In today’s online climate, there is a need and desire to earn an extra income (or replacement income) whether that be online or offline. In the Online world, there is, unfortunately, a lot of misinformation when it comes to earning online income. In fact, there are out right scams online will claim that you can earn a quick buck and not even need a website. This is simply not true. Learning how to create a website and earn money from that website is definitely the path forward to online and offline success.
In this post, I will lay out the exact steps to create a website (takes about 30 seconds these days) and then show you how to earn a legitimate income from that website. This technique can apply to an offline or an online business. Even if you do not currently have a business, you can still learn how to create a website and earn money.
How to Create A Website Step by Step
The process I am going to show you will allow you to not only create the website in under a minute, but it will be on a platform that also hosts your website. It is structured as a “do as you learn” exercise. No worries, the platform is completely free and does not require a credit card. In order to follow along you will need to create an account with a platform known as SiteRubix. It is a platform contained within a program known as Wealthy Affiliate.
Watch the video below for a step by step instruction of how to build a WordPress website in under one minute
As you can see it is not at all difficult to create a website. I know the website we created in the video is in its most raw form, but the beauty of WordPress is that you can customize the look of the website quite easily. The free 10 lesson course mentioned in the video will show you exactly how to make your website look awesome and exactly the way you would like it to look. This training is step by step so you really cannot mess anything up and it really does not take a lot of time and effort. In the old days creating a website like I showed in the video would have taken a week or so to build from scratch. But, with the improvement of site building technology, this process is much easier and of much higher quality.
Finding a Niche For Your Website
You may have come to this post with an idea already in mind for your website. But, you may also be wondering what a niche is exactly. A niche is basically the group of people or audience that would be interested in visiting your website. It is very important to identify specifically what this audience is interested in. The more specific the better. For example, if you are selling a product that eliminates belly fat, you want to target a niche that is specifically for eliminating belly fat. So, your website may be name something like Loosebellyfatquick.com (if it’s not already taken) as apposed to appealing to just people who want to lose weight, which would be too general of an audience.
The reason for this is that not all people who want to lose weight would necessarily be interested in a method on how to lose belly fat. They may be looking for a diet pill or a low carb solution or something like that. In fact, another good example of a specific niche would be something like “learning how to introduce low carbs into my diet”. See how specific this is compared to just “loosing weight”. The mores specific the niche the better.
When choosing a niche it is important that you have an interest in the subject matter. You do not necessarily have to be an expert in the subject matter, but having a desire to learn more about it would certainly help. Or, picking a niche that you already know a lot about is also a great idea. As long as there are people who are interested in obtaining information on this particular niche. One way to determine this is to ask our friend Google.
If you start typing into Google, they tend to finish the sentence for you. This is known as Google Instant. You will notice in the image below, I started typing in “learn how to p” and Google showed several results under my search term. This tells us that people are searching for those terms. This also tells you that there is an audience for that search term. This is a great place to start to search for a niche topic.
To get a detailed understanding of choosing how to earn from your website, here is a great lesson on the process to choose a niche.
How to Monetize Your Website
You may be wondering how you actually make money from your website. In other words, where does the money actually come from. The answer to this question is an Affiliate Network or an individual Affiliate Program. Many companies like Amazon, Walmart, and many others offer affiliate commissions to people who promote their products and/or services. There are also many industries doing the same thing. This, of course benefits the companies because it cuts down on their cost of doing business. In fact, many retailers who have not offered affiliate programs are not suffering financial loss or even bankruptcy.
On my website, I have a complete section on different affiliate programs offered to people who are interested in looking for affiliate programs to supplement their chosen niche. This is really the next step in the process of choosing a niche for your business. In the last section we discussed looking to see if there are people interested in our niche. Now we must determine whether we can monetize from this niche. In other words, are there affiliate programs available for us to earn an income from?
One way to find out is to, again, ask our friend Google. For example, if I am interested in the beauty niche, I could ask Google if there are any affiliate programs associated with beauty products. The way to do this is type in quotes “Affiliate Programs” then type in a + then, again in quotes “beauty products”. This tells Google that I want to see affiliate programs associated with beauty products. See the image below for an example.
As you can see, Google will give me a list of the affiliate programs as well as the commission rate these companies are willing to pay you to help them get customers. On my blog I review such programs in various niches so that you can get an idea of whom to choose as an affiliate program to work with. Here is an example of a post I did for people looking for a Cosmetic Affiliate Program. I listed the top 5 for them to work with. While you are looking at this post, you can also see that I review affiliate programs in other niches including, Hotel Affiliate Programs, Gaming Affiliate Programs, Travel Agent Affiliate Programs, and a host of others.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, if you really want to learn how to create a website and earn money it really is not that difficult. It does, of course require effort and the ability to learn a new skill, but it certainly isn’t rocket science. Millions of people on the Wealthy Affiliate Platform are doing this in various niches and are available to assist you if you decide to join this amazing community of like-minded people. We are living in an environment that requires us to look for other sources of income. The traditional 9 to 5 career paths is becoming dim. Feel free to learn how to create an awesome online income by following my four simple step formula for success. You will be glad you did.
A good article on building a website and business. I know when I started over 10 years ago, creating a website took a lot of time. Now it is so much simpler and easier.
With a company like Wealthy Affiliate you not only get the hosting but the lessons to teach you all sorts of different business models.
With so many jobs lost and people struggling during the pandemic, it is good for people to know there is other work available for them.
Thank you, I enjoyed the article..
Thank you for the feedback Linda. Yes, I agree, the training at Wealthy Affiliate offer quite a bit of training, not to mentioned great hosting and an awesome website building platform. I have two high ranking websites utilizing the simple four step formula taught inside of Wealthy Affiliate.
Hi, this is a most interesting and informative post, ideal for those who are not sure how to build a website or what affiliate marketing is. Have used Wealthy Affiliate for a few years now, as a result have several websites on there, cannot praise them highly enough.
Thanks for an excellant article which all should enjoy and newbies find what they are looking for too get them started.
Thanks for the feedback Stuart!
This is a very encouraging post. I am not tech-savvy but you have made this topic easy to understand. I know that so many businesses and even individuals are going online in search of new horizons. And I would also like to join this trend. I will begin by writing down several niche ideas. This is exciting!
Thanks Abel, I am glad this motivates you into searching for more niche ideas. If my content can help others, then I have accomplished by goals.
Creating a website in this day and age is so much easier than it used to be. In fact, a lot of platforms have made it a lot more user-friendly.
However, I have tried a few of them, and the best is still WordPress, and using Wealthy Affiliate as the hosting just makes so much sense, as not only are you taught how to get your website up and running quickly, but you are also taught how to grow a small online business until it pays you a sustainable income each month.
I would highly recommend Wealthy Affiliate, as the training works and the whole process of creating a website and earning money is just made that much easier.
Thanks Mlchel for the feedback. Yes, creating a website is definitely so much easier to do these days and, of course required less time. I do remember the days when you had to know code in order to build a website. That process took weeks to perform. The SiteRubix platform at Wealthy Affiliate is simply brilliant and I personally have created several websites from it. They also teach you step by step how to rank your website in the major search engines to drive free traffic. This traffic, of course, is the best traffic you can get because it is so targeted. Thanks again, and have an awesome day.
Hey! thanks for this article. Confirmed – creating website and starting to run with it nowadays is a piece of cake. Been there, done that 🙂 the tricky part for everyone to know however is that monetizing on it is not as simple as it sounds.. just a warning so that people don’t get discouraged.. generating valuable traffic to be able to earn money is tricky, time consuming and requires a lot of work.. but once you get there – totally worth it!
Hey Cogito, thanks for visiting my site and for your feedback. I would have to disagree with generating traffic as being tricky. It is not tricky, it’s just that many people are not willing to learn and apply what actually works. They are told by other shady marketers that it is quick and easy to generate online income. You just need to create valuable content and provide value to your readers. Not tricky, just takes time.