4.12 Setting Up Google Analytics and GSC for All Kinds of Helpful Data (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • Why it’s so important to setup Google Analytics and Google Search Console at this early stage
  • How to signup, create a property, and install a Google Analytics script on your WordPress website
  • How to verify Google Search Console website ownership in WordPress using the Yoast SEO plugin

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.12 Transcript Below

Okay, one final step here.

We want to make sure we get Analytics and Google Search Console set up so that we can get some really helpful data. This data is technically optional; but if you spoke to any experienced internet marketer, they would tell you it’s an absolute necessity. So it’s important that we get it set up now and start collecting data because it’s going to come in handy later. So you aren’t going to need these like really extensively for a while; but when you do need them, you’re going to be super happy that you set them up early. Because at least in the case of Google Analytics, you don’t start getting data until you set up the code on your site. And if you wait until you actually need the data and you install the code, you won’t have historical data leading up to that point.

So what we’re going to do in this video is we’re going to create a Google Analytics account, we’re going to add our site to the account, and install the tracking code which we’ll do using a plugin. And then we’ll create a Google Search Console account, and we’ll add our site to it, and verify it using Yoast.

So I’m going to hop out of here, and after all of this, your website is going to be totally set up. So congratulations, your website is totally set up when you’re done doing this. So we’ll get to the real congratulations here in a minute.

So I’m going to come over into my web browser, I’m going to go to analytics.google.com, I’m going to come down here into More Options, I’m going to hit Create Account, and I’m just going to fill this form out really quickly. So my email is ian@ruetattoo.com… password (oops, of course they don’t match. Oops. Of course, on camera I choke up)… okay. I’m not going to put my real birth date on camera. We’ll just say January 1st 1980. And mobile phone… I’m not going to put my real mobile phone on camera either… so we’ll just go… I will verify that stuff later. You want to put in real information but you’re not going to be recorded. No! I need to verify my account. Crap. So I’m going to have to put in real information here. I’m going to have to put in real information so I’m going to have to stop the video and I’ll snip this part up.

So I verified everything and now I’m back at analytics.google.com. I just want to hit Sign up here. I need to input my website data so my Account Name for this can be RueTattoo, my Website Name can be RueTattoo. These don’t matter too much.

Again, because I’m on Bluehost and it’s automatic when you’re hosting with Bluehost these days, https is the protocol for the beginning of my website and it is RueTattoo.com. You want to be careful about… like a lot of people put www.RueTattoo (or whatever your domain is) .com and that’s okay. But you want to use the one that is in your settings for WordPress. If I come in here and you can see my WordPress address does not contain www. so I want to make sure to use the non-www. version consistently. Or if yours does have the www., you want to make sure to use that one consistently. Just make sure you keep it consistent across the board. It’ll keep things from getting out of control. So https://RueTattoo.com.

Industry Category… I guess technically it would be like Lifestyle and Leisure or whatever… Arts and Entertainment? Maybe Education? Technically, tattoo removal qualifies as Healthcare. We’ll just go Hobbies and Leisure. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter that much.

Okay, I’m going to set my Time Zone because that determines when your data resets for a new day. I personally don’t want to share anything with Google because I’m paranoid. So I click Get Tracking ID, now I need to accept the terms, and it spits out this handy-dandy Tracking ID.

So what I need to do is I need to copy this. So for me on a Mac it’s Command-C. You could also just right click and hit Copy. There are a number of ways to do it but your productivity will increase significantly as an internet marketer if you get used to keyboard shortcuts. So it’s Control-C for PC; Command-C for Mac.

So now I want to come in here to Plugins, I want to hit Add New, and I want to search for ‘header and footer’. Insert Headers and Footers. This is it. This is what we need. So I’m going to hit Install, I want to hit Activate.

And now under Settings, you see we have Insert Headers and Footers. I’m going to navigate there. So I need to add this script which is what we just copied from Google Analytics… I need to add it in my header. So I’m just going to… again, for Mac it’s Command-V; for PC it would be Control-V; or you just right click and hit Paste. So I want that script in my header. So since it’s Google Analytics, it’s really important. So I’m going to go ahead and hit Save. And now I have Google Analytics installed on my website. Easy as that.

It may take a couple of hours for Google Analytics to start receiving data and notice it’s actually set up. But you are set up if you did all of this correctly. If you copied the code, pasted it here – good to go.

So the next thing we want to do is we want to set up Google Search Console. So I’m going to come over here, I’m going to say ‘Google Search Console’, and I need to log in. Good. I got my password right the first time that time. Alright.

So my website that I want to add… you can see it says ‘Welcome to Search Console’ so it’s all ready and queued up for me. Again, this is where it’s even more important than Google Analytics. You want to make sure that you use the version that is listed under your General Settings. This is very, very, very important when it comes to Google Search Console. So if you don’t have www. here, don’t put it in over here. So it’s RueTattoo.com. Double check for spelling, Add a Property, and now we’re going to need to verify.

Recommended method… I can’t remember which one Yoast is. So I’m going to go Alternate methods and meta tag… I think this is it. Let me navigate to that section in Yoast SEO. So I want to click in Yoast SEO… I can’t remember what yet. Webmaster Tools. Okay, you can. So, let’s see. They probably linked to an explanation… ‘verify meta values’… okay. So this should… I think this is it. So if I go Google Search Console and I paste this in, hit Save… okay. Verify. Maybe. Maybe we’ll see. Hey, good! I did it right! I’m not too rusty, I guess. So, that’s it. We have… and you can see it was to the correct URL: https://ruetattoo.com. So that’s it. And so now if we revisit… congratulations, your website is totally set up!

I know this has been a lot. Trust me, it’s taken a lot out of me to teach it so I can only imagine – especially if it’s your first time doing it – how much it has taken out of you as a student. However, it is essential to your success. Just keep reminding yourself of that. When you get overwhelmed, take a deep breath, take a break if you need to, take the rest of the day off – whatever. The important thing is that you always get back and keep making progress, alright?

So now that this is all set up, we’ve got our website set up, we’ve got our hosting set up, we’ve got our domain name, we’ve got our core content… I mean, holy crap! If you’re to this point in the video, it’s incredible! You’ve done a lot of stuff especially if this is the first time you’ve ever done it. And even if it’s not the first time you’ve ever done it and it’s the first time you’ve ever done it the way that I’m teaching and you’ve gone through all of this training, you are really ahead of the curve – I think compared to the average person that tries to pursue internet marketing.

So, if you’ve watched all of these videos and you’ve done everything I mentioned about setting up your website and everything I taught and you’ve watched all of the sections before this, you’re ready to go on to Section 5.

We’re going to start talking about keyword research. I need to stop doing that with my arms because I think it makes the microphone go crazy. I noticed earlier. Sorry about that. So we’re going to start getting into keyword research which is so important. I know I say that about everything but when you’re talking internet marketing, all of the stuff that I’m teaching is very, very important.

So keywords will determine… and I’ll talk about it at length… but they will determine whether your business is made or broken. So it’s essential. It’s something that’s not taught very well or very in-depth usually; but of course, here at the Free Internet Marketing Project, we’re going to fix all that.

So if you have any questions, as always, feel free to post them in the Facebook group. It’s free for registered members.

And I hope you’re enjoying yourself. I hope you’re not feeling too overwhelmed. I hope you realize what massive progress you’re making. Even if it just feels like you’re making baby steps, you are making some very serious progress as you go through these videos. And I look forward to continue helping you create a profitable internet business, and hope to hear in the coming months that all of this is paying off, and you are profiting.

So, I will see you in the Facebook group and I will see you in the next video.

4.11 Creating Your Site’s “Core Content” and Menu (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • Creating your site’s “core content” and what all that entails
  • How to create a high-quality and effective “About Me” page
  • How to create a “Contact” page in WordPress
  • How to create Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy page(s) for your website

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.11 Transcript Below

Okay, here we are in the home stretch.

So I want to talk to you about… now that we’ve got everything set up as far as your settings, and your plugins, et cetera, et cetera… we need to start getting some core content. And what I mean when I say ‘core content’ is kind of the content that every site has or should have. So that’s what we’re going to cover in this and then we’re also going to create a menu so that your site’s really easy to navigate and then that’s pretty much it.

We’re going to do one more video about some technical things you need to set up if you want data which is really important. I highly recommend it. That’ll be the last video this section (at least as I envisioned right now) but I may add to it later.

But long story short, we are in the home stretch; we are almost done here; and this will probably be one of the longest videos of the section. But I’ll try to move through it as quickly as I can.

So your core content is composed of an ‘About’ Page, a ‘Contact’ Page, a ‘Privacy Policy’, and a ‘Terms and Conditions’ Page. (Forget the sound of my dog flapping in the background). So ‘Privacy Policy’ and ‘Terms and Conditions’ are frequently the same page. Not frequently, but it’s okay. It’s not uncommon. And then we need to set up your menu.

So something that a lot of people get up really stuck on for some reason… I understand it especially if you don’t really consider yourself a writer – which, by the way, is something you’re going to have to push past if you want to succeed in this industry. Even if you did a lot of video blogging and stuff like that, writing is pretty significant and important to succeed in this industry.

So the About page… just to give some general rules of thumb… it can really be anything. People get caught up, I think, because they believe it needs to be something really specific and it needs to accomplish a certain task. This doesn’t accomplish anything except allowing people a personal way to connect with you and your website. So it can be anything about you, it can be anything about your niche, or your passion or your journey. Again, it can be about anything.

Ideally, it’ll tie you into the brand that you’re building. And typically, that’s going to be done by talking about if you have certifications; or if you’ve worked in the industry for so many years; or you just really enjoy doing it – you live, breathe, eat, you study this all the time because it’s just one of your biggest passions. So there are no specific requirements for the About page. Do not let it catch you up. Just write what comes to mind and tweak it afterwards. Again, don’t overthink it. And like I said, just type it out and then edit it when you’re done.

And I would say keep it to three to five paragraphs max. People don’t want to see… they don’t want to read a novel, they don’t want to read a dissertation, they don’t want to read a ton of stuff. If someone’s looking at your About page, they just want a really brief introduction to you and maybe the brand that you’re building. But that’s it.

Also I would highly recommend adding an image. I know that makes a lot of people uncomfortable for some reason. I know a lot of people have valid reasons for it. But at the end of the day, if you want to keep things private, you can use a stock image instead of an image that you own. We’ll talk about stock images later when we start talking about writing high quality content because images kind of play into that. They’re really important. Like Pixabay (pixabay.com) would be a really good place to find a stock image. I don’t want to get into that really extensively right now because we’ll cover it really extensively later. But if you’re wondering, “Where do I find a stock image that I can use?” Pixabay.com is a good place to start.

So the other thing is you don’t have to publish your last name on the site. There are a lot of people that kind of go through this cycle of picking an alias or a pin name – and then that can get really confusing in time. You’re totally welcome to do it. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just murky.

It can get complicated when… if that website becomes really successful, it can become really complicated to have to work around that. And maybe you accidentally sign the wrong name in your email, or you know, put the wrong name someplace… it just gets confusing in my experience. It’s not something I do. I just put ‘Ian P.’ on everything now. I don’t put my last name anymore.

I don’t have a problem putting images of me on the internet for my various sites and niche sites; but if you do, that’s how you get around it: use a stock image. And you can use a pin name or an alias – unless you have a really, really unique first name just to not put your last name along with your first name. That’s probably anonymous enough.

So your Contact page is another is another piece of your core content. You just want to add a really friendly invitation to reach out and then add the contact form shortcode. That one’s really simple. The most complex of any of these is the About Page and that’s pretty simple as I mentioned, too. So if that sounds like gibberish to you, just add a contact form and a short code – don’t worry I’m going to show it all on-screen.

And then the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Conditions page or pages. My understanding… okay, so I need to give a very, very firm disclosure here: I can’t give legal advice. I am not a lawyer. I am not taking a single class in law. And even if I had, that wouldn’t qualify me to give legal advice. So if you need legal advice, don’t ask me. Don’t ask the Facebook group. I mean, I guess you can ask the Facebook group to see if anybody there has the experience. But at the end of the day, you need an attorney especially if it’s something really individual and important that you just can’t get wrong, the stakes are high, et cetera.

So I can’t give you legal advice, nobody in the Facebook group… even if they are qualified, they’re probably not going to give you really in-depth legal advice for free. So I want to give that disclosure as I start talking about legal stuff.

My understanding (after talking with attorneys over the years) is that legal writing is not copyrighted. So technically you can copy any legal documents that you find online and find and replace their company name or their website domain and replace it with your domain name or your company name. I’ve done it before. I’ve never had any issues with it. But again, I’m not a lawyer so for all I know I’m doing something really, really stupid here. Check with a lawyer before you jump out on that limb or do more research or whatever. But I’ve done it and I’ve had no problems with it.

You can also use any number of free generators online – both for privacy policies and terms and conditions. It’s just important that when we’re using content that’s duplicate content, that we use the checkbox within Yoast that keeps the search engine from indexing those pages. Similar to what we did when we were setting up the website and we set a couple of those pages to noindex so that the search engines wouldn’t index them and they wouldn’t look at them. That’s what we do for these pages as well. And I’ll show you how to do that. It’s really easy. Like I said, it’s just a checkbox.

And also, consult with an attorney for any special needs beyond this. I can’t overemphasize that. If you write me asking about legal advice, I’ll help as much as I can; but I’m also going to say very clearly: you can’t depend on this. You need to speak with an attorney, alright?

So final step in all of this is setting up your menu that links to all of these content. It’s also super easy when you know what you’re doing and I’ll show that on-screen as well.

So, are you ready to dive in? It seems like a lot, I know. It’s going to take some time for us to do it all. I kind of got a little bit of a head start so that it takes as little time as possible. But none of it is complex and it should only take an hour or two even if it’s the first time you do it. So even if this is your absolute first time doing this, it’s not something that’s going to eat up a bunch of time unless you overanalyze your About page. That’s the only thing I can see taking forever.

Once we’re done, your website’s entire foundation is set for months to come. You will not have to tweak any of this – as long as you do it right in the beginning – for months to come. Your appearance is ready; all the plugins are set up; you’ll have your core content up. So it’s all about adding content and promotion from here.

So after we finish this, we’ll also do a couple of things like I mentioned in another video about collecting really valuable data. But that’s really simple and easy. It’s just punching in a couple of codes.

And for now, let’s hop into WordPress and knock out all of the core content. So, of course, my WordPress Dashboard… you can see I’ve already got a little bit of a head start on my About page. I already wrote it just because I didn’t want you to be sitting here on camera watching it. You can read over it if you want. This is the URL for RueTattoo.com/about-ruetattoo-com. That’s it.

So I typically optimize my About page for my brand name so that when someone searches Rue Tattoo or RueTattoo.com, it’s likely to come up so I make sure to use it in the title of my About page.

And I also make sure… this is all of the… this is why we installed Yoast… this is all of the SEO stuff that you can adjust. You can set the Focus keyword like I put in here RueTattoo.com. And you can also edit. You can click Edit snippet and set your SEO title, set your Meta description, and set your Slug which we talked about earlier – your URL slug. And without getting too in-depth here, we will cover on-page SEO very extensively later in the training.

But early-stage stuff for your About page… if you want it to get ranked for your brand name or your domain when people searched in Google, you want to use the domain and the brand in the title of the page. You want it in the URL slug.

Obviously, you can’t have dots in your URL slug so it’s –com. And you want it in your SEO title down here with Yoast and you want it in your Meta description (this is also referred to as a ‘meta title’). And again, we’ll get to know all of these very, very intimately when we get to that step in the training. But for now, just know if you want to rank for when someone searches – in my case, RueTattoo.com on Google or Rue Tattoo – I’m going to put them in these places. Also, when I inserted this image, I put as my Alternative Text ‘RueTattoo.com’… I can actually probably change that ‘Ian of RueTattoo.com’. So you want to be descriptive but you also want it to contain the keyword you’re trying to boost the page for. You don’t want to abuse that. Again, we’ll talk about that very extensively when we get into SEO. But for now, that’s it.

So if you want to read the Welcome page or the About Me page, you’re welcome to. Yeah. I mean, as it very clearly explains, I’m an idiot for ever getting this tattoo. It’s now… like I said, I’m several sessions in and compared to that, you can barely see it now which I’m grateful for. But I’ve still got several months of treatments spaced out over time. So yeah, as the caption, I put, “Look at that idiot.”

So when you’re drafting this up in WordPress, you have all kinds of options that you can get overwhelmed by. But really, just type it up and you can… of course, you can bold, you can italicize anything, you can do something. You typically want to click this. You have a toolbar toggle here and this is called ‘showing or hiding the kitchen sink’ is what it’s referred to as for whatever reason. And so that opens up some extra options that can be helpful but you don’t really need to worry about them too much especially when we’re just talking about your About page and your Contact page.

So for now, I’m not going to go into them in-depth and you can play around with them in time. But when we start crafting actual content, I’ll talk about all of that stuff more extensively. But at the end of the day, your About page just needs to be three or four paragraphs – maybe five paragraphs. About You ideally include an image. In my case, the image speaks to my credibility in the industry as embarrassing as it is. And I’m not always this bright red. This is actually from my bachelor party years ago. I had accidentally belly-flopped into the lake. We had a party barge on. So yes, for those of you wondering, there was alcohol involved.

So that’s all you really need to know about the About page. Put your content in there and an image. I guess I need to show that the way you add an image in WordPress is wherever you want to put the image, so you put your cursor where you want to put the image, you hit Add Media. In this case, I uploaded a file… you can navigate to your computer to where the file is on your computer… but I already have it here. And when you click on it to insert it, you see this information? You can add a caption. I added… remember I edited this to be Ian of RueTattoo.com because the Alt Text can help me rank for RueTattoo.com or Rue Tattoo. And then you would just click… I navigated away from it too quickly… you would hit Insert into page and it would insert it where your cursor is.

Outside of that, largely as usual, I’m going to qualify this with… this is an oversimplification, but this is referred to as a WYSIWYG editor which is the acronym ‘what you see is what you get’… WYSIWYG… and they operate very, very similarly to Microsoft Word or any other word processor.

And the only other thing worth noting personally is I found working with international audiences over the years… I mentioned two-foot… of course you have to be conscious of the fact that if you are American or if you aren’t American that you’re probably going to end up speaking to both audiences. So whenever I use something like Fahrenheit, I also add the Celsius. It’s as easy as just Googling really quick. Fahrenheit to Celsius… you know, “What is 100°F to °C?” But the same thing with measurements. So I just searched, “What is 24 inches in centimeters?” and it’s just under 61 centimeters. So just something worth nothing. A little pro tip. Over the years, your website will probably get an international following if you stick with it. So just make things like that easy on people.

So I hadn’t published this yet so I’m going to hit Publish here in a second. You can Preview your page to see what it’s going to look like. So this is what the page is going to look like on my website now that my theme is all set up which is pretty cool. So I’m just going to go ahead and hit Publish. And now, this website is live on RueTattoo.com. So if we just click this link, we can see… this is the URL… it’s live. We’re good to go.

So you just saw when I clicked here that my… well you can’t see this on-screen… I just realized it’s cut off… but there’s something called the favicon which is the icon next to the URL in the navigation bar, it defaults to Bluehost.

If you find yourself seeing things like that and you’re worried about it; again, you need to be in the mindset of “How do I find this out myself?” I can’t teach every tiny, tiny detail. I’ll teach you everything that matters. I’ll teach you everything that is necessary and sets you up for success making money. I may not always go into things like how to set a favicon – which is what that’s called. So you can search ‘how to add favicon WordPress site’ on Google and you’ll get that. Or ‘how to set icon for my WordPress site’ you’ll get that on Google.

And we’ll probably have Q&A webinars as time goes on and you can ask those things that I can show you on camera. But it’s really difficult, you know. We’re going to end up so in the weeds with things that don’t really matter. Again, I’m going to teach you everything that matters, everything that’s necessary and sets you up for success in making money. But little details like that, I’ll probably skip over and you can just fill those gaps in with Google. So if I skip over something, it probably wasn’t very important. Just know that.

So that’s the About page. The terribly embarrassing About page. And just to go over this really quick – we’ll go over it most thoroughly when we talk about SEO – it’s not so important about the About page… are not so important for the About page… but you get all kinds of feedback here about how well your page is optimized for on-page SEO. So this is going to be really, really helpful for those of you that are new to SEO whenever we get into creating high quality content that is optimized for the search engines.

So I’m just going to go ahead and close this out because this is done. And I didn’t create the About page off camera because I wanted to show that from start to finish. So I just hovered over Pages, I opened Add New in a new tab here and I’m going to call this ‘Contact’. And you’ll see that after I fill in the page title, the URL slug automatically fills in.

And I already have this over in a document actually… oops wrong one… ta-dah! So I’m just going to copy paste from the text document I have – at least the body of it. So I said, “Looking for something that you can’t find on our website, for some personal advice from someone that’s ‘been there’, or just wanting to say ‘thanks’ for something you saw here on RueTattoo.com? Just fill out the form below and I’ll send you a reply as soon as I can!”

So if I Preview that, there is not contact form here, right? Nothing magical has happened where you just say, “Contact Me” and WordPress knows. It just doesn’t work that way.

So sometimes, a theme will have like a contact page as a type of page you can select. This one doesn’t. So what we’re going to have to do is we’re going to go back into that Contact plugin we installed and we set up that form – if you remember that. So I’m going to click this form and you can see right here, “Copy this shortcode and paste it into your post, page, or text widget content.” So I’m going to highlight this, copy. And this is what I was saying earlier: if a shortcode made no sense to you, this is what it is. So you just hop in here, you put in the shortcode. You can put it in the Visual editor; the Text editor – typically – if you’re inserting like HTML code or something like that, it needs to go in this tab. So you would have to click this tab first and insert it and then click back.

But when you’re talking about shortcodes specifically which work with WordPress – it’s something that works with WordPress – you can just paste them in the Visual editor and it’ll work just the same. So if I hit Preview now, this will refresh, you can see my contact page is there. It’s like magic!

So everything that we set in an earlier video when we installed this plugin and set it up is now ready to rock. This would send to ian@ruetattoo.com as soon as someone filled out this form. So, pretty cool. Alright?

So you may notice these widgets on the side. I’m not going to worry about these too much. It’s as simple as hopping into Appearance – Widgets (I’ll open that up in a new tab) and I have all of these over here. It’s super easy. You can just kind of drag these off and it removes them. But I’m just going to go ahead and leave them for now. It doesn’t really matter. I mean, I guess I’ll go ahead and take them off now. So I’ll just remove Archives, I’ll remove Categories, I’ll remove Meta; and I’ll leave Recent Posts and Recent Comments and Search.

And now, you can see if I refresh the page over here, a lot of that junk is gone. And as comments get added to the site and as I publish posts – which is how we publish content to WordPress sites typically speaking – there’s a post versus pages question. I’m sure I’ll address that at some point when we get there. But as soon as I start adding posts, that’ll start popping up over here, too. So again, not really necessary at this point. Doesn’t really matter in the long run. We can just leave it alone and we’ll handle it when we start getting traffic, alright?

So now that I have filled this out, I’m going to edit my on-page SEO just because I don’t like leaving it not filled out even for basic pages. So I’m going to go, “Contact Ian @ RueTattoo.com”. It doesn’t need to be optimized for anything but I do like to fill it out. I’m going to leave the Slug the same. I just don’t like leaving SEO stuff defaulted. It’s a personal preference. I could have and it wouldn’t have really hurt anything. I’m not going to set a Focus keyword here because: (A) it doesn’t matter, it just helps with the analysis here; and (B) I’m not trying to rank for anything here. I just filled it out because I don’t like leaving it blank. So I’m going to hit Publish. I’m not going to insert any images here. And so now, I have my Contact page as well. It’s live. So I can click it here, you can see my meta data – my meta title – updated here, and everything’s like it should be. Right? So that’s good.

So I’m going to go ahead and close this, close this, just kind of clean up here, and I’ll even close my Dashboard.

So the last thing we need to add is the Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Of course, I mentioned several options there. You could search for them and just find one that was similar to what you needed, replace their company name with your company name or your domain name. For these purposes, I found a really good one at bennadel.com and it’s a Privacy Policy and Terms of Service generator. You can just search Google for Terms and Conditions generator or Website Terms generator and Privacy Policy generator. And you can create these as one page or two page whatever you want. But this one in particular I found to be really helpful.

And so, I’m going to put in… company name is going to be RueTattoo.com; company state for me is Texas; Generate Terms of Service Agreement; and we can see down here a preview for all the Web Site Terms and Conditions of Use. And the really cool thing about this particular tool is that it also spits it out in code. So all of these headers and everything, instead of copying and having to reformat it and all that stuff, we can just paste this code into our site – which is super, super cool.

So I’m going to go Pages – Add New again. I’ll do to ‘Terms/Conditions & Privacy Policy’. Remember I introduced you the Text tab a minute ago, so that’s where anything that’s put in code (I’m just going to edit my URL slug really quick because that’s going to bug me. I’m going to hit OK here)… so anytime you have a code which is that’s what this is – this is code… you can see open paragraph (<p>), close paragraph (</p>), open heading 3 (<h3>), close heading 3 (</h3>)– so whenever you’re going to paste something like that in… if you paste it in the Visual editor, it looks horrible. If we preview it here, it does nothing. So you want to make sure to put content like that in the Text tab. So I’m just going to go and paste that again. And now, if I click back to the Visual tab, you can see everything’s nice and beautiful and formatted correctly.

So this is a Heading 2. We’ll talk about what headings are when we get into SEO as well. But we’ve got a Heading 2, we’ve got a Heading 3 here, Heading 3 here, we have some numbered lists which is really, really cool – and it was all just done by that Terms and Conditions editor. Super, super easy.

This one I’m not even going to worry about. Besides… actually I lied… I am going to work. So I’m going to go ‘RueTattoo.com Terms, Conditions, and Privacy Policy’. So I’m just going to put ‘RueTattoo.com website terms and conditions as well as our privacy policy, can be found here.’ Close snippet editor.

And remember how I mentioned that we want to make sure that this does not get indexed by the search engines because a lot of this is duplicate content, right? I talked about that earlier. You want to hit over here this little gear icon, and you can see Meta robots index, we’re going to set this to noindex – and that’s it. That’s all we need to do. Now, the search engines will not index this page which is really important, because again, this is duplicate content. We do not want this indexed. Duplicate content can be very bad for rankings. And even though it’s probably not going to destroy you to have a Terms and Conditions or Privacy page that is indexed by Google and is duplicate content… they’re not going to slap the hell out of you for that… they know better… it’s just a best practice to set it to noindex which is really, really easy with Yoast. So I’m going to click Publish and if I open that up, now I have that on my website as well.

So now we face the issue… the very last step of this process is I don’t have a navigation menu that shows any of this, right? And we want people to be able to navigate to especially my About Me and Contact pages, but it’s also important that people can find our Terms/Conditions & Privacy Policy easily.

So creating a menu is that last step of this process. So all of these pages are done. We can navigate away from here. I want to hover over Appearance, and I want to select Menus, and this is going to load up. We don’t have any menus here so I’m just going to type ‘Main Menu’, Create Menu – and you can see all of my pages here. If I wanted to, I could also add posts or I could add a custom link to somewhere else – totally up to me. I’m just going to pop all of these in here, Add to Menu, and I’m also going to create a custom link for the homepage. I have https – again, through Bluehost. It’s automatic these days which is really, really cool. But I’m going to go https://ruerattoo.com and I’m going to set Link Text ‘Home’, I’m going to click Add to Menu.

Just a side note as we’re working with menus: if you ever want your menu to open in a new tab or a menu item to open in a new tab (which is sometimes it’s a very specific need but I’ve had the need in the past) you just need to select Screen Options up here and you need to select Link Target. And then if we close Screen Options, now you’ll notice that there’s this box here that says Open link in a new tab. If this is set to ‘Disabled by default’ – we don’t have that – so just a little pro tip. I don’t need any of these to open in a new tab.

So now I want to set the order of these. Whatever order I set these in is the order they’re going to appear in my menu. So I want my Home page first, I want About second, and then I want Contact page third, and I think I want my Terms/Conditions & Privacy Policy as a dropdown underneath my About page. So if someone hovers over About, they will see (excuse me, I’ve got a hair on my face)… they will see a Terms/Conditions & Privacy Policy. And you can change the labels for these… ‘Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy’… so now that’s what will show up in the menu. So I’ll probably have that open in a new tab just so you can see how that works.

I usually never check Automatically add new top-level pages. That would just make it so that anytime you created a new page that wasn’t categorized under another page… wasn’t sorted… wasn’t organized under another page… it would automatically be added to your menu. I just never check that. But something that’s very important to check… people ask me all the time, they say, “I’ve set my menu, I’ve created my menu, it’s not showing up anywhere. What do I do?” It’s because they haven’t checked this box. So make sure you check for your main navigation menu the Primary Menu box.

And you can also add things if you wanted to – like if you had a Facebook page or a Twitter or an Instagram or whatever – you could use the custom links to add those in there, too. And you would probably want those to open in new tabs because you don’t want people navigating away from your website unnecessarily. So if they’re navigating to another page on your website, you can do it in the same tab. But if they’re navigating off of your website – affiliate marketing, internet marketing – best practice is to have it open in a new tab. That’s true for your affiliate links, too. And you’ll notice it’s something I almost always do whenever you’re navigating on my websites.

So I think I already hit Save Menu but I’m going to save it again. Now if we go to RueTattoo.com, you can see over here on the left hand side, we have our navigation menu. And this is just based on my theme. So my navigation menu appears over here on the left for my theme. It’s something I could worry about right now. In the long run, do I want my navigation menu on the left side instead on the top of my website? Probably not. Is it something I might be able to change in the Themes Appearance settings? Maybe… let’s see… Customize – Menus – Menu Locations… so… but I really want to emphasize right now and it doesn’t look like I can really easily.

So this is one of those things. Like this bugs me. This is not what I wanted. But it just doesn’t matter. This goes back to one of the previous lessons: it just doesn’t matter at the end of the day. So do I like my navigation menu over here? No. I would prefer it to be up top. But again, it just doesn’t matter. And this was determined by my theme.

So you can see I can click down and if I click Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy, see how it opened in a new tab? It was because I selected that option in the Menus options.

So that’s it!

I want to make sure I didn’t miss anything here. So what are we going to do? Core content, About page – did it. Contact page – did it. We included the shortcode. Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions – we did those. I showed you how to find a generator and also talked about how to find different generators – if you don’t want to use that one. Or if you wanted to… I never showed you exactly how I found that… so we can just go ‘Ben Nadel terms generator’ and that’ll probably pop it up. Yeah! So there it is. Again, Google it. It’s as easy as that.

So we talked about all of these stuff, showed you how to set it all up, showed you how to set SEO at a basic level (we’ll talk about that more later), and then also showed you how to set up your menu so people can navigate to these pages.

And depending on the theme you choose, your menu will show up in different places. I’m not happy with where mine showed up, but again, it just doesn’t matter at this stage. It’s functional. Whatever. Move on. Don’t get too caught up in those aesthetic and design details yet.

So, all of our core content is set up. It’s almost completely done and ready to move on. Technically, it’s ready to move on now; but it’s really important that we put some foundational stuff in place so that you can get really good analytics and data on your website. Even if you’re not getting traffic right now, if you don’t have this stuff set up, you won’t know when you start getting traffic and you start seeing traction.

So, we’ll talk about them in-depth much later, but in this last video of this section –at least as I plan it right now – we’re going to talk about how to set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console for your website so that you can get that data when you need it. Very important step. Like I said, technically you’re all ready to rock right now; but if you don’t do that, you are going to regret it.

So if you have any questions, as always, feel free to post them in the Facebook group. That is free for registered members. And I will see you there and I’ll see you in the next video.

4.10.1 How to Check If Your Theme Is Mobile Responsive (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • How to quickly and easily tell if your chosen theme is mobile responsive

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.10.1 Transcript Below

Hey, guys!

I just wanted to make one quick amendment to the last lesson. You will notice that the website is more built out because I didn’t realize this until a couple of days later but I forgot to show you how to tell whether or not a theme is mobile responsive. I mentioned that it was one of the most important things and then I just kind of left you high and dry and didn’t mention how that’s done. It’s actually really, really simple and this is going to be a really quick amendment.

But you know, you’ll notice my menu is set up and all that stuff – don’t worry about that – that’s taught in the coming lessons so you’re going to learn about all that. But I do want to tie off this loose end.

It’s really simple to tell whether or not a website is mobile responsive which means that it adjusts accordingly when it’s being viewed on a mobile device. Really essential in today’s search engine climate. There’s actually been a lot of information released by Google talking about how they don’t rank sites as well when they’re not mobile responsive – at least for mobile results – so, really important.

And the way you check whether or not your theme is mobile responsive is you just come over to the side until you get that little resizing arrow and you can click and drag. And as you’ll notice, it’s shrinking… it’s shrinking – that’s the first good sign.

But once it gets to that point that it’s like tablet-size, you notice how the header changed now the menu’s up here instead of off to the left. And you shrink more and more, and it just keeps reformatting, it keeps moving the content into thinner and thinner places.

And now you can tell it would be much more obvious if I had more content on the site yet, but we’re just not quite there in the training. And each side is going to look a little bit different. Your menu may not pop up into the top right. Don’t look for exactly what just happened on my site to happen on your site unless you’re using the same theme. But you want to see that it does something sort of along those lines. You particularly want to see that it’s shifting and resizing. That’s the main thing you want to see.

And of course, the ultimate way to check and see if the theme is mobile responsive is to pull it up on your phone; but this is a quick workaround.

So when you’re looking at themes and you’re like, “Is this one mobile responsive? I don’t know if it checks that box.” Just grab it and do that. And if it adjusts accordingly, then more than likely – almost guaranteed – it’s mobile responsive.

But if starts like looking really funky and crunched up and things just aren’t looking very good, it’s probably not mobile responsive and you probably want to rule it out.

So, that’s that. Alright? I just want to go over that really quickly. Sorry for forgetting it the first time around but at least I remembered. I was laying down to sleep or something and I was like, “Ah crap! I forgot to show them how to see if a theme was mobile responsive!” So there it is, alright?

If you have any questions, as always, feel free to post them in the Facebook group; otherwise, I’ll see you in the next video.

4.10 Choosing Your Theme and Crucial Design Tips (AF)

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Or simply log in if you already have one.

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=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

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WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • Pitfalls that most early-stage internet business owners fall into when designing their website
  • What to worry about concerning a new website’s design and what not to worry about
  • Focusing on traffic-generating activities ONLY at this stage of your business
  • What to look for in a website theme on WordPress

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.10 Transcript Below

Alright!

So now that we’ve got everything set up and ready to go, I want to talk to you about some really crucial things that – again – most people don’t talk about. But in my experience over the years, this advice sets people up for success very well compared to people just really not talking about this topic extensively.

So I think we can cover it really quickly, but I just want to cover a few key points about choosing your theme which is the design of your website in WordPress. In WordPress, whatever theme you choose really heavily dictates what your design looks like, like what the layout is, et cetera. And also, some really crucial design tips that are specifically for people that are trying to get started in this industry to get you to profit as quickly as possible.

So I want to say you can choose anything you want – which is true. You can ignore everything I’m saying here and choose anything you desire. I would encourage you to keep all of these in mind and stick very closely to the advice that I give in this particular video.

So the things that matter right now are that your site is clean and easy to navigate and that it’s mobile responsive. That’s it. That’s all that matters at this stage. As we get into creating content and working on SEO, there will be other elements we introduce; but as far as the way your website looks right now, this is all that matters. Period.

The things that don’t matter right now and can be added later are: an image header (a header is the kind of banner image that you see at the top of either the home page or pages on the site); picking the perfect colors (I see that so many times, people are struggling so much to figure out what their background color is and what color their font is and stuff. It’s just a waste of time right now. Just flat out, there are better things for you to spend your time on); and all kinds of other stuff that people get caught up in.

But what this all adds up to is it’s very important at this stage that you pick your battles very carefully. As you set out on creating a profitable internet marketing business, you will find that you’re about to encounter over the next several months dozens of battles… probably. And it’s very important that you pick your battles wisely.

And a battle I see a lot of people pick very early on is what their website appearance and design looks like. And they’re trying so hard to get it perfect and really – again, I’ve already said it in this video – it doesn’t really matter. End of the day, doesn’t matter… yet. It will matter down the road but it doesn’t matter until you get traffic regularly and all you need to start getting traffic is a simple website that’s easy to navigate and mobile responsive and high quality content. And we’re going to talk about those other aspects – high quality content, promotion, and stuff down the road – but that’s all you need. That’s the whole foundation of what you need. And so, I really encourage you to focus on traffic producing activities only.

What a lot of people do when they try to get started in this industry is they pick all these battles that they don’t even know don’t matter right now. And I’ve done this myself over the years, so I’m… you know… I’m not the person… you know… to cast the first stone. I’ve done this myself, I’ve made these mistakes, and I’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds of people make this mistake in the past several years as well.

So when we are setting out on the journey to create a profitable internet business, we probably don’t realize it, but most of us, if not all of us have a certain bank of hours that we’re going to put into this before we just give up and before we get burned out and we’re so tired of it, we just say, “Screw this. This whole industry is a scam, I’m not going to do this anymore.” And none of us know what that number is. Nobody knows how many hours are in our bank. And it varies from every individual to the next.

So when you spend 12 or 15 or 30 or 50+ hours just worrying about your site design and sending it out to friends and family or posting it to Facebook groups and you’re just asking, “What does my design look like?” and largely receiving a lot of unqualified feedback – it just really doesn’t matter. The design is not that important at this stage as long as it’s clean, easy to navigate, and mobile responsive.

So for now, like I said, traffic producing activities means we need to focus on high quality content at this stage in our business; and that means we need to not spend too much time on design.

Once you’ve establish your site with enough high quality content, it may also include promotion. There are all kinds of promotion – we’ll talk about those pretty extensively here in the members’ area in another section – but every ounce of energy you spent on anything else right now besides traffic producing activities is wasted.

If you’re just trying to like… you’re like, “Where should I put my affiliate links? Where should I put my banners? My advertisements? What color should my site be? What images should I have? Is my header in throughout my posts?” Within posts images can be very important; but everything else: broad site design, you don’t need to be worrying about placing a bunch of affiliate links, you don’t need to be worrying about having a bunch of banners and stuff that drive people into sales funnels because there are no people yet. And until you have people in the form of traffic, just none of it makes any sense and you can always change all of this stuff later. You’re just delaying how long it takes you to succeed if you spend a lot of time on those particular aspects right now. So with that in mind, choose your battles carefully.

I would prefer that whatever theme you choose, it has no banner or homepage widgets… the kind of… speaking widely of widgets but very generally… but those kind of sections that have like, “This is what we do. This is what we’re about. Check us out here.” And it’s just like these little widgets with these little blurbs of text. They’re a pain in the butt to set up: (A) they vary a lot from theme to theme, (B) and at the end of the day, it just doesn’t matter. You can avoid it completely and just save your hours for things that matter right now.

So I would also prefer that it have a blogroll for the homepage at least while we’re getting started – again, something you can change very easily down the road. But what a blogroll is is when you go to a website and you see their latest posts published there; and you can scroll down and see what their latest posts were; and every time they publish a new post, it automatically gets added to the top of the list – that’s a blogroll.

And that’s just as simple as things get. Anything with similar minimalism within these guidelines is probably going to be fine; but at this point, the less set up, the better. The sooner we get set up, the sooner we can start creating content and doing things that matter that are going to result in traffic. And of course, as we’ve mentioned many times by now, traffic equals money. As long as you do it right.

So sites with complex home pages – like I said, with the little individual snippets and blurbs, and you know, a banner image, et cetera – they take a lot of exploring and tweaking and figuring out. And frankly, a lot of these things in WordPress aren’t standard. It varies widely from them to theme.

And so when you pick something that you haven’t seen someone go through step-by-step or you’re just kind of picking something randomly, a lot of exploring a new theme is just clicking to the settings, changing something, previewing the site, see if it works. Change more settings, preview the site, see if it works. And you just do that over and over again. And then sometimes, you can’t find out what you need adjusted and you just end up digging and digging through all the settings and features until you find out, “Hey! This thing can’t do what I want. I’ve got to change themes,” and then you start all over again. And again, it just turns into a vicious cycle – frankly – of wasted hours.

So let’s take a look at how this is done in WordPress specifically. So here I am at the RueTattoo WordPress Dashboard, the main admin panel. So I’m going to scroll down here to Appearance – just hover over it – and I’m going to go to Themes.

And like I said… you know… we talked about kind of what’s preferred: no banner on the homepage (I said no banner or homepage… I meant no banner on homepage… oh no, I did. I meant no banner or homepage widgets. Okay. Forgive me for everything.)

So if we come in here and we go into the Themes, we want to hit Add New. You could select from one of these – I think I am going to select from one of these – but just to show the theme marketplace really quick, you can go through and waste so much time here as well. But again, everything I’ve shared is what matters most and those aren’t difficult criteria to hit.

So I’m just going to come into Popular. It looks like… so Twenty Seventeen, if I preview this right now, if I hit Live Preview… It’s actually a fairly complex theme especially by WordPress’ standards. You see how I would have to change each one of these images? So now I have to find high quality images for each of these second sections; I have to figure out how to update them in the theme settings; and all of that. Again, it’s just wasted work right now. So I’m going to close out here in Twenty Seventeen. It’s definitely not going to be the theme that I use.

When I come back in here to Popular… and like you can see this one has a banner image. Banner image. All kinds of settings here to tweak. Banner image. This one looks like it could work although there’s an image off to the right… I’m not sure how that would work. Banner image. Banner image. Banner Image. And these, again, are just things we don’t need to worry about right now.

I used to use a theme called Hiero and it’s a really good theme. But at the end of the day, it just is not updated anymore which breaks my heart. So you can see here, this theme hasn’t been updated in over two years. But this was the perfect template for using when you were setting up a website that was just clean and easy to navigate, really simple – all that stuff.

So I think for this particular site, you can scroll through… and again, find something that doesn’t have a banner, preferably has a blogroll on the homepage, and it’s just really clean and simple, very neutral looking. You don’t want to go overboard here unless you’re a really experienced designer or an experienced UX designer which is an abbreviation for ‘User Experience’. I just wouldn’t risk it. Just pick something that’s clean and easy to use and simple. And for me, I think that’s going to be either Twenty Fifteen or Twenty Sixteen which – bonus – are both WordPress themes so they’re maintained pretty well. And all of this stuff on the right-hand side, we’re going to change. As we start building out content, I’ll probably remove most of these widgets, because again, they just don’t matter right now.

But you can see this is a really clean theme. Obviously, we don’t have any content in here yet – which we’re going to fix here in the next video – but either this one… so I’m going to Leave Page… so that one I believe was Twenty Sixteen… and then Twenty Fifteen. Pretty much just as simple except all of the navigation is on the left. So yeah, either one of those is going to work. It just really doesn’t matter. If I had a coin, I’d just flip it up in the air and check right now. It looks like the simpler of the two is going to be Twenty Fifteen, so I’m just going to hit Activate. And yeah, that means that the theme was originally from 2015. Frankly, I don’t care. It’s updated regularly. That’s what matters. It’s not going to be super vulnerable to security hacks and stuff like that. So Twenty Fifteen is going to be my theme. Done.

You can see that it looks like this might be a banner image. This is not a banner image, this is a featured image for a post – which we’ll talk about when we get to that point in creating content and stuff like that.

So, that’s that. I’ve picked my theme. End of the day, it has a blogroll for the homepage which I like; it doesn’t have a banner and a bunch of different settings I have to figure out early on; I can pick this theme; I’ve already activated it; I can just start focusing on content now and get to the things that matter.

So as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group – that’s free for registered members. And I will either see you in the Facebook group or I will see you in the next video where we’re going to get your website’s core content set up. And then after that, we are off to the races and we’ll start doing things that get you toward making money online. Talk to you then!

4.9.1 Yoast’s Settings Have Moved — How to Find and Change Them (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • How Yoast’s interface updated slightly and where the options shown in the last video (Lesson 4.9) have moved to

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.9 Setting Your Business Up for Profit in WordPress (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • Setting up WordPress to be as secure and profitable as possible
  • Exactly which plugins to install for maximum blog profit, and adjusting their settings
  • Which settings to adjust for your new WordPress website for maximum profitability

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.9 Transcript Below

Okay, now that we have stripped WordPress of all of the useless crap, we’ve got to set things up in their place – things that are actually good for our business and helpful. And we also need to adjust a handful of settings to make sure that your business can be profitable in the coming months as you add content and go through the rest of this training.

So (excuse me) Lesson 4.9, here we go! (And of course, I have to clear my throat 27 times before the video starts.)

So I want to make setting up WordPress as hassle-free as possible. We want your site structure to be optimized for SEO at a really basic level. We’ll get deeper into this later. Don’t – by any means – think that what we’re doing here is comprehensive SEO. It’s just kind of setting the stage for a very small aspect of SEO going forward but we need to do that.

Also, WordPress’ security vulnerabilities can be a total time-suck if you’re not careful. If your site gets hacked, if it gets injected with a virus – you could lose access. Technically, someone could delete your whole website if they wanted to. So we want to keep those security vulnerabilities as minimized as possible.

And none of this is going to be a concern for you after watching this video. So the goal of this video is whether you’re a beginner with WordPress or you’re super-experienced with WordPress, these are the practices that I have found to make WordPress as hassle-free as possible going forward long-term in your business.

So we need to install some plugins and set up your site structure for SEO – also known as your ‘permalinks’ which we’ll talk about here in a second.

So we need to install these plugins: we need to install Yoast and we need to adjust a handful of settings which we’ll do on camera. We need to install Easy Updates Manager for automated updates and security. Like I mentioned, we already have the updates set through Bluehost to kind of automatically update but we just are going to install a second layer just in case. And we need to install Wordfence. For security, it’s my preferred plugin. There are several security plugins – take your pick, really. And we need to install a Contact form plugin which you’re never going to guess what that’s used for and so we’ll use that to set up a contact form. And then we need to adjust your site’s permalink structure like I mentioned.

And it’s probably best that change your log in username – your log in nickname – because it defaults. Again, you really don’t want people to know your username. You all know mine which kind of sucks. I could change it if I wanted to but you’re just going to see it time and time again so whatever. So by default, if you post to your site, your log in is going to be your username that’s displayed to the world so we want to change your nickname and users.

So let’s just hop in and do it! So we’re going to start off and we’re just going to work our way down the list. I may have to reference back to this but it’s really quick and easy overall.

So we’re going to come over here to Plugins and we’re going to hit Add New. We’re going to type in ‘Yoast’; you’re going to hit Install Now, it’ll install; and I’m going to hit Activate. This is going to take us to our Plugins page. If you wanted to, you could kind of just keep installing the other plugins we wanted; but I’m going to kind of install one, set it up, install one, set it up.

So now what we need to do is now that you’ve installed Yoast SEO, you’ve got this little Yoast symbol down here on the left-hand side, I’m going to hit Dashboard and one of the first things that I’m going to do in Yoast is I’m going to click this General tab… I believe it’s in here… No, it’s Features tab. There we go. So under the Features tab, Advanced settings pages… this is going to unlock a world of hurt that could be very confusing; but again, I’m going to walk you through what you need to do. So the Advanced settings page, I just enabled that. I need to come down and hit Save.

And you might consider down the road looking through some of this and deciding what you actually use and what you don’t. Like personally, I never pay attention to the Readability analysis. And if you are writing really long posts, the Readability analysis can slow down how quickly you can type. It can make the editor very, very slow like when you get north of 3000 or 4000 words for a post.

So I do use Keyword analysis. And I just enabled the Advanced settings page. But you know, it’s just best practice. You don’t necessarily want to keep things enabled that you aren’t using because they’re just using resources on your server and possibly slowing down your website. So using resources on your server shouldn’t be that big of a deal unless it slows down your website.

So you know, you can click through and play around in here. You can set up your Webmaster Tools verifications through here which is really handy. Google Search Console – if you want to set up – is going to be super, super handy for your website. Google Search Console and Google Analytics combined can be really helpful for your website. So you can do that on Yoast – that’s really handy. I might actually add a video to this section to do that.

So we just want to come in here and now that you’ve enabled Advanced, you see all of these stuff over here. So we want to click Titles & Metas; and we want to hit Taxonomies; and we want to come down here to the Tags taxonomy and we want to change this to noindex; you want to hit Save Changes.

Of course, sometimes you’ll get errors like that. Just refresh the page, it’s not that big of a deal. I’m going to come back into Yoast. I’m going to come back into Titles & Metas. Sorry about that. It’s a great example though. Sometimes funky things just happen. They don’t really mean anything usually. So I’m going to come back into Taxonomies; I’m going to go Meta Robots, noindex; and hopefully it works this time. There we go.

So what you’re doing there – just to give you a heads up – I mean, you can just follow the actions and have no idea what you’re doing. It’s the correct thing to do; but by default those tags pages on your website can begin outranking content that you actually really want to rank. And the tags pages aren’t really valuable to drive traffic to usually and they’re hard to optimize for conversions and value. So we just keep the search engines from indexing them which means… ‘indexing’ I may have explained it up to this point… but indexing is just being included in the search engine in their database.

So if you are indexed, it doesn’t mean you’re on page one. Indexing and ranking are two very different things. But if you’re indexed, that means you’re included and people can find your site through Google if they search your brand name; or potentially – if you do have rankings – by searching a certain keyword and finding you on page one. So the reason you’re doing that – long story short – is because those are fairly worthless pages that compete against pages you may actually want to rank.

So we need to do it again for another type of page. We want to click Archives and we… under the Author archives settings… we want to hit noindex. That’s also a best practice. So these are just kind of setting up the stage for SEO down the road.

All these other settings don’t really matter too much. Like I said, I may make another video where we verify Google Search Console – stuff like that. But another nice thing is Yoast SEO automatically creates your XML Sitemaps so you can see XML sitemap functionality enabled. So you can also enable a user sitemap. So these are all the advanced settings. If you want to research some of these, you can; at the same time, if you don’t want to adjust anything else, you’re fine. You can just move on. You don’t need to dive into these weeds and start navigating all of these. Everything we just did is enough. That’s sufficient. And then as you learn more and you have more time, you can Google and play with these things if you want to.

So we’re going to go back to Plugins, Add New. The next one we talked about was Easy Updates Manager. So I’ll show you how to install that and set it up really quickly. Again, it’s this one right here. I’m going to install… I’m going to activate.

And this one, you actually just have an easy to access Configure box right here. If you didn’t want to access it here… you notice – unlike Yoast – it didn’t create its own kind of navigation menu… so we want to come in here in Settings. A lot of the time… and actually, it’s not even in here… so a lot of the time when you hover over Settings, you will get an option for a plugin if you don’t see it add a menu option for itself.

But it looks like the only way that we can… Tools… it’s not even in Tools… so it looks like the only way that we can access that particular plugin’s settings is from the Plugins page, hit Configure. And so… I’m just going to close this out. And you can see by default it’s got All Updates… all of these things… just leave this on. I’m going to turn on Major Releases, too. I will leave Development Updates off – there’s just not much of a reason. And then we want to hit Enabled for Automatic Plugin Updates, Automatic Theme Updates – enable both of those. And then you have the individual updates if you wanted to change the settings for each of those – I don’t. I want everything to be automatic. And so… I’m going to just click no thanks but good luck. And all of these save automatically so you don’t need to hit a save button – at least in the version of that as I’m recording this. In the version of the plugin, I should say.

So that’s it for Easy Updates Manager. What we just did by installing and setting this up was, again, we have kind of a second-tier. If for whatever reason Bluehost default automatic updates don’t act quickly enough, now we’ve got a second layer of protection. Technically, this isn’t necessary; but I just figure, why not? Again, you can’t… I shouldn’t say that… you can go overboard with WordPress security but it’s something you do want to take seriously.

So next thing we want to setup is Wordfence – speaking of WordPress security. So you can see Wordfence right here. 3,081 reviews with a solid 5 stars. So it is like one of the leading security plugins. Bulletproof Security is also a really, really good one. You can see it’s really highly rated. But I’m going to… Wordfence will pop up here, so I’m going to hit Install. You can see there all kinds of options. Again, if you want to use a different one, that’s fine. But… I guess it didn’t click correctly… Install Now. So we’ll install Wordfence, we’ll activate it… maybe. There we go. Don’t know why things aren’t clicking. Again, weird things happen. You just deal with them. They don’t even faze me anymore. I’m going to close this, I have no interest in going through their tour right now. You can if you want to – again, to get to know your site – I’m going to hit End the Tour.

And now we’ve got all of this Wordfence Security stuff setup. So this is really helpful. It’s going to help protect your site across the board. In my experience, its default settings are more than good enough and I just kind of… you know… leave it the way it is. But you can – again – go through and take a look at everything. You can scan whatever you want, see if you have viruses or anything that are detected; but this is almost in a lot of ways… it’s an oversimplification because it does a lot more… but this is like having a virus protection software installed on your website. And like I said, that’s an oversimplification; but at the same time, it’s pretty valid broadly speaking.

Wordfence also, I think, helps with stopping brute force. I mentioned those earlier where people have robots that come and just try to log in repeatedly. So you can Click here to configure and… I can’t remember which one… so they say based on their test this (Apache + suPHP) is the best one. If you get an error message here… I have before… frankly, if I get the error message in this, I’m going to move on. I’m not advanced enough to code this stuff. But we’ll go ahead and hit Continue now; we’ll hit Download .htaccess just in case we need a backup; and we’ll hit Continue; and we’ll see what happens.

Okay, cool. So “…installation was successful! Your site is protected to the fullest extent!” Right now, the Firewall Status is in Learning Mode which is pretty cool. So now you can see Wordfence is all set up. And like I said, in my experience, its default settings are really, really, really good. So, that’s Wordfence.

And now, we want to go ahead… so we want to come in here and install a Contact form plugin. So again, we’re going to go Plugins; we’re going to use Add New; and we’re just going to put ‘contact form’ and we’ll see what comes up. I really don’t have a preference here. So you really could – no exaggeration – use any of these options we can see. I’m typically going go to go for the one that looks like it’s really highly-rated and is updated really frequently. Two weeks ago is good enough. So, whatever. I’m just going to install Contact Form 7. I’m going to install that; I’m going to activate it just like all the others; and let’s see… it did not create a menu option either. So I guess the only other place we can access… oh, there! It created its menu option. It just created up here. Sorry about that.

So Contact form 1, I’m going to hit Edit. Again, you can pretty much leave the defaults. And this will vary. This will vary. If you install a different contact form plugin, you’re going to see something differently here and you’re going to have to figure it out on your own. This will come into play in another video soon; but right now, we’re just setting up the Contact form.

So this is the form that people would see whenever we embed the contact form on the page. So you can see <label> Your Name (required), Your Email (required). Subject, required. Your Message, required. So just a really basic one with a submit button and that sends it.

I want to hit Mail. It defaulted to my WordPress admin email which I actually need to update now because while I was off-camera, I created an ian@ruetattoo.com. Again, if you want to do that, you can just set up a Gmail. Nothing wrong with that. So if I wanted to do like ruetatoo2017@gmail.com or whatever – I could have done that; but I prefer to have… you know… my domain name on it. It’s just official. So ian@ruetattoo.com. The From [your-name] wordpress@ruetattoo… so I’m just going to go ian@ruetatoo. Subject… “[your-subject]”… I mean none of this really matters too much. Reply-To: [your-email] and then the Message Body, who it’s from.

So that’s good enough. I just wanted to make sure that the email address it sends to is the email address I wanted to send to which is the RueTattoo one. And nothing else matters. You don’t have to mess with any of this stuff.

So the next thing we want to do is adjust our site’s permalink structure. And if you’re like, “Ian, you barely set up a contact form. What do we do now?” Again, that’s in a future video.

So for the permalinks structure, we want to come over here, we want to go Settings. And in your General Settings, you have all this stuff. Like I said, I want to change this to ian@ruetatoo.com. And nothing else. We don’t need to change anything else. You wouldn’t even need to change that if you had the original admin email set up correctly when you installed. I did not because I just forgot the plan for that. So you have all of these settings over here which again you might go through at your own leisure. You have your Writing settings, you have your Reading settings, and all different kinds of things; but the thing we want to adjust is Permalinks.

So typically, I’m just going to set permalinks to the Post name. That is really helpful for SEO because if you are putting your keywords… which again we’re talking about soon… actually we’re getting to keywords in the next section… if you are putting your keywords in your title, they will automatically then be inserted into your URL slug. An example of a URL slug is like RueTattoo.com and if I had a post titled ‘Laser Tattoo Removal’, my URL would be RueTattoo.com/laser-tattoo-removal. So this right here is my URL slug.

And if you have set your permalinks correctly, whenever you title your posts… because you’re going to put the keyword that you’re aiming to rank for in your title… whenever you do that, you are also automatically going to get keywords in your URL slug – which are also really good for SEO. So that’s why we adjust permalinks to the Post name. It’s just because it helps with SEO.

So the last thing that I want to do (I mentioned earlier) is I want to come into Users and I just want to change the way my user profile presents to the rest of the world. So I’m going to go Edit and you can see right now it is defaulting (like I said it would) to my username that I use to log in and I personally (for security reasons) don’t want the world to know. So I’m going to type in ‘Ian’. ‘P.’ as my Last Name. Because personally, I learned the hard way… I don’t typically like to use my last name for my niche sites… it makes them really easy to hunt down and all kinds of stuff. So I just don’t do it.

And then you can also change your Nickname to whatever you want it to be. And then you want to change Display name publicly as. And now you have the options: your first name, your complete name, and your nickname. So I’m just going to select ‘Ian’. But totally up to you. And ian@ruetattoo.com is the Email for this subscriber.

If you want a profile picture (as soon as I update this, it’s going to change – this is the profile picture that’s associated with ian@stoppingscams.com), you will need to set up a Gravatar account if you want to assign your profile picture. It’s the only way to do it.

So you would just click this link, you would go through here, and you would create an account for that email address that you have associated with this user. So if I set up an email address or a Gravatar account for ian@ruetattoo.com, it will automatically start displaying whatever profile picture I set up on Gravatar. (I don’t know why. That is such an archaic way for profile pictures to work in WordPress but it’s worked like that since the beginning.) Don’t need to fill up anything out… I’m going to hit Update and now you can see that my name will be displayed publicly on my posts as Ian.

Alright, so that’s it. We did it. We did everything here.

We installed Yoast and set it up. We made it so that the Tags archive is not showing. (Or the… what is it called? The tags… here we go. Whatever. The Tags taxonomy. That’s what I’m looking for.) So we set it so that the Tags taxonomy is set to noindex. We set it so that the Author archives are set to noindex so the search engines will not archive those in a way that will compete with our website and the things we actually want to rank.

We installed and set up Easy Updates Manager. We installed and set up Wordfence. We installed a Contact form plugin. I think mine was called Contact Form 7. Again, it just doesn’t matter which one you use as long as it’s highly rated and regularly updated. So you really can’t go wrong. But just know: you might have to figure out some settings and that’s just part of this territory. Again, you just have to be willing to learn things, research them on your own, and figure stuff out.

And then we went ahead and we adjusted the permalink structure – that’s very important for SEO. And we also adjusted the nickname so that our username is not publicly displayed to the world. And of course, I did a couple of extra things like update my email address now that I have ian@ruetattoo.com set.

So, that’s it for Lesson 4.9.

In Lesson 4.10, we’re going to keep going with this. We’re going to start getting the site set up, start populating it with some core content, and stuff like that – here within the next couple of lessons – and you’re going to have a website up, running, and ready to go!

So if you have questions, as always for registered members, it’s free to post them in the Facebook group and myself or someone else in the community will come along to help. And I will see you in the Facebook group or I will see you in the next video. Talk to you then!

4.8 Stripping All of the Default Crap from WordPress (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • Exactly what to delete off of WordPress’ default installation

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.8 Transcript Below

Alright, we’ve got WordPress installed. I have access to my WordPress account by resetting my password so I killed two birds with one stone there. I needed to reset the password anyways. And now we are ready to strip all of the default crap from WordPress because there’s a fair amount of it. But again, really quick and easy.

So what we’re going to do in this video… I’m about to show you everything on-screen… this should be really quick… but just to guide you through what we’re going to do, WordPress installs a bunch of kind of bloated stuff that you don’t need. And whenever you install it – every single time – you just got to go through and delete, delete, delete, delete. So we’re going to delete a sample page, sample post, sample comment, and some unnecessary plugins that we’re not going to use.

We’re just going to go through and do this really quickly. Like I said, follow along and if I go too fast… it shouldn’t really be an issue… but if I go too fast, feel free to pause until you do it yourself and then play until I do the next thing and then pause and do it yourself. You know how it goes.

So let’s hop on in here to WordPress.

So when you log in to WordPress, you’ll see this is kind of your default page. You know, you don’t need to do this… but I’m just going to go ‘I don’t need help’. You know, you could go through a step-by-step thing if you wanted.

But now, we’ve got all of my… this is what you would see every time you log in to WordPress, okay? So the first thing we want to do, we’ll just work our way down the list.

I’ll go Posts, I’ll go Trash for the ‘Hello world!’ post. And you have all of these notifications, because again, you’ve got all these bloatware. We’ll delete those plugins and they’ll go away.

So I’ll go to Pages – just click on Pages on the left – ‘Sample Page’, I’ll Trash. Look for comments… Oh good! There were no sample comments this time. Oh! Because I already deleted the posted page. Duh. So no sample comments because it was attached to the post that we already deleted.

So now we need to go into Plugins and we’re going to delete most of these, okay? It’s ridiculous… and Bluehost does this by default… but it’s not ridiculous because what they’re trying to do is help and some of these could be genuinely helpful.

But in my experience, some of these are also really, really bloated and they can kind of slow down your website which isn’t a good thing. And there are much better versions. These are kind of the most commonly used ones that have been around for years. And since they’ve become so established, there are competitors that are better than all of them. And in a different video, we’ll replace some of these.

But we don’t need Akismet Anti-Spam. We don’t need Hello Dolly. We damn sure don’t need Hello Dolly.

I’m going to deactivate and delete Jetpack as well which some of you may be kind of like, “Oh my God, he’s deleting Jetpack?” Because Jetpack has a lot of functionality but it is very bloated. Everyone that has development experience – programming experience – would advise you to find other ways to do things that Jetpack does because it’s just so bloated. It loads so many different things that your site doesn’t need to load which decreases your load speed which you’ll find out later is a very bad thing. It can be very bad for SEO and for user experience.

So we’re going to deactivate MOJO Marketplace as well… delete. Deactivate OptinMonster API… delete.

And we’re going to need to add a contact plugin. Technically, we could keep this one and figure out how to use it. I’m just going to choose my own. I guess it doesn’t really matter… but sometimes you get a questionnaire, a survey, when you deactivate something… and I’m going to delete.

So now we don’t have any plugins but that’s fine. We’re going to install some more in one of these next couple of videos.

And that’s it! We just stripped WordPress of all of its unnecessary default crap.

So now we need to kind of adjust our settings; install the plugins that we do want on the site for some extra functionality – that’s really helpful; and I guess then we just need to add some content; pick our theme; and we’re going to be good to go. Then you’re going to have a website up ready to rock. So we’re only a handful of lessons away from that now.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group, I’ll see you there or I’ll see you in the next video.

4.7 How to Install WordPress in <5 Minutes (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • A step-by-step explanation of how to install WordPress using Bluehost

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

4.6 Why WordPress Is the ONLY Platform You Should Use (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

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Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

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Important links from this video: https://stoppingscams.com/how-to-build-a-blog-from-scratch-a-comprehensive-guide/#why-wordpress-is-best

In this video I discuss:

  • An overview of why WordPress is the only platform that any internet business owner should seriously consider
  • A discussion of WordPress vs. Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and others

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.6 Transcript Below

Okay!

So before we hop in and we kind of set up your domain and we install WordPress which is actually really quick and easy through Bluehost, I want to take a quick minute because this is something that comes up somewhat often. I want to take a quick minute to talk about why WordPress is the only platform you should consider using and I don’t make any money from saying any of this, okay? So this is… you know… there’s not even a chance of bias here. This is just based on experience as an internet marketer.

So in today’s day and age, you’re kind of drowning in an ocean of options. When I first started in internet marketing, you had to at least be able to manipulate HTML templates. I didn’t know how to code them from scratch and I wasn’t very good at even reading code and editing it but that’s what you had to do. You had to take templates and edit HTML. Before that, you had to hard code the HTML. So at least… you know… by the time I started, they had some options to kind of… you had visual editors but they weren’t that good.

And then along came WordPress and it’s really taken over pretty much the entire web design industry – not only affiliate marketing and internet marketing. So I know there are a lot of options out there and I know that they are easier to learn. CMS stands for ‘content management systems’ which there are a lot of them.

You know, some of WordPress’ most direct competitors are like Drupal and Joomla but even those are… you know… they’re along the same lines as kind of technically challenging to learn as WordPress. But you know, when it comes to Squarespace and Weebly and Wix and anything along those lines – there are a lot of them now – there are a lot of people that ask, “Hey, can I use this?” or “Hey, can I use GoDaddy site builder?” or Bluehost may even have their own option for a visual site builder these days. And the answer is no.

Technically, you can use them but it’s going to hurt you. Their ease of use is their downfall because you’re going to get to a point in your internet marketing business – sooner probably rather than later – where you need to edit some things that Squarespace, Weebly, Wix bury so deeply that they’re very hard to find and then you have to go through and like search Google and find… you know… it’s just so difficult because there aren’t as many users for them as there are for WordPress. But also sometimes, you just can’t edit things there. There are things you need to optimize for search engines and you just can’t do it on Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix sometimes. So they’re so simplified that it’s detrimental to someone that’s trying to build a profitable internet business.

And if for no other reason to use WordPress over using anyone else – and just hands down nobody else even comes close – it’s WordPress’ plugin selection. If you’re not familiar enough with WordPress to know what plugins are, (just really briefly) essentially they are little skills that you install on your website. Again, an oversimplification… but you can kind of install these skills on your website and these features that enhance the performance of your website.

So something that you would have had to pay a developer several hundred or several thousand dollars to code, you can simply click a couple of buttons, install that plugin, activate it, maybe adjust some really easy-to-understand settings; and voila, you have so much more capability on your site.

And we are going to work with several of those plugins. They’re all free… and not all plugins are free, I should say… the plugins that we’re going to be working with in this section are free.

And the nice thing even about paid plugins… like the other day, I was looking for a plugin to build FIMP on (to build Free Internet Marketing Project on). I guess this was a week or so ago and I needed what was called a LMS. Where CMS stands for ‘content management system’, LMS stands for ‘learning management system’ and it’s what you use to build training courses and membership areas and stuff like that. And the one I found… I think it cost me like $147 or something like that. Just not that much.

Whereas if I had had to pay to get all of these custom developed, it would have cost me several thousand dollars to have a membership area that’s nice with all these functionality. And instead, because they can sell it to a massive amount of people and those people go out on their own and install it to their WordPress site without any help from them, they can sell it at a much lower price because now they have a mass market product.

And technically, Drupal and Joomla – and even… you know, places like Wix and Weebly and Squarespace – they all have similar things to WordPress’ plugin library and marketplace but they don’t hold a candle. I mean we’re talking about like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of options versus like on WordPress versus like dozens or hundreds or maybe on the low side of thousands for the other content management systems (for the other CMS).

So bottom line is if you want to build a profitable online business, there’s no cheaper or better option than WordPress. We talk about this more in that same article that I linked last video… a little bit deeper… so if we talk about why WordPress is best and it’s the only thing you should consider using, it’s a pretty accurate description and summary if you want to know more.

But at the end of the day, that’s just what it boils down to. You’re going to be so restricted, you’re going to have less access to knowledge and help and tutorials when you Google things online. It is more difficult technically to learn (I will fully admit that) but at the end of the day, it’s a necessary evil. You have to learn how to use WordPress. You don’t have to learn how to code; the nice thing is WordPress for the most part will keep you out of ever having to code and you can hire a developer when you need to for custom functions and stuff like that that you can’t get through plugins.

But you absolutely have to learn how to use WordPress. There are just no ifs, ands, or buts. You need to learn it if you want to build a profitable business. As much as that stinks, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix are just going to tie your hands too much and it’s really going to stunt your potential and your income potential more importantly, and how much traffic you can get – stuff like that – compared to WordPress.

So it’s going to be a little bit tougher but don’t worry. That’s what I’m here for. We’re going to go through it in the training; you’re going to get really deep and into the nitty-gritty; as time goes on, I’ll show you how to do all these things step-by-step on screen or with screenshots. So don’t freak out. It’s all going to be handed to you and you’re going to see it all step-by-step. And if you do get stuck, there’s a lot of information for WordPress online.

So that’s that. That’s why you have to use WordPress over anything else if you want to be profitable online.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group – free for registered members. And I’ll see you there and I will also see you in the next video where we’ll talk about how to install WordPress on your domain within your hosting company. And I will see you there!

4.5 Linking Your Domain Name and Hosting Account (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

Helpful links from this video: https://stoppingscams.com/how-to-build-a-blog-from-scratch-a-comprehensive-guide/#connect-your-domain

In this video I discuss:

  • An explanation as to why this is necessary (and why it’s not for some viewers)
  • How to update nameservers for domains purchased separately from your hosting company

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.5 Transcript Below

Okay!

By the time you’re starting this video, you should have… as I mentioned at the end of Lesson 4.5… you should have your hosting secured and you should have your domain name registered. So if all of that’s set up, we’re ready to keep going.

So this I think is something that people are intimidated by because it can be easy to get lost but I’m going to show you step-by-step with screenshots how to do this here.

So basically, what we’re doing in this process is we’re tying your two islands together. You know, it’s kind of… again, an oversimplification… but you’ve got your domain name on one island, you’ve got your hosting on another island – we need to tie those two things together so that your browser can serve up the files to you from someone’s website when you go to their domain name. Because if they’re on two totally separate islands, nothing good’s going to happen.

So I do want to say again: skip this video if you just purchased your domain name through Bluehost. No worries. But for everyone else (I think the vast majority of people will have probably opted for NameCheap or GoDaddy) this will be really quick and painless. I promise.

So this is done – like I said – by updating our nameservers. It’s similar for all domain registrars that… you know, it’s kind of you have to click in different places to get to the settings but every domain registrar has a place where you can update nameservers. And it’s pretty easy to Google. Say, for example, for whatever reason you had hosting on HostGator and your domain was with GoDaddy. You could search ‘update GoDaddy nameservers to HostGator account’ and you’d find articles probably from HostGator and from GoDaddy directly that would walk you through that step-by-step.

The important thing is that you need to know your nameservers. It’s really simple for Bluehost because everyone has the same nameservers. But if you sign up with a company like HostGator, depending on… you know… what server you’re on in what region, you’re going to have different nameservers. So your nameservers may be ns288.hostgator.com and ns289.hostgator.com or they could be ns.1181 and ns.1182 or… yeah… ns1182.hostgator.com.

But anyways, that would be included. Your nameservers for most hosting companies (for most humping companies, my God!) for most hosting companies are going to be listed in that initial registration email that you received from your hosting company. But again, if not, it’s very easy to search and find out how you find your nameservers for your hosting account. But again, if you’re with Bluehost, it’s really simple. We all have the same nameservers.

So it’s easy: Google it. End of story. Because I’m going to show here NameCheap to Bluehost, if you have a different registrar or if you have a different hosting company, just Google it. You’ll find a good article or a good video on YouTube.

I also show how to do this in this particular link on https://stoppingscams.com/how-to-build-a-blog-from-scratch-a-comprehensive-guide/#connect-your-domain. It’s a long link so you would have to do a lot of typing. But on our article about How To Build A Blog From Scratch: A Comprehensive Guide, we talked about in there how to connect your domain name from NameCheap to Bluehost.

So I’m just going to show you how to do this in screenshots really quickly. The only reason I’m not going to do this one live is like you can see, I’ve blurred out my… you know… full name and any private domains that I don’t really want to share. Apologies, again. But it’s easier for me to do this way through screenshots if the process looks exactly like this. But if I do it live, then I have to go through and I have to blur the video and stuff. So it’s just easy blur screenshots than it is to blur videos. So I’m just going to show you how to do it in screenshots.

The screens would look exactly like this. Over time, this process may change a little bit – like if NameCheap changed the design of their website – the steps may be a little bit different but they’ll probably… even if they look slightly different… they’ll probably be the exact same steps, you may just have to go looking for them. And if they’re totally different, send me an email because it means I need to update this video. Okay? But it should be pretty self-explanatory overall.

The first thing is you need to log into your account and you need to get to the domains settings. So RueTattoo isn’t reflected here because I took these screenshots a few weeks ago for the article on stopping scams. So you would log into your account and then over here on the left-hand side, you would click ‘Domain List’ and that would take you to this page and it would kind of show you all of your different domains.

The PillPupper I’m okay sharing publicly because it’s just not anything anyone’s going to be able to replicate; it’s patented – all that stuff. So I’m not concerned about sharing this one in particular.

So what you want to do from there and once you click domain list, you see this screen, you want to hit ‘Manage’ for whatever domain name that you want to update the nameservers for. And the cool thing about this process is you don’t even have to log into Bluehost to do this. You know your nameservers already because the same thing for everyone on Bluehost. So as long as you know your nameservers, there’s no reason to log into your hosting account for this process.

So if you feel like, “Uh Ian, I never even logged into the hosting account.” That’s okay. That’s correct. It’s nothing to worry about.

So once you click ‘Manage’, you’ll be taken to this page and you’ll see this little section down here magically-named ‘Nameservers’ – that thing we’ve talked about over and over again. So you would just click right here, you would select ‘Custom DNS’ and then you’ll be able to put in ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com (and those are your nameservers if you’re hosting with Bluehost; they don’t have a bunch of different nameservers like other hosting companies do) so you would put those in there. That’s enough. You don’t need to hit ‘Add Nameserver’ or anything like that. That’s just going to add more lines. You just need to select ‘Custom DNS’, put in ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com, and then you need to click this little green checkmark and then they’ll kind of… you’ll see that it’s processing and it’ll say, okay change is saved – and that’s it! That’s how you update your nameservers.

And so now, you’ve tied those two islands together. You’ll possibly see a notification message too that says like, “Hey it could take up to 48 hours for nameservers to fully propagate.” In my experience, that’s not the case. It can happen and don’t freak out if it does. You can always contact NameCheap support or the support for your registrar if you’re concerned about it. But in my experience, it usually happens within a few minutes; it’s reflected within a few minutes. I’ve never had it really take more than a couple of hours and certainly never the full 48 hours they warned you about. So just know that. It’s probably not going to be instant, but they’ll probably propagate within the next few minutes – 15, 30 minutes at max. And if not, don’t freak out because it can take up to 48 hours.

Okay, so that’s it! That’s how you update your nameserver to tie your hosting and your domain together – at least for Bluehost and NameCheap. Again, if you have a different registrar or if you have a different hosting company, just Google it. You’ll find a YouTube video or you’ll find step-by-step documentation with screenshots from either your hosting company or your domain registrar as long as they’re fairly major, okay? So that’s that!

Now we are going to move on in to actually setting up the website, installing WordPress, and getting everything set up. So things are going to start getting really excited because if you feel like this is tangible output, within the next few lessons, you’re going to have a website with… you know… it’s going to be up and live and it’s going to have some content on it. That’ll be done by the end of Section 4 so we’re just a few videos away from that.

As always, if you have questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group – that’s free for registered users – and I will see you there and I’ll see you in the next video.

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