One of the main ways of earning online is to have your own
blog or website and making money through advertising and related promotions.
It might seem intimidating if you have only a limited amount of technical expertise, but it is in fact surprisingly easy to set up an earning website nowadays.
It might seem intimidating if you have only a limited amount of technical expertise, but it is in fact surprisingly easy to set up an earning website nowadays.
Why Create Your Own Earning Blog or Website?
One of the main advantages of having your own earning website
is that it is “passive income”. That
means that once it is set up, you can be doing other things while the blog/site
is earning money. The site can even earn
money while you are sleeping!.
(That’s the theory of “passive” income anyway, in practice you will have to spend some time maintaining it and adding new material from time to time!)
(That’s the theory of “passive” income anyway, in practice you will have to spend some time maintaining it and adding new material from time to time!)
There are some free blogging services out there, of course, including
the Google Blogger platform, which is the platform for this blog. Having a site with its own domain name is
generally seen as more professional, however, by many, especially if the site
has any commercial ambitions. Plus
having your own website gives you much more flexibility and control in the long
run.
Below is my brief guide showing you how simple
it can be to have your own blog or website up and running in no time!
#1 Decide What the Content of Your Website Will Be
In many ways, picking the subject that your website can actually be more difficult than the technical aspects of setting it up.
Ideally you want to find a topic that people want to read, but which hasn’t already been heavily covered already.
You should try to pick a niche, that’s to say focus the
blog/site around a certain topic or area, rather than allow your blog to be too
diverse.
Examples of niches might be washing-machine reviews, or travel guides for Mexico, or Thai cookery and recipes.
Examples of niches might be washing-machine reviews, or travel guides for Mexico, or Thai cookery and recipes.
Other things to consider when deciding on the content are:
- You should pick an area where you have some experience, knowledge, or expertise. The reader needs to know that you have an understanding of the subject.
- Some topics are naturally easier to make money from than others. For instance, a site reviewing washing-machines is a good place to advertise new washing machines and maybe make some money. A site about the history of French philosophy, no matter how interesting, has far less commercial possibilities (you might be able to sell a few books, but that might be the limit).
- If you are writing a blog, you need to find a topic that you can write extensively on over a long period of time.
- Try to avoid areas where there is a lot of strong competition. There are numerous resources to help you, Google Adwords is free and can be very useful for telling you what phrases people are searching for. You can should also try out some Google searches to see what’s already out there and what the competition looks like. The ideal is to find a topic that people search for but which has already got strong competition.
#2 Get a Domain Name
There are many places where you can buy domain names (GoDaddy, for example, is one of the better known ones). However, if you buy your domain name from a different company to the one that you use to host your site, you will have to “point” the domain to your hosting service. “Pointing” is pretty straightforward and involves only a small amount of copying and pasting, but you can avoid this altogether by buying your domain from the same place as your website.
There are two schools of thought on how to choose a domain
name. One is that you should pick a
domain name that contains the product or service that you provide in it, for
example: washingmachinereviews.com, or iphonetips.net. This makes it obvious what your blog/site is
about and also helps you get traffic from the search engines.
You don’t want a name that is too long and unwieldy,
however. You may also find that many of
the best domain names for what you want to do have already been taken,
especially if it is a dotcom that you are after.
The other school of though is that you should pick a name
that you can use as a brand, it should be brief and easy to remember. Tumblr.com and Bing.com fall into this
category.
How much does a domain name cost?
Domains typically cost between around $3 and $15 per year
(dotcoms are more expensive usually).
#3 Get a Website Hosting Service
There are numerous hosting services out there. My personal favorite and the one that I normally use is HostGator.
I heartily
recommend them both for hosting and the domain name. Their hosting is extremely reliable and their
customer service is friendly and efficient in my experiences – they are also
highly rated across the industry generally.
#4 Download Wordpress and Pick a Theme
The Wordpress software is wonderful in that it enable you to set up your blog/site for you without you having to type in lots of code. If you use HostGator, you can access and install Wordpress with one click, see video below . Wordpress is completely free, by the way.
Once you have Wordpress installed, it’s time to pick a
theme. There are plenty of free themes
out there. Many website
owners use the Thesis Theme for WordPress, it costs money but is more flexible than most of the free
themes, especially if you don’t have any html code skills.
#5 Add Your Advertising
There are many advertising services to pick from, but the two most popular are Google Adsense and Amazon Associates.
Google Adsense works through related ads being placed on the
page and you being paid if a reader clicks on an ad.
Amazon Associates involves promoting Amazon products on your
site. When someone uses a link from your
site to go to Amazon and buy a product, you earn a commission of anywhere between
4% and 8.5% on the sale.
You will need to sign up to each of these services
separately.
What Next?
Once your site is set up, then your next move is to work on promoting it. This also may not be as difficult as you think. To explore this area fully requires much more than one or two sentences, but what I will say is that there are plenty of free ways to get good publicity, many of them completely free – you can utilize social media networks, such as Twitter, for instance.
I just finished reading this article and found it very informative as well useful. I too have a plan to start a blog and thinking of doing something great on India travels, especially the spiritual journeys. But my problem is I am not an expert on maintaining a site as my own due to less expertise in the field. I do well in HubPages. Anyhow your article has instilled a kind of confidence and energy in me. I hope to start my own soon. Thank you for this nice post. I will welcome more such useful blogs from you in future.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the positive feedback. Using Wordpress, the technical side is fairly straightforward. Identifying a good topic to write about is actually pretty tough however.
DeleteHi paul i make a amazing blog on godaddy tips4earning.com amazing experience when others comment on my blog i fell happiness can you tell me google ad sense approve my blog please take a look my blog tips4earning.com reply me as soon as possible thanks.
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