Sunday, September 27, 2009

Starting a website

At first thought, starting a website seems to be a daunting task, but it's not. You don't need to be a Computer Science major to start a website. All it takes is a minute amount of  entrepreneural spirit and a desire to make some cash.

First thing to consider is a niche topic for your site. The normal suggestion is to choose something your passionate about, but the objective here is to make money and who's not passionate about that. So I say choose a topic based on popularity, the more popular the better.

After deciding on your topic the next step is to jump right in and purchase a domain name. It's not very expensive at all, you can find them on sites such as godaddy.com or hostgator.com for as little as $1.99 per month.

Now that you have a domain name you then must decide on a web host. Which are also not very expensive and can be purchased  on godaddy.com for as little as $4.99 per month.

When deciding on a host make sure that the features you choose are comparable to your site. Meaning you have the amenities you need to run your site comfortably without any problems.

Once you've taken the aforementioned steps you can now focus on getting your website up and running. You can choose to outsource the design of your site or you can do it on your own. If you do decide to outsource your site design you can find reasonable prices for web design services on elance.com.

Or if you decide to do it on your own you will need a web editing program such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft frontpage. These programs are fairly easy to learn and make it very simple to produce professional looking websites for a fraction of the cost of outsourcing.

Now that your site is up and running all you need to do is bring people to the website. The way to do this is to implement some search engine marketing strategies. You can choose to do this organically or by pay per click advertising.

Once you've implemented your S.E.O. tactics you must monetize your site by creating an ad sense account with Google. The way ad sense works is Google places ads on your page for free and they pay you when the ads are clicked by your visitors.

Now see how easy that was, all you have do is follow these very simple steps and you can easily be making an extra $500 to $1000 dollars a month with just a few hours a week of work.