WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com

The main difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com is where your site is hosted.

WordPress.com is hosted at WordPress.com. Your URL would be yourname.wordpress.com. While it’s easy to set up and get started this way, you will have only a few choices for themes and no flexibility with plugins. It’s hosted on their site so they won’t let you make changes and risk messing up their site.

WordPress.org is hosted on your domain. Your URL would be whateverdomainnameyoubuy.com. It’s actually a version of the software running WordPress.com that you put on your webhost. It’s free. It’s fully customizable with any of the thousands of themes available or any of the plugins you want to use to expand what it can do.

Now, since you’re probably not familiar with either, the WordPress.org sounds nice but maybe a little scary. You can set up an account at WordPress.com just to get a feel for the guts of the system and how it works. However, if you want to add quote forms or additional features that make your site actually your site then you’ll need to host it on your domain, on your webhosting platform. This is why I recommend Hostgator because you can set up the WordPress.org with a few clicks.

I hope that clears up the confusion and helps you understand why I recommend the self hosted WordPress installation.

Should you use your current website?

Since I know nothing of your current site, I don’t know. However, if you’re like 99% of insurance agents your site will not be worthwhile for this project. If your site already has ranking on the first few pages for the keywords you found in Step 1 – Market Research, keep your site. If not, start with a fresh site and, when you follow these steps, you should be ranking very high, very quickly.

Can I Have A Traditional Site Built For This Niche?

Of course. You can use a traditional “static” site for this purpose. However, wait before commissioning it to be built. In the next videos I’ll show how to take the “on page” ranking data from Market Samurai and how that determines what you put on your website and where you put it.

Keep in mind, if you’re unfamiliar with html and how to change anything your site then you won’t have any flexibility to make changes either. For example, one of my sites was ranking in the mid 30’s on Google (it was 3 pages into search results). I made one change on the page with a few words of text and in about 2 days, after Google crawled it again, it was in the top 10. It took about 3 seconds for me to make that change because I use a WordPress blog where updating the page is very simple.

Can I Use WordPress Like A Traditional Website?

Yes! Very much so.

If you want, you can create a static homepage. How I recommend doing it is creating a page titled, “Home.” Then in the “reading settings,” there’s an option to choose “A static page” for your homepage. Here’s a screenshot of the settings, and you just choose which page you want for your homepage.

Another option, which I personally use, is to use one of the premium themes by StudioPress or Headway.

Headway will allow you to actually customize how the homepage will appear inside its settings with very easy drag and drop settings.

The StudioPress Themes have various layouts with excerpts from your recent blog posts for the homepage. It’s a little more difficult to customize these themes unless you have knowledge of CSS, PHP and HTML. However, the layouts they offer are very clean and easy to use.

Will You Be Writing A Lot?

This is the fear of many agents. Yes, this will involve writing. It’s not difficult to come up with ideas to write about. Also, don’t fear bad grammar, splitting infinitives, or other writing “boo boos.”

As you can tell by reading what I write here, I don’t care if my English teacher writes on her screen with a red pen about my grammatical errors. My site is now graded on dollars earned, not by some random person with an attitude. So, unless your niche is school teachers, don’t worry about it.

Second, you have no shortage of what to write about. Anytime you get a question from a customer or a tip from an insurance company, that’s a topic to write about. Don’t worry about giving away the farm to your competition. (Look what I’m giving away here.) Your writing will build you up as an authority in your area. Your competition won’t be reading your site everyday so forget that fear.

While you don’t have to write a lot, the more content you produce the more keywords you’ll rank for in Google. If you can make a commitment to write two or three 300-800 word articles (500 word average) a week, that relate to your keyword, you’ll increase your ranking much more quickly.

Don’t stress over this but it’s a great habit to get into. If you do it for 30-60 minutes everyday when you wake up, you’ll grease your brain and find this to be an easier process everyday. Most of my articles take about 15 minutes to write, 5-10 minutes to edit and 5-10 minutes to find the images to place with them and post to the site. (In case you haven’t noticed I’m not the best at editing) Set aside time and make it a habit (read the War of Art to understand the importance of discipline and how it increases your creativity).

If you feel you don’t have time for writing, wake up earlier. You can make the time, if you want it bad enough. You can also have staff write articles for you. And, over the next few weeks I’ll show you how to find other people’s content and rewrite it for your site. Whatever you do, do NOT steal other people’s content. Make it your own.

What Next?

Okay, I should have went over this at the beginning in more detail but I was so excited about getting the content out it slipped my mind.

Ultimately, this is about establishing your market authority online. You’ll become the recognized expert quickly. You’ll learn how to network online, tap into other professional’s readers and get referrals. This is about becoming the market leader online.

We’ll dissect the results from Market Samurai to figure out what’s important to ranking for keywords that are actually searched by consumers. Then, you’ll learn how to create content that establishes you as an authority and increase the ranking of your site. Last, you’ll learn how to meet and find other professionals online that will network with you and give you referrals and increase traffic to your site and your authority in the marketplace.

Quick note, I’ve had a few people ask about using Traffic Travis instead of Market Samurai. Traffic Travis is a great piece of software that I use too. It has a new simple to understand SEO tool but does not compare in other features to Market Samurai. If you have Traffic Travis you can use it for research but will be missing out on the many other features Market Samurai offers as we go through this. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about then just ignore this paragraph and get Market Samurai)

Hope that clarifies a lot of where we’re going here and the method to what you’re learning.

It’s taking me a little longer than anticipated to get the videos out on time as I want to put them on YouTube and have to edit each segment to 10 minute or less intervals. Good thing is it breaks everything up into shorter, more easily watchable segments.

With that, comment below and let me know what you think about the process or if you have any questions.