Feed: Start a Website - AggScore: 34.4

#1 - Pick a Topic

---

The first step in starting a website is choosing what its going to be all about. There are a lot of questions to be asked and answered. What kind of content can you produce: text, audio, video? What topics are you going to cover (how much topic-specific content can you produce?) What products are popular with online advertisements within this topic niche you're interested in (will it make any money?)

One of the most important factors in starting a website and choosing a topic niche that you are interested in. You could theoretically write about anything that makes money, but you're not going to be competitive in any topic unless you're extremely motivated. For most people, this means thinking up something you're interested that also makes money. It could be cars, it could be clothes, it could be computers themselves or video games.

Once you've got a few niche topics you might be interested in, do a little preliminary research into competitiveness. Check out Google's adwords tool to see how often various keywords in the niche are searched and how much advertisers are paying for spots on sites that are related to the keyword.

You'll also have to kind of guess at your appetite for competition! On the one hand, you want high competition keywords because they pay more per click, on the other hand, you want the ones that will bring in traffic.

Since hosting is your main cost tied to more traffic, it may be more profitable to run a low-traffic website that targets a few searches in high value keywords!

#2 - Get Website Hosting

---

Website hosting is the service that will connect your data to your visitors. As such, it is one of the first aspects of a new website venture that must be addressed.

For first time webmasters and small website projects, free hosting and shared hosting providers may be a good low-risk choice. The most expensive hosting services are designed for websites with huge traffic and processing requirements - most personal and e-commerce sites can run without problems on discount hosting services. Even free hosting like used on this website you're reading right now is an option, but its usually worth spending the extra few dollars a month to get more control over the data and site customization.

Hosting reviews can help you find the provider that offers the services you need. Make sure to look past some of the technical metrics like bandwidth and disk storage to look at the software management and file transfer options available with the host. What good is a ton of resources going to do if you don't have the tools you need to efficiently build your website?

Since script installations and software management is provided at the hosting level, this should be one of the most important factors a new webmaster considers in choosing a first hosting provider. Being able to install popular content management software will provide a great boost to getting started with an online business or personal website, so take a look at the Fantastico, Simple Scripts, and One Click Installs that various web hosts are offering to their users. There are even plenty of WYSIWYG editors, but these often present a lot of SEO problems and I wouldn't typically recommend them.

When you find a host you like, make sure you also look around for hosting coupon codes, too! Sometimes, there are better deals buried throughout the web with limited time promotions and affiliate-based offers. There's no reason to pay full price for a lot of services because there are free coupon codes and discounts available online.

#3 - Pick a Software Platform

---

After you've established a hosting account and registered your domain names, the next step is to review the types of website software available through your host account's control panel. If you want to FTP the files to your hosting server and manually install the scripts for your website, you won't be limited to those platforms provided by the host - but for most websites and hosts these days, you can get all the best content management systems installed quickly.

Blogs:

Blogs are probably the most popular content management software for new webmasters. The software builds templates that allow new pages and posts to be quickly created through an interface that works like a word processor. Very little technical experience is required to run a blog, and set up can be pretty automated through most hosting providers.

Popular Blog Software

• Wordpress - Free and open source. Wordpress can be installed on a hosting account or hosted for free at Wordpress.com (warning: you can't make money on a free Wordpress account)
  
• Joomla - Joomla is a little bit trickier to use but it probably has more overall potential as far as building in community aspects. Or so I'm told. I would highly recommend building a blog out of Wordpress but it can also be done with Joomla. Joomla is also useful for some professional sites. Remember, it has high potential but its quite complicated and more challenging for beginner webmasters.
  
• Blogger - This site right here is posted on Blogger and its done free through Google's Blogspot service.
  

Forums:

Forums are like the original social community online. Discussions are threaded so they can continue over long periods of time even if eventually they get a long way off from where they started. Forums tend to create a smaller base of more loyal users, so it can present a monetization challenge. However, they make a great supplement to any other type of site.

• PHPBB3 - Example Webmaster forum in PHPBB3
  
• Simple Machine Forums - Example Scholarship forum in SMF
  

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking sites like Pligg allow users who visit the website to submit their own links and comment on other visitor's submissions as well. These sites can be a great way to build a community and in many ways they are the modern equivalent of a web directory - one that incorporates social aspects and a more democratic editorial review.

Pligg is popular because its free and widely supported both with templates, addons, and community support at the Pligg forums. Here's an example site in action, a Pligg site for website news.

#4: Write your Website

---

The fourth step of building a website is producing the content of your web pages. This is probably the single most important step because any good web publisher will tell you its the actual content your site adds to the internet that gives it most of its value and marketability. People will actually want to promote your site for you - as long as it is interesting, unique, and informative.

Content can include writing about topics you find interesting, or photos and computer graphics that you've created, or even videos if you have a camera ready to go and a skill for screen-presence, directing, or writing screenplays. It is critical that this content isn't simply ripped off from somewhere else - content theft may seem easy and harmless, but it will get you shut down quickly as the true owner comes to claim what is theirs. Content theft can result in hosting services being shut down and data being seized, or it could even result in legal action and litigation involving large cash fines.

Websites should focus on a central theme, with related subtopics being organized into categories or tags. Pages of sub-topics should then be linked in to each other, allowing visitors and search engines to get a sense of how to navigate their particular areas of interest within the larger central theme.

How many pages is enough? Technically, there is no such thing so long as they are all unique and useful to the viewer. Writing your website is an ongoing process that never really ends. Even if you managed to become the internet's #1 expert on a certain topic, there will always be news, new research, and other new developments that can be used to expand the content of the website.

#5: Find Advertisers

---

When the domain has been populated with unique and useful content, its time to find contextual or affiliate-based advertising programs you can promote on the site. You might want to wait until the site has built up some traffic and reputation, but the time between writing the website and promoting it can be a useful moment to sign up for some advertising programs and learn a little bit more about how they work.

Since each program has its own standards and policies, I can't say which is best for your website and subject areas. What is good to recognize from this phase of building a website is that advertisers have efforts to improve the quality of the sites they market on and what kind of revenue publishers can expect to earn.

Find a place to put the ads, either in a blogs sidebar or by modifying the template of a forum or social bookmarking site to include the code provided by the advertiser. Pay close attention to quality guidelines! Do not use misleading placement or words to encourage clicks from people who aren't otherwise interested in the things being promoted. This will likely get you banned before you see a penny.

It can take a long time for a website to become a good source of steady revenue - be patient and continue writing content to see the results grow over time. Slow and steady wins the race!

#6: Write for Others

---

The final step of building a website is to begin writing for others. Once your domain is hosted and the pages are populated with unique and interesting content, the most important thing to consider is how people are ever going to find the page.

In simple terms, the only way to accomplish this is to create links to your site and the contents inside it. The best way to do so, is to begin writing on other domains - write content for other peoples' websites that will allow you to put a link back to your own! In simple terms, this is what off-site SEO is all about.

Directories: Web directories are an original part of the internet itself. These sites collect links to useful resources by allowing web publishers to submit a link and a short description of the site. Many directories allow free submissions, and these sites can be considered the traditional foundation of an online marketing program. Yet many directories are becoming outdated and irrelevant, with more momentum and surfers headed to more social media.

Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking websites allow users to submit links to specific stories or pages on a domain that may be of interest to the bookmarking community. Users of the bookmarking site can then vote on and discuss the article in question, and popular stories can gain hundreds or thousands of visits in a single day. Even after the traffic dies back down, links from social bookmarking websites can increase a site's visibility in the search engines. Make sure to bookmark in appropriate places and provide content that people are actually interested in if you want to see any actual results. Write interesting headlines and summaries, and people will want to see what it is all about.

Article Submissions: Article submissions are another internet marketing standard. Many websites like EzineArticles and GoArticles allow members to submit articles that can include links to the member's website. When the article is published on the Article site, other webmasters are allowed to re-publish the article on their own site, so long as they keep the links intact. This way, one article can become dozens of links from multiple domains in a short time.