Make Money Online Without Investment Mini Course – Lesson #2
In the last lesson, we discussed how it is that people make a living online – with Internet Marketing. I told you about a specific way to market online, called affiliate marketing. (Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money, because you don’t have to do all the hard work on making the product, or market research, or any of that…all you have to do is send visitors through your affiliate link.) If you missed the first lesson, you can read it here.
In the second lesson, we’ll talk a little more about how to start a website from the ground up, and what you should be aware of, and WHY you should get your own website.
Why should you build your own website to promote affiliate products?
Having your own website gives you much more flexibility and freedom in a lot of ways. You can put whatever you want on your own website, you can add or remove things at will, and you have an endless supply of space for content. (In case you haven’t heard it yet, according to Google, content is King.)
With your own website, you can continually add more content (articles, posts, etc), which will ultimately bring you more traffic (traffic is visitors to your site, in IM verbage).
Let’s simplify things a bit.
- You build a website around your niche (let’s stick with the “how to lose weight” niche). – You monetize your website, and put affiliate links throughout your site.
- The more traffic you have, the more sales you will make.
So, the more content you have, the more traffic you will get…which means more sales for you. It’s a domino effect.
So How Do You Get Your Own Website?
You can go about this a couple different ways. You can buy your own domain name (this usually costs about $10-$15), and then purchase your own hosting (this will run you between $6-10 a month). Once you have your domain name and hosting, you can start the fun part – making your website! (I recommend installing WordPress and using that as your website platform. It’s easy to use and edit, and search engines love them – you can read step by step tutorial on how to build a website using WordPress). I recommend using Blue Host as your hosting service. You can buy a domain and get hosting all in one place. I’ve been with Blue Host for years and love them. (Click here to sign up for Bluehost.)
Or….
You can start out the free way. When you’re just starting out, there is going to be a learning curve, and there is no reason why you SHOULDN’T do it the free way. I highly recommend that as you get deeper into it, eventually you get your own domain and hosting, in the future. This gives you a thousand times more freedom and flexibility than free website platforms. Trust me. 
A good free platform is Blogger. If you go there, you can sign up and have your very own website/blog in a matter of minutes. Then, all you have to do is customize and edit the theme of your blog, and start writing. And of course, monetize your site. 
Keyword Research
When thinking about what type of website you want, it’s extremely important to make sure you use keywords that are going to get searched. Keyword research is a huge huge part of the success or failure of your website, and I can barely touch the basics of it. Google “keyword research” and learn as much about it as you can. I can not stress this to you enough. I will eventually post a keyword research post dedicated entirely to how to do it, but for now it’s out of the scope of this lesson.
A keyword is how the search engines know what your site is about. It’s also how people search for things they are interesting in. Think about this…when you go to Google, and you want to find out a new way to train your dog, you’ll probably type in the search box “new ways to train dog”, or “a new way to train my dog”, or something similar. Those are all keywords. Google then goes through all the websites, and the ones they believe to be the most relevant around those keywords will be shown first.
Because there is so much involved in keyword research, as I said, I will dedicate another post specifically on the subject, but for now, I will leave it at that.
Ready for Lesson 3?
