Without a doubt, the transition from an offline commerce world to one where you can earn money online has accelerated exponentially over the last several years \u2014 and more so since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. <\/p>\n
Clearly, a website that can be monetized is your gateway to this multi-trillion dollar world. However, to pull this off you need to be armed with the right tools from the get go. <\/p>\n
The wrong set of tools will simply keep you stuck on the ground floor.<\/p>\n
When it comes to choosing the right tools to create your website, there are two main paths you can follow:<\/p>\n
Which path is best for you depends on your specific needs. Website builders require a lot less technical knowledge to get up and running, but offer much less flexibility when it comes to diversifying your online income.<\/p>\n
Self-hosted websites require a lot more technical proficiency, but offer almost limitless freedom of choice.<\/p>\n
If you want to build a website to support a professional service (say, you’re a physiotherapist) and you’re not technically inclined, then a website builder will likely offer all you need to promote your business, book your appointments and accept payments online.<\/p>\n
Since you can’t scale beyond the maximum number of clients that you can personally handle on a daily basis, you don’t need more flexibility than what popular website builders currently offer.<\/p>\n
However, if you want to launch an affiliate site<\/a> that’ll scale its traffic into the tens of thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, you’ll be better off with a self-hosted solution.<\/p>\n
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What\u2019s a website builder exactly? It’s basically \u201cthe machine that builds the machine.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, it\u2019s a service that allows you to develop a website from scratch to launch without having to write a single line of code and without even having to be technically proficient.<\/p>\n
Now, do website builders address the needs of every single website project you can throw at them? No, in some cases, they are just too limiting and often impractical.<\/p>\n
But in many other cases, perhaps yours included, they’re the perfect solution to create a functional and attractive website that does everything you need at a reasonable cost.<\/p>\n
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What\u2019s a self-hosted website? Unlike website builders, where you give a service provider full control over the operation of your site, a self-hosted website runs on a server that you get to control and manage.<\/p>\n
By having total control over your website you get to add features, functionality and resources as you see fit (sometimes for free, other times for an additional cost), allowing you to scale your user base and grow your online revenue<\/a> virtually without limits.<\/p>\n
Now, unlike website builders, self-hosted platforms do require a minimum level of technical proficiency and basic knowledge about the inner workings of the World Wide Web, such as domain name servers, server-based email, domain and email forwarding, file structures, SSL certificates and so on.<\/p>\n
While you don\u2019t necessarily need to poses all this knowledge in advance, you do have to be willing to put in the time required to learn it\u2014but don\u2019t worry, there\u2019s a wealth of free information and tutorials readily available on the Internet for this purpose.<\/p>\n
Unlike website builders, where everything you need is provided through a single service, self-hosted sites require three separate sets of tools in order to function.<\/p>\n
First, you’ll need a web hosting<\/a> service<\/strong> to host your domain that includes WordPress, a free open-source content management system (CMS). This is the software where all of your website content will reside (WordPress powers over 35% of all websites worldwide).<\/p>\n
Here, you’re looking for a theme that’s flexible<\/a>, easy to use, fast and a theme that includes a large number of integrations with third-party tools and services required to maximize your online income.<\/p>\n
Finally, you’ll need a number of WordPress plugins<\/a> to provide you with added functionality to increase your revenue potential, speed up your site and shield it from bad actors, among many other important tasks.<\/p>\n
When it comes to self-hosting your website, performance is key: search engines are known for penalizing slow websites because of their poor user experience.<\/p>\n
So, you need to look for services that consistently deliver fast WordPress websites and with high uptime (above 99%).<\/p>\n
In addition, you want to choose a service provider that can offer:<\/p>\n
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WordPress is without a doubt the most popular content management system in the world.<\/p>\n
But having a place to manage your content is just the beginning, you\u2019ll also need the means to display it, be it on webpages, blog posts, headers, footers, sidebars, widgets, a search page, a 404 page, and so on.<\/p>\n
In short, you’ll need to create all the bits and pieces that make a website functional. And if you\u2019re like most of us (i.e. not<\/u> IT pros) you’ll want to achieve all of the above without having to write a single line of code.<\/p>\n
This is where a good WordPress theme comes to the rescue.<\/p>\n
For a WordPress theme to be really useful it needs to provide you with maximum design flexibility down to the pixel level, so you can create the perfect website for your needs.<\/p>\n
You also want a theme with a well-thought out conversion functionality so you can use it to turn visitors into leads and leads into customers, easily integrating with popular email marketing tools and online shopping carts.<\/p>\n
The real power behind WordPress is the array of plugins that provide it with the functionality you need to develop a profitable online presence.<\/p>\n
Now, there are over 50,000 plugins out there vying for your attention, which can be overwhelming. Fortunately, all you really need is just a handful in order to succeed.<\/p>\n
When you create your website, you want to make sure you\u2019re building it on a solid foundation. To ensure continued growth and performance, you’ll need to:<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s now look at a core set of 9 types of plugins you\u2019ll need to consider at a minimum in order to operate a secure and profitable website:<\/p>\n
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Once you get your WordPress website up and running and you begin to get traffic, you\u2019ll soon come to the realization that the Internet is infested with spam-bots clogging the arteries of engagement with visitors, specifically:<\/p>\n
One solution to mitigate this spam is to add a captcha to every point where you interact with your visitors, but most people find them annoying and you\u2019ll soon discover that many visitors will bail rather than having to answer a riddle.<\/p>\n
Anti Spam plugins do away with the need for captchas by using sophisticated algorithms to filter spammy user-supplied information on the fly against a massive database of spambots that they keep on the cloud.<\/p>\n
The reason you need to deal with spam from the get go is that most times they’ll inject your website with bad spammy links that, over time, can cause your site to drop dramatically in the search-engine rankings.<\/p>\n
In short, a good quality spam blocker is more of a necessity than a feature of convenience.<\/p>\n
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Hosting an online store on your WordPress website is one of the most profitable ways to monetize your visitors.<\/p>\n
Whether you are planning to sell digital products for download, physical products to be shipped or monthly memberships, you\u2019ll need an eCommerce solution that:<\/p>\n
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One of the most useful features on a website is a contact form.<\/p>\n
For starters, it\u2019s much safer for visitors to contact you via form than listing your email publicly on your website and become the unintended victim of spam.<\/p>\n
You can also use forms to ask your visitors lead-qualifying questions and much more. For example, you could use forms to:<\/p>\n
In addition, your membership plugin should allow you to create a paywall to tease content to nonmembers while guiding them through a sign-up path, prorate subscriptions if a member comes in half way through your membership cycle or when they upgrade (or downgrade) their memberships.<\/p>\n
You also want to be able to drip content to members based on their actual registration date and automatically send warning emails when subscriptions or credit cards are about to expire.<\/p>\n
Your website is your primary online asset and doing regular scheduled backups of all your files and databases is like taking out an insurance policy. If something catastrophic happens to your site, you\u2019ll be covered.<\/p>\n
You may think that your self-hosting service provider has redundant servers and that nothing could go wrong with your files, so why schedule regular backups on your own?<\/p>\n
Well, your site could get hacked, you might delete something by accident or a file might become corrupted. Why take the risk?<\/p>\n
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Next to Google searches, the best source of traffic for your website are social media networks.<\/p>\n
To ensure that your content is widely shared, you\u2019ll need to install social sharing buttons on all your posts and pages to make it super easy for visitors to share your content.<\/p>\n
You want to choose a plugin that gives you the option to set social sharing buttons to float on your page as you scroll or to be in a fixed position, while giving you the freedom to select the type of content you want your buttons to appear on (e.g. you may choose to have buttons show up on posts but not pages).<\/p>\n
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Here\u2019s a fact I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll agree with: everybody hates slow websites. Slow websites can kill your conversions<\/a> and send people running in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n