How You Can Start: A Step-By-Step Guide To Set Up A Profitable Website

Welcome to the Entrepreneurs-Journey guide to set up a profitable website.

This page is a starting point to help you with three core objectives -

1. Highlight the most relevant and valuable resources buried within this blog
2. Guide you through the most optimal study order so you are not lost, and
3. Give you action steps to take to deliver real results

If you are curious who created this guide, please go to the How I Started page to learn more about my story (Yaro Starak, the founder of this blog).

I recommend you bookmark this page as it will take some time to work through it all.

I’d appreciate it if you click the Like, Tweet and Google+ buttons to share this guide with your friends and followers.

Okay, ready to get busy? Good, let’s begin…

To keep you on track, push you to take action and give you further advice, you must register for my newsletter if you have not done so already. Enter your name and email in the box to the right, and press the register button.

The newsletter is a companion learning resource to this guide. You will receive a couple of emails per week, walking you through the process of setting up your profitable blog and teaching you different strategies to make money from the Internet.

When you join the newsletter you will also receive a link to download a report, the Blog Profits Blueprint. The Blueprint is a complete guide in text and audio format for setting up a profitable blog. I recommend you study the Blueprint in tandem with the resources on this page as it provides a very detailed breakdown of how to make as much as $10,000 per month, blogging just two hours per day.

Follow the steps on this page, download and read or listen to the Blueprint (it comes in MP3 audio too) and read the emails I send in the newsletter, and you will have all you need to build your own money making website.

Now let me explain your curriculum of study…

As a summary, you are about to go through this process -

• Find out where there is a need in the market and learn how people currently search online for answers to that need.
• Build a website that is full of relevant content that helps people to meet that need.
• Drive traffic to your website and convince a portion of those visitors to join your email newsletter.
• Start making money from the audience you build using advertising, affiliate marketing and selling your own products.
• Optimize the entire process so you don’t have to work long hours to keep it going.

In order to achieve these goals I will teach you five modules, which must be completed in the set order for best results. They are -

1. Topic Selection and Setting Up Your Website
2. Content Creation
3. Traffic Generation
4. Monetization (making money from your website)
5. Optimization and Automation

While it only takes a few moments to read the above lists, the actual process to successfully complete each step can take weeks, months, and even years.

To keep you on track I’ve included an estimated timeframe to complete each module. I encourage you not to rush ahead as successful completion of each module is dependent on whether you did the work in the previous module. For example, there is no point trying to make money from your website (Module D) if you don’t have any traffic (Module C).

The teaching methodology I use in this guide is based on my experiences during the previous 10+ years deriving an income from the internet. It draws heavily on tutorials presented in the archives of this blog.

The core focus is how to make money with a blog, in particular one blog that you focus 100% of your energy on until it makes money, or you decide it’s not going to work. I recommend you focus for at least six months, to even a year, before deciding to move on to another project, and only if your current project is not showing any signs of success.

Although we focus on how to profit from a blog, what you are about to learn are internet marketing fundamentals that can be applied to almost all forms of online business. It doesn’t matter if you use a blog or not, these concepts are relevant if you plan to have some kind of website that makes money.

Since blog software is easy to use, is free, is what I use to set up my websites, and thousands of successful online businesses use too, I recommend you do the same. Instructions on how to set up your website using blog software are in the next step.

Throughout this guide I point you to various articles, podcast audios (mp3s you can download and listen to) and videos. Each of these resources were created at different times and some of the content may confuse you. Always return to this guide when you get lost because it is the roadmap that threads all the different resources together into a cohesive process.

I promise if you focus on studying the resources and taking the action steps I give you as you move through this guide, you will learn a tremendous amount about how to make money from the Internet. You may even make enough money to never need a job again!

Now let’s begin at the beginning, Module A starts next…

While there are many different strategies and techniques you can use to develop an online income, they all have one thing in common:

You must service a need in a group of people who use the Internet to meet that need.

Your challenge is to identify a need with sufficient demand and then develop something to help people who have that need. If you get this wrong, you could end up building a website that no one visits, or you might have visitors, but they don’t spend any money, so it becomes very hard for you to make money.

When choosing a topic for your website you are attempting to combine different motivations into one successful outcome. Those motivations are -

1. What you personally know about and feel confident you could help people with
2. What activities you find enjoyable and are motivated to do every day
3. What the market (people) actually want or need and will spend money on

This is not an easy decision and requires you consider both yourself and the people you want to help. Thankfully you don’t have to guess what people want, there are plenty of research tools and techniques you can use to figure out what people currently spend money on online. I will point you to some of these tools in the resources for this module.

Your goal is to find out where the traffic currently goes (what search keywords people use to find websites and what keeps them coming back for more), then set up a website that is positioned to capture some of that traffic. However before you can build a website or even choose a domain name for your website, you need to have a solid understanding of how people go about looking for answers to their questions, so you can make sure your website comes up as the top answer, and hence you get the traffic.

This might seem confusing right now, but don’t worry because I have a series of resources that will clarify this process for you.

A Note On Resources In This Guide

Each resource will take time to study and some of it you will not understand. That is okay, you don’t need to understand everything, only learn enough so that you can make a decision and take the next action. Don’t get stuck studying everything, action is what matters. Some of your decisions will be made in a state of confusion. That’s fine, do it anyway despite your lack of confidence.

I provide the best resources related to the subject you are learning about in all three media formats: text, audio and video (where available). Each resource is not complete, but may provide the answer you need.

The resources are taken from this blog, courses I have created and content produced for various purposes. Because of the broad variety of sources the materials will repeat concepts and often feel disjointed when studied one after the other. Repetition is a good thing, the more you repeat the more will sink in.

The tasks I give you (you will find tasks below the resources) are the actions you should take, so use them as a guide. Once the task is done you don’t need to study any more resources on that subject, move on to the next task and relevant resources to help you do it.

Here are the resources to help you determine what topic to focus your website on…

Content is the foundation of your website becoming successful. If you want people to visit your site there has to be a reason why.

In this module the resources focus on how to determine what people in your market consider valuable, how you can create that value and what formats are best to deliver to them. We focus on how to create all three media types – text, audio and video – so you can decide what type of content you feel capable of producing on a regular basis (and by regular, I mean every day!).

You have two core goals in this module -

1. Fill your blog website full of valuable content over a period of months
2. Create of some kind of valuable giveaway, such as a free report, as an incentive to join your email newsletter

My advice is to focus simply on writing articles to your blog first, at least one per day if you can. If you don’t like to write, learn how to create audio or video.

The other key outcome of this module is to begin setting up some kind of email newsletter so you can build your contact list. I recommend you start by offering a weekly “tips” newsletter, or an email course – for example five emails delivered one per day for a week.

Alternatively, you focus on writing a series of articles to your blog, which you then collect and put together into a free report, which you can create an audio version of too (by recording your own voice talking out the report). Then give this report away in exchange for joining your email newsletter.

The resources below will explain how you can do all of this, so get busy!

This is Module C and our focus is traffic. This module can be done at no cost, if you are willing to put in the time and energy to drive traffic yourself. Alternatively you can spend money to have other people help build your traffic, to pay for advertising or publicity campaigns, or to create specific materials you use for marketing.

The resources in this module present many techniques you can test on your website to see if they bring in traffic. You will learn about search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, article marketing, guest blogging, publicity marketing and various other tactics that are proven traffic sources.

Be careful not to waste your time on techniques that don’t work for you. I advise you to focus on finding the two or three techniques that provide the best results and stick to these, rather than jump from technique to technique. If something works, keep doing it and ignore the rest unless you have spare time or money.

Make sure when you attract traffic you accurately assess results using a statistics service such as Google Analytics (free). Monitor your results for long term gains. Short term spikes are nice, but retained traffic with a steady growth curve is more important. Also make sure you correlate an increase in unique visitors to your site with an increase in email newsletter sign-ups.

Here are the resources to study in the traffic module:

This is module D, how to generate money from your website. We are going to focus on testing different monetization (the process of making money) methods until you find a combination that is consistently profitable.

The three broad categories of monetization you will learn about in this module are:

1. Advertising
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Product Development

I suggest you work your way through the methods in the order listed above, since it is a lot easier to begin making money from advertising than selling your own product. That being said, you should make it your goal to eventually have your own products as that is by far the most lucrative method to make money. It is a smart idea to generate multiple streams of income, so you are not dependent on any one source.

The resources below present you with simple techniques for making money (for example Google AdSense advertising) and also more long term, overarching strategies for setting up a business behind your website (for example, how to construct a product sales funnel).

I recommend you keep it simple to begin with by placing some advertising on your blog or website and writing product reviews where you promote products as an affiliate. Experiment with different types of advertising and different products until you find some that make you money consistently.

Here are the resources that will teach you how to make money with your website…

By the time you begin this module you should already have a money making website. This module is all about increasing your income and reducing your labor. To do this you will have to set up systems and possibly hire people to complete certain jobs.

The challenge for most people when they reach this stage is maintaining cash flow at the same time as working to remove yourself from the business. It can also be difficult to stabilize your income so you know each month you will make enough to live off, hopefully even more, invest funds into growth and manage that growth.

The best advice I can give you is to keep things simple. When you find something that works, avoid the temptation of always doing more and do not say yes to every single new opportunity that comes your way. Magnify what works, then remove yourself from the process, then consider new projects.

The resources below focus on how to optimize your business, in particular how to set up a customer service system, how to have someone else handle your email, how you can sell products before you create them and then sell them again and again using an automated launch sequence, how to keep traffic coming and produce content without you doing the work and how to set your business up for sale and eventually sell it for big profits.

I’ve also included some resources on how to sell your website if you decide it’s time to exit a project and want to make a big profit from the sale.

Here are the resources to study for Module E…

I’ve left the best, and arguably most important step to last.

Everything in this section focuses on your mind. Your mind is the tool you use to complete the activities leading up to this point, so if you fail to achieve any of the 7 steps in this guide and eventually build a money making website, it’s because your thinking has let you down. Thinking leads to action and action leads to results. You need a unity of these elements if you are to succeed.

Personally this is my favorite area to work on and teach, so you will find some of the most comprehensive articles in the resources below. None of this is mandatory study, all the previous steps before this last section provide the tools you need to build a profitable website.

This section can help you in so many ways. You will learn how to think better, which will result in all aspects of your life improving. You will be healthier, get more done and become an all round happier person. You can make more money, have fulfilling relationships with people who enhance your life, and help other people. Perhaps most importantly, when things go wrong you will be much better equipped to handle it.

If you want true life transformation, these are the resources to follow…