This past week, we have been putting together and finalizing our websites for our online business. I chose to use my music as my online business so I can learn how to market my business/music and generate traffic to my new website and hopefully generate some more fans and customers.
This past week was a bit overwhelming due to a lot of technical errors and issues with my domain name transfer and, also, due to technicalities on the hosting end of things. But, I was finally able to fix all the problems and start building my site.
I chose to use WordPress as my website builder and BlueHost as my hosting site. Before I chose this, we were learning the differences between website builders and hosting sites. Before this topic and conversation, I didn’t know the difference between website builders and hosting sites. I always just used the website builder as the hosting site as well, but I learned you can generate a better website with less money using a different host. That was a great lesson learned that I’ll be able to use in the near future with updating my site and hopefully start building more websites over time.
- Bluehost: https://www.bluehost.com
- WordPress: https://wordpress.org (WordPress dot Org is what I’m using, not WordPress dot Com)
I also have been learning to use WordPress. Beforehand, I was using WebsiteBuilder which is much simpler than WordPress. It has been a stressful week trying to figure out all the tools on WordPress and trying to learn how to create and design specific pages by adding text, widgets, images, videos, etc. Over time, I really am loving WordPress because of how creative I can be! Plus there seems to be a YouTube video for everything I’m struggling with on WordPress, so that’s super nice!
- Link to my new site: https://matthewrappmusic.com
We also have been picking up and practicing using Google Adwords. This is still pretty new to me and I’m still learning the basics, but what I have learned so far is how to set up a campaign. We are able to use a handful of “keywords” (what people can search in Google) to create a Ad Group for my specific landing page (my website). Then we are able to create Ads that will pop up when people search those keywords. I’m excited to learn more about Google Adwords so I, hopefully, can generate more fans and customers of my music.
Matthew Rapp Portfolio 