How To Create A Website Business – For FREE
Being online and having your own website is a must for any business. You can quickly and easily promote your products and services to anyone. That is the power of the internet, to reach far beyond what we were able to before.
Don’t worry, if you’re looking to start a business, being online is a great place to be. You can sell products for others through affiliate marketing or you can create your own products. Either way, you can do this from your own website while sitting around at home if you want.
I want to discuss some basics with you about being online. I will give you a few things to think about when getting started.
Where to start?
The first thing that you want to do is to decide what you want to accomplish with your website. If you are promoting your current business, then this will be easy. Tell people what you do, how you can help them, where to find you, etc….
If you are looking to start a new online business, then you will need to write out a plan of what you want to accomplish. Will you create your own products to sell? Will you sell products for others through affiliate programs? There are a lot of possibilities when it comes to the internet.
Niche
When it comes to online marketing, you want to have a niche. This will be the focus of your website or the main theme. You want to pick something that is not too broad such as sports or something too narrow as baseballs. Leave yourself plenty of room and pick something in the middle like baseball.
Just take a moment and think about all the things associated with baseball. You could sell baseball clothing (hats, shirts, towels), equipment (bats, gloves, balls, helmets), or anything else baseball related.
The Domain Name
Once you have a theme or niche, you want to come up with a domain name for your website. The domain name is like the street address on the internet where people can find you. Like Baseballjoe.com or whatever you want. Keep it simple and not complicated so that people will remember the name.
Domain names are not expensive. You can usually pick up your first year on godaddy.com for $12. Not bad for a business address!
The Website
Now you want to build the website. WordPress is an open-source website builder that a lot of people use. I use WordPress for all my websites. It is easy to use, thousands of layouts to choose from, and there are places you can create them for free. I know Wealthy Affiliate will let you create 2 for free and even host them for you.
What to sell
Once your website is up, you will need to find products to sell if you don’t have them already. There are thousands of existing companies that sell their products through affiliate marketers. You can promote products for any of them. You may need to meet some requirements with some of them such as your site must be up for at least 3 months, you have some content on your site (articles or product reviews) or a variety of other requirements.
Some affiliate programs will let you sell their products as soon as you have your domain name. There are plenty of them out there, just find ones that are in your niche. No sense selling dog food if your site is about baseball. This will only confuse your customers. Keep your products relevant!
Advertise your site
There are several ways to advertise your site and bring traffic in.
- Paid per click (PPC) ads – you can pay to advertise on Google, Facebook, yahoo, or several different ways. This is the quickest way if you have money to spend on advertising.
- SEO – natural searches through search engines. Once you get your site indexed and ranked with Google, Bing, and yahoo, this is like free advertising. The trick is to get ranked on the first page. Google what you are interested in and see what shows up, look past the paid ads.
- Social Media – you can advertise on your personal social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc… This is all free advertising!
- YouTube – create a YouTube channel and post your videos. Product reviews are great here or even just good information. How many times have you searched YouTube for information?
Site Content
There are two main ways to add content to your site:
- Write articles related to your site’s theme (like what you are reading now). If you have a baseball site, write about a game last night, write about a player, trades, coaches, etc….
- Write product reviews – why is this baseball glove the best one? Why would you never use those cleats? Whatever products are related to your niche, write about. People want to read what is good and bad, make sure you tell them why.
As you continue to add content to your site that your readers find value in, your ranking with Google, Bing, and yahoo will continue to climb.
Keywords
A keyword can be anything from a single word to a group of words that someone types into Google. If you type in baseball, what do you see? Type in a baseball glove? Try Rawlings gloves?
Someone who is searching for a baseball glove could type any one of hundreds of words. The trick here is to find a keyword that there is not a lot of competition on. Jaaxy is the program that I use.
If 50 people a month search for a keyword, and the sites on the first-page average 10 visitors a month. Even if only 1 out of 10 buys, if you have 10 keywords that bring 10 visitors each, that would mean 10 sales.
Let’s look at this, a good baseball glove is not cheap. A buyer will spend $100 to $200 or more.
1 keyword = 10 visitors = 1 sale of $100 x 5% affiliate commission = $5 you made for one glove
10 keywords = 100 visitors = 10 sales of $100 x 5% affiliate commission = $50 you made for 10 gloves
100 keywords = 1000 visitors = 100 sales of $100 x 5% affiliate commission = $500 you made for 10 gloves
This is just an example, or is it? Some products will have a higher conversion rate of visitors to sales. What would happen if 20% bought instead of 10% of the visitors? Especially just before or during baseball season.
10% is low, it really depends on the product and how much people believe or trust your review. Your review is probably not the first one they have read. How many reviews do you typically read before you spend $100 or more on something?
Final Thoughts 
This is a quick overview and will give you something to think about. I will cover each of these points in their own article.
For now, just think about something that you are very interested in that might may a good online business. Write your ideas down and make a list of products that would fall under your ideas.
Please leave any questions or comments below.
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