To grow your business, you need to know your numbers! 

At times it’s easy to focus on vanity metrics. These are those numbers that look impressive and appealing, but don’t directly contribute to the revenue, profit, growth and efficiency of your business.

In this short list I will share with you 8 key metrics to focus on and I’ll compare them to similar metrics that are less important.

1. Profit vs Revenue

Revenue is the more appealing figure to quote when discussing the financial performance of your business. The truth is that there are companies that generate massive amounts of revenue, but they fail to make a profit. 

2. Paying Customers vs Likes or Followers

The most quoted vanity metric in online marketing is likes, followers and fans. These figures paint a picture of how well your brand is performing online, but they don’t directly generate income. Paying customers, on the other hand, generate the revenue and profit. 

3. Engaged Subscribers vs Subscribers

When it comes to email marketing, having a smaller engaged list of subscribers is more valuable than having a massive list of disengaged (or cold) subscribers. More engaged subscribers will open your emails, click your links and buy your products and services. 

4. Opt Ins/Leads vs Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of online marketing success. We all need traffic to our web properties in order to get our message in front of our target audience, however what’s more interesting is the opt in rate. In other words, the total number and percentage of users that opt into your list (sign up for a free lead magnet or add themselves to your notification list) and become a lead. 

5. Champion Customers vs Ordinary Customers

As mentioned above, it’s crucial to focus on the total number of paying customers your business serves. You can however take this one step further and focus on those extraordinary customers that:

1. Rave about and recommend your business to family and friends — i.e. Brand Ambassadors
2. Make up a large portion of your revenue — i.e. High Value Customers
3. Send you high value referrals — i.e. Affiliate Partners or Strategic Partners

6. Recurring Purchases vs Once-Off Purchases

While focusing on attracting new customers, don’t neglect and underestimate the potential value of your existing customers. Instead of focusing on once-off deals, shift your attention to creating more value that you can sell as a recurring purchase or an additional purchase. 

On average it costs less to sell more to an existing customer than to acquire a new customer. And recurring purchases, like subscriptions, increase your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), which is more predictable and lead to more business growth. 

7. Engagement vs Views

When it comes to online content the most appealing metric is usually subscribers and views. What’s more interesting is looking at user engagement. How many viewers or readers are taking the next step and engaging with your content — for example leaving a comment or asking a question?

8. Testimonials vs Compliments

It’s easy for friends, family members and even customers to compliment your business. What’s far more interesting is focusing on individual customer success stories, case studies and testimonials.  

Bonus Metric: Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV, CLTV, LCV or LTV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. 

CLV = (Ave. Monthly Revenue per Customer * Gross Margin per Customer) ÷ Monthly Churn Rate
For example: ($100 average monthly spend * 25% margin) ÷ 5% monthly customer churn = $500 CLV

In Summary

1. Track your revenue and profit and maximise your profit margin.
2. Focus on sales to increase paying customers.
3. Track and increase your email engagement, as engaged customers are customers that purchase.
4. Track and increase your opt ins to get more leads into your marketing funnel.
5. Convert more ordinary customers into loyal champion customers and brand ambassadors.
6. If possible, increase recurring revenue by offering a subscription or payment plan.
7. Increase your user engagement to learn more about your audience.
8. Capture testimonials, success stories and case studies and use them in your marketing material.
9. Track and increase customer lifetime value.

In this post I’ll be sharing 15 of my best recommendations. These are tips, tricks, best practices and strategies that you can apply to your email marketing using ConvertKit. So let’s get started.

1. Remember that your subscribers are people just like you and me

Whether you send them down a funnel of opt ins and thank you pages, with up sells or whether you send them a broadcast email. Always remember that you are speaking with a person with dreams, hopes and challenges. Write to them accordingly.

2. Respect Your Subscribers

Always remember that by reading any one of your emails your subscriber is taking time to pay attention to what you have to say. Respect that commitment and share value — help them solve their challenge. Also always give them an option to opt out of your sequence or unsubscribe from your list.

3. Make Use of the Resend to Un-Opens Feature

ConvertKit has a very powerful feature which is really easy to use. The “Resend To Un-Opens” function, let’s you resend an email broadcast to those subscribers that have not opened your email. When using this, I strongly recommend making some slight changes to the subject and the body of the email. Avoid sending out the exact same email.

4. Track Your Numbers

ConvertKit provides a bunch of metrics that we can use to better understand how our emails are performing. 

Track these numbers. They will give you the insight to understand what’s working and what isn’t working. What’s resonating with your subscribers and what they don’t care much about.

5. Get To Know Your Subscribers Using Tags

Every time we send our subscribers an email we have an opportunity to learn something about them and tag them accordingly. But the thing is, we need to build this into our emails.

Whenever you include a link in an email, make sure to tag the user if they click this link. Don’t overdo this, but tags are there to add additional information about each one of your subscribers. 

Make use of tags to better understand each subscriber.

6. Use A Descriptive Tag Naming Scheme

When setting up your tags in your account use some naming convention that makes sense and document the process so you can share it with your team or with whoever needs to understand it.

You might use LM: Descriptive Name, Purchased: Name of Product, AS: Name of Sequence, etc. 

Just keep it standard and keep a record of these names in your own internal documentation.

7. Use Trigger Links To Save Time & Avoid Errors

When including a link in an email you can either set this up in the email or you can create a trigger link as a Rule under Automations. If you’ll be using this same exact link and associated tag in multiple emails, then set this up as a Trigger Link under Rules. 

It will save you time in applying this inside of emails and you’ll avoid making mistakes. Also if the link changes, you’ll be able to change it in one location and it will automatically update in all emails where you’ve made use of that specific trigger link. 

8. Use Sequences & Automations

What makes ConvertKit so powerful is sequences and automations. 

In ConvertKit you can setup sequences and automations that will run based on events and triggers. This might be a simple onboarding sequence that you send to subscribers after they’ve signed up or it may be a more complex automation of a purchase funnel.

9. Broadcasts vs Sequences

Broadcasts are time specific and sequences are event specific. If you need to send an email at a specific time, send it or schedule it as a broadcast. 

If the email needs to be sent out after a specific event has happened (for example an opt in, or a purchase), then set it up as a sequence.

I often see people get confused with these two. Understand them and use them accordingly.

10. Exclude Subscribers From Irrelevant Emails

Make sure to exclude subscribers from broadcasts and sequences that are irrelevant to them. The best example is sending a buyer the remaining emails that are inside a sales sequence. As soon as someone becomes a buyer, they should no longer receive emails promoting the product they’ve purchased. 

You do this by always tagging a subscriber when they make a purchase. This will depend on what system you are using. I’ve used this with SendOwl and WishList Member and it will work with all the other eCommerce integrations that ConvertKit offers.

Assuming you tag buyers with a purchase tag. Then when setting up a Sequence, you can add that tag to the Exclusions field. That means that any subscriber that is tagged with that tag, won’t receive future emails in that sequence.

It’s simple enough, but unless it’s setup and configured, buyers might still be getting sales emails, which is what you want to avoid.

11. Automations Are Powerful 

I’ve setup an email course in ConvertKit for a client that takes into account engagement. When a subscriber opts in for the email course, they immediately receive lesson 1, but what happens next depends on their engagement. 

A: if the user clicks the link in the lesson 1, then they will receive the next lesson 24 hrs later.
B: if the user does not click the link, then they will only receive the next lesson 72 hrs later.

The idea is to reward a user for engagement by sending them the next lesson sooner.

12. Make Use of ConvertKit Integrations

I’ve used ConvertKit with many other apps including Thrive Leads, SendOwl, WishList Member, and Gravity Forms to just name a few. There are loads of integrations and what you will want to integrate with, will depend on your specific setup. 

Just keep in mind that the functionality of ConvertKit can be expanded tremendously using integrations.

13. Cleaning Your List

Our main aim is obviosuly to build a list, but we want a quality list. A quality list has a high level of engagement, so high open rates and click rates. We don’t want subscribers that have gone cold on us. So, there is a simple way of deleting these subscribers to increase the quality of your list.

ConvertKit has a page explaining this process, which is fairly straightforward.

1. Select all your cold subscribers
2. Tag all your cold subscribers with something like “Cold Subscribers”
3. Create an automation rule — link to a page that says “Thank You, You’re Still On The List”, and when a subscriber clicks that link, the “Cold Subscribers” tag is removed.
4. Send A Breakup Email
5. Re-Send The Email using the “Send to Un-Opens” function
6. Wait 7 - 14 days
7. Delete everyone that’s still tagged as a “Cold Subscriber” — these are the people that did not click the link in the email to remain on your list.​
   

14. Use Segments To Group Subscribers

Make sure to use the segments feature to group subscribers. This can be very useful when it comes to including or excluding subscribers from future email broadcasts or sequences. 

Using Segments is a great way of better organizing your subscribers into groups or buckets and it will definitely save you time and avoid any errors.

15. Important Things To Remember & Consider…

… when setting up sequences and automations.

Keep those in mind when planning and developing your sequences and automations inside of ConvertKit, because I know from my experience that it can get complicated and confusing.

Bonus Tip

Keep it simple and build things up over time and enjoy the power and simplicity that ConvertKit offers you. Wishing you all the best for using ConvertKit to manage your email marketing. 

I am always working on improving and expanding my content so that it provides the most value. Let me know if you found this useful and if you have any other questions — I’m happy to answer.

In this post I'll explain the 10 proven business models that will let you create and grow a successful online business that generates online income. 

One of the most common mistakes new entrepreneurs make is they jump into a business idea and start executing without understanding and clearly defining their business model. 

Make sure to understand the different business models and focus on the one that best aligns with your skillset, experience, goals and aspirations. 

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below.

1. Selling digital services — freelancing or creating an agency

This option entails providing digital services to a client in exchange for a set project fee, an hourly rate or a recurring monthly retainer.

Becoming a freelance digital service provider has the lowest barriers to entry with the highest short term earning potential. If you have marketable skills that others are willing to hire you for, then you can in a short space of time find a handful of projects or clients and generate an online income. 

The rate that you will be able to charge depends on your ability, your experience and your past success stories. What can you offer a potential client, what can you help them achieve or achieve on their behalf and what success stories do you have under your belt that will convince clients that you are the right service provider to work with.

Any area of expertise that can be delivered digitally and worked on remotely can be sold as a digital service. These can include, but are not limited to:

It’s fairly easy to start freelancing, but as a freelancer your income is capped by the total number of hours you can work per month or by the number of clients that you can service at any given moment. Also keep in mind that your income potential and potential for being hired is directly proportionate with your skill level, your experience and how competitive the market is for what you are offering. 

2. Selling digital consulting, coaching or training services

This option entails providing strategic advice and support to an individual or a company via online video calls or sessions.

If you have the knowledge and experience in a given area and you are willing to share your expertise and guidance with your clients, then this is a viable option. With this model you are not doing the work on behalf of your client, but you are merely accompanying and guiding them along their journey. 

As a coach or consultant you can offer one-on-one, group or team sessions. If needed and when possible you can offer in person sessions, but sessions can also be conducted online via platforms like Skype or Zoom.

Here are some examples of coaches and consultants based on their expertise:

3. Selling physical products online — eCommerce

4. Selling digital products

This option entails creating, marketing and selling a digital product online. Digital products can include books, audio books, games, online courses, templates, sheet music, musical recordings, recipes, building plans, checklists, or software to name a few.

The benefit of selling digital products is that distribution has become a lot easier to scale and once the initial production is complete, you can sell unlimited copies of your product. 

Once you’ve coded a game, written a book, recorded a song or finished filming and editing the lessons of your online course, you package the product once and can keep selling copies of it for years to come. By keeping overhead and recurring costs low, it’s possible to generate high margins when selling digital products.

One major downside of the digital product business model is that digital products can easily be copied and pirated, but don’t let that hold you back.

One other thing to keep in mind is that creating the digital product is only part of the challenge. A major part is finding product market fit (i.e. creating a product that people want and are willing to purchase) and getting your product in front of the right audience.

The right audience can either be an audience that you have built up over time or you can rent the attention of an audience by running ads.

Here are some examples of websites selling digital products:

5. Affiliate Marketing

This model entails promoting someone else's product or service in exchange for a % commission for each sale that you generate.

Instead of spending their marketing budget on running ads and promotions, some companies offer an affiliate program where they will let anybody willing to promote their product sign up as an affiliate. After being accepted into the program, the affiliate will get their own unique affiliate link which they use when linking to the product online. 

Any sales that are generated via that affiliate link will then get credited to the affiliate’s account and the company will pay the affiliate the agreed upon commission on the agreed upon payment schedule. The commission is paid out by the company selling the product at no additional expense to the customer making the purchase.

Affiliate marketing has a low barrier to entry, but generating enough traffic and sales to earn significant commissions takes time and effort and is something that most affiliates never achieve.

Most affiliate commissions are once off commissions, but some companies do offer recurring commissions for the lifetime of a customer that the affiliate referred. Recurring commissions are great for affiliates, as they will continue getting paid every month as long as the customer remains a customer.

Affiliate income can be a great stream of passive income, but it’s important to understand that you won’t generate any sales without putting in the work that is needed to build an audience and generate the traffic to the specific offer that you are trying to sell.

There are many different ways of driving traffic to your affiliate links. Many YouTubers add affiliate links to the description of their videos recommending their preferred gear. Other affiliate marketers will add their affiliate links to review videos and blog posts. Travel bloggers might recommend specific listings on a booking site by linking out via their affiliate links. 

Here are some real world examples of well known affiliate programs:

And here are examples of some real world affiliate marketers:

6. Advertising & Sponsorships / Influencer Marketing

This model entails building an audience and then selling their attention to advertisers. 

The most most common examples of this model would be YouTubers, authority or news site owners, Social Media Influences (Instagram, TikTok, etc.), and podcast hosts.

A YouTuber will regularly publish videos to build grow their audience on the platform. As they increase their subscriber count, their views, and their engagement, so their channel will become more valuable in terms of displaying ads. In order to monetize their account (i.e. activate ads on their account) a YouTube account needs at least 1000 subscribers and have at least 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months.

An authority or news site owner will create a website that focused on a very specific niche and contains valuable content about that niche. They will create content that ranks in search results and will therefore attract readers (i.e. traffic). They can then sign up with an ad network (for example Google AdSense) to place ads on the pages and blog posts on their site. Ad networks will either pay out CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or CPP (cost per click). In order to generate significant ad revenue a website will need a significant amount of traffic. Some authority sites will also charge advertisers for a sponsored post on their website.

A social influencer will spend their time regularly publishing new content to grow their following on the most popular social media channels including Instagram and TikTok. As their subscriber count and view count grows, so they will have more and more attention to sell to advertisers and so the cost of placing ads on their accounts will increase. Social influencers can charge per sponsored post or can sign endorsement deals in which they feature and promote a brand on their channels.

A podcast host will grow their audience and subscribers by regularly publishing new podcast episodes. As soon as their channel is large enough they can sign start incorporating ads or promotions as part of their episodes. If you become popular enough you could even license your podcast to Spotify for a sweet $100m — yip, I’m looking at you Joe Rogan.

With any of these examples, keep it mind that it takes consistent effort and determination and it can take a considerable amount of time to grow a channel to a significant size to make advertising a viable option. 

7. Membership Sites, Events & Exclusive Communities

This model entails creating and selling access to a private membership and/or creating and selling tickets to in-person events, retreats and conferences.

Running a successful membership site can be a great source of recurring revenue, assuming that you can convince your members to keep paying their monthly membership. 

Membership sites generally provide exclusive access to premium resources and can also include an online or in-person community that gives members the opportunity to expand their network by meeting like-minded individuals.

8. Software as a Service (SaaS)

This model entails creating and selling access to a software application that provides  a valuable solution to a common and recurring problem. 

The SaaS model is great for regenerating recurring revenue, assuming you can build up a loyal user base and customers that keep paying the monthly or annual renewal fee.

Developing a new piece of software is a challenging under taking, as you will need a to create a solution that users are willing to pay for on a recurring basis. You also need to either build it yourself or hire developers. You will most likely also need to keep improving your product in order to keep users from switching to a competitor.  The development, marketing, maintenance and customer support will need to be financed and managed. 

There are higher barriers to entry when it comes to developing software, but if you can create a valuable solution that is delivered in an efficient and enjoyable user experience, then you can create a business that can be scaled almost indefinitely. And because it’s a digital product, your team can work remotely and digitally.

Here are some real-world example of successful SaaS products:

9. Brokerage — Online Market Places

This model entails bringing together buyers and seller to facilitate some form of transaction. This could involve facilitating the sale of an online business, a website or a service. 

Here are some real world example of online brokers and/or market places:

10. Or of course, a combination of the above.

Answer the following questions and implement the recommended actions to increase the effectiveness of your website in terms of getting more traffic, leads and sales. Download this post as a PDF checklist.

1. Concise, Descriptive & Not Overwhelming

Is your site concise and descriptive? Does it provide the visitor with the information that they are looking for or is it cluttered and overwhelming?

2. Clear Call To Action

Does your home page and your other pages and posts provide a clear call to action? Do you tell the visitor what you want them to do next? Do you want them to phone, fill in a form, watch a video, or download a PDF?

3. Valuable Content

Does your site contain valuable content? Does the content on your site answer provide content that the visitor will find useful and interesting? Does your content answer frequently asked questions?

4. Social Proof

Does your site display social proof? These could be written or video testimonials, case studies or social media comments. Social proof plays a huge part in encouraging potential customers to purchase your products and services.

5. Lead Generation

Does your site offer a visitor the opportunity to opt in and become a lead?

6. Optimised For Mobile Screens

Does your website show correctly on mobile devices? Web developers call this “Responsive Design”, which means that your website automatically adapts itself to the size of the screen it is being viewed on. 

7. Search Engine Visibility

Is your site visible on on search engines? A quick way to test this is to search Google for “site:yourdomain.com” and see what comes up. This will list all pages that are indexed by Google.

8. Current & Updated

Is your website content up to date? This might seem like a stupid question to ask, but there are so many websites online that provide outdated information, which makes the site look irrelevant and negatively effects your search rankings.

9. Load Time

Is your site taking too long to load? Slow loading sites causes visitors to leave and decreases your search rankings. You can test your site’s load speed here: https://tools.pingdom.com/
Try keep your page size as small as possible (ideally below 1 or 1.5MB).

10. Automated Email Sequences

Do your email opt ins trigger automated follow up email sequences? When someone signs up for your opt-in gift (lead magnet), you want to make sure to setup an automated follow up sequence. To set this up, I strongly recommend using ConvertKit or with Drip.

Need Assistance

Looking for strategic support or done-for-you implementation? We're here to help. Consider signing up for a Strategic Support & Implementation Package​. 

This post will help you decide which video hosting platform to use to upload and share your videos online. Note: Read through this entire post before making your decision.

Understand Your Requirements

Choosing which platform and service to use depends on the following factors:

1. Your Budget — how much you are willing to spend?
2. Amount of Videos — how many videos do you need to host?
3. Required Features — what features are you looking for?
4. Private vs Public — will your videos be published publicly or privately

YouTube — FREE

YouTube is free and works well. It’s the largest online video sharing and hosting platform. It’s a great place for publishing content if your goal is increasing your visibility online — getting more views and building an audience.

The network is owned by Google and is therefore the largest online video search engine. YouTube videos show up in Google search results and thousands of users are constantly searching for and viewing new content on the platform.

You can publish your videos as:

• Public — the video can be viewed by anybody and is displayed publicly on the network
• Unlisted — the video can be viewed by anybody that has the unique video link
• Private — the video can only be viewed by you or a Google user that you’ve privately shared the video with.

You can embed YouTube videos on pages of your own or other websites or you can send users a direct link to your video’s page on YouTube.

Keep in mind that YouTube is owned by Google and Google’s business model is to collect data in order to sell ads. Your video will however only display ads if you enable monetisation for that specific video. Google’s main goal is to keep users on YouTube to maximise viewing time and ad exposure.

Publish to YouTube if…

1. You don’t mind your videos being publicly available
2. If you are looking to gain views and additional exposure
3. If you don’t have a budget to spend on a video hosting solution

Wistia — From $99 per month

Wistia is a great platform and offers a free plan for up to 3 videos. Wistia specialised in business video hosting and is well know for it’s advanced analytics features. They offer in depth analytics that let you see how many people watched the video and how many minutes they watched or at what stage they stopped watching. You can customise Wistia’s video player and embed your videos on your website.

Publish to Wistia if…

1. You need to protect your video content and embed videos privately
2. You are looking for advanced analytics features
3. You are willing to spend at least $99 per month

Vimeo Basic — FREE

Vimeo Basic is similar to YouTube in the way that it’s free and ad supported. The Vimeo platform and community has a smaller audience than YouTube, but still offers a great place to host and showcase your videos.

Publish to Vimeo Basic if…

1. You don’t mind your videos being publicly available
2. If you don’t mind ads being displayed alongside your videos
3. If you don’t have a budget to spend on a video hosting solution
4. If you don’t want to use and support YouTube and Google

Vimeo Plus, Pro, Business & Premium — €6, €16, €40 or €70 per month

Vimeo’s premium plans are similar to Wistia, but more affordable if you need a larger amount of videos hosted. They also provide analytics, but not as good as Wistia’s.

Publish to Vimeo Plus, Pro, Business or Premium if…

1. You need to protect your video content and embed videos privately
2. You are looking for advanced analytics features
3. If you have a large amount of videos that you need to host and protect
4. You are willing to spend at least €6, €16, €40 or €70 per month (paid annually)

VooPlayer — From $33 per month

VooPlayer is a lesser known platform, but has been around for a few years. This service specialises in fast and reliable video hosting, while also prioritising the mobile viewing experience.

VooPlayer is paid for video hosting platform that offers an extensive set of useful features. You can upload your videos, customise your embedded video player and your video’s viewing page. VooPlayer also provides a selection of marketing features to better help you capture leads, add pay gates or encourage social video sharing.

VooPlayer offers cloud video hosting (on their own servers) or hybrid video hosting, which makes it really simplt to host your videos on your 3rd party cloud account (YouTube, Vimeo, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive) while embedding your videos using the VooPlayer’s video player.

Publish to VooPlayer if …

1. You need to protect your video content and embed videos privately
2. You’re looking for premium video protection technology to protect your videos online
3. You are looking for advanced video marketing features and video player customisations
4. You’d like to use hybrid video hosting
5. You are willing to spend $33 per month (paid anually)

This post I answer the important question ‘How do WordPress websites get hacked?’ and I provide 10 tips on how to keep your WordPress site safe.

How do WordPress websites get hacked?

The vast majority of sites being hacked are not hacked by some human siting in a dark room wearing a hoodie. Majority of hacks are automated and are conducted by computer programs (also referred to as bots).

• 41% get hacked through vulnerabilities in their hosting platform
• 29% by means of an insecure theme
• 22% via a vulnerable plugin
• 8% because of weak passwords

This concludes that the vast majority of site hacks are being caused by compromised hosting platforms, vulnerable themes, insecure plugins or due to weak passwords.

Another thing to understand is that hacking into a site by guessing a password is also not done by a human. Most password hacks are called brute force hacks, which means that an automated program (or a bot) identifies your login page and tries logging in with different combinations of username and passwords. A bot can cycle through thousands and millions of combinations within a very short space of time.

Now that we know what causes most hacks, I'd like to share with you what we can do about preventing these hacks.

How To Keep Your Site Safe 

I’ll share 10 recommendations that will help you keep your site safe.

1. Choose A High-Quality Hosting Provider

Posmay Media offers Concierge WordPress Hosting Plans that include free WordPress maintenance. We take care of all the technicalities on your behalf, so you can focus on growing your business.

If you prefer managing your own hosting, then we recommend Dreamhost (if you're just getting started) or WPX Hosting (if you need more advanced hosting).

2. Perform Regular Backups

This cannot me understated! Make sure to have a backup strategy in place. There are multiple options for creating reliable and automated backups of your WordPress site. We use and recommend the All-In-One-Migration plugin together with Dropbox cloud storage. 

Pro Tip: If you'd like someone else to take care your WordPress backups, then consider our Posmay Media's WordPress Managed Hosting plans, which include Minimal WordPress maintenance, which can be upgraded to a more advanced plan if and when needed.

3. Fortify Your Login

Strengthen your login by implementing the following steps:

1. Always use strong passwords for all accounts — https://strongpasswordgenerator.com/
2. Keep passwords safe — Store them in a secure place, like a password manager app
3. Avoid using the default admin username for any accounts
4. Force strong passwords — make it compulsory for all users to use strong passwords
5. Limit login attempts

4. Add SALTs To wp-config.php 

Make sure to add these random strings to your wp-config file to add another layer of protection. Dreamhost's One-Click installer adds unique SALT's automatically. 

5. Set A Unique Table Prefix

Make sure to set a unique table prefix to your MySQL database when installing WordPress. Dreamhost's One-Click installer adds a unique table prefix automatically.

6. Keep WordPress Up To Date

Conduct regularly WordPress maintenance and keep your WordPress core files updated. Before updating, always create a backup in case something goes wrong.

7. Use Premium Themes and Plugins

Always make use of premium themes and plugins that are reliable and maintained. There are endless free themes and plugins available online, but many of them are not updated and can introduce unwanted security risks to your site.

We use and recommend Thrive Themes, as they have a great toolbox of themes and plugins to help you optimise your site for conversions.

8. Keep Themes and Plugins Updated

As part of your regular WordPress maintenance, make sure to keep all your themes and plugins updated.

If WordPress maintenance is something you'd like to outsource, consider our Managed WordPress Hosting Plans that incl. free minimal WordPress maintenance.

9. Keep Your Computer Clean

Keep your computers operating system updated and uninfected. Avoid any software that may compromise your system including Malware and Viruses. 

10. Stay informed and up to date.

Keep yourself informed with regards to WordPress developments. At times critical security breaches get announced or a new update needs to be applied. Whoever is in charge of managing your website(s) needs to stay in formed.

During the account creation process, you’ll have the opportunity to also register your unique domain name (for example yourbusiness.com or yourname.com). 

Setting up your own self-hosted WordPress website is a simple 3-step process, which will only take a few minutes. The instructions on this page will walk you through the process.

Important: To complete the above action items you will need your email address and a credit card. Make sure to read all the instructions on this page, before clicking through to any other page. For this tutorial we'll be using Dreamhost as our trusted hosting provider. We've used Dreamhost for over 10 years and highly recommend them.

Step 1: Set Up Your Hosting Account

We trust and recommend Dreamhost as a reliable web hosting provider. Their affordable shared hosting plan is ideal for new WordPress users just getting started. They also provide more advanced plans for when your website and audience grows. 

During the account creation process, you’ll have the opportunity to also register 1 FREE domain name (for example yourbusiness.com). Click the button below to get a $25 discount + 1 FREE Domain name. 

Step 2: Add Your Domain To Your Hosted Domains

In order to install WordPress on your domain, you will first need to add hosting to the domain you'll be using. In order to do this you will need to login to your Dreamhost panel, click through to the 'Manage Domains' page and then click on 'Add Hosting to a Domain'. Fill in the page and click on 'Fully Host This Domain'.

Your new hosting setup will take a few minutes to configure. You should receive an automatic email from Dreamhost confirming the changes that you have made. 

The video below walks you through this process.

Step 3: Install WordPress with the One-Click Installer

Inside your Dreamhost panel, click through to the 'One-Click Installs' (under Goodies). Next click on 'WordPress', select the domain from the dropdown menu and uncheck the 'Deluxe Installation' option. Click 'Install It For Me Now'. That's it, you've initiated the installation!

Dreamhost will automatically install WordPress on your domain. Keep an eye on your inbox, as an automatic email will be sent to you as soon as the installation is ready for completion.

To complete the installation, you'll need to click on the link in the email from Dreamhost. The link will take you to a page on which you will need to complete the installation and setup your initial admin user - this will be the account with administrator access. 

The video below walks you through this process.