Moron Monday: Your First Site

Posted on December 17th, 2007 in Retards, Traffic Generation

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This site has been slowly growing in traffic over the past few weeks. The majority of the visitors are people who are fairly experienced with internet marketing, but there are quite a few who are not. Most of these are close friends and possibly family members who don’t know the first thing about affiliate programs, cloaking, PPC marketing, serps, backlinks, pagerank, and other stuff which has become second nature to many in the industry. So henceforth, Mondays will now be home to “Moron Monday” where Nickycakes will give tips to people new(ish) to the idea of making money online and are looking for some more info on how they can get their feet wet, so to speak.

This week Nickycakes will be talking about something that has been beaten to death to the point where people on digital point are getting tired of hearing about it: making a niche blog. Why do people always suggest to newbies to internet marketing that they should make a niche blog as their first project? Well, because it’s really easy, and teaches you the concepts of how to get traffic and monetize it properly in the best way possible, by doing it. As was mentioned earlier, this is for complete newbies, so if you get bored with this post, remember that you were warned. So time to get started.

This project has some requirements, and if you can’t do any of these things then please just give up now and go flip burgers. First, you must be able to write a paragraph or two a day about a topic. You also must be able to follow simple directions and install software. It helps if you are computer literate enough to use the internet as well. It is recommended you be able to shell out $20 to buy a domain name and webhosting. You could set this all up with a free service but those suck royal ass for plenty of reasons. Mostly they make you look like a total newb and ruin any potential authority you could generate for yourself.

Pick a Topic
Get out a pen and paper. Think of something you are interested in. Anything you know a little bit about or are actually interested in. If you like making paper airplanes every day, go with that. Just something that can keep your interest for more than half an hour. Don’t spend all day on this, just think of anything and write it down. Remember, this is an experiment for you, you’re not getting married.

Pick a Name
A domain name, anyway. If you decide to go with some free shitty blog hosting service, which you will regret, then you won’t have to worry about this until the time comes to sign up with them, and they won’t let you get a free domain name, but a crappy subdomain like paperairplanes.blogspot.com. You’re shooting for a 2 word domain name, .com, .net, or .org, with both words being related to your topic. Like Paper-Airplanes.com, or paperairplanes.com. Somethign easy to remember is key, but having keywords in your domain name helps you rank higher in search engines. Nickycakes uses namecheap to register domain names, and you can use their website to search for domain names that have not yet been taken.
Once you’ve found yourself a name, go ahead and register it. Use coupon code WHITEXMAS for a dollar off or something. I think it comes out to be around $8 a year or something stupidly inexpensive. After you get the domain name, they will ask you what Nameservers you want to use. You will be getting this information from your hosting company, so just use their default ones until you get hosting (the next step).

Get Hosting
Good webhosting is key. Remember the cardinal rule of picking webhosting: DONT FCKING USE GODADDY. Godaddy is garbage. They’re overpriced, terrible service, they charge you an arm and a leg for simple services that everyone else gives you for free, but they have superbowl commercials so everyone thinks they’re rad until they get screwed (like nickycakes did). This site, and many like it are hosted on Hostgator. For $10 a month you can host as many websites as you want, as many domains/subdomains as you want, as many mysql databases as you need. It’s got pretty much everything you could ask for, a metric fuckton of bandwidth and storage space, great uptime and pretty good support if anything goes wrong. The only drawback to the $10 package is that if you start doing anything that’s really really server intensive, they will make you buy a bigger hosting package, but it takes quite a bit of work to reach that limit. I’ve got over 50 sites running on one account at the moment and haven’t had any problems. Use coupon code JURY when you sign up and you will get the first month free or close to it. Hostgator will email you two nameserver addresses that you need to go back to namecheap and enter into the settings for your domain before your domain will be associated with your hosting. After that’s done you’re ready to start your new website.

So you want to log into your cpanel (the details on how to do that should be provided to you when you signed up with your hosting). At the bottom of cpanel, should be a button for Fantastico, which will allow you to automatically install Wordpress, the standard blogging software used by pretty much everyone. That takes about 30 seconds.

Now you’re ready to set up your wordpress. You will want to look into getting a good wordpress theme and a few wordpress plugins.
Free Wordpress Themes and instructions for installing: http://themes.wordpress.net/
You will also want Adsense Deluxe plugin for easily putting google ads on your page to make money.

Monetize
Finally, you will need to sign up for Google Adsense if you have not done so already. Here’s a link:

Once you’re signed up with them, you can use your adsense ID with the Adsense Deluxe wordpress plugin to easily integrate google ads on your site.

Make Posts
Once you have your wordpress stuff set up, start making a post or two every day about your topic.

Next week’s Moron Monday will talk more about getting your site indexed by Google and bringing in more visitors.