I have been a little bit slack when it comes to documenting my online money making journey but this Aussie Internet Marketer has been quite busy with a new plan. My own Websites! It feels incredibly awesome to be able to create your very own website where you choose the colours and words and best of all, you make the rules.
Creating your own website may sound daunting but it really isn’t that hard. If you have ever used wordpress or a similar program then you should be ready to give your own website a crack. If you have learnt how to make money, even just a little bit, on squidoo or zujava, then you are definitely ready to make your own site.
I started writing and creating articles known as lenses on a Revenue sharing platform called Squidoo. It was a great adventure where I learnt a lot about writing for readers and Search engine optimisation among many other things. Making money on squidoo was quite easy and I had only just really grasped how to make it happen when squidoo started to lose authority with google and very rapidly started to lose traffic.
Squidoo still brings in some cash for me each month but nothing at all compared to my favourite revenue sharing site. Which in my opinion is far better than squidoo. As I have mentioned in a previous post Zujava has standards and that really helps keep the site full of quality content. I have had a really good month leading up to Halloween on Zujava with sales numbering in hundreds.
I get side tracked easy, so back to building your own websites. It took me quite a few months to see my first sale on squidoo, on Zujava it was quite a bit quicker, but within four weeks I had seen my first sale on my own site.
The first thing you need to do is think about a domain name and a Host. If you shop around you can find some great deals on domains, sometimes for as little as $2.95 a year. Hosting can be a fair bit more expensive. I bought a Host plan for just one year while I experimented and tried it out, I really wanted to see if I would make sales before buying a 3 year plan. Now I really regret not buying the 3 year plan up front. I used Hostgator as my host as a lot of my online colleagues had told me that it is a lot less buggy and far less likely to crash than a lot of the other hosting companies. You can check out hostgator using this link Hostgator. When I paid for my host I decided to go for the babycroc option which gave me the option to register and host an unlimited number of domains and subdomains. It is by far the best value for money plan I found.
I used Godaddy as my domain supplier because they were offering domains a lot cheaper than Hostgator. You then need to redirect the domain from godaddy through to Hostgator. If you want to keep it a lot simpler you can always just buy both the host plan and domains through Hostgator that way you won’t need to do any redirections.
Once you have purchased your host and domain you will be given access to your Cpanel. Your Cpanel is where you need to go to set up your name servers for your domain and also install wordpress or whichever webpage building program you like. Skeffling has a really good step by step and even has fancy screenshots to help show you exactly how to do things like setting name servers and installing wordpress.
Now you probably feel like it was a mission to even think of a domain name let alone building your site. The building of your site is a lot easier than you think due to there being a lot of wordpress themes out there. I use Theme Junkie and they have great professional looking themes with a great support system in place. Once wordpress has been installed it comes with some nice themes such as TwentyTwelve. You can also get some great themes from sites such thinkupthemes and themejunkie. You just need to download your theme as a zip and then go into the themes section of your wordpress dashboard and then upload the sip file directly. Wordpress unzips the file during upload. Now you have a really cool looking website but it is completely empty and eagerly awaiting some content. Using your wordpress dashboard you can go right ahead and start creating excellent high quality articles.
For now, have fun with trying to create your own website.
