Welcome, WarriorForum newbie!
Ready to create your first money-making website?
If you’re here then you probably already know about warriorforum.com and you probably want to make money online. This free guide is for those who are new to internet marketing and want to start making money online with their own websites.
There are so many beginners at warriorforum.com who take the wrong approach that I felt compelled to help people get a good solid start. This is a pretty brief guide, but if you can understand it, you’ll have a foundation that you can build on. This guide will walk you through the process of creating your first profitable website.
Like a lot of other beginners, you may be suffering from information overload and have no idea where to start. Fortunately, the general process of generating income from your own websites is actually pretty straightforward.
The easiest way to get started in Internet Marketing (or IM for short) is to develop a niche website and build traffic to it. For your niche website to be successful, you need to do two distinct things:
- Be able to generate quality traffic
- Be able to monetize the traffic
This short guide will show you how to do both of those things. But first, what is a niche site?
A niche site is a website that has a tightly defined subject matter and target market. For example, a website about kayak fishing would be a niche website; a website about picking the right dog food would be a niche website; a website about learning how to play poker would be a niche site.
This guide will walk you through 3 basic sections:
- Choosing the subject of your niche site and keywords
- Creating your niche website
- Marketing and profiting from your niche website
Choosing the subject of your niche site and keywords
Choosing the subject of your first niche site isn’t a decision to take lightly. You’re going to be investing hours of your time into setting it up and marketing it, so it only makes sense to spend some time right now and get it right from the start.
My first tip is something that not all internet marketers exactly agree on: I think your first niche site should be on a subject you have some sort of interest in. Some say that you should simply find the most profitable niche regardless of what you’re interested in, and that may hold true for more advanced marketers. I think finding a subject you’re interested in helps you to product higher quality content.
The next question is: how big is the niche? Some niches are big, some are tiny. You need to make sure enough people are interested in the niche you’re focusing on. This ties in to the keywords you’ll be selecting as well. Since your aim will be to get a ton of free search engine traffic, figure out which search engine keywords you’ll want to use. Check out the Google Keyword Tool, which is free. Use it to find keywords related to your niche that don’t have too much competition, but have a decent number of searches. Keep a list of these keywords.
Finally, you need to ask yourself how you plan to profit from being in this niche. There are a lot of ways to monetize a website, they include:
- selling an affiliate product/service
- selling your own digital/physical products
- building a mailing list
- Participating in CPA networks
- Advertising with adsense, etc.
- Create a paid membership site
So, which of the above are you going to do to monetize the traffic from your niche site? If you plan in selling affiliate product, which ones?
Once you figure out which niche you want to get into, and you have a list of keywords and a general idea of how you want to monetize your niche site, it’s time to take action. Onto the next section.
Setting up your niche website
Depending on your budget, you may decide to hire someone to create your niche site (by the way I’m a web developer, hit me up if you want my help!) – or you may decide you want to set it up yourself. Fortunately, setting up your own website is actually really easy. For beginners, I recommend creating your website around wordpress since it’s so easy to customize and update. With no skills whatsoever, you can find a decent free wordpress theme and get started creating content/blogging right away. Your websites may look a little bit rough, but if you create great content your visitors will barely even notice.
Choosing Your Hosting and Domain
You need a domain and a host to create your website, this is one of the few upfront costs in getting your niche website started, but it’s not too much. For $75 you can register your domain and get hosting with Hostmonster. The best thing about hostmonster is they offer automatic wordpress installs so you’ll barely have to do a thing to get your site up and running.
When you pick a domain consider a few things:
- try to pick a domain that contains your keywords
- aim for .com domains whenever possible
- most of the best domains with great keyword combinations are taken, but remember that you don’t need a direct match to benefit from having a keyword in your domain.
Here’s how to sign up for a domain and hosting account with Hostmonster:
- Click this link to go to the signup page
- Click on the big “Get Started” button in the center of the screen
- Under the “I Need a Domain” section, enter the domain name that you want and click ‘next’ to see if it’s available (Most of the good/short domain names are already taken, so try to enter something as unique as you can!)
- Fill in your account information and choose the package you want (minimum 12 month initial subscription at $6.95 per month), I recommend unchecking all of the extra options
- Enter your billing info and click ‘next’
- Complete any additional required info – you will be emailed with your site access data. Save these emails, you’ll need the info to work on your website.
If paying for 12 months in advance is too expensive for you (which is Hostmonster’s minimum plan), I recommend you check out Hostgator.com and sign up there, they offer monthly plans – the process is basically the same and they also offer a cPanel interface which is nearly identical to the hostmonster one.
Setting Up Your Website
Next step is actually installing the blog – fortunately it’s really simple. After you’ve signed up with Hostmonster, navigate to your ‘cpanel’ which is your hosting control panel. You should have been emailed a link to this when you signed up, but the links should be www.yourdomain.com/cpanel
Use the login information you chose when you signed up and login. Once in cPanel, scroll down to the icon that says ‘WordPress’ and click on it. You’ll be taken to a page with a button that lets you create a brand new installation. Click on the button to begin the install process. Fill in the requested information and lick on the ‘advanced’ option to enter in your username and password. Once you finish the installation you will be emailed with the details about the site you set up.
You’ve now got a basic empty wordpress blog installed on your site, you can go ahead and log in to the admin section and get started. The link to the wordpress admin section will be www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin and you can use the login details you selected when you installed wordpress.
The wordpress admin section allows you to add new posts, pages, plugins and themes. You can use the admin section to change the general wordpress options which include the site’s name,tagline and permalink structure (I recommend learning about creating semantic permalink structure before you start posting, but that’s up to you).
Adding a post is one of the most basic actions you can take in wordpress. You can post about whatever you want. You can try to sell things to your visitors, give product reviews, post your opinions, etc. Go ahead and start posting about whatever you want to display on the main page of your blog. When you install wordpress, there is one sample page and one sample post in your site, you can just delete these.
Changing the wordpress theme is the quickest way to make your site look awesome. Go to the themes section in the wordpress admin panel and click on ‘add themes’ to search through thousands of free themes and install/activate them with a few clicks. There are many different themes that are suitable for many different niches.
Changing themes in wordpress is really easy, and it doesn’t disrupt the content of your website. What I’m getting at is that if you’re not in love with the look of your website now, you can always hire someone to make a better theme for you later. Right now just focus on creating quality content on your site.
You should also check out the ‘widgets’ section of the wordpress admin panel. Widgets refer to the ‘sidebar’ section of your wordpress site. The widgets section lets you customize the sidebar contents and put in whatever you want.
Finally, I want to touch on wordpress plugins. WordPress plugins instantly add functionality to your website. They allow you to do things like offer mailing list signup forms, offer subscriptions, create membership sites, etc. Whatever the specific function of your wordpress website is going to be, you can use a combination of plugins to achieve it. The plugins section of the wordpress admin panel allows you to search and install thousands of free and useful plugins. I recommend browsing to get an idea of what plugins can do.
I recommend getting some SEO (search engine optimization) plugins such as all-in-one seo pack and a sitemap creator. Basic seo includes creating meta titles, decriptions and keywords for each of your pages, and this plugin makes it easy (whenever you create a new post or page it will allow you to enter the SEO meta). This simple stuff helps get you more search engine traffic later on.
Ok, that’s all I’m going to say about wordpress. I realize that was brief, but my intention isn’t how to teach you to be a wordpress master, but just to introduce you instead. Check out codex.wordpress.org to learn more.
The next section deals with marketing your site and getting traffic to it.
Marketing and profiting from your websites
There are tons ways for you to spend a marketing budget to promote your niche site, but some of the most effective methods of promotion are the ones you do on your own. I don’t even recommend purchasing traffic (even high quality PPC traffic) to beginners. I belive it’s best to make your websites profitable first before you star investing in traffic.
Some of your most valuable traffic will come from search engines, so you should spend a decent amount of time making this happen. There are volumes of information written on getting search engine traffic, but it really comes down to two three basic things:
- Creating content with good keywords
- Building links to those pages with content
- Performing on-site SEO
To create content with good keywords, you need to do a little keyword research. You should still have a list from earlier, start with that. When you create your posts, try to put the keyword in the title and in the body of the text as well, but don’t make the quality of the article suffer by ‘stuffing’ keywords too much.
After you’ve created some posts on your site, it’s time to build some links to them. When you create a post in wordpress, it gets it’s own special URL – you can just click on the title of the post on your main page and you’ll be taken to that page. Copy this URL, you’ll be using it for link building.
n link building, the goal is to get links pointing to your site and pages from high quality, popular sites. When you do this, Google recognizes the links and assigns popularity to your site, and starts to give you search engine traffic. The following are some things to remember when link building:
- Learn about ‘nofollow’ links and avoid getting this type of backlink.
- Learn about anchor text, and use good anchor text (with keywords) in your backlinks
- Avoid linking from spammy sites, and avoid link building services that promise thousands of backlinks for just a little bit of money
So where do you get backlinks to your site? There are a ton of places, here are a few of the most common:
- Blog Commenting (search google for doFollow and commentLuv blogs!)
- Guest blogging (great way to gain backlinks and authority)
- Forum commenting (search googe for dofollow forums that allow sigs!)
- Trade links with other webmasters (reciprocal linking, avoid A-B linking in favor of other methods)
- Buy backlinks (only buy from reputable sources with established recommendations, and be careful not to get scammed).
Keep a list of all the backlinks you build, it will be useful for when you need to build links to new sites/articles and you’ll save a lot of time.
Final Tips:
- Creating income from the internet takes some time, don’t expect it to happen in a few days or a few weeks. Think on the time scale of months or years.
- Don’t stop building links to your website, if you do it on a regular basis your search engine traffic will continue to grow.
- Always try to improve your conversion ratio. Experiment with split testing, try spicing up your sales copy.
- Figure out how to drive traffic to and generate profit from one website before you start building a network. You need to know how to be successful on a small scale before you can expand.
- Write down your plan and stick to it. Estimate how much work you’ll need to do to achieve your goals and schedule out all the work that needs to be done.
- Be careful with your money. The goal of internet marketing is to generate income, not spend a lot of cash. Before you spend money on anything, ask yourself if it’s something you can do on your own for free, and how the expenditure is going to increase your profitability.
- Network. Use internet marketing forums to meet new people and start a dialogue with them. Figure out how you cna use your contacts to your advantage: link trading, guest blogging, mailing list swaps, etc.
