Building a successful website can be challenging, especially if you don’t know where to start. However, with the right plan and a little work, anyone can do it. Let’s take a look at all the steps that are involved with creating a successful online presence.
Step 1: Plan Your Website
Before you begin building your site, you need to do some planning. Think about the following things:
- Who is your target audience? Who do you want to reach with your website?
- What type of content will you create? Will you write articles, create videos or both?
- How many pages will your website need? How will you structure them in a logical way?
- What will your domain name be?
- What is your budget? How much can you afford to spend on building and marketing your site?
- Where will you be hosting your site? What are the hosting features you need?
Think about all of these points carefully, come up with a plan and write it down. Then, move on to step 2.
Step 2: Choose a Website Builder
When it comes to website builders, you have several different options. If you want to build a simple, static site, that will not be updated frequently, a simple site builder like Wix should be more than enough for your needs. If you want to build a large site, that you will update regularly, then you should use a slightly more complex site building tool like WordPress.
Step 3: Choose Additional Tools
Depending on the type of site you want to create, there will be several other tools you are going to need. One tool that you may need, for example, is an FTP client to upload files to your host’s server. A good free one is FileZilla. If you are going to create an e-commerce site, you will need a plugin like WooCommerce, which works with WordPress. If you are going to design your own logo for your site and want the ability to edit images, you will also need a graphics program. Canva is a good free graphics editor, while Photoshop is of course a very good paid option.
Step 4: Build and Design Your Site
Now that you have prepared everything, it’s time to get started building your site. If you are using one of the site builders I recommend, you will not have to worry too much about design. Just choose a template or theme that matches your site and you will be able to create a great-looking, easy to navigate site.
Step 5: Optimize Your Site For The Search Engines
Nowadays, optimizing your site for the search engines mainly comes down to writing great content and making it easy for Google and other search engines to index your pages. If you use a site builder like WordPress you can use several plugins to make your site as search engine friendly as possible.
Step 6: Test Your Site
After building your site and optimizing it for the search engines, you should test it to see if it works properly. Try opening your site in as many different browsers as possible to see if it looks right in all of them. Try out all the links and see if they work. Look at the images and see if they are displaying properly.
Step 7: Promote Your Site
Now that your site is ready, it’s time to let the world know it exists. There are several things you can do to promote your site:
- Share it on Facebook and Twitter
- Post at Reddit and include a link to your site when appropriate.
- Buy PPC ads at Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
- Exchange links with other related sites.
- Write articles related to your site’s topic and have then published on related (but not competitive) established blogs (guest posting)
- Answer questions at Quora and include a link to your site in your answer.
When promoting your site, it is important not to put your eggs in one basket. Use many different promotion strategies. For more information on website promotion methods, click here.
Step 8: Analyze Your Visitors and Keep Adding Content
Make sure you install a visitor tracking tool like Google Analytics on your site. This will allow you to see exactly where your visitors are coming from, what pages they look at and how long they stay on your site. This is incredibly important information.
You should also keep updating your site with new content. Write more interesting articles and create videos related to your site’s topic. This will create more value for your visitors and bring you more free search engine traffic.
