Influency begins when you decide to be serious about becoming influential. That’s simple. And we’ve said for years that there really isn’t anything terrible difficult about the things we do; you might not have great designers at your disposal, or amazing technology geeks, or writers who can hit the bulls-eye for both people and search engines, but you could find them, and there’s very little they do that you can’t pull together yourself if you have the time.
The companies that hire us to direct and manage their Influency efforts don’t have the time.
But if you don’t want to farm your work out, or you think you can’t afford to have us take over your drive toward Influency (you probably can, by the way), or you just plain like playing around with all the things that go into creating Influency, you still need to make sure you’re on the right track.
That’s what this page is about.
Unless you’re dead-set on developing an Internet presence from scratch, the best platform for building Influency is WordPress. There’s a lot that goes into us being willing to say that so directly, and if you want to talk about it we can, but we’re serious; go with WordPress.
That leaves you needing to know how to use WordPress, and making it look the way you want it to look. So let’s start with the learning part of things:
You can click on the stack of books, or if you prefer this link will take you directly to WordPress tutorials, this one to the Influency page, and this is for search engine optimization. Looking to learn about design? Click here.
Ready to roll out the Influency using WordPress? You’ll need to design a theme. Or you can buy one. The benefit of buying a theme is that for a surprisingly small amount of money you can get past a lot of work.
(you can even find free WordPress themes. Don’t. Just … don’t. What you lose going free versus spending a few dollars is huge)
There are lots of places to find premium WordPress themes. We recommend two. Elegant Themes, and Headway. They’re very different, and in different ways, both are superb.
Elegant Themes produces a collection of themes, and you can have access to them all for just $69. You can also buy some extras if you’re OK bumping the price to $89 (we have opinions about that, but this isn’t the place). And they’re beautiful. Elegant Themes also provides some of the best technical support we’ve ever seen, all included in the $69 price of their collection.
Headway is … different. REALLY different.
Although you get pre-made themes in the mid-range and higher Headway bundles, Headway isn’t about themes so much as a tool that almost lets you create a WordPress theme of your own by dragging and dropping elements on your computer screen. It’s seriously amazing, and Headway is flexible enough that when you build a Headway-based theme you can make changes to its layout, without programming.
It’s a lot of power. You can have it for just $59. Headway is the best value in amazing programming tool-set we’ve ever seen.
Bit it’s also got some interesting gotchas built in. Here’s the punchline:
You really can create Influency all by yourself, but under most circumstances we believe you’re better off just picking up the phone and starting a conversation with us. We’ll help you build your Influency strategy, and make sure you have all the tools you need to take over any part of it, any time.
If you like the idea of handling this stuff yourself, Headway and Elegant Themes are the right places to put together and start tweaking your image, and all the education you need ahead of that is right here.
Ready … Set … Be Influence-y …
