Initializing your Website Strategy

Now that you’ve decided to take the next step in promoting your MTGOLibrary Bot to new customers, we are going to look at inexpensive website strategies. As discussed in my previous articled “Starting to realize your Bot’s true Potential”, the Wizard’s Community Blogs is a good place to begin but if you want to realize the full sales potential of your Bot you will want to build a website. With a website, you will be able to centralize your Bot’s marketing strategy as well provide additional services to your clients like highlighting sales or new releases. In the past this may have cost you a minimum of $500 to do but with the Open Source software like Wordpress you can do almost all of it yourself.

One of the great things about Wordpress and other Open Source solutions like it is that you don’t need to know anything about programming code to set it up yourself. Using a web hosting provider that automatically installs Wordpress for you like Dreamhost or GoDaddy will greatly simplify the process. Once installed, from the Administration panel you can use the Plugin’s tab to install third party apps like Akismet for controlling spam, Socialable for adding Social Media links to your posts and WP to Twitter to advertise your articles on your Twitter account.

You can also download one of the many Themes available from Wordpress’s site from within the Administrator panel. Located under the Appearance tab in “Themes”, you can browse through some of the many user submitted designs they have available online and Wordpress will automatically install them for you without you having to download anything. Another good resource for custom themes is websites like Themeforest where you can purchase a custom theme that is more your style.

Once you’ve picked a theme that you like and have Wordpress setup we’ll be able to explore unique plugins designed especially for Magic the Gathering and marketing your site. Your website can become the tool that will change the way you do business on the MTGO Market and we will continue to explore this next week.