Set Up Your Home on the ‘Net
Whenever you start working for yourself from home, you’ll obviously want a space to work in your house. But you’ll also need a home for people to visit online. You won’t have a typical storefront as you would in an offline environment.
Start by selecting a domain. It might be your own name, if you want to brand yourself as a niche leader. Or, you can go with something keyword-related. Make sure you get a dot com domain, because most consumers naturally type that in.
You’ll also need hosting for your website. Go with a small plan at first. There’s no need to buy the biggest hosting package when you’re starting with a single blog and website. If you ever do discover that you need more, they will happily allow you to select a bigger package.
Install your WordPress blog once your domain and hosting are connected, and make sure you have a lead magnet page set up if you want to begin building a list of subscribers.
For that purpose, you’ll need an email autoresponder system, such as Aweber or GetResponse. There are many different autoresponder tools, but go with one that has longevity and is proven to be reputable.
You don’t need to buy anything fancy for your site’s appearance in the beginning. You can use a free WordPress theme and match the design to whatever color palette or images you want.
You can even use free tools like Canva to create headers and sidebar images for your blog – or hire someone on Fiverr to make something professional for you if you need help doing that.