Web Site in 10 minutes!
Step #1 – Put Up Your Web Site in 10 minutes!
You are a visual artist, musician, performer, film/video maker, story teller, author or someone who creatively expresses themselves in some way.
Are you using the internet or simply a spectator?
Some of you may have a web site. Many may not.
Your own web site is the crucial first step for everyone today, but for “creatives”/content creators it’s essential NOW!
This is NOT cause for alarm. Don’t Panic!!!
You do not need to pay someone a large sum or spend months learning new skills.
You can set it up in 10 minutes! Well, maybe 20…anyway, it won’t take long and it won’t cost more than the cost of your domain name.
The following two steps you need to do immediately:
- go to Tumblr.com and get a FREE account.
- go to a domain registrar and register your own name and/or your business name. Get the dot com suffix at all costs. You may consider other suffixes and even get more, but the dot com suffix is a necessity. (You may also want to register where you can purchase an accompanying domain based email address, but this is not essential at this point.)
Once you have your Tumblr account and your domain name, follow the instructions on Tumblr for assigning your domain name to your page. You can find instructions on how to do that here.
BAM! That’s it…you’re up and your new site is waiting for your first blog post.
If you already have social or merchant accounts scattered around, start updating them with the URL for your new domain.
This begins the process of what, in marketing terms, has been called “building a funnel”. The goal is to give anyone who’s been interested in anything you’ve done a place to find out more about you. Doing this ties any social presence (i.e. twitter, facebook, etc.), etsy.com or artfire.com or other stores, or any other accounts together and anyone interested in your content there may find their way back to your home site.
For this reason, eventually, you’ll want to edit your Tumblr theme to include social links to your other accounts so those folks can find you in other places.
You have questions?
Ok, to answer your first question, why Tumblr? Why not blogger.com, typepad.com or wordpress.com or any of the many other free blogging sites out there?
- Tumblr is FREE and EASY to USE!
- Tumblr is constructed to be a community and to benefit from members following and reposting entries on each other’s pages. That’s a huge plus! It not only brings you an audience from within Tumblr, it may increase your visibility to search engines.
- Another reason is that Tumblr lets you use your own domain name if you’ve registered one. That’s a benefit you have to pay for if you choose to host on sites like wordpress.com.
- Tumblr also doesn’t impose “branding” on your page. If you choose a template without any mention of Tumblr or later edit your page template it may not include any mention of Tumblr. Once you’ve assigned your own domain name, from the point of view of someone who arrives on your page it is completely invisible to them that this page is hosted on Tumblr unless they’re also on Tumblr in which case they get the options to reblog, etc.
- ..beyond that, once you’ve set up your account and picked a theme, Tumblr is just really easy to use, as well as letting you post to it by other methods beyond sitting in front of your computer…but more on that in later tutorials.
(You say you already have a site? You host your own on your own server account? Great! At this point you’ve already gotten a site up so you’ve taken this step. Keep Tumblr in mind though because it may be something you can utilize later to increase traffic to your site.)
You already have an account on blogger.com, typepad.com, wordpress.com or another site? It’s not the end of the world. Get your Tumblr.com site and set it up. Future pages will detail building a bigger site and porting from other those other services.
Questions on domain registrars?
A domain registrar is a service that sells you domain names. They can also offer hosting & server accounts, but they don’t have to, and for the purposes of this tutorial you don’t need that. There’s no need to spend more money than you need to at this point.
For reference domain registrar’s include companies like GoDaddy.com, directnic.com, and many others. I’ve had accounts with several over the years and currently use 1and1.com, but you can do a search for registrars and find many more..shop, find one, get an account and buy your domain name(s). Prices vary, but these days $6-10 per domain name/yr. is about average. You are picking your registrar as much for convenience and ease of use of their site as anything else, because most charge almost precisely the same amount for a dot com domain name.
Disclaimer: fyi, I’m not getting anything from any links or mentions on this page. The recommendations on this page are my best recommendations to get your web site up quickly and as inexpensively as possible…and in a way that encourages traffic and notice of your site. This advice is aimed specifically at those folks who think they can’t get started….YOU CAN!
By the way, if you think Tumblr is a shortcut and not something to use longterm, I disagree. Future tutorials include ways to incorporate the steps above into a larger web presence so taking these steps are not only an easy way to get on the net, but first steps in a larger strategy.
Now go get your Tumblr.com account.
