If you do not choose a niche that you are passionate about, you will soon get extremely frustrated. We recommend you choose a niche you are passionate about and will love writing, researching and making videos about. There is a comprehensive tutorial on niche selection elsewhere on the “Making Own Website”.org community.

Please see: How do I find my niche

How do I find my niche?

This is the topic you are going to spend hours writing about. You will be spending hours doing keyword research. You are going spend time answering questions in forums on this topic. You are going to be making videos on your niche topic. You are going to be writing articles. You will eventually be creating products.

So you see, you really must love the niche you choose!

How do I find my niche?: Video Part One

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4RCCFHDd_U

Ho do I find my niche?: Video Part Two

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCYVM5t3aDE

Before you can start making your own website this niche topic needs to be as clear as daylight in your mind. No second guessing yourself. Once you start, it is VERY important to build and keep your momentum.

If you have not looked at the make my own website to get the big picture, please do that quickly.

How do I find my niche?

How do I find my niche?

• Look at areas you are already knowledgeable in
• Ask your friends and family what they think you are good at
• Make a list of the first twenty things that pop into your mind

Choose a niche with the following attributes:

• You have a passion for the niche
• The niche have the potential to earn money
• The niche is not completely saturated

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

You must have a passion for your niche

Remember, you will be spending hours and hours creating content for this niche.

Your niche must have the potential to earn money

When you do a search in Google on your specific niche, can you see Adwords ads on the right? Adwords ads are on the right and at the top of the screen. If you can see people and companies advertising then you can be fairly sure people are making money in that niche.

The niche is not completely saturated

That’s why you need to be very specific when you choose your niche. You will not rank anywhere (maybe on page 100) on Google with your website if you choose a niche like “diet” or “car” or “bike”. There is no money to be had in such a broad niche anyways.

You need to narrow the niche down to what is known as a long tail niche. This means there are more phrases in the niche or keyword term you choose for you niche. Narrow the “bike” niche down like this for example:

1. “bike”
2. “mountain bike”
3. “mountian biking for women”

“Mountain Biking for Woman” is a good long tail niche to focus on.

Here are some more resources to help you choose your niche:

In depth description of a Niche Market

Are you 100% sure you are the owner of your website?

Should you be using free websites at all?

The only way to be 100% certain that a website belongs to you:

• You must personally register the domain name
• You must personally host your website
• You must at all times be able to publish any content you want
• You must at all times be able to change the design of your website in any way you want
  

If you can do all of the above, then your website belongs to you. If not, you are using free website tools or a system that belongs to someone else. In the following videos I discuss what the differences are between free website creation and owning your website outright.

Owning Your Website or using Free Websites: Video Part One

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

Owning Your Website or using Free Websites: Video Part Two

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QOs9_XhvH8

Making Your Own Website

Let me put it to you this way, if you are even a little bit serious about publishing a website that will earn you money, then a free website service is completely out of the question.

For the following reasons:

• The content you publish is not really your content
• You do not have control over the domain name on many free websites
• You have very little to no control over the design of your website
• A free website is not scalable, you cannot add new functionality of your choice
• You have no control over how you monetize the content you publish

My own experiences with free websites have not been a good one. Too many of them will suddenly start charging you when you get some good traffic and if you do not pay, they take control of your website. This is not true for all free websites, but it’s not worth the risk. If you have not read the “Making Own Website” basics post and watched the videos, please visit that first, it sets you up for the rest of the steps toward creating your own website.

If you are willing to create quality content and you are going to spend the hours doing this, then why not spend a little money up front for a strong domain name and a few dollars every month on quality hosting you control.

You can then control how and when you want to start monetizing your website. It is not a good idea to start monetizing from the beginning, more on this later. If you have your own website and your own hosting you can control this. You can control the functionality of your website, on the WordPress platform you can choose to add extras using plugins. For example you might want to use your website to do event management or project management; you can easily add this to your own website.

What will a paid website cost you?

To register your own domain name with Godaddy will cost you $7.49 if you buy through us ($11.99 if you buy directly from Godaddy). Get very good starter hosting deals with Hostgator Unlimited Hosting starting at $3.96 or Godaddy Limited Hosting for as low as $1.99. The hosting package deals all offer different benefits, we will look at hosting in detail in a future video.

The best part is, once you have your hosting account setup, you can host as many websites as you please. This means once you have once niche focused website up and running, you can launch another and another in the same broad industry, each focused on specific keywords. Each one of these websites could potentially become passive money generators for you if stay focused and build your websites correctly from the start. (We will show you exactly what to do in upcoming videos)

In future videos we will show you exactly how to register your Godaddy account and your Hostgator account and what you need to do to setup your account. It is VERY simple and absolutely worth it to get your own website setup this way. Everything remains in your control, your content is yours to do with as you please, you can add selected functions in the form of new plugins to your website and you can monetize your website the right way (more on monetization later).

My expert opinion, stay away from free website hosting. For the extremely low price of a domain name and quality hosting it’s just not worth it to take a chance with free hosting.

If you do choose to still to go with free websites, then go with a service you can trust. Here is a short list of quality places to launch your free website/blog:

• Blogger
• WordPress
• Typepad

These are mostly viewed as blogging platforms, but the difference between a website and a blog is only in the name. You do not have the freedom with these services as you would have when running your own website, but they are very good for launching a test website and playing around a bit.

You can even launch a few of these blogging sites and keep them active, because later we will need them to build the credibility and search engine ranking of your own website.

To continue on your journey of making your own website, you will need to get yourself your own domain name and open your hosting account. We will be showing you exactly how to setup your account, how to manage your domain name and how to start publishing YOUR OWN website.

There are hundreds of services out there, we recommend the following:

For domain registration:

• Godaddy will cost you $7.49 if you buy through us

For your hosting account:

• Hostgator Unlimited Hosting starting at $3.96
• Godaddy Limited Hosting for as low as $1.99

But we will take you through choosing and setting up your account in detail in future videos. For now go and do your topic / niche research and start making a short list of what you want to write about.

Remember to have a look at the “making own website” page to get a big picture view of how to approach creating your own website.

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

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

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

Making Your Own Website

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.