Woodturner’s Website

One of the members in my facebook group was excited about building a website, he purchased a domain, I presume a woodturning related domain and wanted to put up a website to sell his woodturnings, ie a Woodturning Website. I thought that was pretty cool, becaue these days most people will go to one of the free platforms and start blogging. Bad idea because you don’t have control over that free site and could lose it at any moment.

Woodturner’s Need
Their Own Website

So, I was thinking. A woodturner really does need their own website and it doesn’t matter whether or not you want to use it to make money woodturning. Think of it this way, use the woodturning website/blog to chronicle your progression in woodturning. Think how many people that would help. What if you purchased a new tool and it just sucked, it was the worse…. you could do a review. What if you purchased a lathe that was the best and you just love it….you could do a review ….a continuing review. If you were smart, you could try and find an affiliate program for that product and suggest the other woodturners might want to purchase and put a link in your article….you’ve done a service and now you can make a few bucks …so you can purchase your next tool or piece of equipment.

I started this woodturning website/blog to document my woodturning experience and thinking ahead, I would like to set up a store so I can sell some of my woodturnings in hopes of getting a better lathe, better tools and just to have some extra cash. Lots of ways you can accomplish this along side the website. If you chronicle your progress or your projects with video you can start posting on youtube. That does many things when it comes to website traffic and money making potential.

Anyway, I thought I would post my facebook woodturning comment here. I’m sure someone on the group won’t approve …but you can’t please everybody all the time 🙂

Facebook Post About
Woodturning Websites

Here’s my facebook woodturning post:

I’ve been building websites since around 1998 when you actually had to learn HTML coding!

I remember reading an article where the author predicted a time when websites would be able to be built as easy as one can use “Microsoft Word”

That time has pretty much arrived. However, there are many more aspects of building a website that you should consider if you expect to sell your products and services.

I tell clients that their website can be as simple as a business card. In other words, it makes you look more professional and you might add some contact info on the website, maybe some pics.

OR

You can use your website as an “authority site”, teaching and informing people regarding your products and services. This requires a lot of content, consistent content, images and videos.

Not only that but there is a method of building your website that helps to bring more visitors to your site and it is called SEO, or search engine optimization. You want your website on page one of google for whatever it is you are selling or the service you are providing.

Sounds like you want your website put up to sell your woodturnings?

Here’s what I would do to get a web or online presence.

Buy a domain ….you did that.

Get it hosted ….not sure if you did that yet.

Once the site is hosted, start adding content to it immediately.

-you need to pay attention to keywords, for instance, if you are turning and wanting to sell wooden rolling pins, use the keywords “rolling pins, rooling pin, french rolling pin etc”

-a quick way to get your pages indexed and on page 1 or 2 of google is to add geo modifiers, that would be something like “rolling pins in Seattle” you can go broader and “rolling pins in Washington State”

-you should try to post links back to your website, the home page and internal pages whenever and whereeever it is allowed.

-I don’t mind if people do that on our woodturning group www.facebook.com/woodturningbasics as long as they do it responsibly, no spamming. post away if its relevant.

There really is a lot to learn, unless you have a bunch of time on your hands you should have someone help you with the poject.

WordPress for Woodturning Website

I would suggest that you use a content management system (CMS) called WordPress for your woodturning website. Once installed, it is almost as easy as Microsoft Word to use, I just started a blog or website using WordPress ….everything is very basic and free at http://www.WoodturningBasics.com

There are 1000’s of free wordpress plugins that you can use to perform different website related tasks, there are 10’s of thousands of free wordpress themes that can make your site look different in a matter of minutes. Of course there are themes and plugins that you invest your hard cold cash in, often times these things do amazing things to help you get your website rated so you can sell more or get more eyes on your website.

You can quickly learn how to make a post, add an image or video. Then you would customize it with a storefront for your woodturning projects. The beauty with using WordPress is that everything works together.

For instance, lets look at the rolling pin example.

You would want to use the “Blog” part of the website to post articles about rolling pins. Basically, I would document the process with some text, add some images and a video or two….make several blog posts. At the end of each blog post you would want to include a link back to your woodturning store in the rolling pin category.

Using these methods will help you get some organic search engine traffic.

You could buy some cheap facebook ads or google adwords, or any other number of online advertising….but this costs money, the best way as far as I am concerned is to build a website. Fill it with content and let it start “cooking”, that is the search engine robots find your site and take notice, they determine whether your site is good enough to send rolling pin searchers to.

It does get complicated, like anything else ….it can be overwhelming in the beginning…. thus the need for some help.

In my opinion though, you have made a good choice regarding the desire to build a website. Some folks will use free platforms like facebook, blogger, wordpress.com etc and will add content for years only to do one thing wrong and have their sites completely removed and/or deleted.

It’s like my facebook group www.facebook.com/woodturningbasics ….if I make a religious comment facebook doesn’t like, or I make a political comment or a LGBT comment ….the site could be deleted and gone forever. If you have your own website, its yours to keep and no one can delete it! When working on the internet always keep in mind that you have limited control over many things, build your business accordingly.

If you need some help getting your domain hosted and wouild like wordpress installed PM me and I should be able to help you in the next couple of days. There are plenty of free wordpress courses that teach the basics if you have never used it before. I don’t have it done yet, but I’ve been working on a template for woodturners, it will be able to be customized so your site can be unique. But for now, you can use one of the free wordpress themes to get you started.

I’m not sure how much I would charge yet. However I would suggest, never use free hosting and always make sure you have some sort of way to backup your site, either you do it or have the hosting provider do it.

I might add, there are many website building portals that have sprouted up. The ones I’ve come across have always had some type of problem. I’m sure some might be acceptable but there is almost always a problem when it comes to html coding, they will use some proprietary stuff that hinders the transfer of the site if you would like to move it and they might use methods such as “flash” to build the site and flash makes it very difficult if not impossible for the search engines to find and rank the site.