How To Build A Website To Make Money – A Step-By-Step Guide

How to build a website to make money is a popular question that I will answer in this step-by-step guide.

Having a website does not mean that you will just automatically receive traffic but if you write quality content, Google will find you and will index you. All you need to do is to ensure you get indexed where it matters: On the first page of the search engines.

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So how does it work?

The Google bot crawls the Internet and when it finds your website it will index it in its search results pages. Similarly, Google will do this for content found on your website as well.

A very basic explanation: Google is looking for relevant content related to your heading and will then extract key phrases that it feels is relevant to your topic. These key phrases will then also be indexed in the search result pages and the ranking of these key phrases are determined by a number of factors.

These factors include but is not limited to:

1. The number of competing pages
2. The quality of the content
3. The interaction of people on your topic
4. The time people spend reading your article
5. The word count of your article
6. Your on page SEO
7. Internal links
8. External links (relevant websites linking to-your-website)
9. The frequency of new content on your website
10. Page speed

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What Will You Learn?

In a previous post I showed you how to build a website for free in 30 seconds or less. I will now show you what you will need and how to set up your website in order to rank on the first page of Google for your topic. I will then take you through the process step by step.

What you will need:

1. A niche
2. A keyword research tool
3. A mobile friendly website
4. SEO optimization tools

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What Is The Aim?

You want your topic to be indexed on the first page of Google and other search engines in order to maximize the traffic received to your post.

Once you have traffic to your site, the aim is to make some money. This is achieved by joining affiliate programs and advertising your affiliate links in your content so that you can receive a commission when a reader purchases the product through your affiliate link.

Making money online; however, should be your secondary goal. Your primary goal is to offer helpful and quality information to your readers.

In order for you to rank on the first page of the search engines, you will need to do keyword research to ensure that a relevant keyword from your topic is able to appear in the top results.

That is why it is important to do keyword research even before you start writing a word.

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Where To Start?

I am showing you how to do affiliate marketing which is one of the best ways in making money online.

There is a Chinese proverb saying:

So if you want to know how to be successful in something, ask those that already achieved success.

If you want to be successful with affiliate marketing, I will highly recommend joining the Wealthy Affiliate academy. They are simply the best in the industry.

Moving on…

You will first need to find a topic that you are passionate about. From there you can select your niche.

Anything can be a niche and is basically a part of a business. So if you are passionate about gaming, you can have gaming chairs as a niche for example. This is like a micro-niche – a small part of a big industry.

In my example, I will take “gaming” as my niche.

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Keyword Research

Now that I have selected a niche, I will do some keywords research to find a proper domain name for my website.

Jaaxy and SEMrush are examples of keyword research tools you can use to find your ultimate keywords for both your domain and your topics.

I used Jaaxy and found a great keyword that will fit my niche just perfectly: “best PC strategy games of all time”

You do not have to, but I decided to make this my domain name as well. Now, let’s build a money-making website!

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Build A Money Making Website

WordPress will be the platform I will be using to build a money-making website as it is one of the most widely used platforms out there and conveniently have a plugin for everything and anything.

I will be creating my website as shown in my article: How to build a website using WordPress.

You can build it on a free domain or purchase a domain name for your website. The .siterubix.com domain will also rank in Google but not as easily as a proper domain.

This is what it will look like with the free domain set up:

I; however, have decided to purchase a domain name:

Pro Tip: Make sure to select a responsive WordPress template so that your website is mobile friendly.

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Get Your Website Ready To Make Money

Step 1

Go to Posts (In the left margin menu of WordPress’ Dashboard) then All Posts and delete all dummy data. Do the same for the Pages.

Step 2

Now add all the pages that you want for your website. I would recommend creating a Contact Page, an About Page and an Affiliate Disclosure Page at a minimum.

Step 3

In the WordPress dashboards’ left menu, go to Settings and then General Settings. This is where you will set your website’s Title and Tagline. I will use my keyword as my website’s title:

Step 4

Staying in the General Settings, adjust the Timezone and Date Format to your preference.

Step 5

Moving to the Plugins option and under clicking on installed Plugins, you will see all the plugins that are already installed. For SEO purposes, you will need either YOAST or the All-In-One-SEO plugin.

I have opted to stay with the All-In-One-SEO Pack as it was already installed. The free version is perfectly fine to use and so I activate the plugin.

Step 6

Moving to the Appearance menu item, I will click on Customize and edit everything according to my preference. Add perhaps a logo for the site and customize the menu, look and feel of your theme.

Step 7

Next, we will need to link Google Analytics and Google Search Console to your website. With Google Analytics it is possible to monitor and track user interaction with our website. Search Console will, in contrast, show you search engine interaction with regards to your website.

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Connect with Google Analytics

If at this point you do not have a Google account, I suggest that you create one here: Create A Google Account

1. Open your Internet Browser and go to http://analytics.google.com

2. Sign in to your Google account and click on Admin in the bottom left corner of the menu.

3. Click on Create New Account, add your Website Name, URL, Industry, and click on Get Tracking ID.

4. Accept all the Terms and Conditions

5. This will give you a UA-xxxxxxxxx-x number.

6. Copy that number and head over to your website’s Installed plugins

7. I chose the All In One SEO Pack and will click on its SEO Settings link

8. Scrolling down, I will enter this code into the Google Analytics ID field and click on Update Options at the bottom of the screen.

That is it! Done.

Now, let us connect Google Search Console:

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Connecting With Google Search Console

1. Open your Internet Browser and go to https://search.google.com/search-console

2. I the top-left, expand Search Property (if need be), and click on Add A Property

3. Add your full URL and click on Continue

4. Because we have already set up Google Analytics, you can choose Google Analytics as your verification option.

5. Go back to your All I One SEO plugin and select Feature Manager in the left menu.

6. Activate the XML Sitemaps

7. Activate the Social META

8. Go back to Google Search Console and click on Sitemaps in the left menu

9. Add your sitemap name – in this case: sitemap.xml and submit it.

I add the sitemap to Search Console because it makes it much easier for the search engines to crawl all your content.

There is not much in the way of content right now, but hopefully, you have done the Contact Page, the About Page, and the Affiliate Disclosure Page.

So yes, I submit my sitemap every time I add content to my site. This is all part of SEO.

There are more tweaks you can do to your site, but this will be a good start.

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So what is next?

You will need content on your website and lots of it. You will therefore do keyword research again on a topic you want to write about that is relevant to your niche site.

I have chosen to write about the best PC strategy games of all time and it is obvious that I will now write about one of these all-time great games. But I will need a headline for my post and it is, therefore, essential that I choose one that can rank in the search engines.

First I do a little research to see if some of my strategy games I play or have played before are listed as some of the best. There it is: Age Of Mythology. A strategy game I have fond memories of.

I quickly filter my game database of installed games on my computer with the word ‘Age’ and what do you know: It is installed and ready to go.

I plug my topic into Jaaxy and find that Age Of Mythology Review is a great keyword to use.

Now it is your task to write a lot of content for your niche and once you get some traffic, it is time to find affiliate offers for your niche.

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How To Find Affiliate Offers

A Google search will help you do that. Simply type ‘your niche + affiliate’ in Google search to find some great options.

Amazon is a huge online company with millions of products that they sell. They also offer an affiliate program where you can make a commission when someone buys a product of theirs through your website.

There is also ClickBank and JVZoo to consider.

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Why The Affiliate Disclosure Page That We Created?

Since 2015 rules were set in place for anyone making money through United States products and programs.

You need to declare to your readers that you are making money from the links in your content.

You can learn more about it here: Federal Trade Commission released their new rules for Disclosure Compliance.

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Conclusion

I have shown you the basics and the crux of what it is you need to do to be successful in online marketing. It took me years, lots of money and unwanted programs to find and realize the same.

I, therefore, hope that this post was helpful to you and that you found exactly what it was you were looking for.

In the end, it is all about quality content, keyword research, SEO, and hard work.

If you like this post and really want to reach great heights with building your own website to make money, then you will surely benefit from all there is to learn at Wealthy Affiliate.

Like always: Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer you. Perhaps you can comment and share your own experience doing affiliate marketing and what made you successful.

All the best,

John