How a Website Can Change your Life

My business partner in Grassroots Internet Strategy, Serena Star-Leonard, wrote a book that was published this year titled “How to Retire in 12 Months”.

The book is about figuring out what you’re passionate about, working out a way to turn that passion into profit and then using the opportunities created by the internet to do just that.

And the cool thing is that every day I work with clients who are having a red hot go at using the internet to create an opportunity to change their life.

They are generally either people who are using a website as part of their marketing plan for their full time business, or people who are employed by someone else while they create an online business and build it up to a point where they can leave their job.

Here are Serena’s tips for how to use a website to change your life.

1. Identify a topic that you are passionate about, and make sure that it is something you’ll be willing to speak about every day.

It’s a good idea to do some research to find out what already exists in relation to your topic, but don’t be put off if something similar already exists. You are what is unique and you are what can make your business stand out.

2. Use the technology that it is available to create a website for the business

There are so many low cost tools available now that it’s relatively easy to get started. Tools like WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics and Mail Chimp.

The biggest decision you’ll need to make about your website is what areas will you learn and do yourself, and which parts you will outsource.

Then you just need to get started and keep taking action to make things happen.

3. Build your community and your content

Once your website is set up, you have something valuable to share so go ahead and share it to get the word out.  Create a marketing plan and start implementing it.

Creating content and sharing it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can be time consuming so work out a plan related to how much time you have, and whether or not you have the budget to outsource some or all of your marketing.

4. Keep on going

Keep reading. Keep learning. Keep marketing. Keep trying new things. And keep building relationships with your readers and people in your industry.

For more details on the steps you need to go through, grab a copy of Serena’s book.

Once you get set up and start effectively marketing your website and blog, you’ll find that it can change your life by:

• Giving you an open forum to express yourself and receive feedback
• Generating opportunities through meeting like minded people
• Generating an income without having to work from 9 to 5
• Giving you freedom to work from wherever you like (as long as there is an internet connection) and whatever time of day, or night, you like
• Giving you the personal satisfaction of doing something you like
• Not having to wake up to an alarm clock (unless of course you want to).

There is a huge learning curve once you dip your toe into the online marketing pond, so if you decide to take this path (or you already are), hopefully you’ll enjoy the challenge.

In addition to the info above, my tips are:

• Accept that you have to put a lot of work in to make your business successful
• Accept that things will probably take twice as long as you expect them to.

In the next few weeks Serena and I will launch the fourth version of our Grassroots Internet Strategy website (5th if you count the free WordPress version that we initially set up). That’s quite a lot in less than two years, even for two website marketing peeps such as ourselves! But it has all been part of the process.

We started by putting something together relatively quickly so that we could get started, and as we’ve learned more and more about WordPress and new methods of online marketing, we continually upgraded the website to meet our needs and capitalise on new business opportunities.

Need some expert input to get you up and running faster?

If you’re ready to find out how to set up a website and create the foundation of your dream lifestyle, check out Serena’s Website Launch Pad course