Leaving Work Behind

Launching a Website From Scratch – A Complete Beginner’s Perspective

Guest Author

Tom: This is a guest post by Jamie Logie, a personal trainer and nutrition and wellness specialist from Canada who runs Regained Wellness – a site dedicated to helping people take back their health. This is a must-read for people who feel intimidated by the process of creating a website and/or blog!

I have worked in fitness and nutrition for a long time and decided that I would dip my toe into the waters of the internet to see if I could make an impact and ultimately reach more people worldwide.

It ended up being a much longer process than I anticipated, but the delayed time ended up being a blessing in disguise.

Through this article I will show you the steps I took to get launched, including:

Most importantly, in this post I take you through the times I was in over my head, and what I did to recover and take positive action.

Summer 2013

When I first decided to launch a website/blog, I had no idea where to start.

I had been listening to some fitness/nutrition podcasts and was completely unaware of the online business and blog world. I did not realize people were able to make a living conducting their business online, nor did I appreciate that the internet enables you to help people with the potential for gaining income from it.

I decided I needed a website and blog as I wanted to share nutrition information and offer nutritional coaching. At this time I was unaware of things like WordPress or AWeber and simply did a Google search on making your own website.

I stumbled upon Weebly, which is a true drag and drop website designer. At the time I knew I should buy a domain, but was completely unaware of what web hosting was. I had bounced around a few name possibilities and decided on Recovery Nutrition. My idea being that recovering your nutrition would help you get back to a state of wellness.

Due to their wide range of advertising, the only place I thought you could get a domain name was from Godaddy. I purchased the domain name and realized I needed someone to host where the website would be run from, so I purchased a year’s worth.

The First Website

I was very aware that what I was doing was going to be completely lackluster.

That did not bother me though, as this was more about getting a grasp on how things worked online. I am reasonably technically abled, so getting something simple designed was quite easy with all the drag and drop features on Weebly. I started writing blogs with no real direction or knowledge of SEO, linking sources or even a regular posting schedule.

I ended up going away for the summer but spent the majority of my time consuming every bit of information on all things internet marketing. Podcasts that really helped were from the Internet Business Mastery and everything by Derek Halpern at Social Triggers. These sources also lead me to the guys at Think Traffic (now Fizzle) and I really got an understanding on what needs to be included in a website and how important it is to craft truly compelling content. I learned how you must build trust with people and that being successful online is much more about giving rather than taking.

There are millions and millions of blogs, so I had a lot to compete against. My focus was on genuinely helping people and giving away as much content as possible in order to build relationships and trust into (hopefully) future customers.

Some say it should be an 80/20 split between giving and then asking for business, whether it be from sales of ebooks, coaching or programs. I had also heard of looking at it as giving away the house for free but selling the yard. In a world with a lot of noise and information out there, value is ultimately what will win people over

Taking a New Direction

Armed with a deeper understanding of what I wanted to do, I knew the Weebly site was not going to cut it.

Also, the domain I purchased was a Canadian .ca instead of a .com. I know there are different domains and servers based on countries and there is .net, .co as possibilities but to me keeping it straightforward with a .com was what I wanted.

I knew what I wanted on my website too:

I was in touch with a web designer friend who worked for a major online travel site and he was excited to help design the site and get me up and running.

I thought we would be up within a week; it ended up taking more than four months, and at that time he had barely got anything up.

This was annoying me more and more on a daily basis. What I did each day though was work on content, thinking that I could be up and running soon. I developed a bunch of blog posts, as I understood that a new website should have some content ready to go, as visitors who are hopefully wanting to look around will have more than one article to read.

Along with 5-6 blogs, I had time to write two nutrition guide/program e-books. I was able to have some people try them out for me too. This is a very key step in creating your own product in that you want to run it through its paces, so to speak, to see what works and what doesn’t.

I was able to get a lot of feedback on what I had worked on and was able to adapt and alter some things in my nutrition guides.

Fed Up With Waiting

My original goal was to be up and running before Christmas. With Christmas having passed and my friend too caught up on being promoted at work, I decided to take things into my own hands.

At this time I decided I needed to go with WordPress. I realized that WordPress.com was simply a blogging platform and that WordPress.org was a true content management system, i.e. something you want to set a business up on.

My hosting of choice was Bluehost, as I had seen them recommended countless times. They seem to always have some sort of promotion on and was able to get hosting and a domain name for $3.99 a month. However, they do make you pay all at once for the year, which I was unaware of at the time. The domain name was included and the name honestly just clicked in my head one day: Regained Wellness. Best of all, the dot com address was available!

Bluehost offers a lot of good tutorials on getting set up with instructional videos which I found very helpful, and they work hand in hand with WordPress, so it makes for an easy set up.

I was unaware of what themes were – I quickly learned that they essentially act as the ‘skin’ of the site. I did a lot of research about the Genesis framework by StudioPress and decided to go for it. It cost around $60, and once you buy it it is yours and can be used again on future projects.

With WordPress there are many free and paid themes. With the Genesis framework, StudioPress offers a basic theme that honestly I liked the look of. I am more particular to clean, solid looking websites with a good amount of whitespace. They say that people assess your site within the first eight seconds and decide on whether or not it is worth sticking around. I can see how that is true, or maybe I am just more aware of design features on websites after going through all this.

It’s All in the List

Something else that had not occurred to me was the idea of capturing emails.

Without being able to contact someone, there is very little hope of building relationships and being able to offer your products or services in the long run. You need to get traffic to your site, but you also need a way to keep in touch with them.

If you listen to successful people online who took a while to get to that stage, they always say that they wish they had been collecting email addresses right from the start.

A person’s email is a very personal and guarded thing. People are not openly willing to just give it away and I learned how there again needs to be an exchange of value. This mostly comes in the form of a free, short e-book, but there are other options as well. You can design some form of course related to your niche that is delivered out over the course of 4-5 emails. You could even design up specific reports on a certain subject. Basically it needs to be something that will provide the person with value.

Two of the big companies that provide email service are AWeber and MailChimp. Again, after hearing it mentioned quite a bit I decided to go with AWeber. Their service allows you to build forms, manage emails lists and send out broadcast emails to your list.

Aweber costs from around $20 a month. I do find that a bit problematic, as you are being charged monthly, even if you don’t have any subscribers. But what you are paying for is the convenience of having everything taken care of for you. You can make opt in forms and set up autoresponders to send out emails that are pre-scheduled over spaced out times. You can choose what days and times the emails go out, so essentially it is completely self automated.

MailChimp is free for the first 2,000 emails you send, but if you want an autoresponder, it costs from $15 a month.

Using Fiverr for Designs

Fiverr.com was my favorite resource I found through this whole process.

I had never heard of it until it was mentioned in a Fizzle podcast. Fiverr, if you are unaware of it, is where people offer a wide variety of services for just $5. You pay through PayPal when the job is complete and you can get anything from design work to someone making a lego design of your name (and just about everything in-between).

Fiverr has sections dedicated to e-books and logos. I had two different people making me e-book covers which turned out awesome. They even kept doing alterations even after I paid.

The logo for my website I also did through Fiverr, and it turned out to be better than I had ever hoped for. I had no real idea of what I wanted but the designer made something I was thrilled with. And this was after going through about six different versions. And all this for just five bucks.

I cannot say enough good things about Fiverr.

Using Gumroad to Sell Products

I developed a simple nutrition guide and learned about Gumroad, which is an e-commerce platform developed out of San Francisco. They make it extremely easy to upload a product and then provide a simple overlay on your site that features a secure payment feature. This keeps things contained within your site – people do not have to click through multiple tabs to finally get to a checkout.

Gumroad allows you to set up your own pricing and even provide a “pay what you want” option which has been used successfully by a lot of brands.

There is a fee to use Gumroad – they take 5% of what you charge plus 50 cents. This is quite less than a lot of other options out there and you get to deal with a very hands on company. They were very quick to respond to my questions and a pleasure to deal with!

Hitting the Wall

I got farther with everything than I had anticipated. I was able to set up my site, create menus and design some opt in forms. I knew eventually I would get stuck, and it was with integrating the sign up forms and setting up a page that had the PDF file for my opt-in giveaway. I also was stuck with how to have my blog appear with a snippet on the homepage and incorporating in a signup form and social media buttons.

I have since figured out how to do all of these things, and I was confident I could teach myself (albeit over quite a long time). I would rather have someone spare me all that lost time as I struggled on how to move code around, etc.

The next great resource I found was Elance.com. I was aware of Elance and heard about others using it. Elance is where you can post any type of job you need and people can offer their services. They have a secured pay system as well through paypal so you do not have to deal with the other party financially as it is taken care of through Elance.

Elance is a great place for getting web design as a majority of the Elancers are based in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, etc. They charge substantially less than a lot of North American developers and their work for me has been top notch.

I put up an ad saying I needed help with the finishing touches on my website.

I heard from quite a few people and decided on a group from India that checked out my site and gave some helpful advice, whether I hired them or not. Their rate was only $12 an hour and they quoted me $130 for the work I needed doing.

They were very detailed and made suggestions, but ultimately did exactly as I asked. I could have asked for a more specific design, but I just wanted to get the website’s functionality up.

I thought it would only be two or three days before the work was finished, but the time zone difference made it very hard to communicate. I would wake up to messages from them, but it was late at night their time when I got these. I would write back and would have to wait until the next morning to get replies.

The language barrier posed a bit of a problem as well, as it can be hard to communicate things over email generally, let alone when there are some interpretation issues due to language.

These guys were very well spoken in English, but some terms and expressions were lost on them, leading to a little more frustration.

Getting Up and Running

With the work done through the people from Elance, I technically launched on February 27th. It was not a planned day – it was more that I had paid them for the work and they had uploaded my e-book and put up five of my blog posts after finishing the other touches.

One tip I had seen was about including a roundup article amongst your early blog posts. This is basically where you ask a question to people of authority in your line of work or niche and feature their answers in a blog post. I reached out to about 18 influencers in fitness and nutrition and was shocked to hear back from some pretty big time players.

With the website launched ,I reached out to most of the people I featured, via Twitter, and shared my link to the article featuring them. Most of them actually retweeted to their followers, so within the first few hours of being up and running I got just under 500 visits, 22 Facebook likes, 20 Twitter followers and four email subscribers.

By the end of five days I was at over 2,000 page views. I understand this is known as the honeymoon phase and some websites are able to do a lot more on a launch, but I was happy with it.

The Real Work Begins

I know that the process of getting up and running is relatively simple compared to trying to build and maintain a presence online. I know now that in order to create something substantial, I have to continue creating content and building relationships – not only with potential readers, but with other people online. It means taking the time to respond back to questions or comments on your blog and even just thanking someone for leaving a comment on the blog.

Had I launched the thing way back when I had wanted to it would have been a mess.  I would not have learned what I needed to make it effective, nor would I have had the time to create a wide range of content that was ready to go as well as some guides for giveaway and for sale.

My site is far from perfect and will always be a work in progress but the main takeaway I got from this that I think applies not only to trying to create something online but for life in general is “progress, not perfection.

Photo Credit: Owen H R