You want to create your own Finance blog ?
Guess what, this can be done in less than an hour.
Below are the exacts steps I recommend you to follow to create your very own website or blog.
Follow them one by one and you will have a fully up and running website in no more than an hour :
1. Finding a topic for your website, your niche
Maybe you already have an idea for your blog.
If you don’t, there are several ways you can find one.
The most obvious is to list topics or subjects that are of interest to you, activities that you specialize in.
Remember, blogging is all about bringing valuable content to your readers, so it is important to find a subject on which you believe you can bring added value.
If you don’t have any idea but are looking for an audience, you might want to check what type of content is trending by going to Google trends.
Alternatively, you can use google’s Keyword planner tool.
That tool will enable you to search any kind of keyword and see what kind of search volume they attract.
Once you have found a niche or a topic, you can test your keyword on Neil Patel’s post around building a profitable blog.
2. Find a domain name for your website and check availability.
Once you have found an idea, you need a name for your website.
You can find available names (and domains for that matter) at many websites, one of the best is name.com.
At this very early stage, I also recommend checking the availability of an email address, twitter and facebook logins that match your domain name.
This will give you consistency in the interactions you create with your visitors
3. Find a hosting service for your website, in order to connect your content to the internet.
Now that the initial steps are completed, you have to find a provider to host your website’s files and connect everything to the Internet.
Complete and affordable packages are available with hostgator, they will cost you no more than 5 to 6$ per month. This provider is very reliable and is one of the best known in the world.
If you’re going to setup an affiliate marketing blog, I strongly recommend using Wealthy Affiliate’s fantastic hosting platform (Siterubix), they offer hundreds of premium services that make managing your website so much easier.
4. Choose a website building platform.
In order for you to build your website and content you are going to need a Content Management System (CMS), otherwise called a website building platform.
The most famous and the one I definitely recommend is WordPress.
It is free, full of themes and layouts and very easy to use for beginners. Hostgator has an integrated wordpress installation service that simplifies the whole journey for you (go to hostgator, control panel, choose quickinstall and select wordpress).
5. Choose a theme
To make your content look professional and ensure scalability when you start building an audience and want to enhance functionalities.
A lot of themes (including free ones) can be found at themeforest.
I use one of the web’s most famous themes which is called Extra from Elegantthemes.com.
6. Free pictures for your content
For the content you are going to publish online, you might want to include pictures. Since it is likely you are going to favor free pictures, you can find some from a variety of sources :
If you need to insert pictures of your screen in your posts, use windows’ integrated screen capture tool
7. If you want a logo
If you want to create a logo, you can use a number of free resources, I used logogarden.com in the past, but an excellent option is the service provided at brandmark.io.
I recommend using your logo as your gmail, twitter and facebook logos or favicon as this will enhance your visibility and give consistency to your communication across channels.
8. Outsource some of the work
At any point in time, a number of tasks can be outsourced, such as editing, writing, design, graphics creation, seo.
For that purpose, several websites provide freelancing resources, the best known one is Upwork.
9. Create your social networking tools
Create all the email and social networking tools that will help you interact with your visitors. I recommend at least a gmail account, a twitter account and a facebook account.
10. Track your activity
Once your website is created, you will need to follow the activity and traffic and therefore I recommend creating a google analytics account (linked to your gmail account).
Tracking activity is crucial for you to understand what content people are most interested in, how many visitors you have, how long do they stay on your website, where do they come from, what browser they are using, etc….
11. Install WordPress plugins
Within wordpress, I recommend installing a series of very useful plugins :
Yoast SEO : improve your writing, keywords and optimize your website
iThemes Security : to secure both your content and the access to your website
Google Adsense plugin : easy to use, monitor and manage the ads on your website
Sumome : for growing your email lists, using heatmaps and other social media and analytics tools
12. To make some advertising and affiliate revenue
If you wish to advertise, create a google adsense account, that will allow you to earn revenue from you site’s trafic.
If you want to promote other people’s content or your own content on other people’s website, use clickbank.
Promoting content from amazon can also be a way of monetizing your website, check out amazon’s affiliate program
13. Spread the news
Make your website known on some popular content sharing websites such as Stumbleupon. You cannot do that upfront, you need to wait until you have written or published sufficient content in order to attract visitors.
14. Email marketing and list building
Creating engagement and building an email list is key. To do all that and more aweber is THE tool. It is extremely widely used and can save huge amounts of time in managing email lists and automatic quite a number of tasks.
15. Want to create videos ?
If you want to create videos by filming your screen, use camtasia.
If you want to create animated videos, a brilliant option is doodly.com.
Conclusion
There you are, ready to fire up. Completing most of the steps described above will take you very little time. Drop me a question if anything isn’t clear.
Further Reading
I hope this review will be helpful. If you want to thank me, buy me a coffee 😉