How to Build a Website in 2024? A Simple Guide for Beginners

Let me teach you the basic steps on how to build a website for your first online business?

Hello buddies, thanks for the opportunity to write a post on one of the hot topics in the blogosphere, how to build a website in just a few simple steps or a few minutes.

Everyone is trying to build a website and to fulfill this destiny, they are always searching Google for the best guide to teach them.

But so far, everyone has explained their way of building a website but, only a few articles out there teach the exact methods to proceed.

In the current decade, if you have plans to start any business or have an idea for a product or a service, then the essential part is to have your website.

Creating a beautiful website is a tedious process, and have to follow lots of steps and pieces of information that are needed to build your first website.

Let me walk through the process of simple steps to creating a beautiful website for your business or your career.

Why do you want to build a website?

Before starting any business, ask yourself the purpose of the business.

Only a few people were turned into successful entrepreneurs because they ran behind their passion.

I have asked many of my audiences, why they want to create a blog or a website. The most answer I got was, “to make money”.

Of course, we need money to live, but money is not everything.

Blogging is a chance to communicate with the world. It is a great way to share your thoughts, ideas, and tips with the world.

It is your virtual home.

Free Blog Vs Own (Paid) Blog

Image Credit: https://www.thewhitfordlife.com/

I must express my thoughts here because, in my 2024 resolution, I set a goal to create 1000 successful blogging entrepreneurs in the blogging field.

To get started the individual should have his/her blog and hosting, a very nice-looking blog with a premium WordPress theme, etc.

All these three things will cost you because there is no such good business without investment and this is not an investment.

Many people prefer to start with free blog hosting such as Google’s BlogSpot, WordPress sub-domain, and Weebly. There are many similar kinds of providers are available.

1. The first important thing is that you won’t get a fully qualified domain name that you can’t rank ever.
2. Free hosting providers will allocate very limited resources such as hard disk space for storage, minimal RAM, and bandwidth, which is not sufficient.
3. Too many restrictions in the theme customization and you can’t bring a high-quality layout.
4. No guarantee your blog will never be suspended, as they are offering it for free, they have the complete rights to suspend your sub-domain anytime.

Imagine the situation, after a long day of hard work, you just started to earn revenue, and your blog was suspended.

Also, they add advertisements and links without your consent which will annoy your users.

If you go with the paid domain and hosting, all these restrictions do not affect your domain. You have full admin rights and control until the license ends.

Ok, let me walk through the actual process to describe how to create a website today.

1. Select the Right Niche.

2. Register a Niche Domain Name

3. Purchase a Reliable Hosting

4. Install WordPress and Design your blog

5. Keyword Research and Article Writing

6. Publish and Promote your content

7. Monetize your blog

1. Select the Right Niche

Well done, so you have decided to start a blog on your own. I must congratulate you for taking this firm decision today.

But remember, it’s not enough to just have a website these days if you ultimately want to make money online.

Everyone is creating a website/blog, but maintaining the website requires a lot of damn effort to drive a steady flow of visitors.

Let me come to the point, the very first step for the question of how to build a website was to select the right niche based on your passion and Interest.

Do not select a random niche just to make money. Imagine how could you come up with valuable content on your blog useful to your community without having an interest.

The most successful money-making websites are niche-specific websites only, where the blogger has sound knowledge of the subject.

You do not have to start as an expert in the niche, but you should have the interest and the willingness to learn new things.

2. Register a Niche Domain Name

Once you have chosen the niche, then find the right domain name and register. It will be more powerful if your domain name has a niche keyword.

Secondly, the domain name should reflect the subject matter as far as possible. It helps to build your brand and makes it easier for others to remember.

Registering a domain is a very easy task and requires only a very small capital fee of up to $15 depending on the registrar you choose.

The most recommended domain registrars are Godaddy, Namecheap, Bluehost, and Hostgator. They are the top domain name sellers across the world.

If you are looking for any personal assistance in domain registration, reach me here. Choose a domain name that is easily memorable and memorable by all people.

3. Purchase a Reliable Hosting

Next, to the domain name selection and registration, hosting is very important because from here only your website/blog will be served across the world.

Web Hosting service is a special server located at some physical location called a data center, where you host your web pages, files, images, and other digital documents.

You should prefer a reliable hosting plan based on your blog needs and consider the following factors before choosing:

1. Fast server
2. Reliable Hosting environment
3. Latest Hardware/software
4. Scalable architecture
5. 24×7 customer support
6. 99.99 % Guaranteed Uptime

Your website should be accessible anytime from anywhere in the world. Three different types of hosting services are there in the market and we will see them here.

3.1. Shared Hosting

Here, you host your website in a shared environment, which means a single server shares its resources across many blogs/websites.

It costs you normally between $10 – $20 a year. Suitable for beginners and you can upgrade your server once your business grows.

I will not recommend this because your site quality will be compromised by other sites hosted in the same shared environment.

3.2. Virtual Private Server

This is slightly different from a shared hosting environment. But here you will get the guaranteed resources for the monthly recurring payments.

In VPS, each virtual server will act as its dedicated server from one big physical server. Here the resources are isolated to each account.

This hosting is a bit costlier and has to pay every month between $20 – $50. If you think your business is serious, then I recommend you purchase VPS hosting.

3.3. Cloud Hosting

Cloud-based web hosting refers to a new technology that lets several hundred websites run together on a single giant server.

It has many advantages such as the server itself increases its resource limit based on the increase in traffic to the blog. Here, you will pay for what you use.

3.4. Dedicated Server

This means you are renting one complete physical server from the data center to host your blog.

You will have full root control access and all the resources are completely dedicated to serving your blog/website.

This server is much costlier and costs you around $100+ every month based on the size of the server.

So, choose the server wisely based on your budget and monthly expenses. To those who wish to start a blogging business seriously, I recommend going with VPS or CLOUD hosting.

4. Install WordPress and Design your blog

Creating a website or a blog won’t happen overnight and it takes time and concentration to create the best-structured layout.

When I started blogging back in 2013, Content Management systems such as WordPress were not flourishing at that time.

I created this blog, Online Home Income, by using basic HTML table design methods and later upgraded to WordPress.

But in 2024, creating a blog/website is much easier with just a few mouse clicks with the introduction of the WordPress Content Management System.

Read More: Blogger Vs WordPress: Which is Better and Why?

You can build your website in few minutes but the actual part is choosing the right theme to fit your business.

There are many free themes available on the market, but I will not recommend going with the free theme because of lots of limitations.

I recommend Thrive Themes, Genesis Themes to purchase for your blogging business. They are the top-selling brands of WordPress themes.

After you install your theme, you should have the following plugins to support your blog’s growth and development.

The required plugins are:

Yoast SEO Plugin: This is the most common WordPress SEO plugin that powers more than millions of WordPress domains.

W3 Total Cache: This plugin is used to build up HTML content to serve your web pages faster.

Akismet: The internet is full of spam everywhere and to stop comment spamming you should employ this plugin.

Contact Form 7: Communication is the major influencing factor of blogging success, you should let your blog visitors communicate with you easily.

These plugins are very important for every Word Press but additionally, there are thousands of plugins you can use later.

5. Keyword Research and Article Writing

So far you have learned the process of how to build a website. Now we will see the action part of this business which is writing content, publishing, and promoting.

From here the actual part of your business starts. Now, you have to sit and perform a Google search to build the list of top performers in your niche.

Then, doing keyword research is the next step. Many people are usually stuck here in this process because they don’t know what to write and how to write.

Everyone has their own writing style and skills to produce useful content. So there is no big deal here, and remember to write for your audience/readers and not you.

If people need to visit your blog/website often, you should produce more quality content at regular intervals.

PS: If you are looking for any kind of content writing job from home, then I have listed some genuine paying websites on my blog.

6. Publish and Promote your content

Once you published your first post on your blog, create a sitemap, and submit it to the Google search engine.

It’s not necessary as all the web contents on the internet are indexable by Google and submitting a sitemap is just to speed up the process.

Then, leverage various social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, and post your content in front of millions of eyes.

Every time when you publish a new post on your blog, promote it to all the social media platforms.

This method helps you to drive instant traffic to your blog and at the same time, you should perform various OFF-PAGE SEO activities.

Perform various link-building activities such as Guest Post Publishing, Link Exchange, Forum Participation, Article Directory Submission, etc.

Important follow-ups

These are the very important activities to drive traffic to your blog and increase your brand value.

1.) Post on Social media sites and establish new connections.
2.) Grow your social media followers.
3.) Write for other blogs (at least 5 blogs every month).
4.) Be active in forum sites related to your niche.
5.) Collect your visitor’s emails and build a mega list of subscribers.

All these tips will be useful for you the first time and if you want to grow your audience and make them come back later, you should produce more new quality content.

Many bloggers are making a major mistake in that they are not often consistent in producing new content for their visitors.

Search engines and people like to read the new and fresh information available on the Internet. So, if you want to rank high or to drive more traffic, publish new content often.

7. Monetize your blog

Now, we will look into the monetization part of our session. There are generally five ways to generate revenue from blogging and they are:

7.1. Contextual Advertisements
7.2. Display Advertisements
7.3. Affiliate Marketing
7.4. Selling Own Products
7.5. Selling Ad Spaces.

7.1. Contextual Display Advertisements

This method of advertising is a kind of displaying ads relevant to the page’s content or browser history. An automated targeting system to display ads for higher conversion.

One of the popular examples is Google Adsense, where Google automatically serves ads on your blog and pays you a percentage of the profit they make.

Normally an Adsense publisher will earn 68% of revenue every day and they will pay you every month once you reach the minimum $100 payout threshold.

There are so many kinds of online jobs on the internet that can be done from home, but out of them, this method works very well.

I have written a very descriptive article on the Adsense method of generating revenue linked here.

7.2. Display Advertising

This works very similarly to Google Adsense. These networks display advertisements on websites or apps through various ad formats such as images, text, flash, gifs, audio, and video.

The main purpose of this advertising is to deliver general advertisements and brand information to the site visitors.

This method shows how profitable if you have a blog with at least 5K visitors every day to generate some decent revenue every month.

Most Google alternatives such as Propeller ads, and Native ads, Chitika have display advertisement options where you can display some random ads to earn money.

7.3. Affiliate Marketing

This is a kind of performance-based business model where an individual called an affiliate earns a commission on every successful sale.

This business is the most lucrative and profitable business idea as one can easily make huge money by selling someone else (merchant) products or services.

There is no need to have your product/service sold on the market. Simply find any trustable high-paying affiliate programs and enroll yourself for free.

I recommend the Amazon Affiliate Program especially for you because where I am making such a decent volume of income every month.

How to start this monetization process?

First, register an affiliate account with this program and wait for your approval. After approval, find the hot-selling product and also suitable for your blogging niche.

Each product has its unique affiliate tracking URL with Banner or text link ads, just copy the code and paste it into your blog.

Refer visitors to click on the link and once they successfully place an order, you will earn up to 12% commission from Amazon.

7.4. Sell your own products/services

This is another way to monetize your blog if you have many loyal audiences to convert into your buyers.

You can sell your handmade products, especially for housewives, this method is much more suitable for them.

Even you can offer services in the field you are an expert in such as offering SEO consultancy services through my official blog – Myilraj.com

This is just an example for you to get an idea so that you can come to know, how to create a website to make money by selling products and services.

7.5. Sell AD Spaces

Google Adsense and other display networks have state-of-the-art software to display advertisements on your blog.

For the same, if you have at least 5000 visitors a day, you can invite advertisers directly to advertise on your blog.

Create a page named, “Advertise with us” and disclose your Google Analytics traffic report, Alexa ranking, and Social strength.

Quote the best price you can offer for the advertisers. This removes the mediators and you will get your payments directly to your account at the end of every month.

Last Few Thoughts,

Dear buddies, once again thank you a lot for your patience in reading this complete article and I hope I have delivered the best I can do.

I have written all the basic steps to be followed to build a website.

Good Luck and All the best for your new venture. Let’s put an end to your hesitation and start with determination with new aims and goals.

There are many successful bloggers out there where you can see them in the real world, and all of them started their careers exactly as I have written here.

Now, they have grown up to the highest level. Hard work never lets anyone down.