I want to start this article by assuring you that it is possible to build a website online and make money from it, and if you’ve ever been skeptical about that this article is going to help you change your perspective and get on the ride of starting your own website today and making money online from it.
Some people think that it usually takes time and so much effort to start making money online, but I was one of the fortunate ones that began making money online immediately after I started this blog in 2019.
And to be honest with you, I never had a plan or strategy for making money from my website until I had it started. Formerly this blog taculia9ja.com started as an entertainment site where I uploaded trending songs for digital downloads and also updated news and gists that were trending.
A few months after I began this blog, the pandemic struck and I had enough time to focus on blogging during the lockdown period.
And if you inquire to know how I started to make money online from this website then keep reading this article and you will be inspired to come up with your own idea and make the journey more smoother.
This article is going to come in two phases, in phase one I will show you how to build a website by yourself, and in phase two I will show you how to make money from that website.
And in case you find it difficult to make your own website, you can visit our web design agency @taculiadesigns.com.ng to order one.
In the meantime, let us get into this article and learn as we ought to.
How to build a website.
Below is a step-by-step guide on how to build a website:
- Know the aim and purpose of your website.
- Choose a niche or industry.
- Check for the availability of your domain name.
- Register your domain name and get web hosting.
- Design your website.
- Create important pages.
- Optimize your website for search engines.
- Add a blog to your website.
- Write content.
Know the aim and purpose of your website.
Before starting a website you want to make money from, you must know the aim and purpose of that website.
There are so many reasons to start a website, and below are a few of them:
- You can start a website for the purpose of educating or entertaining people. A good example is my entertainment website taculiaentertainment.com where I offer digital download services as well as update people on what is going on around the globe.
- If you already have a physical business where you sell products, you can create an e-commerce website or online store to reach proposed customers who will buy your products online.
- You can also build a portfolio website based on your skills and showcase your services to people who will hire you online to work for them. An example is my web design agency taculiadesigns.com.ng where I offer web design services to my potential customers.
As I said earlier, when I began this blog, my mission was to offer free digital downloads to music lovers and update the current news of what’s trending across the globe. Taking on this mission helped me to discover that I could make money online by uploading music for upcoming artists, and I did not waste much time making money from this blog back then.
Choose a niche or industry.
Knowing the aim and purpose of your website will help you to choose the niche or industry you are going to concentrate on.
Choosing a niche or industry for your website is very important because it will help you to connect with a target audience and build authority in that space. People will be confident to always run up to you whenever they need a related product they always buy from you or have a related problem you’ve been helping them to solve.
Take for instance, people have been fond of having their personal doctors whom they always call upon whenever they or their family members have any health issue. People also have personal lawyers who handle all their legal issues.
And they always do this to ensure they don’t get to hire someone who is inexperienced or new to their job and as such be unable to meet up with their needs or demands.
Therefore, when you have a website that focuses on a particular niche or industry and people come there once and find solutions to their problems, believe me, they are going to bookmark your website or sign up for your newsletter in order to always come to your site whenever they have a similar or related issue you have solved for them before.
So even if you want to build an online store, you must categorize the products you sell and make it easy for people to recognize what you are really offering.
Check for the availability of your domain name.
Even if you’ve been running a business that already has a name, you need to check it to see if someone else has already used that name for a website.
The easiest way to check for the availability of your name is by typing that name into a browser to see if it’s going to load a website.
If it does then you need to make adjustments or come up with a new name, but if it doesn’t then you are good to go on this step and move on to the next.
Register your domain name and get web hosting.
Once you’ve settled for a domain name that is free, the next step is to find a web hosting service that will help you register it and get web hosting to enable your website to become visible online.
My own technique for finding a good web hosting service is to visit any web hosting and use their customer care line to initiate a chat. If real humans respond and give accurate answers to my questions I will then know that their customer care is really active and then settle for their services.
I normally do this because of the experience I had with Web Hosting Magic. It was time to renew my hosting account and they had changed their payment methods to what I could not pay with my ATM card. And when I reached out to their customer care, they told me there is nothing they could do about it and God knows what I went through before I could get a new web hosting and transfer my domains there.
I think I lost some of my domains due to that incident because there were domains I was unable to transfer before the grace period they gave me expired.
Reaching out to your web hosting service is important because you will always run into some issues and need their intervention, and if the issue is urgent and you are unable to reach them, you can lose the website you’ve been putting so much work to get on the ground running.
Am currently using Truehost Cloud and since 3 years ago I started to use them, I’ve never run into an issue they have not been able to respond to ASAP.
You can follow the link HERE to give them a try. Mind you it’s an affiliate link and I will get a commission if you sign up with them.
Design your website.
After purchasing your domain and hosting, your Cpanel login details will be sent to the email you used for the purchase. So head on to your email and follow the link to log into your Cpanel.
In your Cpanel, scroll down to “Softaculous Installer” section and click on WordPress. Check the WordPress menu and use the “Quick Install” option to provide your login details and install WordPress to your domain.
After installing WordPress to your website, two links will be generated, one is your WordPress login URL and the other is your website URL. Click on the WordPress URL and it will take you to the WordPress dashboard where you will do the following:
- Go to the menu and hover on “Appearance” and when the options appear click on “Customize” When it loads select “Add New Theme” and change the WordPress default theme to a new theme of your choice from the many displays that will appear.
- Go back to the menu and click on “Plugins” to install a security plugin (WordFence), a statistical analysis plugin (Hetpack), and an SEO plugin (Yoast SEO).
Create important pages.
There are three important pages you will need for your website when starting out, and depending on the new theme you installed these three pages may be already created and all you have to do is edit them. The se three pages are:
- Homepage: This is usually the landing page of a website. You can use this page to give an introduction to your website’s mission and link back to the “about page”, provide a link to important pages and posts on your website, and even advertise your most important products or services.
- About Page: This is the main page to state your website’s mission. Here you have the opportunity of making your visitors understand what they are going to get from coming to your website.
- Contact Page: This is where you provide the means people can use to contact you directly. It could be your email, phone number, physical address, or all of the above.
Optimize your website for search engines.
Although there are so many ways to bring traffic to your blog, the best and free method is organic traffic and this usually comes from search engines. To therefore optimize your blog for search engines and get organic traffic you need to do the following:
- Install Google’s “Site Kit” and follow the prompt to sign up and submit your website to their “Search Console”.
- Install Google’s “Site Map Generator” and submit the generated link to the search console. to help Google crawl and index your pages without having to take too long.
- Add a blog to your website and do “Keyword Research” to discover queries pertaining to your niche and use that to write articles or create content.
How to make money from your website.
Now that you have successfully built your website, below are the ways you can make money from your website:
- Add an online store to sell physical products.
- You can also sell digital products.
- Start a freelancing website.
- Join Ads network.
- Offer Ad spaces for sale.
- Start affiliate marketing.
- Work with similar brands for lead generation and sponsored posts.
- Accept donations.
- Add a paid membership area.
- Do online courses and webinars.
- Do product reviews.
- Sell websites.
Add an online store to sell physical products.
You can make money online from your website by adding an online store where you sell physical products to your potential customers.
The only challenge with making money online by selling digital products on a website is delivery. So you must think of an effective delivery system that will give people the confidence that they are going to get what they have paid for in a short period of time.
The best option is to always start small, that is advertise your products to people who are around your locality or where it will be easy for you to take the products directly to them.
But if you have a means of transportation, say a bike or car, you can cover a wider area. Your main target however is to always ensure you deliver the products to those who order them.
Lest I forget, some people will prefer to pay on delivery, so ensure you have that option for selling products on your website.
You can also sell digital products.
Making money online from selling digital products is best for those who are running an educational website.
There are several solutions to problems people need about a profession or trade, so being an expert in the one you started your website for you can create digital products like audiobooks or ebooks and sell them online to your visitor.
The trick here is to write several articles on a topic you have chosen for your website and hold back some very important aspects which you are going to add to your audiobook or ebook.
Now when you get to the end of those articles you advertise your ebook or audiobook and let people know what they will learn more by purchasing it.
Start a freelancing website.
Freelancing is a process where experts in a particular field are contracted to work and deliver a project without being employed as staff and placed on a salary level.
And making money online from this method is therefore good for those who are offering one service or another on their website.
For instance, my website taculiadesigns.com.ng is a web design agency, where people can order for their websites.
So based on your own skills or expertise, you can start a freelancing website today and make money online.
Join Ads network.
When you check on this website, you will see lots of Ads being displayed and when people are seeing and clicking on them I am being paid a commission by Google AdSense which is providing the Ads. And that is helping me to make money online from this website.
Though Google AdSense is very hard to join since you will have to wait for at least 6 months after starting your website as well as write enough articles and stick to their community policies before you can submit your website online to be reviewed and accepted, there are other Ad networks like AdSterra and Propeller Ads that will get your website in less than 10 minutes when you sign up as a publisher.
Offer Ad spaces for sale.
You can also make money from your website by offering sensitive places on your website for people and corporations to buy and place their Ads.
The challenging part about making money from your website with this method is that you will have to show proof of the traffic that is coming to your website before you can get people to buy those Ad spaces because no one will pay for an Ad space and in the end has no traffic coming from it.
Start affiliate marketing.
affiliate marketing is the process of referring people to a particular product or service online and earning a commission for doing so. It usually works by generating an affiliate link from the website that offers an affiliate program and placing those links where people can see and click them on your website.
There are lots of affiliate marketing programs online like Jvzoo, Tirpleclicks, etc.
Work with similar brands for lead generation and sponsored posts.
Lead generation is the process where you gain the interest of potential customers and use them to increase sales in the future.
Your main target with lead generation is to put potential customers in touch with the companies that are going to benefit them. And achieving this works best when you partner with companies that are in your same niche.
Say for instance you are selling furniture and there is a brand of furniture a same brand is selling online and you don’t have it, what you do with lead generation is to reach out to that brand and partner with them for the purpose of referring customers and agreeing on a commission they will pay when you do so.
The difference between affiliate marketing and lead generation is that with affiliate marketing companies reach out to their partners for affiliation but with lead generation partners reach out to companies for affiliation.
Accept donations.
You can add a donation page and solicit funds from those who are using your website to get the information that benefits them
Make sure you tell people why they should donate to you and also how you are going to use their donations.
You can check out the donation page on my religious website Freetruth Evangelical Mission HERE for a rough idea of what I am talking about.
Add a paid membership area.
If you have vital information or features you don’t want every visitor to access on your website, you can add a paid membership area and set a subscription fee for people to join.
Even after adding a paid membership area on your website, make sure you also have a free members area so that people can start to access the site for free and by doing so see the need of upgrading to have a better user experience on it.
That way you will be able to make money online from your website.
Do online courses and webinars.
Select important titles from your niche and use them to do online courses and webinars where people can pay to watch and learn more about a skill they want online.
There are lots of WordPress plugins that will help you to host online courses and webinars right on your website and MemberPress is one of them.
Do product reviews.
There are lots of new products online that people are trying to learn about before they start using them.
So the best thing to do is to try and get that product and physically use it to get a perfect understanding of everything about it.
Now create a blog post about that product and add an affiliate link to where people can go and buy it. That way you will earn a commission by referring people to that product.
Sell websites.
Selling websites is a very profitable way to make money online, but before you can succeed in doing so you need to map out a strategy and moreover understand the kind of niche that will help you to sell a website that will make so much money.
After knowing the niche that is going to be worth more, the biggest challenge in selling websites hangs on increasing the value of that website.
And the best way to increase the value of a website is by writing original and helpful content that will rank on search engines and bring organic traffic to that website because if you want to use paid adverts to bring traffic to your website you are going to spend a lot and minimize the profit you should make.
Though the latter will be much faster, it is all going to depend on the budget you have.
I have an article that goes in-depth into how you can make money online by selling websites and you can read it: How To Make Money Online Selling Websites.
You can also read another article that will help you discover several other ways to make money online here: How To Make Money Online.
