Network Marketing with Magnetic Sponsoring and The Renegade

Written by Kate Williams

Squarespace is an easy and inexpensive blogging platform.

As an internet marketer, you need a hub, a center of value, created for internet cruisers looking for what you and your business have to offer. Don’t get sidetracked by arguments about whether you should build a blog or a website. Use Squarespace to build your central information hub and get the advantages of both—without the potential costs and technical headaches. Attract prospects to your business. Help people who are interested in what you have to offer find you and your business.

As a beginner, you could figure it out yourself, pay a designer or use a website builder provided by a hosting service. Figuring it out could cost significant learning time. Paying a designer will cost significant money upfront and when you want to make changes. Using a website builder adds huge limitations when you want to find or change a template, add a blog or other features.

Squarespace is a great internet marketing tool because it's a new generation content development and management system that allows you to choose the features you add as modules. It’s easy to choose to add a new section, a journal page (for blogging), a web page, a gallery or a forum. Click here to see a list of Squarespace features.

Squarespace for Beginners: Cost Effective and Easy

Squarespace offers a free trial, no credit card needed, for 14 days. If you spend a couple of hours every day for a week working with it, your new business hub will be set up and ready to show off before your trial period is over. It will cost you about what it would cost you to host a static web site, from $7 to $25 a month but you won’t have to be a trained geek with knowledge of html or css—and you won’t have to hire one either.

Alternatively, you could build a website (or maybe you already have one). They are relatively hard to build, almost always expensive to build and host, and difficult to get search engines to fall in love with so that you get traffic.

There are other blogging platform options: Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad -- that are relatively easy to set up, easily updatable and free or inexpensive (at least at an initial getting started level). However, I find them very hard to customize and get them to look the way I want them to look and function the way I want them to function.

So, although they may be free, I’ve spent a significant amount of time experimenting with web and blog development that could have been better spent doing what I do well instead of fooling around with technical issues that I sometimes end up paying someone else to solve for me anyway (usually after making a complete mess of my project). My mistake.

Creative and sometimes fun, yes. Practical and good business sense, no.

Don’t make that blunder. Use the right tools from the beginning and get your web of content off to a running start.

Squarespace Advantages

Easy for beginners. In a matter of hours you can have your first well-designed website up and running with a landing page, blog, photos, videos.

Powerful enough for experts. See the features list and take it for a test drive to see why you might choose to move your other sites to Squarespace.

Well-designed pages. You can choose from a lot of templates (but not so many you’ll get dizzy or sidetracked) and you can customize them like a pro without learning a new language or programming skills.

Great support. Squarespace offers clear and dedicated support both online and through their technical support team. Don’t hesitate to call on support to help you through any difficulties you encounter.

Search engine optimization. You would pay big bucks anywhere else for what is built into Squarespace to get noticed by the search engines and into position for capturing traffic to your new web of content.

Hosting. I choose having my web pages and blog pages hosted so I don’t have the headaches that come with supporting hosting. I choose Squarespace hosting because their servers are dedicated to hosting Squarespace, nothing else.

Cost. Squarespace isn’t free but it does have a unique combination of simplicity and function for a reasonable price. It’s a great value in terms of reliability and design.

Traffic statistics. Many blog platforms would require a third-party plug-in to give you traffic statistics. If you don’t know what a third party plug-in is, join a very large club. If you do, you understand what a boon this feature is—and what a great value. As a business owner, you want this data, trust me.

Squarespace: Getting Started

Power into your creation of a web of content that attracts visitors by using Squarespace to build the heart of your web content system.

To get started with Squarespace:

1. Go to the Squarespace site and sign up for your free (no credit card information needed) trial.
2. Work through the step-by-step blogging tutorials at Renegade Pro during your free trial period.
3. Get one-on-one help from a Renegade Super Guide. Don’t let speed bumps or road blocks stop your progress. Stay in confident action with any support you need. We’re here and we are people who have powered through this learning curve successfully.