speed you get, the easier it is to get off the ground.
I’d even go as far to say that if you did a soft launch on your blog, you should board it up and go through these steps to re-launch your site.
Step 1: Pick a Launch Date
Unsettle’s launch date was decided after a post-sushi dessert run for frozen yogurt, as I told Cait that I was struggling with nailing down and sticking to a date.
It was December, so the first Monday in January made sense because it was after the holidays. So, January 5 was set.
The one thing you need to do right now to launch with a bang is set a launch date.
Don’t be one of those people who picks their domain, registers with a host and upload WordPress on their websites, and publishes their first post. They’re blogging five minutes after they think up their blog topic, and that’s a mistake.
Setting a launch date makes this whole website business far more serious. Think about it: if you were to start a business, you wouldn’t register the business with the government and then go sign a lease at the local mall and open your doors the same day.
No, there’s a lot of planning that goes into launching. And that is true for a website as well.
Set a launch date 1-3 months in advance. Not longer than three months, as that’s just an excuse for procrastination. I launched on a Monday because I wanted to have the weekend to prepare.
As to which month is best to launch on, just avoid crazy holiday weekends like Easter or Christmas and aim to launch at the beginning of the week. Make sure you have some time off surrounding your launch or you’ll be one exhausted new entrepreneur!
Once you have your launch date, tell somebody about it!
This is a very important step. Don’t just file your launch date away in your brain. Tell somebody you know will be expecting you to follow through. Tell a friend who will hold you to the date. Put something on the line. Here are a few ideas:
I told Cait that if I didn’t launch on January 5, I’d owe her $500
Hire a coach or a web designer – make an investment into something that will make you want to get your money’s worth. Think about it: if you want to lose weight, hiring a personal trainer and shelling out to pay them will make you want to stick with it!
Use a program like StickK to automatically donate money to your most hated charity if you don’t launch
Sign up for the Unsettle private Facebook group and make a public declaration of your launch date. We’ll hold you to it!
No matter what, set that date and stick to it.
Step 2: Pick a Name
Jason and I don’t have babies yet so bear with me during this analogy, but I would think that when you’re expecting, it doesn’t feel as “real” until you have chosen a name for your baby. Your baby doesn’t feel as human or as tangible (I could be totally wrong here, but I know it’s the same with pets).
Same with a website. As soon as you name it, you’re going to feel a sense of renewed responsibility to get this thing up and running – and get it up and running the right way.
So choose the perfect domain name for your website.
If you’ve already done this, move on to the next step.
Step 3: Stake Your Land
After you set a launch date and choose a domain name, it’s time to choose a host.
Think of hosting like your website’s land. You can have a house (your website) but nobody can come visit you if it’s not sitting on a piece of land (your host).
There’s two types of hosting:
Free (WordPress.com, Wix)
Paid (WordPress.org, private hosting)
Think of the free hosting like renting. You don’t have ultimate control over your website, and you can’t make money from it. You’ll always have the “renter” label – if I were “renting” space from WordPress for instance, my domain would be unsettle.wordpress.com, which isn’t professional.
Think of free hosting like being an owner. You can do whatever you want with your property. You can have whatever domain name you want, you have freedom over your website looks like and functions. It’s professional and you can create a business from it.
If you can’t afford hosting right now (it’s about $65/year with BlueHost), save until you can, or pick up a gig on Fiverr or eLance to earn the money.
I recommend BlueHost for your host. It’s easy to use, it takes five minutes to setup a WordPress website (tutorial here) and it’s affordable at about $65/year.
Get a free domain by using my affiliate link here and I will earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you!). If you do choose to use my affiliate link thank you so much for your support.
When you’ve registered with a host, you can install WordPress.
Most websites use self-hosted WordPress – in fact, over 74,000,000 sites use it – for good reason.
WordPress not only has a ton of great plugins you can use to do various things on your blog, but it’s open-source, so it’s free.
Here’s a quick guide to walk you through how to start a WordPress website through Bluehost in under 5 minutes.
Alternatives to WordPress include Squarespace, Tumblr, Blogger, and sites like GoDaddy and Wix (not recommended).
Step 4: If You Only Do One Thing In This Guide, Do This
If you have a day job, you probably recognize the term “strategic objectives”. Your company probably have a list of goals and objectives you’re supposed to be working toward and metrics to track.
But this is silly. Companies, individuals and entrepreneurs should have one goal, one metric, and one focus. Yes, only one. There never should be more than one priority. If you have more than one priority, nothing is a priority.
“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities.” – Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
When you’re building a lifestyle business of any sort, your one priority absolutely needs to be building your email list.
Your email list is your audience. And lifestyle businesses are built almost 100% on the platform of your audience. I can’t stress the importance of having an email list. But I’m going to try:
When people give you their email, they’re giving you permission to be part of their life. When you do offer a product or service, those fans who give you their email address are the ones that will buy.
Emails build a deeper connection. I am a member of a select few newsletters, and I always read the emails. Because they go straight to my inbox, it feels like they are especially for me. I am a blogger, so I know they’re probably autoresponders, but they allow me to build a deeper relationship with the blogger, and the blogger with me. And remember – people do business with people they know, like, and trust.
With email, you can make a much bigger impact with your audience. People might not check your site every day, but how often do you check your email? If you’re like most people, it’s multiple times a day.
You own your email list. You’re a squatter on social media – you can’t take those followers with you if you leave Twitter, but you can take emails with you if you rebrand your website or anything ever happens.
Building an email list is like having traffic on demand. When I publish a new article, service, or podcast episode, I send an email to my list. Thousands of eyes land on whatever it is I want eyes on with the push of a button.
Your email list is the easiest, best way to do “market research”. If you want to know everything about your audience, including exactly what they want to read, what they need help with and therefore what type of products to develop to serve them, the easiest way to find out these things is to ask. And who are you going to ask if you don’t have an email list? Sure, you could write a blog post, but the people who answer might not be part of your audience – they could just be people passing by.
As Derek Halpern says, “If you’re not building an email list, you’re an idiot”.
That’s why your subscriber numbers are the only metric you be paying attention to – at least until you monetize, and at that point, your email list and the money you make will have a direct and strong correlation.
So, now that I sold you on the fact that you absolutely 100% need an email list no matter what, you need to choose your email service provider.
I use Aweber for my email list.
You can get a free month on Aweber by using my affiliate link (and if you choose to use it, thank you so much for your support. I am grateful for you!)
Your email service provider will collect those emails for you.
I started with Mailchimp because it was free to 2,000 subscribers, but quickly regretted not just going straight to Aweber, because you can’t send autoresponder sequence with the free Mailchimp which renders the email list useless.
Step 5: Prepare for Landing
After you’ve chosen your email service provider the next step is to set up a landing page. There are both free and paid options for this.
I use Leadpages for all of my landing pages, but before I discovered Leadpages was an option, I used Launch Effect.
Launch Effect is free and sufficient until you get your site up and running, but Leadpages is far more professional and easier to use. If you plan on using Leadpages when you do launch, I’d recommend just starting with that. It will save you a ton of headache!
Here is a landing page I created with Leadpages (click on the image to take you to the full page):
And here is the landing page I created with Launch Effect before Unsettle launched:
You can see that my Leadpages page is far more professional and compelling (it was a lot easier to create, too). Sign up for Leadpages by clicking here.
My conversion rate (the percentage of my visitors who subscribed) on that Leadpage is about 36%, compared to about 10% on my previous landing page:
But if you don’t want to invest in Leadpages right now, a free plugin like Launch Effect will work just fine.
There’s also a resource called LaunchRock, which I have never used, but the website says it’s free.
No matter which you choose, the purpose of setting up a landing page is to capture emails. Remember that one goal we discussed?
So, keeping that goal in mind, here are a few ways to make your landing page work harder for you:
Your landing page needs to be clear. It needs to immediately communicate what your website is about the second the visitor lands on the page.
Your landing page needs to have an opt-in form. Since your goal is to collect emails, don’t forget this! Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to integrate your AWeber account with Leadpages.
Your landing page needs to outline the benefits of signing up for your list. What will the visitor get if they subscribe? Don’t just outline how many emails they will get per week. Outline exactly what the emails will help them achieve. Use the language your target market uses that you found in your research.
Your landing page should have a sentence or two about you. It’s not an about page, but it should concisely describe who you are.
Your landing page should include a unique selling proposition. The USP is a textbook business term for exactly how you’re different. What do you bring to the table that others do not? Why should they follow you, instead of the sea of others? You must have one of these.
Your landing page should include the launch date. If you are using Leadpages, there are many page templates with countdown timers. If possible, use one! They are great to give a tangible feel of time and also create some urgency.
After you have your landing page up and you’re ready to start collecting emails, you can focus on driving traffic to that landing page and increasing your conversion rate.
On Wednesday, I’ll focus on a few ways to do just that.
Tell me in the comments below: what is your launch date?
The post How to Launch Your Website for Instant Success: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Unsettle.