A Beginners Guide to Motorsports Marketing >> Building Your Website

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Building a Website – The Stages of Website Design

#1 Strategy – Set your goals, pick your keywords (SEO), know your competition and plan your Branding strategy elements (ex: Domain/URL and matching custom Soc Media URL’s and “handles”.)  Use this cool widget below to see if you desired Domain name, or website address is available.

#2 Plan – Plan your marketing budget and include whether or not if you can outsource some of the work –  or if you will need to do it all in-house.  Most of the resources I recommend are free or very low-cost. For example:Bluehost Domain and Hosting is as little as $3.49 a month for hosting and $11.99 for the first year\’s domain registration.  You get free email accounts and the best service ever!  I love them.  Plus I can help you if you need it. **Please use the link via the ads below for Bluehost to activate KAM\’s affiliate referral program when you start planning your website.   It costs you nothing extra – you get the same amazing great service from them at a low price – and we get a referral fee if you sign up for their service using our affiliate link.

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Next thing to do in planning if you are brand new to web design is to start with a Word Press tutorial – Google \”WordPress help\” and you will find tons of blogs on the subject and in YouTube there are hundreds of “How To” videos to help you with step-by-step instructions.  One of my favorite help sites is WPbeginner.com when I was learning WP. 

[icon name=\”asterisk\” class=\”\”]TIP: Select \”Automatic Renewal\” of your domain registration so that you don\’t forget to renew it and then it get purchased by someone else!  That happened to me about 5 years ago with Kaley\’s website – why someone wanted to snatch her domain was crazy to me but it happened and then they tried to sell it back to me for $1,000.  I said no and waited them out, but that meant Kaley didn\’t have a website for over a year.

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#3 Design – Sketch out on paper how you envision your website to look. Chose your WordPress Theme and plugins. Several free themes comes with your WP installation and there a lot more Free themes here  as well as plugins here. (For the sake of this post, I am assuming that you are going to use WordPress for your website.) 

Next, plan out the basics out first – Home Page, Blog section or page, a page for your schedule and/or race results and a \”Contact Us\” page are a good start. Add an \”About Us\” page with a Race Resume or Driver Stats and Photo and Video Galleries would be next good step to take.  Make sure you think these pages out so they flow well and tell a good story about your race team and driver.   The end-goal is to get Sponsors for your team so you must have a good web presence in place to accomplish this.

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#4 Build – After you obtain your web hosting (please use my affiliate if you use Bluehost!) and install WordPress (which is FREE!) you can then install your Theme and the plugins that you will need to help you build your pages. (See my list of recommendations.) You will then want to create the main pages: Home, Blog, Schedule/Results, Photo/Video Gallery, Sponsors and a Contact Us page.

Once your core pages are established you can start uploading images for the galleries and add your race schedule.  Then finally to complete this first phase of website building – write a few blog posts right away and post them. 

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#5 Optimize & Test – Optimize your images (too large and they take up all your bandwidth and make your site slow) and add ‘Alternate Text’, or “Alt Text” to each image you upload. You will also want to test all your pages and links. Do all your images fit properly? If not you need to re-size them and then upload them again if you can\’t get them to the right size in via your Theme\’s Media tool.

[icon name=\”asterisk\” class=\”\”]TIP: use Picmonkey.com for this – it\’s Free and has lots of extras to jazz up your images to make them more appealing.

#6 Launch & Promote – Go live! Tell the World!! Tell me!!!

If you have gotten this far in the checklist we will take a break before going into step #7 – Analyzing.  But be sure to come back to this after about 6 months.  Not only do you have enough on your plate right now, it will take about this long to get some good metrics and stats compiled. But don\’t forget this step because it\’s crucial for explaining to Sponsors how you can deliver a good ROI in exchange for their marketing partnership with your driver or race team. 

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One more thing – request to join our private Facebook group page, Executive Speed Marketing, to join myself along with other like-minded Pit Parents and \”Team Owners\” who are also just getting started with Motorsports Marketing.  I created this group to Educated, Inform and Share among all the members as we work together in a joint effort to get our KAM Kids to the next level in their racing careers.  Send me an email if you would like to get an invitation to join.  In addition to the support, posts and tips offered on this FB group page, there is also a section for \”Files\”, and I have uploaded all the forms, cheat sheets, ebooks, workbooks and spreadsheets I will be referencing in this Beginners Guide Series on Marketing your Drivers/Race Teams.

 

1 thought on “A Beginners Guide to Motorsports Marketing >> Building Your Website”

  1. If you would like to be invited to the private Executive Speed Marketing Facebook group page and have access to information, feedback, tips, forms and the opportunity of chatting with other parents who are new (or new to the marketing part of it) to motorsports marketing – with efforts to try and win fans and sponsors – just LIKE the above post (link to blog post on KAMkartway.com about Web Design) and I will send you an invitation.

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