In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to grow your direct sales business with a blog.
After multiple people reached out asking how to start a blog and how much it costs to start a blog for their direct sales business, we figured we’d just share a little tutorial.
This tutorial will show you how to start a blog with as little as zero dollars. While we do recommend a self-hosted WordPress blog, we understand that having a blog will work just fine for direct sales reps. It can be a great way to use content marketing to grow their direct sales revenue this year.
How Do I Get Started in Direct Sales?
Direct sales are an excellent way for stay-at-home parents or working parents to start a side gig. There are so many different direct sales companies out there that we couldn’t even begin to list them all.
Some of the more popular options that you might see floating around on Facebook include Paparazzi jewlery, Rodan and Fields, Young Living Essential Oils, and Usborne Books.
I love that Paparazzi allows me to be my own boss while selling jewelry that I love.
Dawn from Paparazzi
If you want to get started in direct sales all you need to do is ask the question on social media. Within minutes you’ll have all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork telling you about their direct sales business and why you simply must join.
Remember, these people earn money when they build a team of consultants underneath them so they have an incentive to get you in with them and help you succeed with this side hustle.
How to Create a Blog for Your Direct Sales Business
Now, let’s jump right into this topic. We’re going to show you the cheapest way to start a blog since so many have asked about investment with starting a blog to make money.
The cheapest way to start a blog to make money blogging in direct sales is to use Blogger.com.
Head on over to Blogger.com, you’ll need to be logged in to your Google Account to gain access. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see something similar to this page.
I happen to follow a lot of blogs through blogger, so I have a “reading list” that shows up with the latest blog posts from other bloggers.
In the upper left-hand corner, you’ll see “Create Blog”. Click on this option to start creating your direct sales blog. The next screen will look something like this:
Choosing a Blog Name
This is where you’ll choose the name for your direct sales blog. Keep in mind that you can’t use certain terms for your direct sales blog.
Review the terms and conditions within your agreement with the company to know which terms you’re not allowed to use within a domain or blog name for the promotion of the products and brand.
Perhaps you already have a domain name that you purchased. If you already purchased a domain, aka a website address or URL, for your blog then you can use that as your “blog name”.
Example: If you own buyjewelry.com you might name your blog Buy Jewelry. If you own essentialoils4you.com then you might name the blog Essential Oils For You or Essential Oils 4 You.
There’s no need to have the word “blog” in your title.
Above is the screen you’ll see after you insert your blog name and click the next button.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we went ahead and created the blog name Starter Blog for Direct Sales, and will choose the same blogspot.com URL for the blog. If you already own a domain, you’ll still need to go through this step of the tutorial.
As you can see, this blog address is available. You might have to play with the words to get an available .blogpost.com URL for your blog.
Once you have an available blog address that you like, click save.
This is, in fact, your blogger blog ready for you to design, customize, and set a custom URL if you have one. If you don’t have a blog URL yet, but want to use a custom domain rather than the .blogspot.com address, you can buy a custom one.
Start your domain search here to find the best possible domain for your new direct sales blog.
How to Point a Custom URL to Blogger
Now that your blog is ready to go, it’s time to customize your blogger blog for direct sales. We’ll show you how to point your domain that you just purchased for your blog to this Blogger blog, and then get into the designing of your direct sales blog.
If you don’t have a custom domain, then feel free to skip this section.
You’ll click on “settings” in the left-hand menu, and see these options as shown above. The area you need to change is “custom domain”. Click that option.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll use a domain that we own but isn’t being hosted anywhere else at this time.
In the box that says “custom domain” you’ll insert the full URL address of the domain you purchased.
One thing we noticed is that you have to include the “www” in front of the domain URL that you’re using as a custom domain. When you put this in and click save, you’ll receive the above error.
Follow the instructions at the URL provided to learn how to change your DNS settings within your account where you purchased your blog domain.
This step is different for each domain company, but basically, you’ll log into the account where you purchased your domain and follow the instructions from Google to have the domain “point” to your new Blogger Blog.
Note: It may take up to 24 hours for the custom domain changes to show publicly. Meaning, it can take up to 24 hours before your custom domain actually brings people to your blogger blog.
How to Make Your Direct Sales Blog Pretty
The next step to starting a blog to grow your direct sales income is to make it look pretty.
This involves changing the theme, adding widgets, and making your home page of the blog look appealing to the eyes so your visitors stay on the page to buy some products or join your team.
From the screen of your blog, where we left off in either of the above steps, you’ll see “theme” as an option on the left-hand menu. Click theme and see a bunch of options show up. This is a fun area to play with to get the right look and feel for your blog.
As this part is more preference of style and layout than a step that we can tell you what to do with, we’ll give you a moment to pick a theme you like.
If the theme seems too difficult for a beginner blogger, please select an easier theme to customize as we’re not getting into all of the ins and outs of designing a theme in our tutorial today.
Click on each theme to show the options preview, customize, and apply. Here is where you can see a preview of the theme on your Blogspot blog URL. The preview is what the blog will look like to future visitors.
Since you don’t have any new blog posts, yet, it will look rather blank but this gives you an idea whether you want to click customize for this theme or not. Once you have a theme you really like, click customize to go to this screen.
Note: Don’t worry if you don’t like the theme once you start getting content on your blog, you can change the theme as often as you like until you truly find a look that you love.
Customizing Your Blog
Now that you’re in the customize area of Blogger, it’s time to put in some of your direct sales information and images.
You’ll see “remove image” and “change image” in the upper left-hand corner. This is where you’ll replace the main image on your blog theme with another image of your choice.
Be sure to use images that you have the right to use. While you can search the internet to find images to use, not all are free for commercial use. Some people use Istock for their royalty-free images while others may find some lower-cost images on Etsy.
If you already have your own images, then just use your own.
As you can see in the screen capture video above, we have plenty of options to play with within each theme.
Don’t get overly involved in changing the colors, background, and so on as a beginner blogger. You can learn to adjust the theme settings at a later date.
For now, we’re just trying to get you started so you can grow your direct sales with a blog for the lowest investment price tag possible.
How to Create Blog Pages in Blogspot
You might want to have some pages for your blog, we highly recommend you create a privacy policy and terms of use policy.
If you’re not interested in investing cash right now in a lawyer, you can always use this free Privacy Policy Generator. All you do is go through a questionnaire and at the end, you’ll have a document that you can copy and paste into your blog page that you created for each option.
The above is your screen to create a new page in your blogger blog. To get to the above screen you’ll click on “page” and then “+new page” in the left-hand column of your blog dashboard area.
Once you have the page area open, you’ll write the title and write the body of the text as shown in the image above. Once you’re done, you can preview it to ensure it looks great, make sure the page is grammatically correct, and click publish.
The following pages should be created within your new direct sales blog:
- Privacy Policy and Terms of Use Policy – a basic policy that helps disclose tracking cookies, and other details that pertain to having a website on the internet that people visit.
- About Us – includes information about you, your direct sales business, perhaps a little about why you joined, and a link to your direct sales webpage for people to learn more.
- Contact Us – includes contact details such as a form to submit questions, an email address to email you, and quite possibly a business phone number if you have one.
How to Create Blog Posts in Blogspot Blog
Here comes the tricky part of growing your direct sales business with a blog, content creation. If you’re a natural-born writer, then this won’t be an issue.
If you struggle with writing content, then you’ll need some assistance. Perhaps you can hire an SEO ghost blogger to write your content for you or find someone on Fiverr who is able to write the blog posts for you.
You’ll create a new blog post using the same tutorial we featured above, just using the “post” and “+new post” buttons instead of the page buttons.
If you hire a writer to create blog posts for you, then you’ll follow the same steps as noted but just copy and paste the title, then the blog post content into the appropriate areas.
This is how you can build a blog without any upfront costs to help grow your direct sales this year! Now that we’ve featured our tutorial to start a blogger blog, it’s time to learn more about Blog SEO and proper ways to layout a blog post to ensure search engines index your blog properly.
