A Guide to Setting up your own Money Making Website or Blog
If you are planning to make money on the internet then there is no better way than creating your own money spinning website or blog. Sure, there are other ways to make money online without your own site and we will look at those another time, but not many are quite as easy and effective. This guide is intended for budding internet entrepreneurs.
Step 1 - Choosing your money making niche
The first thing you will need to do is decide what topic your website or blog is going to be about. Try to find a topic that you are interested in or have some experience in. From a sport you enjoy to a health issue - just about anything can make you money. Do not choose a topic that is too broad and going to have millions of competitors. For this example i am going to choose “a guide to making gold on World of Warcraft”. I chose this topic because i play World of Warcraft, so have some experience on the topic and be able to write about it.
Step 2 - Finding an affiliate product to sell
We now know what our website is going to be about. Next we are going to find a product to sell on the website. There are plenty of affiliate websites out there such as Commision Junction and Clickbank that have products we can sell for just about any topic. I went to Clickbank and searched for word of warcraft.
Signing up to Clickbank is extremely quick and easy. They are a reliable company and nearly always pay out on time, so do not worry about using them.
As a Clickbank member i can click on a link at the top of the Clickbank homepage called “marketplace”. It is here i can search for a product to sell. I typed in “word of warcraft” which brought up the following link:
World Of Warcraft Gold Secrets…Highest 75% Payout! New 75% Payout Per Sale! Over 3 Years Running, The Original And Best-Selling World Of Warcraft Gold Guide Is Now The Highest Paying WoW Guide. Superb Conversions With New Sales Page. Affiliates Make Hundreds Per Day- Do You Want To?
If you click on the link above you can see their sales page that you will be sending potential buyers to. The 75% payout means that every time you refer someone to that page and they buy the product, you make 75% of the money the customer spend on it. In this case i would make $24 per sale. Not bad.
All you need now is to click “create hoplink” from the search result screen. You then type in your Clickbank id and it will generate a link for you. Copy this link and save it into a text document. You will need to put it on your website later - this is the link that will send customers from your site to the Warcraft guide sales site and in the process telling it these customers are yours and if they buy the product, give the 75% to you.
You can swap steps 2 and 3 around - search click bank for a product and then make a website about it, but as i said, it is best to write a website about a topic you are familiar with, or better yet - about something you enjoy.
Step 3 - Finding the right website host
Picking a website host is fairly easy - you want to find a host that is cheap but reliable. I can highly recommend Host Gator who are very reliable and only charge $7.95 a month.
If you do go with HostGator you can also register a domain name there. If you go with another host they in turn should allow you to register a domain name.
Step 4 - Choosing a website domain name
A domain name is the name people will type in to the address bar to find your website. (eg, www.letsearnmoneyonline.com). You are after a name that contains the following:
-What your website is about : this will be good for search engines finding you - for example the website you are on right now contains the words earn, money and online, which is what i want people to find me for
-A .com address - i always recommend a .com as they look the most professional
-A name that is fairly short and catchy
Now that is not an easy order. You may be able to think of a few but in all likely hood they will be taken already. But don’t worry! Just keep trying until you find one you like that is free. For my example i might choose http://www.theguidetowowgold.com, which i notice is free. I like it because it contains wow - the games name - gold and guide - the two thing people will hopefully be searching for.
Once you have your website registered it is time to upload Wordpress to it.
Step 5 - Setting up your website with Wordpress
We are going to make our website using Wordpress. Wordpress is a blogging platform that is very easy (and quick!) to set up, customize and add content to. For those reasons it is the choice platform for a lot of budding online entrepreneurs.
We are going to be hosting wordpress ourselves so we will need to download it from www.wordpress.org. (Do no confuse wordpress.org with wordpress.com - wordpress.com host your blog for you at www.yoursite.wordpress.com and allow for very little behind the scene customization, whilst we can do anything on our own wordpress.org site).
To install wordpress on your site you can follow this guide. If you have any problems please leave a comment and i will try and help you out the best i can.
Once you have installed it, it is time to find a suitable theme for your website. You can find over 700 free themes here. Download the theme of your choice to your computer, unzip it, then put the whole folder in your websites wp content > themes folder, using an ftp program of your choice. Now log into your wordpress site, go to themes and click activate on your new theme.
Step 6 - Writing content and getting people to buy the product you found on Clickbank
This is the final stage of our making our website. We have to write a main page that explains why the product, in this case the warcraft gold guide, is so good and why they should buy it. There are many ways to do this - for example i might review the product and at the end say ” 5 out of 5 stars, click here to get the guide and make your warcraft millions!” and turn that end sentence into our clickbank link we saved earlier. Then when people go through to the site and buy the product we would earn money for referring that seller. Easy.
Step 7 - Getting visitors / Traffic generation
This final step and i will look at in detail in my next post.
There are two main ways to get visitors to your sit
The first method is through having lots of unique content on your web page and posting links to it all over the net. Your unique content may be lots of articles you write about your chosen subject. It will take a long time for traffic to start coming in through search engines, but once it does you are sorted and best of all - its all free!
The second method is called pay per click advertising. This is where we create adverts, usually using “google adwords” and then when ever some one clicks on one of our adverts we pay google money for driving that visitor to our site. The key is to earn more money from visitors coming to our site than we are paying to get them on to our site. Pay per click advertising for Clickbank products is an art in itself and i would not recommend it to beginners unless you have got money you are willing to trade in for experience
OK thats all till next time!
Nick Smith
