We all know that one of the most important things that we can do online as network marketers is to “Brand” ourselves. We need to differentiate ourselves from the competition and get our fellow network marketers to get to know who we are and why they should join us. There are many ways to do this (ask Mike Dillard!) but what I want to talk about today is creating your Brand online with a blog.

It is imperative that anyone who takes their online network marketing seriously have one. There are many themes to choose from, some are free and some cost money…some look better than others, but the key is getting your blog seen by others. If you are the only one looking at your blog, then it’s doing you no good! You want your blog to generate traffic, and in turn help to generate network marketing leads for your business.

I am not an expert by any stretch, and I am not a SEO master. My Hubspot Website Grade is 87, good and improving but not 100…yet! What I am is a motivated learner and I am someone who takes his business very seriously. I have learned a lot about setting up a blog properly in the past 2 months and want to share what I know. My experience is based on using WordPress, which I believe is the most popular blogging platform. There is much more to know, and it’s an ever changing landscape, but what I am going to share with you will help get you off to a great start.

1. Self-Host Your Blog. You want to get your own domain, preferably with your name in the title since you are branding YOU, and host it yourself. You do not want to use the free wordpress internet version or blogger. You want to have control of your site and your content. You are limited with the free sites of how much “promotion” you can do and you could get shut down.

2. Choose Your Theme. There are a ton of Wordpress themes to choose from, with many different looks. You will want one that is customizable and relatively professional looking — I’d stay away from a Jonas Brothers theme (can you tell I have a 12 year old daughter?). Also, and I’m honestly not completely why or what to look for, but some themes are read easier by the search engines and rank better. This one, for example, grades on HubSpot about 30 points higher than my prior theme, and I’ve only made minor modifications. I’ve only been using this theme for about 2 weeks.

3. Submit Your Site to Search Engines. You need the search engines to know you exist so you need to tell them. I just manually submit my site through a free website submission service. This submits my site to the the major search engines as well as a lot of smaller, independent search engines. You can also pay for this service but I’m honestly not sure what the benefit of doing that is.

4. Get Your Site Verified. You also want to get your site “verified” by both Google and Yahoo. This is free to do and helps the search engines to index your blog pages by crawling your site. Both Google and Yahoo explain how to do this. When you get to the point when you need to place the meta tag on your site’s homepage, this can be difficult to place it exactly where they want you to. If you have problems verifying your site because of this, download the Ask Apache Search Engine Verify plug-in. I did and it worked like a charm!

Now I want to talk about optimizing your blog for the search engines by properly setting up your permalinks as well as some vital plug-ins and how to set those up. I sincerely hope that this helps some of you out there as I have needed to learn this piecemeal throughout the course of the past few months!

RSS FEED: Get an RSS Feed URL from Feedburner for your blog. This allows readers of your blog to subscribe and receive updates automatically via email.

Privacy: Be sure to go the “Privacy” section of your Setting and check the box that allows your blog to be seen by the search engines!

Permalinks: You will want to go to the “Permalinks” section of your Settings and choose “Custom” and input this: /%category%/%postname%/. This will make your post urls make sense and contain the title or key words about the post.

All-In-One SEO: This WordPress plug-in is highly recommended, even if your blog says that it is already SEO optimized. It think it’s the most important of all the plug-ins for helping your site get optimized for the search engines. Some important information for setting up All-In-One SEO:

* Home Title – Include Your Name and a Keyword (if possible). You want to dominate the search engines for your name. If your name is John Smith…you may have to try harder!

* Home Description – Include Your Name in this description as well.

* Home Keywords – Do not include more than 10.

* Page Title and Title Attribute – Each page of your site needs to be set up. Your title is what appears in the top left of your screen when you are on a page. Include keywords, your name, etc. I set these up with the same information.

* Page Keywords – again, no more than 10 and should be relevant to the content on that page

* Page Menu Label – this is what will read on the drop down menu of your site. Just include what you want it to say…for example my title attribute is “About Steve Hawk” because I want my entire name seen by the search engines but my menu label reads “About Steve”.

XML SiteMap: Notifies Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask about updates to your blog. You will need to set this up so that the search engine spiders can crawl your site. In layman’s terms, this plug-in makes your site readable by the search engines.

Askimet: This plug-in manages your comments and includes a spam filter.

OnlyWire: This plug-in is great if you are using an article marketing strategy. All you need to do is click a button and your blog post will be uploaded to 30 different social media sites including Facebook, Digg, Mixx to name a few.

TweetMeme: This plug-in allows you or your readers to click on a button on your post and have it published on Twitter.

SEO Friendly Images: This plug-in makes all of the images on your site SEO friendly. Images can have a negative effect on search engine rankings because they can’t be read by the spiders. SEO Friendly Images makes the code of your images readable to the spiders.

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