The top two search engines on the planet are Google and YouTube (believe it or not) and as you've probably noticed it is not easy to get yourself ranked on the first page for many search terms. If you have a podcast or a YouTube channel, but you do not have a website associated with your show or channel, you are missing out on a major opportunity to drive more potential traffic to your site. Of course, there are no guarantees, but today we're going to get into the basics of starting your own website. We'll have additional tutorials later that focus on tips to try to get your website and blog posts toward the top pages of Google search terms, also known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
Background Information
Since 2017 StadiumScene.TV has moved a couple of times to different web hosts. First, we started with one of the larger and more famous web hosting companies, but the cost and the lack of updated features for a start-up website really limited our capabilities. The one thing we never had to worry about though was downtime. We took a calculated risk and moved to a smaller company that offered a better rate, but the support was non-existent at times and once the pandemic started, it went invisible for days at a time. If you've followed us, you may have remembered that we had periods of two or three days where our site was completely offline and the process was extremely frustrating. To our shock, our next host DOUBLED the cost of hosting at our renewal. In June of 2023, we made the decision to move our hosting account to Skystra Cloud and we have not looked back. Skystra Cloud has very competitive plans starting at $4.95 a month and you can grow your plan as you grow the traffic on your site. We've been very happy with my experience with Skystra Cloud.
Start with a 7-day free trial and the free website migration services. We opened the ticket on a Sunday night not expecting a response. Not only did we get a response back from support in less than an hour, but they also had our site migrated in less than three hours. Our site is rather large and is not typical, so it's quite possible your migration will be much faster. The next morning I pointed StadiumScene.TV to Skystra and off we went with no problems!
Not a technical person? Check out the WordPress Packages which make it very easy to set up a WordPress site, and add blog posts almost like you are typing into Microsoft Word. You can use one of the millions of templates (both free and paid options) to give your site a great look and you don't have to spend weeks building it. My other site F-R Racing was built on the WordPress platform in under two hours.
The Basics
As we said above, Google and YouTube are the top two search engines and it can be extremely difficult to get your work seen on the first page of a Google or YouTube search result. If you do not have your own web presence, there's a great chance your podcast will never be seen. Without that web presence, your best hope is that people see your Tweets, Facebook Posts, Pinterest Pins, or Instagram posts and go to your appropriate podcast page. If you aren't regularly paying for advertising on those services, good luck getting seen. At StadiumScene.TV we focus on SEO (search engine optimization aka getting your work on page 1 of Google) so we definitely can help with that, but wouldn't you want to have some control yourself?
Domain Name
A domain name is literally your website address, like StadiumScene.TV, Facebook.com, Twitter.com, etc. The key to picking a great domain name is to think of something catchy and easy to remember. Don't add funny spellings, misspellings, years, or numbers to your domain as calling your blog "blog2021.com" doesn't make a lot of sense once we hit 2022. Check the availability and see if you can think of the next Facebook.com or Twitter.com
Hosting
The two types of hosting you would want to consider are "Shared" and "WordPress". If you are not technical, we would recommend you start with WordPress. Note that it doesn't look like there's much difference between the two plans anymore, but that wasn't always the case. If you sign up for 12 months, you'll get some great rates for that term versus paying month to month! Keep in mind that if you start with the lowest-cos hosting, you may be artificially capping the number of visitors you can have each month.
What Can I Do With My Website?
The simple answer is...a lot of things! Here's just a sample of the most popular reasons:
- Start a brand new blog
- Blog about your podcast, streaming (Twitch), or YouTube channels
- Share all the services (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc) you can download your podcast on a single page without paying for a service like Linktree
- Start a merchandise store for your blog, podcast, streaming channel, or YouTube channel
- Create a business related to your publication (like what we did!)
Getting Started
Congratulations on starting your very first website! The first thing you'll want to do now is to log into your Skystra Cloud account, scroll to the quick shortcuts and select "WordPress Manager". Select "Install", follow the instructions, and off you go!
Follow the instructions, set up an account, and you are ready to start building! After you post your first sports blog, you're ready to sign up for StadiumScene.TV! Once you've joined the network, consider joining the MVP Premium Network to have access to our MVP Training Camp, where we provide more articles to show you how to make your publication even better!
We'll have more tutorials for getting started soon, so keep checking back to StadiumScene.TV for more tutorials!
Note - This post contains affiliate links to our partner Skystra Cloud. By you clicking the link and making the purchase, we receive a commission off your sale and it does not add any expense to your purchase. Your support of our affiliate partners helps keep StadiumScene.TV running and growing. We thank you for your support.
This post was proofread by Grammarly
