If you have a business, organization or even just an idea that you want to share, you need a Website. Perhaps you’re looking to earn some passive income – you need a Website! This article will guide you through the process of what you need to do in order to create a Website.
There are companies that do all the work for you and give you a framework to add your content (such as my service – I know, a shameless plug) but you might want to do it yourself. This will give you a framework to work with if you want to do it yourself.
Domain Registrar
To start, you’ll need a domain. A domain is the Website address like “LincOn.com”. To obtain a domain you need to go to a registrar like GoDaddy.
Web Hosting Service
You also need a robust host to keep all your data and Website. You might see that the registrar can act as your host but it’s good to have a dedicated service that can host your Website. That way if anything goes wrong and you want to switch hosts or your registrar, you can. I have used Media Temple for over 20 years and recommend their services for your host. We can even host your site for you and as I mentioned, do all of this work for you.
How to switch Name Services
Once you have a host and they have configured your service, you need to point the DNS or Domain Name Service name servers to your host. It’s really system. Just look for Name Servers at your Registrar and change them to the Name Services of your new host.
WordPress
With everything pointed in the right direction, you need to create a platform for your Website to be built on. One of the most used platforms is called WordPress. WordPress will create beautiful sites for you!
To install WordPress, your host should have an option to automatically install it. Sometimes this is called “one click” installs or something like that. Follow the prompts to complete the install.
Once the framework is in place you can start to customize it. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, I would enhance the base version of WordPress with a few Plugins that will give us some extra options.
WordPress Plugins
To add Plugins to WordPress, click on the Plugins menu option from the WordPress menu on the left. Next to the title you will see “Add New”. Click that and you’ll see a list of featured Plugins. Search for, install and activate the following Plugins:
- WP Statistics
- Social Media Feather
- Yoast SEO
There’s thousands of others but these will allow you to see who is visiting your site, what they are looking at and allow visitors to share content that they find interesting. It will also help users find your content by adding meta tags to your pages.
WordPress Themes
It’s also a good idea to add some themes. Themes are how everything looks and how things are laid out. It allows you to artistically change the layout of your site with a click of a button.
To add themes, click on Appearance, then Themes and then Add New. You can add popular themes or search for features that you’d like to see.
Once you have loaded a number of themes, you can click on any of them and do a “live preview”. This will show you the site and how it would look with the new theme. If it’s close to what you want your site to look like, you can activate it and start to customize it to make it look like what you want.
Setting up your site
Once you have the framework and theme for your site, you can start creating posts or pages for your site. A page will allow you to setup the page the way you want it and posts will be articles displayed on a page. For basic sites, pages might be the easiest way to create your site.
Go ahead and click on Pages and Add New. Give your page a title and type up some content. You can add images, titles, columns and anything else you’d like to see on your site. When you are ready, click on “Pubish” and then “Publish” again to make the page live.
To setup that page as your homepage or the page that loads every time when someone types up your domain, choose Settings and then Reading from the menu on the left. Here you can tell WordPress that you want a static page for your homepage. Select the page that you just created and save the setting.
Adding Content
You’ll want more than one page of information so your homepage doesn’t get too crowded. You can create additional pages just like you did your homepage. To create a link, just highlight the word that you want to be the link, select the link icon (looks like a chain link fence piece) and enter the name of your page that you want to link to. Don’t forget to save your settings.
You’ll want to add pages and posts that are relevant to your topic and fit a need for users looking for information. If you’re a physical business or a small business, this might be what you need to drive business to you. However, you might want some passive income from the site and the next section is for you.
Getting Passive Income
If you want to use your site to earn passive income, you’ll need to have a site full of content that fills a need. The best way to do that is to find topics that you know a lot about and there aren’t many pages out there that have that content. Create multiple articles (pages, posts) and after about 10 months, 100+ articles and you’re seeing solid traffic to your site, apply for Google adsense to have ads on the site.
You’ll need a plugin that will insert the ads but since people are searching for the content that you have on your site and are going there, the ads will be relevant and you will earn income from the ads.
You can also have an Amazon affiliation which will pay you a small percentage of the item if someone buys it through your site.
