The following steps are needed to get started:
First, PICK A NAME FOR YOUR SITE. Try to stick with ***.com
Next, once you’ve chosen the name for your domain, you’ll want to GET HOSTING for that DOMAIN. These are the two things you’ll need to launch your website. Hosting is where your website files will be stored. Domain is obviously the name you’ve chosen for your website.
To get hosting and a domain (sometimes the domain is free depending on the company you’re dealing with), try Googling the terms Dotster.com, GoDaddy.com, HostGator.com, BlueHost.com, Accuwebhosting.com, Liquidweb.com, wpengine.com or A2hosting.com (the one I use– and I’ve posted a direct link to it. If you choose to use it, I may get a referral fee. But the reason I’ve listed multiple other companies here is because I want you to look at all of them, then choose one for yourself). There are many companies to choose from. Alternately, do a Google search for terms like, “hosting,” “web hosting,” “domain,” “web service provider,” etc. This is where you’ll purchase hosting for your up and coming web site or blog site. Click on “GET STARTED.”
Check for the availability of the domain name of your choice (Just to be clear, Google.com, Facebook.com, Amazon.com are domain names), and purchase it. Or, if you already own a domain, you can click on that option instead. You’ll be presented with different purchasing terms (ie. 3 years, 2 years, 1 year, month to month). Purchasing annually is actually cheaper than purchasing from month to month, and purchasing for 2 years or 3 years is cheaper still. If you choose 1 year (or 2 or 3 years), you will be billed at one sitting (times 12/24/36 months respectively), but your price per month will drop in each instance. Be sure to check the box for “Domain Privacy Protection.” This will keep your information private and prevent email or phone solicitations, and prevent people from spamming you. Having chosen your domain name, hosting plan and billing cycle (length of time of your hosting), it will be added to a cart.
Proceed to checkout and make your purchase.
The hosting service will now ask you to login.
Go to “CREATE ACCOUNT.” Fill in the subsequent boxes with the required information (ie. E-mail, Username, Password, and possibly a pin number to be used when you contact Support). Once you’ve provided this, click CREATE ACCOUNT.
Then continue filling in the details under “Billing information,” such as your first name, last name, email, country, address, zip code, city, state, organization and phone number. Next, choose your payment option, click continue. Next, you’ll come to, “Review your order and confirm your purchase.” Click the box to “place your order,” and click the box to, “make your payment.”
You may need to confirm your bank whereby you’ll be redirected to a bank page for verification of credentials and payment processing. You’ll be provided with your transaction details, debit account details, reference number, order details and account information.
There might be slight variations to this process as outlined here. With your new domain.com name and a company that will host your forthcoming website, it’s time to investigate what it will take to get a website online.
There are a few ways to approach this. Decide whether you will attempt to build your own website or if you will have a website built for you.
Run a Google search for Craigslist.org. Choosing “computers” or “services” in the drop-down menu will present you with options of people who are online and advertising their services to build a website for you and their prices will vary, sometimes drastically. Don’t pay for someone by the hour, wherever and with whomever you choose to get your site made. You open yourself up to allowing someone to bleed you to death. Insist instead on a gig price, a package deal. Even if slightly on the higher end, it’s better to have some idea of what your price cap will be. I can’t recommend a good price, I don’t have enough experience, but as you call and explain what you’re looking for, you will begin to discover “commonalities” in each conversation and learn to discern whether someone is willing to take on your project as another completed job for their portfolio, or if they’re trying to get rich on your project alone. I’ve spoken to many people. All sounded professional, some were straightforward, some slicker than a snake. But keep at it with dogged determination. You need a website, a presence on the internet. It’s the basis through which you’ll be able to move forward with the process of building your enterprise. Take names, phone numbers and keep notes on each contacted person.
You’ll need to choose between a static page and dynamic pages (possibly involving Java(?) or some other higher end programming language). You’ll also need to decide if you will want your website to have 1 page or say 5+ pages. These can include a homepage, an about us page, a product or services page, a blog page and a contact us page. Other potential categories include a video page, a page for photos, frequently asked questions, and so on. You’ll pay a higher and higher price for every additional page and the more elaborate your site becomes.
Next, think about what you’re trying to achieve. Based on your primary objective, you’ll choose either a personal website, an e-commerce website, a niche website, a blog website, a small business website, or a membership website. There are also other options available such as a forum website (an organized way to publish public topic discussions and for which users can register to contribute to said discussions on topics such as hobbies, popular culture, academic topics, etc.), a portfolio website (in which an artist, for example, might choose to showcase their work), a non-profit website (to provide info on a charity and ways for people to donate), and a multiplicity of others. My suggestion is to keep it simple, don’t get bogged down in the details, you can always make changes to the content of or expand your website (pages) at a later point in time.
Your goal should be to get online, at a reasonable price, and with a site that will get the job done for whatever it is that you’re trying to do. Selling products? One primary product? 10 products? Are you even selling products at all? You get the idea. Some sites give you the ability to keep a blog. Or, you can choose (as I have) to use a separate domain name with which to keep a blog, and from which one can later tie in to the website itself.
I mentioned Craigslist.org at the beginning of this paragraph. There are other options as well (to have a site designed and built for you), to include Fiverr.com, Upwork.com (both of which I’ve spent time on), WordPress.com which hosts and maintains the site for you once completed based on specifications you will be presented with and choose as they walk you through their process to finally arrive at the check-out button (purchase/buy button).
There are many other options available. In the case of WordPress, one can choose either WordPress.com OR WordPress.org, the prior being hosted and maintained by WordPress.com and the latter being self-hosted WordPress.org, self-built and (essentially) self-maintained. Whether going with whatever hosting provider, each, in every case, is hosted by said company on their platform (ie: WordPress.com, GoDaddy, Hostgator, Dotster, Liquidweb, etc.) except for WordPress.org. I personally find that option (.org) appealing for a multiplicity of reasons not the least of which is that you own your own site instead of (in essence) “leasing” said site. When using a hosting provider, or WordPress.com site, your website could be deleted at anytime if they feel you’ve violated their terms of service. Second, you cannot monetize with ads. Third, you cannot upload plug-ins. Fourth, you cannot upload a customizable theme or you have limited options. Fifth, you do not own your own domain name, which in the case of WordPress.com, will be (YourDomainName).WordPress.com.
When choosing to make a site on WordPress.org, first, you will have access to thousands of plug-ins. Second, you’ll have a unique domain name that you own. Third, you can monetize your website with ads. Fourth, you have the option to create an online store. Fifth, you have complete control over the customization of your website. If you do choose to take this (self-managed) route, you are responsible for familiarizing yourself with your site’s WordPress “dashboard” and your hosting service’s “control panel.” There are many videos available on YouTube that provide instruction on both of these. These will allow you to add plug-ins usually to achieve something specific. Two important notes about plug-ins is that pretty much anything you want to do with your WordPress site, there’s a very good chance there’s a plug-in for it, and the second is that you also don’t want to go crazy installing plug-ins because the more you have, the more vulnerabilities your site may potentially have and the slower it may run.
The videos also provide instruction on checking your site’s stats (ie: visitors, traffic, subscribers) and much more. One thing I’d here like to point out is that your traffic is your money. LITERALLY. If you have something to sell, for instance, the traffic stats are something you’ll want to monitor regularly.
Imagine Ma and Pa’s Baked Breads. Next imagine their business potential at 5 people walking down the street by their business per hour versus 500 people walking by per hour. If they have good products, once those people walk in, they’re probably going to buy. Let’s just say for the moment that only 5 people actually buy per hour (of 500 walking by). Lets say the average purchase (for pastries, breads, croissants and coffee is $10 per person. That’s still $50 per hour times a 10 hour day (most shops of this genre open early and stay open until the early to mid-afternoon) and that’s a $500 day, could be higher, maybe lower. That’s a $2500 week (at 5 days per week), a minimum of a $10,000 month, and with 52 weeks in a year, that’s a $130,000 year (in sales). Not bad for a low cost product (both to make and as sold), and in the prior example, I’ve assumed a 10 hour day. Let’s not forget the Internet operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and has a potential near global audience (of those who are online), and a minimum potential audience of circa 300+ million (in the US alone).
Now imagine YOU are either selling a specific product or you’re advertising an Affiliate product. (Affiliate Marketing is a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals. ClickBank is an online market place that deals exclusively with products offered by merchants and sold by affiliate marketers for a commission. Also, most every large vendor has affiliate marketing programs. For example, Amazon’s affiliate marketer program is also incredibly effective. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see, “Make money with us,” and under this subsection, you’ll find a link that reads, “Become an Affiliate.” BestBuy and Walmart also have affiliate programs available and you’ll find the same informational links about becoming an affiliate with those companies. If you have your own website, you can subscribe to these offers and sell (using affiliate links) the product offers of your choice, some products offering an affiliate commission of $10-100 per sale. Whether by way of organic traffic sent by Google or paid traffic with Google (or Bing, or Duck Duck Go, or Yahoo, or by advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Tik-Tok, FourSquare, or a myriad of others), if you’re receiving (or driving) some amount of traffic to a specific product (could be an Affiliate Product or could be your own), it’s not a stretch to see that it doesn’t take massive numbers (in traffic) or a significant amount of sales to make this endeavor well worth it.
So, are they (you) managing to convert said traffic into customers (or at least subscribers)? Next, are you managing to collect email addresses? Building an email list is one of the cornerstones to success. If your site is consistently providing value, whether through goods or information, people are more likely to trust you with their name and email address, and if you treat those emails with respect by insuring that you have a legitimate reason to reach out to those customers with any offers that can genuinely benefit them or potentially be of interest to them (and not just you), people will be more receptive to opening a message from you and not just clicking delete. Email marketing, when done properly, creates a symbiotic relationship that can benefit both the marketer and the consumer in real world ways. People have extended you a certain amount of trust. It is your job to respect that trust by going the extra mile to find ways to provide value to your customers.
By way of SEO (search engine optimization), your site having its words indexed and achieving some site ranking (1st page of Google versus 20th page in someone’s search results), Google will provide you with what is called “organic traffic.” This is contrasted with what is called “paid traffic,” which is, literally, traffic that you are paying dollars for.
Once you’ve selected your hosting and domain, the next step in the process is to INSTALL WORDPRESS. On whichever hosting service you’ve chosen, scroll down and click on Managed WordPress, and Get Started. Under Pick A Domain, pick the domain name that you chose from the drop-down box, then click next. You’ll probably have to click next again until you get to Create A WordPress Login. Under WordPress User Name, you can enter your actual name or some user name. Then enter a password and confirm it. Choose something easy to remember on both because you’ll be using these often to log-in to the back end of your account. Then click Install. Once WordPress is installed, click on Get Started, No Thanks (to the Quick Start Wizard), and in the pop-up box that says Are You Sure You Want To Exit And Configure WordPress On Your Own? click OK.
You will now be taken to your DASHBOARD and from here, you’ll be able to control your website. When you need to access your WordPress dashboard again, you can type “your-domain-name.com/login” You can also type “your domain name/wp-admin/” as another way to access your back-end.
Let’s now say that you have a website and a means to blog, however you arrived at this point. You should have, by now, determined your objective. Will you be selling a product? Will you be selling multiple products? How many types of products do you have? You will have to play with your site to familiarize yourself with it. I’m providing some examples of videos (or links) that you can watch (or read) but my objective isn’t to do this for you blindly. I have no idea what it is you’re wanting to accomplish. But, the material that I’m providing is to give you an idea how to go about finding what it is you need and you can search for yourself using keywords applicable to the specifics of your search. It’s all common sense (pretty much).
You can take a look at the following WordPress.org Dashboard Overview, and after you’ve gone through this introduction, you can use the following video that introduces A2’s control panel (A2hosting.com), a hosting platform that you can use to maintain your website. Trust me when I tell you that if you actually take the time to familiarize yourself with the WordPress Dashboard and the Control Panel of whatever hosting service you’ve happened to choose, it will make your life immensely easier. Just play around with it over the course of a few days, or even a week. Eventually, it will begin to come into focus and you’ll learn your way around the back end.
To be continued…
