Now that you have identified your target audience, it is time to build your website. Your site will be your face to the online world so you will want to make it visually appealing and useful to your intended audience.
If you are staring out with a free blog or website, just log into your account and follow the instructions there. At some point you will be asked to give your blog or website a name. Read below for some advice on choosing a name but, in the case of free sites, you are not buying a domain so you are only limited by what names are not already in use.
Choose a Domain Name
If you will be using paid hosting, you will need a .com domain name and a web host. I recommend that you only consider .com domains. They look professional and they tend to rank higher in the search engines than other extension do. Your domain name can be a keyword related to your website topic or it can be a brandable name you choose and promote.
If your niche is wildflower photography your keyword domain would be wildflowerphotography.com. The problem is that name is already taken so you will not be able to use it. You can extend the name to include other words to come up with a name that is available – betterwildflowerphotography.com for example. At the time I searched for it that name was available but might not be now.
A brandable name might be picturingwildflowers.com or wildflowerswithdenise.com.Those are not directly tied to your main subject but that is alright. Despite what you might have heard, you don’t have to have your main keyword in your domain name. After all, it is just one keyword and you will have it, and hundreds of other good keywords, in your content.
Click Here To read an article titled “How to Choose a Proper Domain Name”
The easiest way to check for available names is to go to domain registration at Wealthy Affiliate. Time in the domain you would like and WA will do a search to see if it is available. Once you find just the right name, you can just go ahead and purchase it while you are there. You don’t have to be a member of WA to search or to register. A free Starter Membership is included when you buy. Take a look. The Wealthy Affiliate domain registration page is a great way to research domains even if you don’t buy there.
Choose your Web Host
I hope you will decide to host your new website with Wealthy Affiliate but, it’s your decision. If you don’t, you should now select a hosting company and pay for hosting. Buying more than a year will save some money in the long run but also make it harder to change hosts if you want to later.
If you bought your domain from somewhere other than WA, you should follow your hosting company’s instructions for setting up your name servers. It isn’t difficult but the procedure will be slightly different for each host so please refer to their instructions.
Now you site is live online but empty.
Build your Website
Surprisingly, actually building your website framework should be the easiest part of getting it online.
If your new hosted domain did not come with WordPress already installed, you will almost certainly find a one click install button for it somewhere. Using WordPress will make building and managing your site easy so you should at least give it a try. Besides, it’s free!
Click the image below for a video that shows how easy it is to build a WordPress website in just 30 seconds.
You can try it for yourself by creating a free website with the site builder below. Give it a try. I really is as easy as the video shows.
Maintaining Your Site
Once you have set up a website and installed WordPress, it is time to start adding content. That is what you will spend the most time on as you build your online business.
Content creation is too big a subject for this introductory article but of my other posts will go into detail about it.
Here, I just want to mention some tools that will make your job easier and also make your site look better. The default WordPress editor does a good job and you might be happy with it. Personally, I have chosen to use a suite of tools from Thrive Themes that I love using. They are not free but the cost is well worth it to me.
