Making Your Own Website – The Big Picture: Video Part One

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2oI3sdn60I

Making Your Own Website – The Big Picture: Video Part Two

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCMPd2bWWJg

There are a few things that you need to keep in mind before you even start thinking about creating your own website.  The purpose of this article is to give you a broad idea of what you need to keep in mind when you get started.  Too many people just start creating or posting content without thinking about the future and the long-term repercussions.  Building a strong web presence takes time and effort, but it is simple, and if you do it right from the start you will reap the benefits in the future.  Everybody wants to make money, and if it is passive income so much the better.  If you keep these things in mind before you start creating a website and make your decisions based on these simple guidelines, you might just turn your website into a passive income generator sooner than you think.

The first choice you need to make is will you use free own website creation tools or will you use a paid website.  I will never recommend anybody use free websites, they might be a bit easier in the beginning but long-term it is a bad choice.

• Free websites or quick and easy to setup and is free
• Free website systems belong to someone else
• Free website hosting is out of your control
• Many of these free website systems the content you can create belongs to them
• You have limited control over how you monetize your website
• And you have very little control over the look and feel of your website

The only advantage of a free website is the fact that it is free.  All that said many people still to use web sites like blogger.com successfully.  If you only want to play around a little bit and you have no dreams of turning your knowledge and effort into money, then rather go with the free option.  But if you are even slightly serious about building your own website and generating passive income for you and your family I would strongly recommend you go for the paid options.

I know that paid websites are the best route to take, I have burned my fingers enough to stay far away from free options. The biggest problems I have had in the past was the moment my website started getting serious and getting some good traffic, the “free” host want me to start paying stupid money.  Paid websites are the better option for anybody even a little bit serious for the following reasons:

• You have complete control over all the content
• You have complete control over the look and feel of a website
• You have complete control over the platform you want to use
• You need to make a small initial investment
• Self-hosted website means you need to spend a small amount of money each month

What do I mean by a small investment?  You are going to have to buy your own domain name and you’re going to have to pay a small amount of money each month to have your website hosted.  A domain name usually sells for about $10.00 and hosting will cost you no more than $10.00 per month. For the extremely low cost and great long term benefits of hosting your website yourself, you can afford to rather stay away from free own website creation tools.

With this in place, you have everything you need to start building your website towards and soon earning money from your efforts.  The secret is to start small and not to lose focus and try too many different things at once, as I did many times.  Keep your focus on what you know and share relevant, interesting information and just keep on publishing content.  I promise you will reap the benefits.  It is not a quick process bit it is a simple one.  In this community we will show you how to set up your website simply an easily and what to keep in mind from the start, so that you reap the benefits of having your own website quicker.  We will start with the absolute basics and work our way through to the more advanced topics.  Let’s have a look at the basics first:

• Select your topic or niche
• Select your domain name
• Choose where you’re going to host your website
• Select the platform you’re going to use to run your website
• Start generating the content for your website

Let’s have a look at each one of these in a bit more detail.

Your topic or niche

If you select your niche carefully from the beginning you’ll just rank so much faster in the Google’s search engine.  And the secret to growing your website to money is to get visitors to your site.  I will always recommend choosing a topic that interests you, something you will enjoy writing about and doing research on.  If you are very knowledgeable on the topic, that is a bonus.

Your domain name

Selecting a domain name can be a very complex process, but it need not be.  Because so many domain names have already been taken it might feel like you just cannot find the domain name that you want.  Keep in mind that you are going to select a domain name based on the keywords of your main topic or niche.  And more specifically were going to choose long tail keyword for your domain name.  A long tail keyword is simply a keyword that consists of more than one phrase, for example “how do I create a website” instead of “create website”.  And there are still many long tail domain names available.  We will show you how to do the research so that you can find your perfect domain name.  Basically what you’re looking for is a long tail keyword that has little competition but enough traffic.  We will show you in following videos how to find this keyword.  Then you simply turn this keyword into a domain name, or find the closest available domain.

Your hosting

There are literally hundreds of hosting companies out there.  We have hosted with many of them and know which ones are good and which ones are not so good.  We will show you which ones to use that’s cheap yet very reliable and offer you the best deal.  Choosing your hosting will be a next video.

The platform

There are many different platforms out there.  Platforms like WordPress, Joom and Drupal.  We use WordPress because we found it to be the most powerful platform for the purposes of building your own content website.  It is an open source platform which means you do not have to pay to use the software.  WordPress might have started off as a blogging platform a long time ago but it has turned into a very powerful content management system.  Just visit the WordPress.org website and have a look at the examples they give of companies currently using the WordPress platform.  Individuals are using it, small business is using it and corporate companies are using it to run their web sites.  The WordPress community is massive.  You’ll never lack for support, there are millions of themes that you can use and millions of plugins to upgrade your site and add different functionality.  On this community we will mainly focus on WordPress  and we will show you how to setup your WordPress website and make it look and function in the way you want for whatever purpose you want to use it.

Your content

Content is at the heart of your website.  That’s why you need to choose a topic that you are passionate about.  Creating content will take the most of your time initially and you need to be very consistent.  The most important part is that you enjoy writing about the topic or niche you have chosen.  There are certain things you need to keep in mind when writing this content and we will show you what those are, but the main thing is to keep your writing natural and just have write the way you would talk.  Publishing content in WordPress is easy and we will show you how.

Advanced topics

Once we have covered the basics, you have your website up and running and you’ve started publishing some content you can move on to more advanced topics.  I urge you to first get going, just get your first website published, don’t even think about the advanced stuff.  Just keep it simple and stay on target.  Some of the advance topics we will cover at a later stage include the following:

• Search engine optimisation
• Advanced keyword research
• Advanced domain selection
• Advanced content creation
• Advanced platform management
• Email list building

But don’t worry about this now. If you need some of these skills to setup the basics, we will give you that info, but only that bit of info you need, no overwhelming tactics and fancy tricks, just what you need to move forward.