How to create a website in 10 minutes using WordPress

Creating a website is probably one of the things that put off newbies in internet marketing. Since I will be building an authority website for my internet marketing journey, I will share how to build a website in under 10 minutes using WordPress. If you don’t understand anything or have questions, feel free to ask in comments or ping me on Facebook.

Here are simple 6 steps to follow to get your first WordPress site up and running.

Step 1: Get a domain name and hosting

The first step to start building your website is to get a domain and a hosting account. I will write a detailed tutorial on how to get cheap hosting and domains but for now, here are some quick tips.

• Search for ‘domain discount coupon’ to find discounts available on various websites and blogs. These coupons will usually let you save up to 20% on various domain registrars.
• Try to get your domain and hosting from the same provider as many offer free domain if you purchase hosting. That way you just pay for hosting.
• Pick a web hosting provider with excellent customer support. This is going to be critical in the long-run. You don’t want to be caught up with unresponsive support when your site needs some technical help.
• Go for Cpanel powered hosting since you can easily install WordPress using Cpanel as compared to other hosting software.
• Buy a .com domain if you can.
• Don’t buy exact-match domains (EMD) since Google isn’t loving these anymore.

So if you are going to build a website about ‘compound miter saw reviews’, don’t buy compoundmitersawreviews(dot)com. Instead opt for something more wider in scope such as woodworkingtools(dot)com or probably toolshop.com.

Step 2: Install WordPress

The next step is to install WordPress. This should be easy with Cpanel powered hosting. If your hosting isn’t powered by Cpanel, you can simply contact your host and ask for WordPress installation. Majority of hosting providers actually let you choose whether to install WordPress or not at the time of purchasing your domain and hosting account.

To install WordPress from Cpanel, look for Scrip Installer or Softaculous. Both will let you install WordPress with just a click.

It is important that you don’t select any directory when installing WordPress. By default, Softaculous installs WordPress in ‘WP’ directory on your site. This means that your WordPress homepage would be ‘http://ift.tt/1ECo556; which isn’t what you want. To install WordPress in your root folder, just leave the directory empty.

Step 3: Choose a theme

Once WordPress is installed, you should receive details of the installation in your email. Simply use these details to sign in to your new WordPress website. Your admin URL will be http://ift.tt/1PWNIRX

Follow these steps once you have signed in to install a theme for your website.

• Once on the admin backend, go to Appearance>Themes
• Choose a free theme that you like and click Preview. Make sure you like the theme before installing it. We don’t want to waste time installing and then uninstalling themes just because we didn’t like one.
• Once you like a theme, click Install and wait for a minute. It will usually take less than a minute.
• After installing a theme of your choice, simply go to Appearance>Theme Settings to change settings of your website. Since last WordPress upgrade, majority of themes are using WordPress’ native customizer for providing customization options. You can access customizer by going to Appearance>Customize
• You can also buy premium themes if you want some premium features for your website. There are tons of premium themes available for WordPress. I will do a detailed article later about some of the best paid and free WordPress themes.

Step 4: Install essential plugins

WordPress offers a lot of functionality out of box but still you can add plugins and make your website even more functional. For example, if you want to add Google Maps functionality in your newly build website, you don’t have to code anything. All you need to do is add a WordPress plugin for Google Maps. Similarly, if your theme doesn’t support Google Fonts but you want to change default fonts, look for a Google Fonts plugin that will let your change fonts in the customizer. Here is a quick list of some essential WordPress plugins that I recommend installing on every fresh WordPress website.

• WordPress SEO by Yoast: This plugin lets you modify keywords, titles, descriptions and few other details for individual posts as well for website-wide meta data.
• W3 Total Cache: This plugin improves speed of your website by offering caching services.
• JetPack by WordPress: Jetpack is probably one of the best plugins out there. This plugin offers various added features for your website such as ability to add a gallery, view website stats, enahnce security and so on.
• Vault Press: This plugin adds necessary security features to your website in order to protect it from malware and hackers.
• AntiSpam Bee: This plugin will help you keep the spam away from your website.
• Disqus: This plugins adds Disqus commenting system to your WordPress website.
• Contact Form 7: this plugin lets your add contact forms to your website.
• Pop Up Pro: Pop Up Pro lets you create engaging pop ups for your website for enhanced user engagement and email list building.

Step 5: Change header and logo

Once you have added essential plugins and have setup a theme of your choice, you will need to change logo and header for your website. Majority of themes will let you change logo in Appearance>Header but if you don’t find an option to upload your logo there, look in Appearance>Customize.

Step 6: Add posts and pages and setup navigation

You can start adding posts and pages in your WordPress website to start filling it up. You can setup different categories for posts and show them on navigation. To add posts, go to Posts>Add New. To add new pages, go to Pages> Add New.

Finally, you will be setting up navigation for your website. You can add pages, posts, categories and custom links to your navigation. To build up navigation menu, simply go to Appearance>Menu and Create a New Menu from there. Once done, choose menu location/placement from bottom and hit Save.

Now visit your website and it should look decent and professional.

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Finding a niche without using any paid tools

I start my day by reading a few Internet Marketing forums. One of the most commonly asked question on these forums is about finding a niche. There are tons of answers to that question in the forums but majority of them offer little insight on what they are doing really. You will usually find something like this:

• Check trends
• Go through UberSuggest or a similar tool to generate some ideas
• Pick a few keywords
• Check traffic for your keywords
• Check competition
• Check search volume
• Check CPC
• Check first results on the first page to see if there are some week websites in there.

The problem with this method is that there is hardly any purpose to it. You can’t follow this method unless you know exactly what the person suggesting these steps was trying to achieve by finding a niche. Was he trying to sell ClickBank products? Was he trying to make money with Adsense? Was he simply building an authority site? And so on…

So many questions remain unanswered.

Since I’m going to build an authority site, I will show you how to find a profitable niche for that only. If you are looking to build smaller niche sites or something else, you will have to put your own spin on what I teach you in this article.

The PURPOSE of this guide is to find a niche where I can build an authority site and make $100/day within 8 months.

Find a market that spends money

The foremost thing you need to do is to find a market that spends money. You don’t want to end up with a great niche where you can rank your site in days but no one is interested in buying anything in that market. You want visitors who are potential buyers. Keeping that in mind, we begin looking for a market with huge spendings.

To start your search, you can simply use the list of websites below to get some ideas.

• Nichebot
• Shopping.com
• AOL Hot Searches
• Google Groups
• Craig’s List
• Delicious Popular
• Dig
• Google Catalogs
• Google Suggest
• Technorati

To find markets that spend money, you can simply do the following.

• Visit http://pulse.ebay.com/. This is a great place to find hot products. You can easily find out markets that are spending money.
• Visit Amazon and look at their hot selling items.
• Check the largest stores to see what they are selling. This will give you an idea about what people are buying. These large stores won’t be selling if no one is buying. So if every large store has electronic products, it simply means a lot of people are buying them.

Once you have identified the markets that spend money, make a list of them and move to the next step.

Pick an evergreen niche

This is common sense. You don’t want to pick a niche/market that is seasonal. Since I will be building an authority site and will be finding a niche for that through this tutorial, I would only look at markets that sell round the year.

Think of weight loss, beauty products, dating and so on. People are always going to want to lose weight, buy beauty products and go dating. These are examples of evergreen niches/markets where you will make money even 10 years from today.

Determine profitability and competition

Once you have identified a few niches that you think generate a lot of sales, you can simply use this free keyword tool to check the number of people searching for it. Once you enter your niche/keywords in this tool, it will show you various matching keywords with number of searches for each of them. A keyword with more than 5,000 monthly searches is something you want to add to your final list.

Another way to check profitability is to check search volume in Google. You can simply perform some targeted searches in Google and find out search volume for your keywords. This can give you an idea of popularity of the keyword/niche and therefore make an idea about profitability.

For checking competition, I simply used Google Adwords. It’s a great tool and it’s free. It gives you nearly accurate estimates of competition and profitability of a niche. Simply search for your keywords and see the CPC and competition. You’d ideally want to go for niches/markets with HIGH competition since that means there would be a lot of advertisers willing to spend to show their ads. If I end up building a valuable authority site, I can get a higher CPC (Cost Per Click) which means more money from clicks.

Visit forums and find out more about your niche

By now you should have picked your niche. I did.

You should be visiting forums and exploring your niche now. This is the time to determine behavior of your potential customers, understand their purchasing habits and see what they want. You will be offering them what they want through your website. Forums are a great place to see what people are talking about.

You can easily find forums for your niche by searching [forum+your niche]. You can also search for [intitle:forum+niche] and [inurl:forum + niche]. Both queries should give you enough results to dig through your niche.

Make sure that you are recording all the information you get by visiting these forums. Make note of questions that people are asking and things that people are talking about within your niche. All this will help us build a site for our audience and not for ourself.

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Niche site Vs Authority site – Which one is better?

Majority of internet marketers build small niche sites before they go for a full-scale authority site that dominates their niche. Since a successful authority site takes a lot more effort and dedication as compared to a small niche site, many shy away from starting their journeys with an authority website. In this blog post, I will explain key differences between both models and finally I will help you make a choice.

Since this blog post is a part of my ‘journey’ posts, I will also be discussing my own preferences and deciding whether to go with a small niche site or a full-scale authority website.

Niche site vs authority site is an ever-green debate for internet marketers. Many marketers have shifted their focus to building authority websites due to recent changes in Google algorithm but still a lot of marketers are finding value in niche sites and they continue building them.

In this post, you will learn about

• Arguments in favor of a niche site
• Arguments in favor of an authority site
• Why I chose to build an authority site

Arguments in favor of building a niche site

There is no doubt that internet marketers love building niche sites. They are easy to build, you don’t need to have a great looking site and still you can bank quite a lot with these sites. Once you have built a niche site successfully, you can easily scale up the method and build dozen of similar sites within different niches to generate a lot of money through affiliate sales and Adsense (but there are other ways to monetize as well – we will discuss monetization later during the journey).

Basically, a niche site leverages the power of ‘ignored’ keywords. The trick is to find keywords with good potential and build a site around those keywords. The income model is often selling Clickbank and Amazon products coupled with Adsense.

Niche sites offer a chance to test market

Niche websites can be used to test a market without investing a lot of time and money in it.

Although niche sites aren’t going to make you a millionaire, they are a good starting point for any internet marketer. You don’t have to add a lot of content on the site and still you can make money from it. Most importantly, niche sites are a great research tool. You can use it to test a market for building an authority website later.

It is easy money

Even though you can’t possibly make a six-figure income consistently from a niche site, it does help you make some easy money. Let me be clear on this that there is no ‘easy’ money-making method out there but still niche sites are relatively easy compared to doing a full-scale authority website. You have to add less content, there are fewer pages and posts to promote and you are going to promote everything to a very small niche instead of promoting to a large community of similar minded people.

All this simply means that you can create a niche site even if you are new to internet marketing and actually make some money with it.

More chances of generating actual revenue

Those internet marketers who vote in the favor of niche sites believe that instead of building one massive authority site, it is always better to build a lot of small websites that target different niches. This way there is minimal risk as one of the niche sites is definitely going to make money even if others fail. With authority website, you just have one single website which means you won’t be making money if your authority site fails.

Arguments against niche sites

Niche sites are a great way to start making money from the internet. It gives you the confidence to go ahead and serves as an important tool to test different markets and customer behavior. However, there are number of problems and risks with niche sites. An authority website comes without these risks and therefore offers a much better business model.

Niche sites are more likely to get penalized by Google

For a niche site, you are depending entirely on Google. Your niche site will only generate revenue if you are ranking on the first page. This means that if Google, for some reason, doesn’t like your site, you aren’t going to make any money with it.

The problem with niche sites is that they are mostly build by people who are looking to make some quick dollars. As a result, majority of niche sites today are nothing more than spam. They don’t provide much value and therefore Google looks at them as ‘useless’ resource.

With recent Google algorithm updates, Google has been really harsh on niche sites. I’ve seen few of my own sites going down the gutter with these updates. Since majority of niche sites will have minimal content with a focus on answering just one ‘search query’ instead of offering a lot of value around that ‘query’, Google doesn’t favor these sites anymore.

Niche sites aren’t a reliable business model

There is no doubt that you can make a fortune with niche sites and people have done that in the past, but niche sites can’t be called a reliable business model. Since these sites rely heavily on Amazon or Clickbank products in addition to Adsense, there are chances that a niche site banking six figures today might bank nothing at all the next month in case Google bans Adsense account used on the site and Amazon refuses affiliate program for the area you are living.

Niche sites aren’t reliable business. You can’t always be sure that you will be making money with niche sites in the next five or ten years.

Arguments in favor of building an authority site

Unlike niche sites, authority websites provide a lot of value to the user. These sites don’t just focus on one keyword trying to answer a single query from the visitor but these sites have a lot of unique content and therefore answers multiple search queries from within the same niche.

To put simply, an authority website will offer you tons of content before asking you to purchase anything whereas a niche site focuses entirely on pushing you through with the ‘purchase’ rather than helping you out first.

As an example, think of a weight loss niche. An authority website will offer you tons of useful articles, videos and other information on the topic. It will be selling various weight loss programs but the focus will be entirely on providing value and help the reader make an aware decision.

On the other hand, a niche site on weight loss will be focused entirely on a selling a particular weight loss product, let’s say ‘weight loss guide for women in their 50s’. AS a result, the website will only offer a few articles on the topic and push women to purchase a product.

Authority websites offer better Return On Investment (ROI)

When it comes to ROI, authority sites clearly win. Unlike niche sites, an authority website is an actual business model that can help you generate massive ROI.

With an average niche site, you can be making anywhere between $100-$500 a month but this isn’t guaranteed. Google might dislike something about your site and decide to take it out of its index. That will mean your business is dead and you have lost all your investment.

An authority site takes $100 to get started, just as is the case with a niche site. However, you will have chance of unlimited ROI with an authority website. All you have to do is to attract loyal audience and once you do that, you can offer them what they want. Once you align your website to what your visitors want, you can easily make a full-time income from an authority website.

There is less risk with authority sites

Unlike niche sites, authority sites face less risk of getting de-indexed or sandboxed by Google since there is a lot of valuable content on the site. Authority sites are build around audience engagement rather than affiliate products. Once you have a loyal audience, it won’t matter even if you are not ranking in Google. Your visitors will continue coming to your website.

Income comes from varied sources

Moreover, authority sites usually generate income from various sources instead of relying on a single source, any major shift in internet marketing space will not kill the business as is in the case of a niche site.

Why I chose to build an authority site

This should be quite clear by now. I was initially planning to get back to earning money with a niche site in my journey (follow my journey to build a massive authority site). I could have probably started making some money in a month or even before that. However, as I explored, I found many reasons to go for an authority website instead of a niche site. Here are factors that changed my mind.

• Niche sites are temporary and chances are that I won’t be making money with a niche site after a year or so. There is every chance that Google will tighten its claws on niche sites and we will start seeing less and less of them in search results.
• Niche sites generate income from few sources, which means there is a risk of failing. If I can’t make money with Adsense or Clickbank products, I’m doomed. That’s not the case with authority sites. Even if I fail to make money after 8 months, I will have a great asset at hands that I can sell.
• The hardest thing with a niche site is that I will lose interest in a week or so once I’ve written everything out there about a very specific topic. Tell me how much you can write about ‘electric shaving razors’? I’m sure all of you would have 10-15 ideas to write about at max. On the other hand, think about what I can do with ‘razors’. I can even write about different hairstyles, latest hair fashion and so on. There are endless possibilities of adding quality content to an authority site as opposed to a niche site.

 

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