If you have a few minutes to spare, I’d like to show you how to set up a new website, optimize it to bring in an income and some of the tools I use. This is a basic step by step guideline and will work with setting up a simple site. If you know what the site will be about, skip down to website editors.
If you’re building a new site to put Adsense on or sell Clickbank or other product, you’ll need a simple, straightforward site. This post should fill the bill.
The best way I think to explain this process is like a recipe. You buy a bunch of ingredients at the grocery store and until you mix them all together and bake them, you don’t have a finished product. This process is the recipe and the steps are the ingredients.
Say you’re selling picnic tables and want a website to sell them. Here’s how to proceed.
First, you’ll need a domain name with the words picnic table in it. You’ll need to do a little research to find out what domains are available. Simply go to a site like Go Daddy, which sells domain names and use their domain search tool . Almost always, the exact name you want won’t be available so just pick something with a picnic table variation in it and go ahead and buy it.
Second, you’re going to need a company like Host Gator to show your new site to the world. Pick a plan that’s only what you need. If you’re only going to show a single site, go with the most inexpensive plan. If you’ll be hosting more than one site you’ll obviously need to kick the plan up a notch or two.
The third ingredient you’ll need is a website editor. Fortunately if you go with Host Gator or some of the other popular companies for your hosting, they offer a free site builder that’s included in your hosting plan. They also have website templates you can use for your picnic table site. If you don’t like the site builder they offer, there are lots of free website builders you can use. I did a quick search on Google just before I started this post – this is the first page they have for “free website design software”.
Fourth, you will have to be to point your new picnic table domain to your hosting company. For instructions on how to do this just go to my previous post “How to set up a blog” and take a look at the second paragraph on nameservers.
Ok. Let’s take a quick look at where we are with our recipe and maybe grab a cup of coffee. If you’re completely new to all this you may be grabbing an adult beverage ;-)
After you’ve completed all the above, you’re done with the ingredients for your recipe. Now we’re moving on to the seasoning. Just as with the recipe, your website will be pretty bland if you don’t add your seasonings. The seasonings for your new site are the keywords. Now, you’ll be heading over to use the free Google Keywords tool. to find some relevant keywords for your new site. Go to my previous post “Making money from home isn’t as hard as it used to be” for info on how to use this tool. Look for a high volume of searches for different words and ideally low competition. Click the box for each keyword you want to save and download them to a file – about 10 good keywords will do. For my keyword work, I use something called Market Samurai which has so many options to find promising keywords it’s amazing. If you want to use this tool free for 7 days to try it, there’s a link on the right side.
All you have to do now is “season” your new website with your keywords. How? Simply sprinkle some of the keywords you’ve uncovered into the text – especially the titles of your site when you’re building it. Don’t overdo it and don’t make it sound crazy. Just a pinch here and a dash there so the text or story sounds natural, flows well and makes the search engines know your site is relevant to picnic tables.
After your site has been up for a week or two, Google and the search engines will have had a chance to crawl it and you can start to check your traffic with Alexa. Sign up for a free Alexa account and you can check your traffic stats by just adding a snippet of code to your website. So how do you add this snippet to your site so Alexa can find it?
That’s for another blog post!
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