Beginners Guide to Making Money Online

The information on our site is geared around teaching you how to make money online. Throughout the site, we cover various topics which are important to helping you earn a full-time online income such as search engine optimisation, content writing and affiliate marketing. While the detail of these topics is important, I remember only too well from my first steps in the world of making money on the internet that when you don’t really know what you are doing yet, the complexities of the individual topics are just too complicated when there is so much information to take in. So in this article, lets take a step back and forget about the detail of article structure, title tags and cross linking and just look at a step by step guide to setting up your own online business if you are just completely starting out.

Step by Step Guide to Setting up your Online Business

1. Choose your area of interest

The first thing you have to do is come up with an subject for your online business. At this stage in your career, pick something simple. Trying to compete with the big boys for competitive terms is not going to work as you don’t have the knowledge or the expertise. It is impossible to make huge sums of money on the internet overnight, even the top gurus had to go through a long, slow process.

For now, pick a topic that you are passionate about, because this is the best way to learn. Don’t worry if you don’t think you can make money from it - you will be surprised how profitable most topics can be. The key is to do something good - if you are interested in it, others will be too and if you do it well, you will make money. Here are some useful guides to helping you choose your topic.

How to find your first Niche Website
Finding your First Affiliate Niche

2. Setup your Blog

If you really don’t know what you are doing (although we’d recommend using this method even if you do), then we are going to run your blog using Wordpress.

Before we can do that, you are going to need a domain name and a hosting package. We recommend using Hostgator, as it allows you to run several sites for the price of one.

If you need help installing Wordpress, contact us and we will be happy to do this for you for a small fee.

3. Choose a Design for your Blog

Wordpress comes with a default theme, so technically you could start creating content for your website without making any alterations to the default design. However, there are literally thousands of free designs for Wordpress, so it makes sense to take a little time to give your site a new, fresh look.

Read our guide to the best Wordpress themes.

4. Plan the Content for your Website

Before you write a single sentence for your website, you should think about what areas you want to cover. Of course, you can also add more later, but the more thought you put in just now the less hassle you will have later.

Think about what topics you are going to cover and how you are going to structure your content. You should decide which sections (categories) you are going to create. This will both help focus your writing and make it easier for your readers to navigate around your site and find relevant content.

Read our guide to planning the content of your website.

5. Start Writing Content

You’ve no doubt heard this phrase already but if you are hearing it now for the first time, I assume you it won’t be the last. CONTENT IS KING.

Forget trying to trick the search engines with spammy SEO techniques. If you want to rank well on Google and obtain regular, loyal traffic, then all you need to do is write good quality, useful content and if you are patient, the traffic will soon start to flow. One of the most important articles on our site explains how Google works.

When writing content, make sure it is unique, relevant and interesting. Put yourself in the eyes of your visitors. Would YOU be interested in what you are writing about?  Are you adding useful content to your topic, or are you just rephrasing what others are saying?  If it is the former, you’ll find fairly soon that others begin to reference your site and traffic will flow.

6. Build Relevant Links

As well as writing content, the other main thing you have to do is receive links from other websites. You should ensure that you aim for relevant links from similar sites, rather than low quality spam sites as those would do more harm than good.

There are many ways to build links. You can exchange links with other websites, but you will find by writing quality content that you will receive links without having to ask.

When you get links from other websites, you will find that they are more useful if the anchor text (the text which links to your site) is of one of your main, targeted keywords.

7. Next Steps

The above 6 steps cover the basics of getting your website online, if you are a complete newbie to the world of making money on the internet.

Of course, there is a lot more that you need to learn but you can’t run until you can walk and once you have gone through the above steps, you will be in a much better position to start tweaking your website and making improvements.

I hope this article has been useful and don’t forget, if you would like personal, 1-on-1 SEO training, feel free to contact us and we will be happy to guide you through either the basic or more advanced steps to help you make money online!