Build Your Own Website

October 16th, 2008 by admin

Build Your Own Website

“Build your own website and make money while you sleep!”

Making money with a website is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling ways I have found to make extra money.

And if your immediate response is “But I’m not at all technical - I wouldn’t know where to start.” then please, just read on a while and click on some of the links. I am not a techie - my long suffering techie brother will tell you exactly how much I don’t know!

But there are ways around this!

Within a year - given some time, creativity and determination (and notice that technical ability is not necessarily in that list) you could be making money with a website. Thousands of work at home Moms have.

“When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever even heard of what is called the Worldwide web. Now even my cat has its own page.”

Bill Clinton (announcement of Next Generation Internet Initiative 1996

What would I write about?

What do you care passionately about? What are you interested in? What do you know something about? Do you already have a small business or ’sideline’ which you want to promote more?

Your website has to be something that you could realistically spend a lot of time researching and writing about. Then you need to do your research. There are tools online to help you search the subjects you are interested in (keywords) to establish how much demand there is for those subjects. It may be that there is a huge demand… but also a huge supply. So it will be difficult for the search engines to find you. Best to find a ‘niche’ and area of your subject that not too many people are supplying for.

For example, ‘parenting’ is a huge subject and very well supplied. ‘parenting dyslexic children’ (for example), on the other hand will not have so much supply, and you could build your own webite based on this subject which you may have a great deal of knowledge about - and you could do very well.

“I’m not an ‘expert’ on any subject!”

Who said anything about being an expert? You do not need to know everyhting about it in order to make build your own website. Share what you know! You certainly know more on your chosen subject than a lot of people, and you have a unique angle or experience which people want to read about.

Plus the content of your website does not all have to be your own. There are numerous sites on the internet where you can pick up and use other people’s articles, as long as you keep their signature (the part where they talk about their own product or website) intact.

Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic. (anon)

“But how do I start making money with a website? Especially if I’m not actually selling anything!!?”

There are a number of different ways, which I will be discussing in more depth on different pages as the site develops. However, just to give you a few ideas:

Selling an existing product or service

This goes hand in hand with an existing business, or one you are starting up. The main profit will be through sales made. However, people search the internet not just for products or services, but mainly for information, and if you can offer your customers inofrmation as well as goods or services, they are more likely to come back

For example, if you build your own website to advertise your farm produce, don’t just sell home-made jam, throw in some recipes as well! Sell your dog-walking business - and throw in some dog psychology alongside!
Affiliate Marketing

This is a common and profitable way to make money with the internet where basically you sell somebody else’s product or service, and they pay you a commission. You don’t have to take money, deal with products, worry about custoomer care or any of that. Just recommend a product/service that you believe in (try and test it yourself first if possible as you will lose credibility if it’s rubbish) and if your reader clicks through and buys it, you will be paid a percentage of that. On many websites you will see a small box marked ‘affiliate programme’, if you register with this, you will get a unique code which you put on your website. (Your customer will not see it, they will see ‘click here’ or whatever text you choose). When your reader clicks from your website to buy the product you are selling, their tracker registers that the custmoer has come from you (very clever stuff - don’t ask me how they do it!) and your account will be credited with the comission.

To see some examples of this, have a browse through one of the best known affliate sites: clickbank to see how it works and the sort of products they sell. This is just one example of many. (However, be warned that you have to notch up a certain number of sales, paid for in different ways before you will get your commisson cheque through)

Affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways to make money with the internet - and can be done with blogging, websites of any size or ezines as well as through a website.

A fantastic example of an individual company’s affiliate link is the SBI 5 Pillar club

Affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways to make money with the internet - and can be done with blogging, websites of any size or ezines as well as through a website.
Google Adsense

Once your website is up and running, with a good number of pages and a constant stream of ‘traffic’ (ie people visiting your site)then you can register with Google Adsense and they will place their own advertisements on your pages, and pay you every time someone clicks on them. These guys know what they are doing - they’re not going to advertise dog food on a site about organic nappies(!) so you can know that their advertising will be in line with your website content.

I haven’t started using Google Adsense yet, but this seems a great method for making money with a website and many people make a lot of money through this. Internet guru Joel Comm gives a fantastically clear and informative run down on how Google Adsense works, and how to make it work for you in his bestselling ‘Making Money With Adsense’ (click below)

How Do I Get Started? Some Useful Tools

There are a number of ways you can get going. If you want to start from scratch and have some technical knowledge there are numerous ‘web hosts’ who would be delighted to see you started.

And if you want to learn more about how to research keywords and make sure that the search engines find your site I really want to recommend

‘Optimize Your Website’

by Lyne Lee.

Lynne is a Work At Home Mum who started building her own site a year ago. Her site is going great but in the journey of building it she has learnt valuable lessons about the whole process of making a website work, and she has shared these lessons in her easy-to-understand e-book.

Site Build It!

I cannot recommend Site Build It! highly enough if you want to build your own website and make money on the internet. They give you the tools to build your site from zero to… wherever you want to go, providing support and easy to follow tutorials all the way.

They have ready to use graphics, or build your own; block by block page building (no need for html) and they analyse every page you write to ensure that the search engines will love it.

And that’s just the tip of the iceburg. Yes, it is more expensive than some of the other options - but for what they are giving you it is incredible value for money, and there are no hidden extras as I have found with other hosts - you can have as many pages as you like and build it however you choose to. They then help you find the best ways of monetizing it, and provide you with a monthly ezine to keep you in touch.

Even if you have no intention of buying their product, if you are serious about making money with the internet, have a look at their site: it has a phenomonal amount of free information and some very interesting case studies to get you thinking creatively.

How to build your own website is a huge subject. As I said, I am no expert, but I am having great fun learning! It’s definately a challenge but huge fun, and once you’re up and running you can be making money while you sleep! How good is that?