My single best piece of Rainmaker Platform advice

Copyblogger Media formed to bring the needed talent together in 2010.

Then following what felt like a lifetime to me, but was more like a little more than four years time, the Rainmaker Platform finally showed up.

I’m currently over 1000 days into using Rainmaker Platform. Get the actual total here.

My very first look at the Rainmaker Platform followed my more than six months of incessant clamoring to get into the paid BETA or pilot program.

I was not important enough to discuss the MVP version with the Copyblogger Media team. I’m still not.

I just think about this stuff more than anyone outside Rainmaker and possibly as much as some people inside Rainmaker.

I’ve used every iteration of Rainmaker so far

Back before the Landing Page Builder was added to Rainmaker,
much less the second version of the Rainmaker Learning Management System (LMS), or any of the Marketing Automation bells and whistles. Or the rather helpful, Need Help green guide button were included in Rainmaker.

Here’s How You Get Started

Start with Strategy. The point of your business website is to grow your business.

Anything not directly related to that mission statement, especially starting out, MUST BE IGNORED.

Deal with secondary details later.

From the instant your site goes live under your domain name. Your website immediately turns into an asset or problem. Which your business owns lock-stock-and-barrel.Is that the right saying?

Is your website sapping your strength? Every time technical details divert your attention from building assets for your business, your daily supply of power is diminished.

But the needle doesn’t move.

Is your website, an asset your business owns?

The content YOU ADD to the content management system powering your website IS a business asset, yes.
The processes and systems formulating your customer’s experience with your business IS a business asset, yes.

From the moment your website becomes live, all the way through your forty-second year of business success, everyone combining an internet connection with an internet browser now access you at their demand.

1. Your site should attract interested customers into an audience
2. Educate them and their decision
3. Fulfill their requests by delivering access to your solution, via your service or product.

My process for new businesses online, goes a little something like this:

1. Start by completing the eight tabs comprising the Rainmaker Universal Settings Which is found, while logged into your Rainmaker site, by clicking on the Gear Icon beside your Avatar to the right of the blue admin bar across the top of the browser window.
2. Choose your Design –> Design Template
3. Start at the top of the Live Appearance Editor and work your way all the way through the bottom making changes IF needed. But be sure to fill all of the widget areas with your content prior to taking your site from staging to LIVE.
4. I recommend starting with one paid product in addition to the default member library shipped with every Rainmaker installation.
5. Add /sales-page/ to any domain name using Rainmaker, at the end of the url, to see the sales landing page example.
6. This is very helpful getting your bearings about what is easily possible right out-of-the-box.
7. You’ll want to setup a Sales Landing Page for your free product. You could make a copy of the sales landing page example and then modify it to your message, especially to get started.
8. When they sign up for the product and you have an email service, like Mailchimp or aWeber  connected to your Rainmaker site, they’ll be automatically added to the single MailChimp list you select from a dropdown while editing the product.

Keep in mind that, in Mailchimp, you can add any automated email messages and then attach the email(s) or email sequence, to that specific Mailchimp List.

DO NOT try to reinvent the wheel.

Fit the form offered by Rainmaker inherently to learn from the best practices over collective decades of successful content marketing experience.

Choose a design template and move on. Don’t fret about custom css etc to stat. Just allow the template to remove everything but what you need to accomplish your goal and write/record your content path to that goal.

This way, you’re immediately at work growing your business, not wasting your attention on useless distractions.

Can your Rainmaker Site deploy a podcast network out of the box? Yes.

Is that realistic for you as you first get your business going online?

Oh, heavens no.

Do NOT try to do everything to start. Do ONE THING your customer loves and do it really well.

Businesses have been built on less. Trust me.