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How to build a website on your own

Building and running a website sounds like a good idea as passive income but those of us who have absolutely no idea of where to start, it may be a challenge.

When I say ‘those of us’ I include myself because when I started from zero in February 2019 I had absolutely no idea of what to do or where to start. I had ZERO knowledge and ZERO experience about websites creation, but I learnt and Effiworkx was born in November 2019. 

On this page I will guide through through the steps you need to take to build a website and eventually earn passive income from it. If you have the ambition, motivation and a few hours a week, you can do it.

Build your first website

Effiworkx it is hosted in Siteground and it has been built using WordPress and Elementor Pro. If this combination works for me it will also work for you and it will save you the time and effort of having to compare and analyse other alternatives.

For anyone with zero knowledge and experience, the path that I am going to layout in front of you is as good as any other and probably better than most.

Learning how to build a website with Udemy

For those with little or no experience on website creation, the first step is learning. I learnt most of what I know from Udemy which is an absolutely fantastic place to learn and increase you knowledge about all kind of topics.

Along the years I have taken many Udemy courses and I just simply love this platform because it is very affordable and I always find courses available for any topic I am interested on.

Once you have the foundation, you can add more knowledge by just practicing, having a look to YouTube videos or searching on the web for specific topics. But you need the foundation first, the basic knowledge, and that is what you will get out of the Udemy courses.

My golden rules when looking for courses on Udemy:

1- I look for courses with are rated with 4 to 5 stars

2- I look for courses that are at least three hours long. Anything less it is not worth to pay for.

3- I look for courses that are recently added or recently updated. You don’t want to take a course that has outdated information

4- I never pay more that 30 dollars for any course. If a course that I want to take it is over 30 dollars, I add it to my wish list and wait for the prize to decrease. Offers are usually offered every month

WordPress + Elementor

WordPress is probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (CMS). WordPress it is used by over a third of all the existing websites, it is FREE, it is SECURE, it is SEO FRIENDLY and most importantly it is EASE TO USE and it is WIDELY SUPPORTED. The perfect pick for those who want to create their first website.

Elementor is a DRAG AND DROP front end page builder for WordPress that let’s you create great WordPress website very quickly and very easily. NO NEED OF CODING, just drag, drop, configure the blocks and with some knowledge and a bit of practice a web page can be created within minutes. 

Don’t just take my word, do your own research but if you want to build your first website, the WordPress+Elementor combination is most probably one of the best choices. It is the choice over with this website has been built.

For those who follow the golden rules when looking for courses on Udemy, one of the best picks would be the course ‘Complete WordPress Course Elementor’. This course also shows you how to install WordPress on your PC which it is a handy way to learn without having to pay hosting fees.

Udemy WordPress Elementor

Security

You just don’t want to put a lot of time and effort into building your website just to have a hacker breaking into it and destroying all your hard work. Even if yours it is small website, there will be unethical people practicing towards becoming proficient hackers who will use your website as a practice ground. Investing into a good security software like Wordfence is a MUST because otherwise your investment and all your effort may be wasted.

Even with good security software, it is a MUST to have good knowledge about website security and good practices. My advice, do a security course, no need to apply every single countermeasure explained in the course if you are going to install a good security software but make sure that you follow good practices that prevent hackers from easily breaking into your website.

Udemy website security

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What is SEO? This is what most of us first think about the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ term when we hear about it for the first time. But take note that optimizing your website to rank high on search engines like Chrome, Bing or Yahoo it is very necessary if you want to have traffic coming to your website through search engines.

Get the knowledge before progressing too far with creating content for your website because you don’t want to put a lot of effort on your website just to discover that your were not advancing into the right direction and your website is far too slow, has not any backlinks or the images are far too big or your content have not keywords, or… 

Search Engine Optimization

Again, without using SEO your website will have difficulties to rank high on any search engine so you better make sure that at least you understand the basics.

Digital Marketing

The reality is that new websites get very little organic traffic. Unless the thematic of your website is very unique and very demanded, your website is not going to rank high on any search engine so don’t expect much or any traffic from Google, Yahoo, Baidu… for at least one year.

That means that most of the traffic will have to be generated by you through social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, through YouTube videos, paid ads or blogging platforms like, Read.cash or Uptrennd.

You will need to get the most from those tools and learning about digital marketing is a must for anyone who wants to drive traffic to their websites.

Digital marketing

Again, at least for the first year, near all your website traffic will come through digital marketing so make sure that you understand all your digital marketing options and how to get the most of them.

Practice, practice and more practice

No amount of learning or courses can substitute experience. Once you have the foundation, once you have got the basic knowledge, you just need to put into practice and with time what now takes you hours to do will just take you minutes.

At the beginning, the learning and the technical part will take most of your time but eventually you will be able to create a new page, a new post or a new menu within minutes and the GOOD content creation and the marketing of your content will take most of your time. 

A piece of advice, do not wait to have the best and most perfect website before making it public. Create it, publish it and improve it over time. Your website is going to get very little traffic at the beginning and it will not be taken seriously by any search engine for at least a year. You will have plenty of time to keep learning, improve and get real experience.

Calculate the cost of running a website

One of the first steps you should take, it is to calculate how much it will cost you to run your website. You don’t want to go through the whole process of learning about building and maintaining your website just to discover that taking your website project ahead it is over your budget.

Website startup costs

The first year, the software licenses prize will be lower because of the sign in discount. Also, the website it is on a too early stage yet so it is not worth to spend money in marketing (e.g. Google ads) yet.

But the first year it is when most of the learning will happen so even though it shouldn’t be a high costs if the learning takes place at Udemy, the learning costs must be considered in the budget..

 
  
Website recurrent costs
After the first year, in theory you should not need to invest money on learning anymore so that is a cost not to be accounted anymore. Still, you must take into consideration other costs
 
  
There will always be unexpected costs so it is very advisable to set aside at least an extra 20% so if the costs of running your website are, let’s say, 500 dollars, add on the top another 100 dollars for unexpected expenses.
Most probably you will make little to no revenue from your website for at least a couple of years so make sure that you can afford the costs or, otherwise, find out how to decrease your expenses.
Outsourcing activities
It is very time consuming to get to be proficient enough in every single area and being able to do everything by yourself. 
Personally, I don’t have enough time nor the will to learn about graphic design so I have outsources most of the graphic design from Effiworkx: The banner, the logo and all the icons. Also, the background sound for the Effiworkx Youtube videos was created by an author from Fiverr.
I have routed all the outsourcing through Fiverr. There are other platforms out there but Fiverr it is the one that called my attention at the beginning, it has worked well for Effiworkx so I keep using it.
 Outsourcing to Fiverr
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