Start Making Money Online
If you’ve ever been looking for a way to make extra money online then I have no doubt you’ve wondered how websites make so much money. In this post, I will share with you a great method I have found to do this and share with you a step-by-step summary of how to create a business from a website. It’s the best way to turn something you already like doing, a hobby or an interest into your own residual income that will grow over time.
Turn your passion into a business!
There are so many different ways of generating money on the internet and most will only create a bit of extra cash each month. I know this as I have also been where you are, searching for hours for a solution. This is fine if that is enough to feed your hunger for that extra income and if so have a read of my post on how to make money online but there is more potential to the internet than most people realise.
Follow my steps below to see how anyone can create an income online that will grow every month as you keep building your site – No experience needed!
Background
We read websites every day from blogs to newsfeeds and all sorts of social media. One thing people won’t always see is that all these websites are there for a reason, to make money! It could be a review site recommending a product or a community site making money off the adverts from the large traffic flow. If you have the focus and determination to look further you could learn how to create a business from a website yourself. This doesn’t have to be just for businesses to use you can do this from home and from just talk about something you like.
Businesses create websites to attract customers and generate extra profits. To do this they use advertising to catch customers attention and draw them to their websites and hopefully gain those extra sales. This same style of business you can use for yourself but one thing you don’t need to have but they do is products. Businesses need capital to buy products and then use websites to sell these products. The more products they sell the more profit they make. They also have to take into account purchase price and profit margins.
The great thing is you don’t need capital, you don’t need products and you don’t have to worry about profit margins or any other cost really. I will show you how to use the internet techniques they use to promote their products and help increase their profits and in turn, they will pay you a commission for generating that sale for them. This is called Affiliate Marketing!
What is Affiliate Marketing?
The name affiliate has been given to the idea of you affiliating yourself with businesses, working with them to help them generate a profit. You are in a sense acting like another website for them. More web space means they can reach more people. To become an affiliate you have to apply to a business through their affiliate schemes and if you get approval then you can start using their links. There is so much potential in this that most people don’t realise and yet we click them every day.
There are thousands and thousands of different affiliate possibilities because just about every company has an affiliate scheme as they know it is so effective. You just simply find a site name and then do another search on Google with the company name and add an affiliate to your search. This will then link you to the affiliate section of their website. I find not every company advertise their affiliate schemes on their main website pages so this is the best way to get in with them. Or you can even just do a search for affiliate programs but then you tend to find sites that act as a management site for affiliates.
Myths of affiliate marketing
It’s not as easy as just creating a website and putting a few affiliate links on and suddenly making money. This I found out the hard way because unfortunately there are loads of scams out there telling people this is the case. Website-building companies get people signed up promising them quick and easy ways to make money. They then tell their customers all they have to do is use their website builders and put Amazon adverts all over it.
Unfortunately, there are no easy wins in this world just fake promises. If it was that easy everyone would do it. All that really happens is you are paying them a monthly fee in the false hopes of making money. You build a site with them stick ads on and sit there waiting for months to see a few clicks but never build any traffic. It frustrates me that these scammers prey on our desires to make money. This is why I built my site
It frustrates me that these scammers prey on our desires to make money. This is one of the reasons I created my website, grahamhodsdon.com. Where I share what I’ve learnt over the years to help others grow and hopefully prevent people from getting caught out by scammers. Along my journey my urge to learn more and learn ways to create an income I have come across scam after scam. So I use my site to expose these scammers to the world and hopefully teach you how to avoid them too. I also will be exploring ways to improve our lives and also reviewing different ways to make money online and recommending ways I personally think are safe and if they are worth the time and effort.
How to get started with Affiliate Marketing!
All you need to get started is:
- A Niche
- A Domain Name
- A Hosting Server
- A Website
- Great Keywords
- Time and Effort
- Support and Training
- Affiliate links
The best thing is, I can show you how to set each one up for FREE!
What is a Niche?
A Niche is what topic you chose to write about on your website, it’s a particular segment of the market. A segment of customers log on to the internet and search for this topic to read. When choosing a Niche you cannot be too broad as your site will be too varied and to be successful you need to be more specialised to create great traffic. So it’s not as easy as just picking Electrical Goods as your topic to write about. Electrical Goods is too broad as it covers anything from laptops and computers to hoovers and anything that has a plug. This would make a site too broad and you wouldn’t capture traffic as easily as it would be too difficult to write enough about such a large amount of different topics.
A Specialised Niche
You would need to pick a niche that is more specific, like tablets for example. This allows you to build very detailed reviews and allows you to compare different types. Consumers searching for tablets to learn more about them. They could then visit your site to help them decide which one to buy. You can then link different companies selling tablets as affiliates and then you get paid a commission for each sale. This also allows you to branch out a bit to laptops and mobiles as well, as your site builds, as these are all similar products. Though I would still recommend keeping most of your site about your main niche.
Secret to a Successful Site
The secret to an effective affiliate site is great content. Customers will keep coming back to a site full of pages of content. The trick is to keep publishing new posts and great posts can take a few hours to write. So you just need to keep posting several times a week once your site is up and running and it will keep your readers coming back. This is where your passion or your hobby comes in handy because it is your hobby you will be very passionate about it and have a lot to write about.
Create a Domain Name
Now you have selected your niche all you need is a name for your site. This is your domain name and depending on what you chose you will have a choice of the ending like ‘.com’. To give you an idea if you chose .com is seen as more of a brand image. If you chose .org it is normally a sign that you are an organisation and .net is more of a network site. You can choose anything you like it is all done to you in the end.
To choose a Domain name you just need to buy and domain name and this can be done anywhere that sells them. They will register the domain for you and it will be yours for as long as you register it. You could just register it for a year and then reregister it next year.
Don’t worry too much about your site name as this doesn’t impact on your keywords too much, I will touch more on keywords later. Just pick a name for your site you like that tells people what your site will be about.
You can set up a free website and domain name here:
Hosting for your website
Before you build a website you need what they call a hosting package. A host is a company who owns servers. You usually pay these companies annual fees to be able to host your website on their servers. Servers run 24/7 so that anytime anyone wants to view your site it will be available. They will offer you an amount of storage and amount of sites you can host and the prices all vary.
Like I said I would share with you a way that is free to set up. Wealthy Affiliate has the best hosting package I have found so far as you can get set up for free. They give you 2 free websites with their SiteRubix platform and hosting for your website. You also get detailed step-by-step lessons on how to get started with your website and all are included. The lessons take you from a complete beginner with no experience through finding your niche, using keywords and finally getting your site up and running. This is all free within their starter membership package. It’s great as it also gives you a chance to test drive what they have to offer. You can go premium with them if you get really serious about wanting to be successful. This then opens up, even more, training and an impressive support system from a community of thousands of like-minded people.
Building a Website
Websites used to be a lot more difficult to make and you would need to learn lots of computer coding called HTML. Thankfully anyone can do it now thanks to companies creating software that does the coding for you. The easiest way to build a website is to use WordPress. WordPress is one the most commonly used platforms for building websites and a lot of big businesses use it too because it is so versatile. They use templates and then you add your content. There are thousands of available templates and these are increasing all the time.
It’s very easy to use too and the layout looks just like this:
Like I said all you do is add your content. Here is a basic explanation of how it works:
- This is the name of your post this needs to be the keyword you choose. (explanation to come)
- You just type what you want to say in your post here
- This is how you change your headers, bold, italic, indentations and text alignment. Very similar to Word.
- This is an easy way to add links to your content. Links take people to other pages or websites.
- Visual is selected at the minute as I am typing but if you select Text this will show the coding for your site
- Selecting Text shows how WordPress has changed your content to HTML code.
- This is your Dashboard for WordPress to build your website. Here you create new posts or pages, create menus and set the appearance of your site depending on what theme you have chosen.
- Then once you have finished creating your page or post just hit publish and now it appears on your website.
Viola! You’ve created your first page on your website.
WordPress takes care of all the site programming for you, you just select what you want your content to look like for example your headers, text colour and even links and then it converts it to coding. The coding is used by the internet to know how to render your site when people open your site. You just have to focus on being creative with your writing so that people will want to read it. The best way to write your content is in a relaxed informal way as if you are talking directly to your reader. This makes for a more relaxing read.
Great Keywords
You’ve now started to work on your pages so in order to create pages that people will find easily, you have to use great keywords. Keywords are the phrases or words people type into search engines, like Google, to find what they are looking for. Your goal is to find the best keywords that relate to your pages. Your aim is to get your page onto the first page of Google or any other search engine. If it’s on the first page you are more likely to be found.
Another great tool for you to use at Wealthy Affiliates is their Keyword Search tool. This allows you to type in different phrases or words people might use to find your site and tells you how many competitor sites use them. This helps you to select great Keywords that will hopefully get you in the top ranks of search engine pages that you need to gain traffic. Your best aim for Keywords with 100 competitor websites or less. I wouldn’t recommend going any higher. Too much competition means you won’t be found and won’t create traffic to your site. No traffic means no profit. This way once your site gains trust from search engines like Google, these keywords will then push you up the rankings and help bring in the consumers you need to turn a profit.
When you start going through the keywords you just need to click on view results to find out how many competitors there are. So you can find one that is under 100. If I was to click on view results for ‘make your own web page’ you would get this result.
So this Keyword particular keyword has 161 competitors using this keyword so I wouldn’t use this. It takes a good 10 to 20 minutes of good searching to find great keywords, The lower the better. The time you spend doing this is really worth every minute and can affect your site for life.
Where to use your Keywords
Keywords only need to be used a minimum of 4 times for each post but you can use it more, just don’t overdo it as this can go against you if you have filled your post with it. The 4 key areas are:
- Your page or post title
- Your URL link for the page or post – On WordPress, this is done automatically for you.
- Somewhere in your first paragraph
- Somewhere in your last paragraph.
These 4 are enough to get you rankings in the search engines. People underestimate the power of a great keyword. So make the most of these.
Time and Effort
You now have your niche, your domain name, your website is live and you have now created your first post or page with a great keyword. You are now in a great place to start moving your online business forward. Or are you? The one thing you are now missing is traffic.
Now it’s time to put some effort in and really create a site worth reading to create that traffic. a site up and running and all it takes now is for you to put the effort in to create your pages. You goal going forward is to create a content-rich site that you can reach out to consumers and start creating loyal readers. New sites take a while to get trusted by search engines so you need to build that trust. Once you start creating more pages and start getting comments you will begin to start building that trust.
Tips to take your site to success:
- Publish new posts regularly
- Invite people to make comments on your pages
- Prompt replies to these posts will show search engines you look after your readers.
- Content-rich posts, not just a few lines, this make for a good informative reading experience.
- Mix your pages up with some images to break up the content so it’s not a sea of words.
- Use headers to break up the post and show customers the relevant information a lot easier.
Traffic building
Once your traffic starts building keep the content flowing and start reaching out to social media to promote your site and your posts. This will then create more traffic for your site and in turn, the search engines will begin to see you as an authoritative site and trust you more. This will then send you up the rankings and in turn, get more visible to more customers on the search pages. You will soon be ready to start thinking about creating money from your site with affiliate links.
Support and Training
When building a successful business who best to take advice from than the ones that are already successful? Wealthy Affiliate is a fantastic community site full of like-minded people turning websites into successful businesses. This is where I learnt everything I am sharing with you. The community is free to join and sign up to and the support and training you get are second to no other business I’ve come across. The training is step by step and even uses video tutorials so anyone can follow each lesson. They teach you in great detail all the steps I have been talking you through and so much more. As for support, you’ll never have a question that can’t be answered because of the wealth of knowledge and levels of success there is always someone who has been there and can talk you through it. You can even message the founders Kyle and Carson and they will always reply, this was my biggest surprise the founders are active members of the community and there for support and guidance. You can also utilise myself and message me anytime and I will always be there for support.
Affiliate Links
Now it’s time to start researching good affiliate programs. You need to start by looking for affiliates of products relating to your niche so that they are relevant. Just sticking random adverts on your site to make money isn’t really going to drive a business for you.
That’s why you spend the time creating great content. Content that has created a following and a large amount of traffic. You can then add some adverts to your sidebar that might not be related to your post but they are from within your niche category. You could also write a full post about reviews on products or services on your website and then recommend them to potential customers. The affiliate links you then set up start sending customers to these products on their company websites. So when customers buy any of these products the company know who referred them and so know who to pay a commission.
You could even just add unrelated products and services to your site. I wouldn’t recommend doing that though as you have spent all that time creating a trusting relationship with your readers. They might not take kindly to having loads of unrelated adverts in their face. It is entirely up to you but seen as there are thousands of different affiliate programs, there will always be plenty to use for your niche anyway. As I said before just about every business has an affiliate program even if you can see it on their main site. So I recommend keeping them relevant and keep searching to find some great ones. Other types of affiliate links are PPC links.
PPC – Pay per click
These types of affiliate links are exactly what they say, you get paid every time someone clicks on one of the adverts. These don’t tend to fully relate to your site and sometimes they have absolutely nothing to do with your niche. These are like the Google Adsense banners where you sign up to have a window of adverts that are sent to your website. You set up a position on your website to base the banner and then adverts are sent from the company. The problem with these adverts is you don’t always know what you will be advertising as you can select categories but that’s it. There are loads of pay-per-click companies so you’ll never be short of choices.
The most commonly used affiliate program is Amazon Associates and as Amazon is hugely successful most of your readers would have already purchased from them before. So it’s not new to them, you’ll just be recommending products for them to buy and because they have been sent there by you, you’ll get paid a commission from the purchase.
But like I said there are literally thousands of different possibilities for affiliate programs. So find your niche and then get your sites up and running, create that well-needed traffic and then start searching for relevant affiliate programs that will pay you a commission for sending customers their way.
Congratulations! You’ve just created a cash flow!
Conclusion
What I have shared with you here is a summary of all you need to do to create your own online business. If you want to see more detail behind each step then I highly recommend you check out Wealthy Affiliate and follow their step-by-step training, that’s all I did. Affiliate marketing is the the best way for anyone to create an additional income for their home and family. You can start working for yourself and get your life back.
If you decide it is for you I suggest having a look at Wealthy Affiliate for yourself, this way you don’t have to be a computer expert you can literally start with no knowledge of HTML whatsoever. At Wealthy Affiliate, the training is second to no other platform I’ve come across to date.
Look at me, if you would have seen me several months back you wouldn’t have thought I’d be creating this website, but look at me now. Everything I have learnt I have learnt from these guys. They teach you the proper way to actually make an income for yourself and create your own business.
The Secret to Success is You!
The only thing you need is the determination to do it. You have to be willing to take the time each day to work through the step-by-step training and you will be successful at this. This is ‘no get rich scheme’ or ‘click this and you will be rich’, this is a ‘you put the effort in and it’s all yours‘ kind of business. Which, guess what. is the only way to succeed in life anyway!
Ready to get Started!
Loads of people carry on with their lives just getting by but it takes the decision to say enough is enough to make a change. To create the focus and determination to make a difference.
Ask yourself this:
- Are you tired of just getting by in life?
- Are you tired of watching others enjoying life and wishing you could do more too?
- Are you tired of working 9 to 5 for someone else?
Then you might just be ready to take back control of your life!
Are you determined enough to set yourself the goals needed to create a better life and enjoy it the way you are supposed to.?
If so, Click the link below and take a look for yourself, it’s free to join so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain! It was the ‘free to join’ that tempted me to have a look and I haven’t looked back since. My life went from slow, steady and just getting by in life to being full of energy and fully focused. This is all because I am now building something for myself, not for someone else, I am now working to build my future and free up my time to spend it with my family and start enjoying my life again!
Hi, my name is Graham. I hope you found what I have to share interesting. I also hope you make use of this great information and chose to take control of your life again, as I have done with mine. I can’t thank the guy enough who shared this with me because since then my life is my own again and I’m loving every minute.
The community behind Wealthy Affiliate are amazing and the knowledge and experience behind them is a gold mine of potential. These guys have been successful for over 10 years. There isn’t any other business out there that can say the same when it comes to showing people how to create a business from a website. Please share your thoughts with me or if you want any advice on anything I’ve covered above don’t hesitate to drop a comment below or send me an email request at the bottom of the post. Thanks for reading!