My, how the times have changed.
Back in 2003, I got licensed to do mortgages. It was a pretty lucrative time to get a refinance since rates dropped and people were still in high interest loans; I’m talking 13% in some cases.
The company I started working for had a process where they would give us hundreds of letter, envelopes, business cards and stamps. We had to fill all those envelopes, lick them (or if you were fancy/smart you used a sponge) and stamp them. THEN we had to bring them all in to be counted and delivered. They went out on Thursday and by Monday morning, the calls would come in.
We had to do this every week!
The phones rang and we took the calls on a semi-round robin fashion to qualify the leads. Some worked out and some didn’t, unfortunately, BUT THEY HAD A SYSTEM. AND IT WORKED!
Mind you, there were other companies out there that used a different kind of paid lead system through a certain popular online lead generator specifically for mortgages. The company could filter for different things like loan size, credit score, equity, etc.
I got the crazy idea, “Why not create my own website for the local area and do something similar?” I didn’t have the money at the time to pay someone to do it, so I asked a friend and told him what I was looking for and he gave me that look as if to say, “That’s a lot of stuff!”
So I went out and bought the html/xml/css for dummies book. I got through a good portion of it just dozing off at night over a period of a few months. I would try different things and I launched something simple for my DJ site.
In THAT process, I started to understand why my friend gave me the look. Perspective and experience has a way of teaching you things sometimes.
I had no clue about WordPress. It was just getting started and, based on how much attention I spent on this type of information, it was probably not as user friendly as it is now. Hence, I wasn’t ready yet.
Fast forward to today; years after leaving the mortgage industry. I had a similar idea for a few different offers I came up with. I watched videos and checked out free training videos from the ads on YouTube to the point where I was comfortable enough to dip my toe in the proverbial waters.
For me, applying for hosting was a HUGE move because that was going to be the engine that launches my projects. Mind you, I had already bought a few domain names years prior through GoDaddy. Their marketing was on point! I renewed them with the hopes of MAYBE doing something with them one day. That proved to be a wise move.
Once the hosting came, it was so easy to set up email addresses, install Worpress and launch a simple site that looked WAY better than anything I could’ve imagined doing if I tried to code every line using that book.
I don’t know when it happened, but after I started focusing on one site, I started to get familiar with the design aspect of the WordPress framework, Elementor (a pretty popular page builder) and a host of plugins that are like apps that you install in your WordPress to add other functions that the base framework doesn’t come with. That could include things like security, contact forms, E-commerce plugins, backup, maintenance, etc..
Just spending a few hours of intent tinkering and experimenting with different settings, I started to understand why this is such a powerful tool. The variety of different types of themes and site types at your fingertips can be daunting, but it helps if you have an idea about what you want on your site.
You can create a one-page site with all the necessary information to get the point across or a more complex store with a blog and all kinds of bells and whistles just by getting into it a bit for a hour or two every day.
I didn’t do it EVERY day. As matter of fact, I took the longer route. I would learn something, take some time off, forget what I learned a little, relearn and then try something else. If you’re on the fast track, that’s not how you want to do it. It all really depends on what kind of time you have to get into the nitty gritty of it. Life tends to happen to everybody and if you can invest what you CAN, you could see a LOT of progress in a very short period of time.
You save time by starting and steadily moving towards a certain goal. You may want to learn how to set up or learn how to post a blog one day. Tomorrow you may want to focus on the menu and header. Then the contact page or whatever. Work on one thing at a time and you’ll slowly become the “expert” with different templates set up and a system. Before you know it, you’ll be telling friends about it through social media or even running ads for affiliate offers.
This is not something that is restrictive in the sense that a person couldn’t do it because of physical limitations, really. It might take some time at first because of the nature of learning something new, but you have to be patient with yourself and understand your way of doing things and make changes in positive ways. It may take some sacrifice in different areas of your life in order to make the kind of process that you want. That’s with ANYTHING that’s worth doing, though.
My message to anyone who wants to learn this thing called WordPress, stay tuned and look for some of my videos in the near future. They will include some of the nitty gritty moments you don’t typically hear about while you’re watching these videos. After it’s all said and done, information, themes, plugins, programs etc are updating all the time and things change every day. If you understand the base operation it will help you make it through a lot of issues. You’ll understand that making mistakes will not completely destroy you. Mistakes typically help you learn. As a matter of fact, I’ve started looking forward to making SOME mistakes because I know that it’s through that process where I get stronger. I’ve even broken things to see if I remember how to fix it….just to get video of it.
So don’t be intimidated, just get going sooner than later.
Dontrez