How to Build and Manage a Website For Your Business in 39 Minutes Using 4 Simple WordPress Plugins

Can you remember doing business before the Internet? Those were some great times. Everything was done over the phone and with business cards. I’m curious to know, do you still use business cards?

Things have changed since those times, right? Everything is online now. You had to transfer your business empire to the Internet. I suppose that wasn’t an easy change, but hey, we’re here and we’re thriving.

Let’s imagine your business is like an ancient empire. Naturally, you would like your empire to be as powerful as possible. Now, let me ask you what do all the biggest empires had in common?

They all had a shiny capital city and a city fortress or a castle. In today’s day and age, your website IS the main castle in your entire empire. Hence, you need to make a priority to build an amazing castle.

Today, we’ll show you how you can do exactly that in less than an hour.

The fact is that almost 70% of websites are built with WordPress. For people who are not developers, WordPress is still the easiest way to build and maintain a website.

Other 30% are built with Wix, Squarespace, Ghost, Joomla etc. Don’t get me wrong. These are not bad, but as soon as you want to make something remotely unique or a little bit clever, you quickly see their limitations.

As you business grows, you’ll need the flexibility that WordPress offers.

With WordPress, you can do whatever you want in a few simple steps. Everything you’ll see in this blog post can be done with a couple of clicks.

As I moved through the process of making this blog post, I realized it’s actually a complete guide on how to make a WordPress website. I’m well aware that most of the people, who’ll read this, are in fact, regular people; with no coding or web development experience.

Everything will be broken down into simple action steps, and if you still have additional questions feel free to send them directly to me here (marketing@ninjodo.com).

Just an “FYI”, I used to run a web-development company prior to starting Ninjodo. I’m experienced in website development and I’m a witness that the way of doing things I’ll show you is the most efficient today.

I understand that you’re in charge of everything and you wear many hats as an entrepreneur. Cash can sometimes get pretty tight and I’ll help you figure out this invaluable piece of business today.

A tough question: Where to start?

For the blog posts sake, we’ll take this scenario into account: You’re a solopreneur, or a small business owner who’s just starting out. You don’t even have a domain purchased. That will actually be the first step.

Choose a domain name

We use GoDaddy. The process is pretty straight forward. You choose a domain name, and if it’s available you purchase it.

You buy web hosting. And when you log in to your web hosting there is a button to install WordPress. Your web host can also help you get it installed if you get stuck or want so extra support.

Installation takes about 10mins.

Onwards and upwards: Why WordPress themes are important

WordPress themes are the visual design your customers will see when they visit your page. One might compare WordPress themes to your clothes. WordPress is the framework(your body) and themes are the clothes which you put on when you go outside.

That’s why it’s important to choose your clothes wisely. First impressions count and it will be your chance to make a visitor fall in love with your brand.

Where can you find free themes

Quality is important for every new business and that’s why you shouldn’t be trying to penny pinch when it comes to the look and feel of your WordPress website. On the other hand, I get that your budget is probably tight and you might want to put all the resources into customer acquisition.

What if I told you can balance out both of those. Well, you’re living in an amazing time. You can find cheap(if not free) themes which are beautiful and will make a great first impression.

When I was first assigned to the task of finding a theme, I made a killer list of all the possible sites to get themes. After searching for a couple of hours more, here is the updated list:

• http://www.templatestash.com (145+ free WordPress Themes)
• https://colorlib.com/wp/free-wordpress-themes/ (colorlib’s 50+ free WordPress Themes)
• https://themeforest.net/category/wordpress (Best bang for the buck WordPress Themes)
• https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=wordpress+theme&type=(GitHub search for WordPress themes)

Searching takes about 10 minutes.

How to install a WordPress theme

How’s it going so far? It seems like a big job, right?! But truth be told with this blog post you can do all the steps within 20 minutes.

So, you’ve picked out your favorite WordPress theme. Now you need to install it. It’s done in 2 easy steps.

Step 1 – In your admin panel go to Appearance – Themes – Add new
Step 2 – Click on the upload button – click the browse button and choose the zip file where your theme is.

And that’s it. Two pages and 8 clicks! Can it get any better than that? Ok, going forward, it’s heating up.

All right, you’ve done it! You’ve successfully created a WordPress website for your business. That wasn’t so hard, wasn’t it?

Installation of a WordPress Theme takes around 5 minutes.

Now, after you’ve set up your beautiful new theme, you need to figure out what will you use it for. Let us take a guess…

You need a website to get new leads, make it easy for customers to contact you, and you might even need a Shopping cart for people to buy products or services from you. And you might even want to do some content marketing in the form of blog posts.

In order to do all of these things, you’ll also need a little help managing it. In WordPress language, you’ll need PLUGINS.

The life blood of your website

WordPress plugins are add-ons to your WordPress sites. They make your life easier. To get back to the clothes comparison … If your WordPress theme is your clothes, then the plugins are all the zippers, pockets and shoe laces. Basically the things you can’t go without.

WordPress plugins are there to make your website functional. With plugins you can:

• Defend your site against all sorts of attacks,
• Make your website faster for google,
• Optimize it for Google easily,
• Engage your visitors by making beautiful landing pages,
• Enable your visitors to buy from your right there on the website etc.

With WordPress plugins you can do so much with your WordPress sites, it’s ridiculous. There are literally thousands of highly specialized developers working every day to give you only the best plugins.

Who would go through all of them, it’s impossible. It’s just like choosing a book to read, there are around 15 million books published so far. Which one to choose? Now that’s where this blog comes in.

Wouldn’t you say that when receiving a book recommendation, you’re more likely to accept it from a person similar interest as you that also has proven authority on the subject(has read the book)?

It’s similar with me and WordPress. I ran a web-development company plus I’m running this site with what I’m suggesting you do.

The thing is most of us have been in contact with WordPress and it’s plugins one way or the other. I’ll tell you about all the plugins we used to get Ninjodo going. The truth is, our website is the life blood of our business and if you’re reading this it’s probably the same for you.

So, let me help you by showing you how to install a plugin and which ones to install.

How to install a typical plugin in 6 clicks

When you’re in the admin page in WordPress go over to “Plugins” section. And then click on the “Add new” button on the top.

Now, most of the plugins we’ll suggest are free and you can find them in the search section. So, you’ll just type in the name of the plugin you want to install.

Bonus tip: If you want to research plugins, check out the “Featured” and “Popular” sections.

After you’ve found the plugin you want, click on it and then click on the “Install now” button. You’ll see a dialog box which will tell you if it’s a success or a failure.

And that’s pretty much it. Let’s count the clicks… there were 6 clicks. Super simple. Another point here is that you can upload plugins from your computer if you’ve purchased it somewhere.

Now that you know how to install a plugin, we will show you a few simple plugins we use for managing our CRM business.

Yoast SEO

Some people say that SEO(search engine optimization) is dead, but that’s far from the truth. If something doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work at all. For the last couple of months, we’ve been SEO-optimizing every blog post we’ve written. Other than that, we wrote useful content and we’ve got some great results so far.

When you have content like that it gets read and shared, people hear about you and they become a member of your tribe. You get momentum and get’s only better and better.

So what’s our SEO secret? We don’t have any, actually. The only two things that we do is we write useful content and optimize SEO with Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.

Google’s algorithms are ever changing, but one thing is important now more than ever. Simply put, you need to write content after which your visitors will stop their Google search. They’ll find all the answers on your webiste.

To be completely honest you don’t need to be a technical person and I’m far from an SEO expert, but the fact is that we did manage to increase our visits from Google by 200% in the last 4 months.

Basically, the Yoast SEO will help you get discovered by Google by making clear and effective suggestions on what you should change.

Yoast SEO gives you easy to understand suggestions with the following things:

• Focus keywords and content analytics – Multiple focus keywords
• Post titles and meta descriptions – See how it looks in Google right then and there
• Meta configurations – Avoid duplicate content
• Readability check – Flesch readability test
• Linking – Canonical and Internal linking

Similar to SEO enhancements, Yoast is great at giving you readability tips as well. This is especially true if you’re using your blog as a primary source of leads and customers. This Yoast feature reminds me of The Hemingway app so much.

It will make your sentences shorter, clearer and you will get your points across much more easily.

Furthermore, your visitors and readers won’t be bored to death with your complicated content.

Wordfence for Security

Security is something that most of us don’t consider until it’s too late. We take the security we feel right now for granted and we are not even aware of the fact that any moment our life can be changed forever. If we’re not careful.

Here is an odd fact about WordPress security issues. One would think that the biggest threat is from hackers. But, it’s so rare to have a team of expert hackers who want to hack you. Most of the hacking(around 16,000 of them in 2016) happens just because websites are not protected at all.

If hackers see that you are protected they will most likely stay clear of you and search for an easier victim.

For this, and many other security issues, we at Ninjodo use Wordfence. It’s the best security WordPress plugin available for your website. It will save you from all sorts of hacker attacks, malware, viruses, scams etc.

It can be installed just like Yoast SEO in 6 clicks. But similar to Yoast, you can download a premium version and get your security on an even higher level.

Wordfence for security features are these:

1. Firewall
   Web application Firewall
   Real-time threat defence feed
   Country blocking
2. Scan
   Malware scanner
   Spam detection
3. Live traffic
   Google crawl activities
   All other crawling activities
   View Logins and Logouts
4. Tools
   Cellphone sign in
   Comment spam filter
   Detailed IP info

You will get incredibly well-thought out system in Wordfence security. Try it out for yourself.

Woocommerce

Just the other day Amazon price of a share has gone up to over $1000. This makes Amazon alone worth over $300 B. For comparison it’s more than Walmart and Target combined. This is the power of e-commerce. Now, why wouldn’t you take a piece of that cake?

If you’re serious about selling anything online, you should think about getting the Woocommerce plugin for WordPress.

The Woocommerce plugin is a free WordPress plugin that lets you not have to worry about shopping carts and order receipts. You just install the plugin and you products choose a payment gateway so ppl can pay you and you’re done. It’s pretty useful and it’s pretty clear why there are millions of users of this particular plugin.

Most noteworthy is that Woocommerce is completely free for WordPress users and you guessed it, you can install it in 6 clicks.

With Woocommerce you’ll sell easily and beautifully. Here are some of the features you’ll get from using Woocommerce:

Here are some of the features you’ll get from using Woocommerce:

• Fully customizable e-store
• Over 300 paid or free extensions to help you
• Big community of people just like you
• Modern and clean interface
• Fully integrates with WordPress and Ninjodo

Thrive Themes

If someone were to ask you right now: “What’s the most important skill in business?” – what would you tell them? I would definitely answer that sales is, and always has been, the most important skill a business person should have.

Just think about it. When you’re approaching a potential love partner, you’re selling yourself. When you’re making a connection with somebody important to your business, you’re selling yourself.

Sales is everything, and everything is sales. It’s a competitive market out there and you need every tool to try one-up the competition.

For us, one of those tools is Thrive Themes. We strongly depend on our content marketing to scale our sales. This wouldn’t be possible without Thrive Themes. But Thrive Themes are great for all sorts of things on your website. Lead generation is more and more important.

Thrive Themes lets us create beautiful landing pages, and monitor the complete analytics. After we’ve got all those leads we can easily extract them to Mailchimp.

Here is what you can do with ThriveThemes suite:

• Thrive Themes – Conversion focused WordPress themes
• Thrive Lead – The best tool for email marketing as we know it (Lead generation, landing pages, opt-in forms etc.)
• Content Builder (build visually appealing content in a matter of seconds)
• Landing Pages (specifically made for this important part of your business)
• Clever Widgets (Advanced targeting with widgets)
• Thrive Ultimatum (great when you have an amazing offer that will expire soon, scarcity based marketing)
• Headline Optimizer (A/B test your headlines, make them SEO friendly and see which one is better)
• Thrive Ovation (puts your testimonials on steroids)
• Thrive Quiz Builder (an amazing and undiscovered lead generation tool)

Installation of these 4 plugins will take you about 14 minutes

A Bonus Lead-generation tip

By far the biggest challenge for businesses around the world is getting new leads. In our experience, it’s more or less easy to get people to your website. It’s just a matter of right strategy. If you want to improve your growth, you should check out these 7 growth tactics to use in 2017.

The problem is you need to stay in contact with people that dig your stuff. And you can’t do that unless they’ve decided to join your community somehow. Hands down the easiest way to do this is capturing the email of a visitor which you can do in a number of ways.

You can do this directly on your website with opt-in form integration.

I’ve already mentioned we use ThriveLeads for this.

When someone comes to our blog (like you perhaps), it’s often the first time they’ve come into contact with us. They have no idea who we are or what we’re on about. But, if the article they’re reading is useful (like this one is) then you realise we’re not just out there trying to always make a buck.

We genuinely want to help people, and this is just one of the ways we do it, by offering useful guides and strategies like this one that you often waste hours and even days or weeks trying to figure out how to do for yourself.

Another one way that we’ve found exceptionally useful is offering a different kind of engagement form for people who are a bit further in the research phase of what we do. For Solopreneurs, Startups and Small Teams who want a better way to increase sales, manage contacts, simplify email and get organised, they can take our checklist.

This tactic alone increased our conversion rates by 24%.

Here is what we did. We made a simple small business checklist. We called it “Is Ninjodo the right tool for your small business?”. And you can find it directly on our homepage. This way we help our visitors decide if Ninjodo is right for them and give them value upfront. You can do something similar for your business.

Actually, we made this checklist using one of our own features just to prove how useful it really is. We call it Ninjodo Forms. We described how you can transform your results using forms on your website here ( 7 steps to get more leads from your Website Enquiry forms ).

We’ve put this particular form on our homepage and it generates leads daily for us. This is a premium Ninjodo feature, but if you start your free trial today you can try it out for yourself.

That’s it for today. We like creating blog posts that our visitors will use immediately after reading them. That’s the case with today’s blog post as well. Stop everything you’re doing and experiment with tactics we mentioned today. But before that, if you think someone else could benefit from this guide, share it on your networks.

Now…go make your castle the best in your industry and crush it like never before!