Get Started Online

First things first – DON’T get overwhelmed and DON’T think you ‘can’t’ do it!

I say this as that attitude stopped me in my tracks for around… 6 months (I say sheepishly) – what a waste of half a year of my productivity!

I’ll guide you through in some easy steps – the big thing is to see it through to the end… if you struggle ask the community  at Wealthy Affiliate – they always have help and answers for you!

Must Watch: How A 28-yr- Old Got Fired &Then Built A $500k-A-Month Business ⇒ 

1. Find Your Niche

The first and most crucial part to becoming a profitable online entrepreneur is choosing the correct niche market for YOU personally.

The reason you must choose correctly, is that if you are not interested in the topic, or get bored with what you’ve chosen to write about, you are going to lose interest and the chance of you reaching your success goals are very slim!

So picking a niche that suits you is super important – Let’s say you decide to create a website about ‘boating around the islands’. This is a popular niche as many people love boating around the islands and holiday destinations. Some people however, have no interest in it. If this is you, and you’ve decided that it will be your way forward for your business, have a think about what you could share with your readers.

Experienced travellers would have so many good stories to tell – they’d have a pile of blogs / articles to get their websites up and ranking well.

The trick here is to solve problems for your readers – If you have nothing to teach people, then no-one will be interested in your website.

Put yourself in the picture – if you are looking through a website, you are generally looking for information you don’t already know – so as the writer of your own blog you have a great place to start!

Having a popular and well ranked website can bring in money from multiple sources (through links to related affiliate products on your site). The only way you can have a popular website is by having lots of valuable content. If you cannot give value to your readers, they’ll go to another website!

Here is a list of things to think about in regards to choosing your niche market:

• What are you personally interested in?
• What information do you know that others may not? Maybe through your previous career.
• What clubs are you a member of?
• What do you read a lot about?

Choosing a niche for your website is not a difficult decision, but it is a crucial one.

Take some time and write down all your interests. Once done, write down any experience you have in these fields. You should be able to come up with something that links the two; this can be your broad niche.

There is a little more to making your niche profitable as writing about something that interests you but doesn’t have a way to monetize that interest is not helpful… keep reading…

Refine Your Niche Market

In today’s competitive industry, to get noticed and ranked you need to refine your niche market. For instance, let’s say you choose baking as a niche. Now baking is extremely popular. How popular? Look below.

As you can clearly see above, 1.75 million results!  And in the google keyword tool, there are 823,000 searches per month looking for baking.  Or I suggest a sensational keyword tool Jaaxy – trial it for 30 searches, it’s my go-to tool and super easy to use with great tutorials so you won’t get stuck!

So, this needs to be refined!

Let’s say we decide ‘baking for beginners’ has a better chance of getting ranked. As you can see below, we’re down to 664,000 results.

Then refine some more through the same process.  Look for ‘long tail’ keywords in Jaaxy.  Through this small exercise you can see that the more broad you make your niche, the harder it will be to get ranked and make the first page of Google. If you can make your niche more specialised it will rank much better.

For more information about choosing a niche, take a look at this video from Kyle at Wealthy Affiliate.

So it’s your turn – find your main interest and something you think you could write about for years to come. Refine it to become that little bit less broad.

Now you have a direction you want to move in – head to the next step.

2. Buy A Domain Name

Buying a domain name is super easy and not expensive.

(side note: A domain name is basically your website address e.g. www.beginaffiliatemarketing.com). Purchasing a domain name does not mean you are up and running – you need to have your website hosted.  Think of a domain name as a loaf of bread and the hosting company as the supermarket.  The bread is displayed at the supermarket and can be monetized… if the bread doesn’t make it to the supermarket, it won’t get seen and bought, hope this helps!)

It would be nice to have your keyword in the domain name but don’t stress if you can’t get this – it’s the keywords in your articles that will rank you in google.

For example: Spotify, Techcrunch or Linkedin. are all immensely popular household names but the name of their product is not in their domain.

You can purchase domain names through many sources (GoDaddy, NameCheap) however if you get your domain name through your hosting company quite often you’ll get the domain for free.

Also, should something go wrong you are dealing with only one company to solve both domain and hosting issues… as you get more experienced you may choose to separate the 2 but seriously when you’re beginning keep it all together for ease.

Currently, Bluehost will give a FREE domain name with hosting.

3. Hosting Your Website

As mentioned above, my preferred host is Bluehost, but of course you do not have to use them, in fact I have a free option for you further down the page.

Now, your hosting provider is the place that will store all the data associated with your new website (like a shelf in a supermarket).

I find that if you are just starting out, you want a host that has everything laid out in a manner that is easy to understand. Especially when you are setting up your WordPress website for the first time.

Initially you will not use most of the services provided by your host, as you become more familiar with the control panel and your website becomes more established, you will use more of these functions, so don’t get overwhelmed, just stick to basics and trust me you will learn as you go!

There are many choices out there for hosting and the more you get involved and experienced, the more you will know what to look for. Certainly to begin with you want a host that will be capable of storing/ hosting your website, gives you decent support, has a control panel that is easy to navigate, is fast and is reliable.

4. Choose A Website Theme

This is where you get to be create – I love this part of the website setup, whether it be for profit or not. The theme for your website is the look and feel, the colours and slider images.

When you first setup a WordPress website, a default theme will be activated for you. This will be a theme created by WordPress.org called ‘Twenty Fourteen’. The theme will probably change and be enhanced throughout the years I imagine.

This default theme is good, but as you get more familiar you will want to experiment with other themes to suit your particular ‘flavour’ website. You can get some free themes, however paid themes are more preferable as they offer more functionality.

BUT to begin with a free theme is perfectly fine!

Free v Paid Themes

Free Themes – I suggest starting with a free theme – you will get all the basics and I created my first websites with free themes and had fantastic results!

Most free themes nowadays incorporate many of the features that a paid theme will have anyway, including sliders and fade-in capability. But as mentioned there are certain functions you won’t get – and that’s understandable it is a product and someone has created this product and would like to get paid for it.

Please make sure you get a ‘responsive’ theme however, as most readers now will look on their ipads/ tablets, phones etc your website needs to be responsive to this – to not have this will hinder your business!

Paid or Premium Themes – There are many benefits of a premium theme, as opposed to a free one:

• You want your website to be unique and stand out from the crowd, especially if you have a product or blog that has some competition, with a paid theme you can get more creative and make your theme way more unique to you and your business.
• Many free themes are built by inexperienced programmers, hence the coding for the theme is poor and subject to security vulnerabilities. Bear in mind you can get security plugins in Word Press that can help with this.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is another thing to think about when purchasing a theme. Premium themes tend to be SEO optimised, so your rankings will perform much better. And this is going to get more and more important as you start building your business.
• Again the functionality, colours, bells and whistles will be way more on a premium theme.
• Paid themes tend to get updated regularly.
• With a Paid theme you get a support system – with a free theme – you don’t.

Look as I suggested, start off with a free theme – once you get confident and know you are going to actually build a business from this particular website, then go premium to get the benefits – to be honest most themes only cost $40-$70 per  year – so it’s not going to break the bank anyway!

My Top Suggested Premium Theme Options:

• Themeforest
• Woothemes
• Studiopress
• Elegant Themes
• Mojo Themes
  

5.  Start Setting Up Your Site

Once you have your domain and  your hosting sorted, you will need to install WordPress and choose your theme.  Then you have access to your WordPress Dashboard.

Your dashboard will initially look very basic. The reason for this is that you will quite often require a plugin which can be accessed from the Plugin section on the menu. A plugin being an extra command needed to enhance your website.

For example, most people insert an SEO plugin for ranking performance. I use one called ‘All in One SEO’, this is now added to my dashboard. Under that section there will be options to optimize my SEO.

When you first start WordPress, there will be a plugin called Akismet. Go into settings (under Plugins->Akismet) and request an API Key and insert in the required field. This is a great plugin as it will stop spam from clogging up your comments inbox.

You will also see Posts and Pages. What you’re looking at now is a page. If I was going to write an article for my blog, I would write it as a post – posts are more time sensitive, they give information on what is happening now and will appear in reverse chronological order.

A page is information that is not time sensitive and will sit under your main menu where the information on your page can be found anytime.

Your Posts and Pages will be where you really get your rankings from so make sure you do some really good keyword research and integrate them into your articles.

The Comments section is for others making comments on your posts. Under here you can approve or delete comments. However it’s good to keep them as they will improve your rankings.

Appearance is the look of your website. You will have a ‘Theme Options’ section under here which is specifically for your theme.

The Widgets menu option is for your sidebar, i.e. the section most people use for advertising, generally on the right hand side. As this site is to get you started with affiliate marketing, a good use of the sidebar is to add a banner for a product you wish to promote and ad your affiliate code to it.

The editor section at the bottom should be left alone, especially for beginners to WordPress. This is where you can edit your actual files that make up your theme. As a newbie, don’t muck around with this!

The Settings section however will need to be set up immediately.

In the General Menu, you are prompted for your Website Title and URL address. You can also insert your email address here, choose your time zone and give a date and time format.

The Writing section allows you to set up a Category for your default posts. For instance, you may have set your Homepage to add a blog roll but as a default you only want a particular category of posts, this is where you can change this setting. Posting via email can also be setup here.

The Reading section is very important, this is where you set your Homepage to be a static page or a blog roll. If you choose a blog roll, how many blogs (or articles) do you want to show on the Homepage (ten at a time, or 5 maybe?)

For a fantastic full tutorial, watch this video below from Kyle at Wealthy Affiliate. 

6. Content

Ok, you have probably already read a few of my posts – content is KING.

I don’t say this to overwhelm you – it’s not quite that scary – but a lot of beginners (myself included) think once your website is up and running it will work all by itself…. Wrong!

You need to constantly create new, unique and quality content full of all the wonderful keywords you would have already researched
Once you get used to writing about topics you love, you will get used to it and you will understand why I say you must chose to build a website around a topic you are passionate about!

The reason you are at this website as I’m passionate about being an online entrepreneur – it literally saved my financial life – I was miserable working in corporate and was almost at the point of sabotaging my job as I was so unhappy.  Now my life is everything I ever dreamt of – and if I can help share how I did this, then great!

The reason I am able to say this is down to starting with Wealthy Affiliate – and you’ll see on my site www.beginaffiliatemarketing.com I’m pretty passionate about it!  So I don’t have any problem getting up and researching and adding articles and learning more to share each week.

7. Show Me The Money

Can I tell you how thrilled I was to receive my first $5 from my efforts online?! Once you put your training into practice and see your first return – then you can start to SCALE!
Now as you can see I’ve only skimmed the surface of a ‘few’ aspects of getting going online… for a full training and ‘hand holding’ process I will always steer you back to Wealthy Affiliate as I simply can’t cover everything off here unfortunately.  So here’s a quick rundown

1. Get your website up and running (a free one through Wealthy Affiliate to test it out is a good idea – that saves you on domain names, hosting and gives you a platform to ask questions)
2. Write quality content – and find products that relate to what you are writing about so you can promote them on your site
3. Join affiliate programs such as Amazon, Clickbank and Market Health. When you join an affiliate program they will assign you your own link that you can add to banners or text as a clickable link for your readers.
4. Once someone clicks your link and goes on to purchase, you get the commissions! YAY!!
5. It can take a little bit to get ranked and to be found, but once you start getting comments and more and more exposure, you will see the money start coming in.
6. When you get the hang of this – the problem will be stopping you from creating 100 sites!!! It’s very exciting and you see the potential to SCALE – basically rinse and repeat the process.
7. When looking for affiliate products to promote – do try to go for ones that offer a recurring commission that way it’s not just a one off payment for you.

OK, it’s up to you – take responsibility for your business – be ambitious, be curious, be resolute and don’t waste another day, month, year on someone else’s business!

Must Watch: How A 28-yr- Old Got Fired &Then Built A $500k-A-Month Business ⇒ 

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