How To Create A Website
& Earn a Living With It Fast
Your fast track to financial independence
It is the ultimate dream for many in our new digitized world: Making money from the comfort of your home or while travelling the world. And preferably not just some small bucks on the side, but money that will provide you a comfortable life. The path to achieving that can be hard, but not as hard as you may think. Hundreds of thousands of people all around the globe have managed to make this kind of life their reality. You can, too.
The following will show you how you can relatively quickly (sometimes within a few weeks or months) achieve your financial independence, simply by following these 5 major steps:
- Find A Topic
- Create A Website
- Produce Content
- Promote Your Website
- Monetize Your Website
That’s it. All it takes to make your website financially successful.
Now you may think “Well, that is easier said than done.” And you’re right. You will definitely have to put either some work OR money into these steps. But it’s going to be worth it. I promise.
NOTE: If you already have a website, you can skip straight to Point 3 or 4.
1. Find A Topic
Before there can be a website, you should of course know what that future site of yours will be about.
The best and easiest way to find a topic is always to consider your own passions and hobbies. What are you personally passionate about? What do you like? In what fields do you possess a significant amount of knowledge that visitors of your website could profit from?
You can then promote items or services relevant to that topic, run advertisements or even sell your own products. Generally speaking, you can earn money from every topic since there are enough humans on the internet who are interested in every single topic you can think of.
However, some topics are more profitable than others. The profitability of a topic depends on these general factors:
- Interest in topic (measurable by volume of searches in search engines like Google)
- Market saturation (measurable by the level of competition for a topic/keyword)
- Price levels of market product/service (the higher the prices, the fewer items you’ll have to sell/promote)
If you have trouble deciding on a topic, consider doing a Keyword research. A Keyword research will give you insight on how many people are interested in a particular topic and how financially valuable the market for that particular topic is.
There are many tools online that can help you with your Keyword research (e.g. Google’s Keyword Planner). But I’d recommend using Wordtracker since it is primarily made for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With Wordtracker you can quite easily test how often a certain keyword (topic) gets searched for during an average month a.k.a. the volume of a keyword. It also shows you the level of competition that you will have to face for a particular keyword.
Here are all the features Wordtracker provides you in comparison to Google’s Keyword Planner:
By the way, you can try the Wordtracker tool completely for free (with limited features, however). The free version alone can be enough to find a good, profitable topic to write about.
But for a more extensive SEO, you’ll definitely be better off with going for the paid versions which unlock all features and allow you to research up to 10,000 keywords per month. Ranking for only 1% of those will guarantee you clicks from Google, but more about that later.
Note: There’s now a limited offer on Wordtracker giving you a 7-day risk-free trial version. This means you can unlock all features on Wordtracker for 7 full days without paying or subscribing to anything! AND: If you decide to keep Wordtracker after the trial period, you get a 25% discount on any package you register for! Sounds like a more than sweet deal.
CLICK HERE to profit from this exclusive coupon!
2. Make A Website
2.1 Register A Website
If you have found your topic, you’ll next need the very basis of your successful future online business: A Website!
In order to get a website, you will need to find a virtual place on the internet where you can “place” it. Web Hosters provide you with such place. You can choose a free web hosting solution like WordPress.com (not to be confused with the Content Management System WordPress, which can run on most Web Host servers). It’s a good option for single-page websites (one like this).
But be aware that you won’t be able to choose your desired domain name and have to face some other limitations.
If you want long-term success, you should better opt for a paid web hosting plan. There are many web hosting providers out there these days. Factors to consider before choosing a provider are the price, the reliability, speed and the easiness to set up your website. The web hoster should also provide WordPress Hosting. WordPress is a content management system that makes designing your website and content creation as easy as possible. You literally don’t need any past experience in web design to create a beautiful website with WordPress within one single day.
So to summarize, the perfect web hosting provider should be reliable, fast, cheap, easy to sign up for and allow for WordPress usage.
Of the many hundreds of web hosters, there are like 3-4 out there who fulfill all of those demands.
Reliability
Reliability of a web hosting service can be measured by the uptime rate the service provides.The uptime rate tells you for what percentage of time in a given time frame the websites hosted on the provider were accessible and “up” (opposed to down). Absolutely nothing is worse for a online business if potential clients and users can’t even reach the business to begin with. The ideal rate is therefore naturally 100%, but this is almost impossible to reach over a longer period of time. Still, uptime rates from 99.97% to 99.99% can be considered as very good. Web hosters with such uptime rates are therefore the most reliable.
Speed
The speed a web hosting service provides is measured by the average load times. This metric is pretty self-explanatory. The quicker it takes to load a site on the server, the better. This means the lower the average load time, the better. Of course the load times always also depend on the content of a site, but a high average load time across the board indicates a major flaw concerning the respective web hosting service. Load times below 500 ms can be considered good, everything above that is mediocre at best.
As far as Reliability and Speed goes, the Top 5 Web Hosting services are as follows:
As you can see, when it comes to reliability, no web hoster is more reliable than Bluehost. It practically never fails you and will make sure your website is always available to your visitors.
When it comes to speed, A2 Hosting and Hostinger practically offer you the same average load times. If speed is important to you, you should go with one of these two providers. If money is also a factor for you, then you should definitely go with Hostinger though. Hostinger is known for extremely affordable plans. While you currently have to pay $2.99 per month ($35.88 per year) for one single website in the most basic WordPress Hosting package at A2, Hostinger offers you an unlimited amount of websites in their most basic package for just $2.15 per month ($25.8 per year) The difference gets even bigger if you choose a non-WordPress hosting package.
Check out Hostinger’s WordPress Hosting plans here
Check out all of Hostinger’s hosting plans here
User-friendliness & WordPress compatibility
What about user-friendliness and set-up easiness? When it comes to that, we have to once again talk about Bluehost, but also about WPEngine.
Bluehost is known to be extremely customer-friendly and easy to set up. You’ll be able to start creating your own website within minutes and not pay anything for your domain name for the first full year. Bluehost is also known for high reliability and high speeds. and a good customer service as well as its affordable WordPress hosting (it is recommended by WordPress itself). All the requirements checked! Additionally Bluehost also provides you with some sweet extra perks such as a whopping $200 Marketing Credit for Microsoft Advertising or Google Ads.
Update May 2020: Bluehost right now offers you WordPress web hosting for only $2.51 per month ($30.12 per year) for the first 3 years (later $7.30/month). After these initial first three years, your online business will likely make enough money for you to not care about the higher monthly fee afterwards. Even the more extensive packages are available for respectively $4.52 or $4.98 per month for the first 3 years (later $10.99 or &14.99).
Here are the prices and features of Bluehost’s WordPress Hosting packages (correct as of May 5, 2020, you may want to hurry up before the offer expires):
Alternatively, you can also go with WPEngine, a web hoster specialized in WordPress. They’ll make your experience with WordPress especially easy with lots of pre-installed features, themes and tools. The more premium packages can be quite expensive though, so you’ll definitely need a solid budget to start with if you want to make the website making process particularly easy.
Note: WPEngine currently offers you 3 months for free for the first year on all plans if you choose to pay annually.
Update: Use the coupon wpe3free and click here to additionally get 10% off your first payment!
Once you chose a plan and signed up, you may now proceed to design your website with WordPress.
2.2 Design Your Website
As mentioned, designing a website with WordPress is as easy as can be. There are plenty of plugins, tools, widgets, etc. that make the design process incredibly easy. You can find a good list of essential plugins for your website here (of course you don’t have to use each and every one of these).
The most important aspect of your website design is your theme, however. Your theme is the foundation of your website so to speak. The entire layout, functionality and also plugin compatibility of your website mainly depends on the theme you choose. You should therefore definitely take time to research and try out several themes before making the final decision in favor of one.
The good news is that there are plenty of completely free themes out there. You can just install them directly in WordPress.
But as with many things in life, the best stuff doesn’t come for free. If you want to use a theme that is precisely made for the purpose of your website, then you may have to choose a paid for premium theme. This is where registering your website with WPEngine comes in handy, as they include more than 35 high-quality StudioPress themes in each of their plans.
In any case, choosing the right theme for your website will bring you half-way through to your path of making serious money with your new website. So again, choose wisely.
3. Produce Content
So now that your website is registered, your website theme has been chose, all necessary plugins and tools are installed, the content creation process begins.
Remember when I told you that you should preferably choose a topic for your website that you feel passionate about? This is the main reason why. The more passionate and genuinely interested you are in a topic, the more easily you will be able to produce texts and content in general. And you will definitely have to produce quite an amount of texts if you want your website to really succeed and give you long-term financial independence.
Before you write your texts, do a quick keyword research to see which keywords (including long-tail keywords) are most searched for and have the lowest level of competition. Then just write a text around that keyword. The longer the better, but a minimum of 500 words would be good. At the end of the day though, quality is what matters. This will help you to rank in Google and other search engines.
But a good keyword research is just an effective way to speed things up at the end of the day. If you produce consistent content then you will succeed anyway! Sooner or later, Google will find your site and show it to enough people interested in your chosen topic. I can promise you that.
4. Promote Your Website
Again, the most important thing at the start of your online business is choosing the topic you feel comfortable with, registering your website, designing your website and then producing content. But once you’ve written around 30-40 articles (or even less for some types of websites), you can start thinking of ways to make your website known to the world. There are quite a lot of ways to do that:
4.1 Search Engines
The most common way to expose your website to the world is through a search engine. Every search engine uses crawlers to find and index sites which others then can find by typing in certain keywords to search. There are several search engines, but none is bigger and more widely used than Google.
In order for your site to rank well, you need to produce high-quality content and optimize it for certain keywords or topics. Once again, tools like Wordtracker can immensely help you with that. But first and foremost, content is important. Just write and write and write quality texts and you will DEFINITELY start to rank for some keywords. And by some keywords I mean up to thousands of keywords. Ranking for thousands of keywords then in turn means your website gets found more and more.
As you can see, getting clicks from Google is not at all hard. Just consistently produce content and your website will definitely be found.
The more (relevant) keywords you produce, the more likely your website will be found by people who are interested in the topic your site provides.
4.2 Social Media
Social Media is another great way to drive traffic to your site. There are basically 5 Social Media platforms that you should consider:
While not as popular as it was some years ago, especially among younger people, Facebook remains the largest social media platform in the world. It has over 2 billion users from all around the globe. Posting your website posts on Facebook, will therefore give you a lot of exposure.
Alternatively you can also use Facebook Ads to target specific people (with interests relevant to your niche), but this will cost you money.
Especially if your website targets people with different interests and of most age groups, Facebook can become a powerful traffic source, even completely for free.
Instagram is an image-based social media platform. It is now also owned by Facebook, but functions as an independent entity. Instagram is the second most popular social media platform in the world, receiving more than a billion visitors each any every month.
You can achieve exposure with pretty much every website you wish on there, but Instagram works especially well with websites that are in the Fitness, Cooking, Fashion, Travel or Entertainment niches.
Oftentimes overlooked, Pinterest is another powerful platform out there to get visitors to your website. Strictly spoken, Pinterest actually isn’t a social media platform, but more a search engine like Google. It combines the social media aspects with those of a search engine if you will.
Pinterest as a platform is especially useful if your website targets women as around 70% of regular Pinterest users consist of women. But that doesn’t mean that men don’t use the platform as well of course.
The interesting thing about Pinterest is the high income levels of Pinterest users. Pinterest users have an average yearly income of around $75,000, more than the average on any other platform out there. People who possess a lot of money can also spend a lot of money. Why not on your website?
YouTube
YouTube is another great way to make your website known all over the world. The video platform is known as the second most visited website on the Internet, with billions of visitors from all around the planet.
Produce interesting videos on a consistent basis and you are guaranteed to amass a solid following to which you then can link your website. Even a 1,000 or 10,000 subscribers can already make a big difference in terms of making your website known and profitable.
Producing videos is also much easier in this day and age as you may think. There are plenty of video editing software out there, that allow you to create videos without having any real prior knowledge about video editing. It has become really really easy.
And by the way: You won’t even have to show your face in order to run a successful YouTube channel.
Other
Of course there are some more social platforms out there (Twitter, Spapchat, TikTok, etc.), all of which you can use to make your website known. The ones mentioned above are the most widely used, but for many niches some of the other ones can be even more powerful.
4.3 Paid Ads
This text promised you to make your website profitable completely for free, but for the sake of complete information, let me also quickly mention the possibility of paid ads. You can buy ads which will then show up for internet users with relevant interests and bring them to your website.
You can practically combine this method with your search engine and social media strategies and buy ads on Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. While this certainly represents the fastest way to make your website known quickly, it can also cost quite a lot of money. In most cases you will have to pay on a Cost-per-Click (CPC) basis. This means you are paying for every click a search engine or social media platform or other platform generates for your website. The more valuable the keyword, the more you’ll have to pay.
5. Monetize Your Website
So now that you have created your website, designed it, optimized it and started getting visitors, it is now time to put the cherry on the cake and make some serious money with your website.
The common way of making money off your website is by selling your own products on there. But since you’re reading this, you likely do not have anything to sell yourself. Meaning you don’t own a shop and products which could be sold through your website. And neither do you need those to make money online in this day and age.
There are now two general methods with which you can profit off your website without having to sell any of your own products yourself:
5.1 Monetizing your website – Method #1: Website Ads
This method represents the somewhat classic way of monetizing a website. It simply involves inserting ads onto your website. Depending on the ads and the ads provider, you will then get paid either for every click on an ad or for (usually) every 1,000 views an ad gets. It is basically the other side of the coin of the “Paid Ads” approach for promotion strategies that we mentioned before. If you want to run ads, you will have to pay for every click or number of impressions, while if you’re letting ads run, it is you who gets to earn from every click or number of impressions your website generates.
There are quite a number of Ad providers out there these days, the most known ones are:
- Google AdSense
- Microsoft Advertising
- WordAds
- Media.net
- Amazon Native Shopping Ads
- Sovrn
- PropellerAds
- PurpleAds
- etc.
Most of these programs follow the CPC model, meaning you get paid per click. Some providers, however, pay you per 1,000 impressions. WordAds, which is run by Automattic (the same company behind WordPress), is an example of an Ad service using this ad payout model.
Which provider is better suited for you depends on, once again, the content of your website. If your website consists of plenty of valuable keywords in a highly profitable niche with a huge target market, then Google AdSense probably represents the best choice for you. Programs like WordAds, on the other hand, are best suited for websites that are within broader niches that are perhaps less advertised. In such case it is much harder to target specific people with specific ads and a ‘per impression’ payout model becomes more profitable in such case.
Note that many of these programs won’t let you in until you get a solid number of views on your page. So just concentrate in creating content and promoting your website first. Once you’re then starting to get around 50,000 page views a months, you can start making serious money with this website monetizing method.
5.2 Monetizing your website – Method #2: Affiliate Marketing
Running ads on your website is nice and all, but you need to attract hundreds of thousands of page views if you want to turn your website into a seriously profitable business that way.
Thankfully, there is another method which lets you monetize your website with a lot less views and visitors: Affiliate Marketing!
The concept of Affiliate Marketing is as easy as it is effective. Basically, you are getting a commission for sales you refer to your vendor. Let’s for example say your website is about fishing. You will hence write about different fishing techniques, perhaps the best places to fish and where you can find what fish. Additionally, you would likely also write about fishing equipment, first and foremost about rods. You may for example review and compare different rods from different companies and then recommend one or more products based on your own experiences or opinion. Here’s where it gets interesting: As an affiliate partner for one of those rod manufacturers or an online shop which sells them, you can now paste affiliate links to the seller and earn a commission for every sale you have referred. The commission is typically given as a certain percentage of the total price for a product.
So let’s say you get 100 visitors to your review page about the different rods that you recommend. 10 of those 100 people proceed to click on the link to the sales page of the online shop which sells the rod and which you act as an affiliate partner for. 1 of those 10 then completes the sale and orders the respective rod (Conversion rate = 1/100 = 1%). Through the special referral link, the seller recognizes that it was you who sent the buyer to his page and therefore awards you with a predetermined percentage of the price. If the agreed on rate was 20% and the price for the rod $200, you would get $40.
Now if such referred sales occurs every day of the month, you could expect a monthly revenue of $1,200 ($40 x 30 days) for your business. And all that with a relatively low assumed conversion rate of only 1% and only 100 visitors a day which isn’t very much and reachable within a few months. Triple your conversion rate to 3% (which is about the average for most niches) and increase your daily number of visitors to around 500 and you’ll already make a whopping $18,000 per MONTH for only that one referred product.
As you can see, affiliate marketing can be a highly profitable way of making money with your website and it is quite easy to implement. Essentially, all you need is enough (good) content and then a (relevant) vendor who is interested in an affiliate partnership with you.
And this leads us to the last point of your hopefully very successful future as a affiliate marketer: Where and how can you enter affiliate partnerships. You could of course just contact each vendor individually and offer them a partnership. But especially if you have many different products that you link on your website, this could take ages. Not to mention that some vendors simply aren’t interested in such a partnership. They will usually indicate such an interest with an appropriate affiliate page section placed in the footer of their website. If there is no such section, it usually means that they aren’t interested in obtaining affiliate partners (you can still ask of course).
But there are more effective ways to become involved in affiliate marketing: By signing up for one of the many affiliate marketing platforms out there. Affiliate platforms, more commonly known as affiliate programs, let you choose from many different products to promote and link to. Vendors interested in working with affiliate partners sign up for such program and then you can easily start promoting by your own personal affiliate link which you get from the respective vendor.
Here are the leading affiliate programs known to be the most popular and profitable out there:
Clickbank
Clickbank is an extremely popular affiliate marketing platform used by affiliate marketers all around the world. Unlike many other providers, Clickbank is specifically dedicated to affiliate marketing. It doesn’t sell any own products and instead just connects interested vendors with potential affiliate partners.
One of the things that make Clickbank so popular among affiliate marketers is the incredibly easy usage of the platform. Simply sign up and then head to the Clickbank Marketplace. Choose one of the hundreds of products from various categories that fit your niche and that you feel your website visitors will like or be interested to check out and then grab your personal affiliate link and paste in onto your website. That’s it. For optical reasons you may want to use a URL shortening service like Bitly for your affiliate link. But aside from that, that’s it. Everytime the clicking of your link leads to a sale, you will get a commission out of it.
And that’s really the best thing about Clickbank: The commission rates for Clickbank products are the highest in the industry, unbeatable really. This allows you to make a lot of money relatively quick.
The downside to using Clickbank is that there’s also a lot of junk products on there which could hurt your reputation among your website visitors if you try to promote those to them. So make sure you’ll find a Clickbank product that you can honestly recommend to your users.
It can take a while to make your first money with Clickbank, but in the longer term you can make spectacular amounts of money with it. Most successful Clickbank marketers make five figures a year, but a yearly six figures revenue ($100,000+) is not uncommon either. Clickbank has paid out many billions of Dollars in commissions to its affiliates, that alone should tell you how profitable this platform can be for you. Just find out how to put this powerful platform best to use and you, too, can create a business around it.
There are many resources online that teach you how to create a successful money-making business with Clickbank. The so-called “Clickbank University“ is the most notable example of that. It is Clickbank’s own very detailed offer to teach affiliates how to build a profitable business around the platform (after all, Clickbank profits when their affiliates profit). In total, CB University has led their “students” to whopping revenues of more than $3 billion over the years. Check it out if you want:
2. Amazon Affiliate Program
Whenever there is something to sell, Amazon needs to be part of the conversation. The world’s largest online retailer does also offer an affiliate program. The best thing about it is the vast variety of products you can promote for Amazon. It basically doesn’t matter in what niche you are, there are practically always relevant products for which you can refer your visitors to Amazon.
The bad news is that Amazon doesn’t offer exactly attractive commission rates. They are usually in the single digits (less than 10%). Compared to Clickbank, that is depressingly low. BUT in return Amazon offers pretty much the highest conversion rates anywhere on the internet. People know Amazon and trust Amazon.Which means once you send your website visitors to an Amazon sales pages, the likelihood that they will sell the respective product tends to be much higher compared to, for example, Clickbank.
Clickbank products give you the highest commission rates, but tend to have relatively low conversion rates. Amazon, on the other hand, offers much less attractive commission rates, but the highest conversion rates anywhere on the Internet.
Update (May 2020): Amazon has now drastically reduced its commission rates even further. At this point the now extremely low commission rates make Amazon’s affiliate program far less attractive. You’re going to need a lot of sales (and by that, a lot visitors to your website) to make it viable. See the current commission rates below:
Image source: Amazon
If you’re not involved in the Luxury Beauty niche or at the very least the music / digital video, books, kitchen, automotive or fashion / apparel niche, then Amazon has become much less attractive for you as an affiliate partner.
5.3 Other affiliate programs
Clickbank and Amazon represent the most commonly used affiliate programs, but there are many more of course. Here’s a list of some of the best known ones currently:
Affiliate Platforms (other than Clickbank):
- CJ Affiliate
- ShareASale
- MaxBounty
- AdWork Media
- Tradedoubler
- Awin
- etc.
Retailers with Affiliate Programs (other than Amazon):
- Ebay
- BestBuy
- Walmart
- Home Depot
- etc.
There are additionally many companies which offer affiliate programs for their specific industry / niche. For example, if your website is in the travelling niche, the affiliate programs of hotel search sites like Booking.com or Tripdavisor are more profitable for you than anything else.