Posted on April 13, 2011 - by Kwame

How to launch a new blog or website with a bang and virtually no money

Many people are familiar with the common way of launching a blog or website; get a domain name, buy hosting, get a website design, add content and then that’s it. It’s that easy but you can do more with your launches. Know how to use landing pages?

You’ve seen many internet marketers and businesses use landing pages in their product launches. The reason why they do this is that, it gets potential customers in the door for their products. Some of these people order the product when it finally launches. It is a system that works for internet marketers and it can be used in any other industry to start a community for your blog or website before it actually goes live. So how can you do this with your new website launch?

What you will need

You will have to spend some money but not more than what you will spend setting up a new website the common way. So here is a list of what you will need to set up a landing page for your prelaunch:

• A domain name: I recommend that you get a .com or .net domain name. You can buy your domain names for $10 or less on Godaddy.

• Web hosting: Hostgator is the hosting service I recommend. I use them to host my websites and I haven’t had any problem so far. They also have excellent, responsive tech support too. That is rare with other hosting companies. Use coupon code TEXAS to get the first month for 1 cent. You can sign-up here.

• Landing page template: You can get one for between $8 and $12 on Themeforest. Click here to see some examples.

• Newsletter system: I recommend Mailchimp for this. They allow you to collect up to 2,000 emails before you pay anything for it. That’s the best deal I have ever seen when it comes to newsletter systems. Get it here.

So adding it all up, you can expect to spend less than $25 on everything. After grabbing all these tools, set them up and then build your prelaunch content.

Prelaunch content

Before your prelaunch content, you will need your introductory content; the content that you will send out to anybody who joins your newsletter once it is set up. It can be a welcome message with an introduction of yourself and what your blog will be about. It’s that simple.

The prelaunch content is the content you send after your introductory content. I recommend that it should be a tutorial of some sort or about something you’ve observed in the niche your site will be about. Write 2 or 3 pieces of this content, send them to your subscribers one at a time and then ask them to forward it to a friend. If they do, more eyes will see your content and their friends might actually visit your landing page to join your newsletter too. You can send them one piece/ article each week. You can set this up easily inside most newsletter software. Make sure whatever you teach or show them in your prelaunch content is relevant to what your site or blog will be about. After all, that is why they joined your newsletter.

The next stage is to set up your landing page.

Landing Page set-up

I am going to assume you already know how to set up a website but I have a few tips and recommendations for the landing page.

First of all, make sure you write a catchy headline that showcases the benefit of joining. Your headline is what draws people to join your newsletter. If you need help in this area, Brian Clarke has tons of articles concerning headlines. Just go to Google and put in this query, “site:copyblogger.com  headlines” (without the quotation marks) and you will find a goldmine of articles there about headlines.

The second thing you have to look at is your graphic elements. Some experts say that big buttons drive conversions so you want to make sure that your buttons are big. Some also say that arrows also aid in converting visitors to subscribers. Maybe a User Experience expert can explain it further but what I have been told is that, it works so try experimenting with it to see how it goes.

After setting these up, you will now have to promote your landing page.

Landing Page Promotion

In order to get people ready for your launch, you need to send them to your landing page so they can subscribe to your newsletter. I will show you the 2 cheapest and fastest way to get people to your site; it will cost you no money at all.

Here are some tips for landing page promotion:

1)     Write guest posts to pre-existing blogs who write about your topic or a similar one. You can use specific keywords you will want your site to rank for as anchor text for the link to your website in your byline. You will need to check with the blog you are writing for to know if they accept this. This will help your site to start ranking for those keywords even before you launch. That’s just one of the SEO benefits of guest blogging. Read my article on 10 Places to Find Blogs to Guest Post On if you need some help finding places to send your guest posts.

2)     Turn your prelaunch content into presentation slides and upload them to Slideshare.com and scribd.com and leave a link back to your landing page in the description area and also inside the document itself. You should actually tell people who read this what you want them to do. This will work just fine, “We will be launching a blog soon to teach more of this stuff so you should visit our website at http://www.yourwebsite.com to sign-up for our free newsletter so we can notify you once we launch.”

After collecting some subscribers, you can actually go ahead and launch.

The launch

On your launch day, just email your subscribers and let them know that you’ve launched. If you are launching a blog, I recommend that you have at least 3-5 articles ready to be published on your launch day. Once published, you can send your subscribers to your blog and ask them to interact and discuss the content there.

Set up RSS feeds and social profiles so that you can continue building your community; thereby, expanding your network of fans, followers and subscribers.

Conclusion

I hope I explained this post in the simplest way for you. However, if you have any questions, suggestions or recommendations, I urge you to share them in the comments area below.

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