Create a Winning Wordpress Site The Easy Way

Not every entrepreneur comes from a technical background.

When you're a solopreneur and your strength lies in something else, like copywriting or visual design, creating a great WordPress site can seem like a massive challenge.

You don't want to get in over your head with complex technical features, since if something goes wrong, you want to make sure you can fix it.

But at the same time, you want something that's relatively distinctive and unique.

The good news is that there's a way to improve your site without tons of technical knowledge or a massive effort.

You can apply kaizen, a concept from Japanese Buddhist philosophy that revolves around gradual, continuous improvement.

You can do a little bit every day to make your WordPress site better.

This breaks up the process into smaller, more attainable goals, giving you plenty of breathing room to avoid getting overwhelmed.

A recent post from Copyblogger explains the concept of Kaizen in detail.

It’s so easy, especially in today’s environment of ubiquitous distraction, to get lost in big ideas and forget about the inevitable series of small steps it takes to achieve them.

I am easily prone to this. I’ve learned this about myself. I have to be intentional about pulling myself down out of the clouds so that I can actually plant my feet firmly on the ground and put one foot in front of the other … then the other … then the other.

Steps.

One at a time.

That is the only way to achieve continuous improvement — the only way to take a big, grand idea and bring it to fruition.

Now, with that as our foundation, let’s talk about your website …

The four pillars of a successful WordPress website

Building a powerful website that does everything a website should do — help you earn authority, build an audience, and drive business — is a big task.

There is a lot that goes into a successful WordPress website.

Some of the choices you have to make are big decisions, like where to host your site and what theme to use.

Other choices are smaller, more subtle, like what color to use for your call-to-action buttons and whether you should use “How to …” in two consecutive blog post headlines or change one for the sake of variety.

All of your decisions, big and small, can be categorized in one of the following four buckets:

Content

Design

Technology

Strategy

They are the four pillars of a successful WordPress website.

How to apply kaizen to the four pillars of your website’s success

You can’t build a successful website with one inspired 48-hour work binge over a weekend.

You can’t even do it by taking an entire month, or even three or four, to focus on nothing but your website. Not if you want your success to sustain beyond those three or four months.

Sure, through evergreen content, autoresponders, and the power of digital products, you can (and should) do a lot to earn ongoing, recurring, some might say “passive” revenue … but you’ll also experience diminishing returns if you aren’t:

Marketing your ideas

Tweaking or reworking your design to keep it fresh

Updating WordPress and plugins to keep them secure

Staying vigilant about your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

In other words, you can’t just set-and-forget your content, design, technology, and strategy.

You develop, build, and launch your website in incremental steps … and then you continue taking incremental steps to avoid stagnation and drive your site toward continuous improvement.

If that sounds like a lot of time and effort, good. Because it is.

But it’s worth it.