Learning how to make something your own is a process.

For some lucky people, the learning curve is so short that it can appear almost non-existent. They seem to have been born with an innate knowledge of and confidence in who they are and a talent for effortlessly demonstrating this to the world.

For the rest of us, though, it can take time to get to this place. And to help us along the way we often look to role models – people who have walked this path before us.

Role models are great. Imitating them is a necessary and important part of growth. But, imitation can go too far: learning from someone else’s experience and applying their advice in your own way to your unique situation is helpful; copying someone else’s personality and morphing into them in an effort to become as successful as they are is not. In fact, it’s downright harmful to you and your success.

The scary thing is that this latter form of imitation is not necessarily intentional. And it often happens so subtly and insidiously that the person involved doesn’t realise that they’ve got themselves stuck in the imitation phase and not actually moved on to making the advice their own.

Case study: Big Name Blogger and her fangirls

A certain current Big Name Blogger (who shall remain nameless as this is not about her) has a very large following. And rightly so. She is fantastic and excellent at what she does. She’s successful and she’s quirky and cool. In fact, she’s successful because she’s quirky and cool. And she teaches other people how to be successful by being their own quirky and cool selves.

Oh the irony.

Let me ‘splain. What’s happened over the past year has been painful to see. So many wonderful vibrant women flocked to Big Name Blogger, all eager to learn from her. But, instead of becoming more of their own quirky and cool selves as both they and Big Name Blogger intended, they instead slowly but surely morphed into clones of Big Name Blogger’s quirky and cool self.

I used to read some of these women’s blogs, and watched as their writing style changed. Now, all groups have a certain vocabulary in common, and this one is no different, but the types of changes I’m referring to went way beyond simple group jargon creeping in. I’m talking about the rhythm and tone of the writing changing to match that of Big Name Blogger. I’m talking about such similar ways of expressing things that in some cases sentences will match word for word – not plagiarism, just an exceptionally ingrained way of thinking. There’s more, but I can’t figure out a way of explaining it without giving away who I’m talking about. All I can say is that it totally freaks me out.

You’ll notice that I said I used to read these women’s blogs. Yup, I ended up unsubscribing from them. What attracted me to these women as writers and business owners in the first place was gone. They were no longer vibrant and interesting. Instead, they became boring repetitions of what I’d read over at Big Name Blogger’s blog. They were no longer unique. Instead, they became pale imitations of Big Name Blogger. Like Coke, they changed the recipe, leaving out that secret ingredient in their awesomesauce that made them so fabulous in the first place.

The world already contains Big Name Blogger. She’s an essential and brilliant part of the world. But, the world doesn’t need more clones of her. What the world needs are more people allowing their own special brilliance to shine forth.

I hope these women remember just how amazing they are, and start to let the rest of the world see it. I hope it’s not too late.

Self-hosted blogs

If you already have a website for your business, or are about to create one, the most obvious place to put a blog would be on your own website. Because you are hosting your blog on your site, this option is often referred to as a self-hosted blog.

To run a blog on your website, you need blogging software to power it. And the best blogging software out there is WordPress. I’m not just saying that because I’m a WordPress developer and set up websites for people using this software. Rather, it a case of me choosing to work with WordPress because it’s such an excellent product. WordPress has become very powerful over the years that it’s been around, and it can in fact power your entire website as a Content Management System, regardless of whether you have a blog on it or not. I often set up sites for people like this, with nary a blog in sight!

The WordPress software itself is free of charge, and to use it to set up a blog on your website, you will need to toddle along to WordPress.org to download and install it on your website. Some web hosts (like Hostgator) also offer an easy install of the WordPress software via Fantastico.

Either way, the process is fairly simple, although some technical knowledge can come in handy, particularly if you’re doing a manual install of the software. Please don’t let this put you off setting up a blog this way, though – as you’ll see in a second, having your blog on your own website has some very important benefits that far outweigh this small (possible) disadvantage.

Free blogging services

If you don’t have your own website, another way to set up a blog is to use one of the free services offered by the companies who develop blogging software. In this case, instead of your blog being hosted on your own website, it is hosted on the free services website.

WordPress offers this option at WordPress.com. The other biggie in this arena is Blogger. If you visit those sites, you’ll see that the process of setting up a blog there literally takes a few seconds: you fill in a brief form, and – voila! – you have a blog.

Now, in comparison to the first option with its extra technical knowledge requirements, this sounds like a Godsend. But… (why is there always a ‘but’?!)… because these services are free to use and so quick and easy to set up, they tend to attract two types of blogs: one is personal blogs, people’s online journals about what they get up to, and the second is spam blogs, also referred to as splogs (that’s probably the only funny thing about them!).

I’m a bit wary of throwing a business blog into that mix.

It’s fine if people already know you, like you and trust you, but for people who find your blog via a search engine query it can be difficult to distinguish your blog from the other thousands of blogs that all look exactly the same as yours – you’re all using the same free templates provided by the service for your blog design, so your business blog looks the same as a few thousand spam blogs and a few thousand personal blogs.

It’s not impossible to run a very professional business blog from one of these free services, but you’re sure starting off on the wrong foot and giving yourself a tad more work to do to convince your site visitors that you are, in fact, a genuine, legitimate business.

If you can, use the self-hosted option

All these disadvantages of the free blogging services fall away when you host your blog on your own website: you own your domain, and you can customise and brand the heck out of it (tastefully of course!).

In short, you’re in control over the impression that you provide to people finding your site via the search engines. It’s easier for you to demonstrate your integrity to them, and consequently easier for them to enter into a trust relationship with you.

[This blog post is based on a presentation I did for local businesses at the East Lothian Coffee Morning on 23 April 2010. You can download the slides from that presentation from the East Lothian Council.]

Cliché? Well, yes.

But clichés tend to become clichés because there’s often an element of truth to them, as there is with this particular one. But I think it’s worth unpacking this statement a little more, especially in the context of blogging.

To do this, let me tell you about a gentleman we know. We also like him very much. He’s a fun guy, has a great sense of humour and is very entertaining in social situations. He also (ironically, given what I’m about to say) has a good heart. The thing is, this particular gentleman is a builder, and while I don’t think he ever intends to screw his customers over, things always seem to be going wrong with his building projects. To listen to him, you’d think he was the unluckiest person on earth. The upshot of all of this, however, is that he lets his customers down. A lot. And, as a result, when it came time for my husband and I to do some building work to our house… well, despite knowing and liking this gentleman, there was no way on God’s green earth that we were letting him anywhere near the project.

We simply didn’t trust him.

If we look at our business cliché again, then, I think it’s fair to say that, while knowing and liking someone are important and nice to have, they’re not necessarily fundamental to business relationships. What is fundamental, however, is trusting that the person you’ve hired will deliver whatever it is that you’ve hired them to do.

Blog: A technical definition

A blog is a series of articles, known as posts published on a web page in reverse chronological order.

Great. That tells us what a blog is.

But we often forget what a blog does

When we focus on the technical definition, we lose sight of what a blog is really doing for us and our businesses. At the heart of it, a blog is a demonstration of our trustworthiness to potential customers.

Please note that this new definition of a blog assumes that you already possess integrity as a business owner. Blogs are good at showing us for who we already are.

How this plays out in practice

One of my blog posts on how to create a custom tab for your Facebook page gets an incredible amount of traffic from Google.

It’s one of the benefits of having a blog on your website – because you’re constantly adding to the content on your site, as well as adding to the number and variety of keywords on your site, your blog posts start showing up in more and more search results, driving more and more people to your little spot on the big ol’ web.

The thing is, all of this traffic – those hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of visitors – is, in a sense, wasted if you’re not converting at least a percentage of them into paying customers.

Don’t get me wrong, blogging is fun. Heck, if you own your own business, most of what you do (bar those few annoying and boring admin tasks!) is probably fun. But fun doesn’t pay the bills. I tried, but unfortunately my bank manager didn’t quite see things my way.

At the end of the day, we’re business owners, and regardless of how much fun we’re having, we need a return on investment for our time and effort.

That return on investment comes from converting random site visitors into actual customers. And that conversion happens when your site visitors enter into a trust relationship with you. They know that if they throw money at you for a product or a service, you won’t let them down.

Your blog content helps this trust relationship to develop. For example, through your blog posts, you’re constantly demonstrating your expertise in your chosen field. It becomes very clear to your readers whether you know what you’re talking about or not.

Your blog comments also feed in to this trust relationship developing. Again, when you answer questions, it shows that you know your subject. But, just as importantly, your attitude towards your readers (who are your potential customers) is on show: Are you genuinely friendly and helpful when answering questions? Do you even bother to answer questions at all, or do you routinely ignore your comment section? I know it can be difficult to respond to every comment when you have a busy blog, not to mention a busy offline life, but it can make people think twice about hiring you if they feel that you may ignore them or that you’d treat them patronisingly!

On the other hand, if your interactions with your blog readers provide a clear indication of the fact that you do excellent work and treat your customers well, people will trust you, like you and get to know you… and do business with you.

[This blog post is based on a presentation I did for local businesses at the East Lothian Coffee Morning on 23 April 2010. You can download the slides from that presentation from the East Lothian Council.]

In today’s post, I’ll take you through installing WordPress on your site. Although WordPress started out life as blogging software, you can now use it as a content management system for a traditional looking website (with or without a blog attached!). The great thing about WordPress is that it’s very flexible. Even more great – it’s free!

1. After registering your domain name and signing up for a web hosting account, you’ll receive an email from Hostgator to confirm your order and give you all the technical details for your site. It will look something like this (although, of course, you’ll have actual information in place of the smudges!):

   

   As the email states, if you followed the process in my previous post and purchased your domain from Hostgator at the same time as your hosting, you’ll be able to use the links in the email to access your domain immediately. If you purchased your domain elsewhere, you’ll need to let your domain registrar know what your Hostgator nameservers are (they’re contained in the welcome email from Hostgator) – you’ll probably be able to do this yourself by logging into your account with your domain registrar and entering the information in the appropriate place.

   To access your site’s control panel (cpanel), click on the link in the email that says “Until your DNS has been changed and resolves to our nameservers, you can access your cpanel at…”.

2. When asked for your username and password, enter those that you chose when you signed up with Hostgator.

   

3. Scroll down towards the bottom of your Hostgator control panel, to the section called Software/Services.

   
   

   Click on the very happy looking Fantastico De Luxe. Despite its corny sounding name, Fantastico De Luxe is a wonderful way to install a range of software with one click. In this case, we’re going to be using it to install WordPress on your site.

4. Click on the WordPress link in the menu on the left hand side of the page. This will result in the following screen – click on New installation.

   

5. Choose the name of the domain on which you want to install WordPress. If this is your first site, there will be only one choice here in the drop-down menu.

   

6. Leave the option Install in directory blank. This is because you will be installing WordPress as a content management system, i.e. to manage the content of your whole site (pages and a blog, if you decide to have one). You would choose to install WordPress in a directory if, for example, you already had a site designed in HTML and CSS, and wanted to add a blog to it – in this case, WordPress would be used purely as blogging software on one part of your site only and not as a content management system.
7. Choose a username and password to use to access your WordPress administration area. If you use WordPress as a content management system, you do not have to go via your Hostgator cpanel to edit your site. Instead, you’ll do this via your WordPress dashboard, which you’ll be able to access at www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin.
8. Leave Admin nickname blank.
9. Enter the email address that you want to use to receive WordPress notifications, e.g. when people comment on your blog.
10. Enter a name and description (tagline) for your site. Don’t worry if you’re not yet 100% sure of this – you will be able to change these settings in your WordPress admin area at any time.
11. Lastly, click the Install WordPress button. The following screens will ask you to confirm and finish the installation, and give you the option to email the details of the installation to yourself.

Voila! You have installed WordPress!

You can view your site by either going to your domain name (i.e. www.yoursitename.com) or by using the link in the Hostgator welcome email if your nameservers haven’t yet resolved (if you go to your domain name and there’s nothing there yet, then the nameservers haven’t resolved and you’ll need to use the link Hostgator gave you). It can take nameservers anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours to resolve, so you may need a bit of patience here

When you view your site, you’ll notice that it doesn’t look so pretty yet. Next time, we’ll take a look at how to install a WordPress theme and start adding content to your site.