Is a Website Absolutely Necessary for a Successful Online Business?
No, not always.
I know people who have built impressive businesses on social media platforms or using just newsletters.
YouTube Channels, for example, can be stand-alone businesses, and a woman I know runs her personal training business entirely on Instagram. I’ll explore those in future posts.
But having a website home base gives me my own protected territory in cyberspace. I can’t be shut down or silenced easily. I don’t have to worry about “community standards” censorship or algorithms. I can make things on my site look how I want them to look, and I can promote my content there as I wish.
Plus, it’s my own internet real estate, and I can rent space on it. Renting space – charging for exposure to my audience – is one source of revenue for my online business.
The type of online business you decide to build will dictate the kind of website you’ll need. For my purposes here, I need a basic blog-style site, allowing for a variety of promotional options as well as basic editorial content.
The primary purpose of any business is to create and maintain customers. I intend to post content on this site that will attract readers/subscribers/customers and build my email list. I’ll use that mailing list, along with a continued stream of good content, to maintain them. That’s the plan.
For my $1 million project (let’s call it P1M, for short) I certainly need a website, and I expect to need more than one for some of the experiments I have in mind. Affiliate marketing, for example, where you earn commissions by promoting other people’s products and services, sometimes uses one-page sites called “landing pages.” These landing pages feature an offer which, if taken by a reader, triggers the commission payment to the creator/promoter.
So, getting comfortable with the process of building websites is a key piece of the talent stack I’m trying to build, en route to creating this $ million online business.
I love that term btw — “talent stack.” It suggests a genuine construction effort to build a broader, deeper competence. A great image… for me at least. I need all the competence I can get.
And…
Good news: building websites has never been easier. Believe me, if I can do it, you can do it.
Let’s explore how I built my website.
Here’s the process:
- Choose a Content Management System (CMS) – web publishing software that allows you to design and publish your content online.
- Select a hosting company – a business specializing in holding your website data on its servers, making it available to the world 24/7, 365.
- Choose a “theme” or create a design for your website – how the site will look, how the text and images will appear.
- Begin creating and posting content.
I Chose WordPress (WP) for My CMS.
It’s the dominant option, supporting more than 35% of all sites published online. WP offers two different ways to use its CMS.
The free “.org” version, which I chose, is “self-hosted,” meaning you download the software to a separate hosting site of your choosing. The WordPress.org ecosystem is vast, offering all kinds of additional functional options available as “plugins” — easy additions to your site, almost always free, but often with paid “pro” versions providing added levels of functionality.
Most importantly, with the .org, self-hosted option, you’re in total control, allowing you to place advertising on your site and earn ad revenues.
I chose the .org version without hesitation because I had used it in the past and had ignored the changes that have been made over the past few years in the .com version. Previously the .com version offered very limited options in almost every aspect, including no ability to earn advertising revenue on your site. These limitations appear now to have been almost completely eliminated with certain plans.
The WP .com version (wordpress.com) includes hosting, offering complete plans as inexpensive as $48 annually. To get the range of functionality and flexibility of the .org version you have to subscribe to an enhanced plan ranging from $96 to $540 annually, with the “Business” level plan, at $300 per year, providing a competitive alternative to the .org version.
Eventually, I’ll do a deeper dive on the comparison to see whether I’d make the same choice again — or even whether I would transition my site to the .com version. I don’t yet have enough experience with my current hosting platform or enough research on WP.com’s customer service quality to make that decision. If anyone reading this cares to comment from personal experience, I’d welcome more information.
Other good options for non-techies like me are Wix and Squarespace , which claim to be simpler and easier than WordPress. They feature “drag and drop” site design functions and lots of templates, ready to go. Neither offers self-hosted options, which means your site is hosted by them. Pricing varies from roughly $150 to $225 annually for a basic, functional site, which isn’t much more than some hosting sites charge for hosting alone. There are even more options, like Weebly, although I didn’t look too closely at any of them.
Why Would You Consider Anything Other Than WordPress?
Because WordPress can be intimidating to learn. It’s popular because it’s so powerful, but complexity is the price you pay for all that. In 2016 when I launched my first website, I struggled to get comfortable with WordPress. I bought a couple of books and spent long hours finding my way in the Dashboard where all the settings are controlled.
Back then there wasn’t such a great selection of predesigned “themes” – website templates — and a beginner like me had no easy way to create a cool design. Or maybe I was just too dense to find the right online resources. I ended up hiring a programmer/web designer to create the site I envisioned. I don’t think it cost me even $1,000. Once I had the site design I just started writing and posting, with lots of poking around figuring things out. I eventually got very comfortable with WordPress.
So, don’t be intimidated by first impressions.
WordPress is actually easier to learn today because…
- Gutenberg
- Themes
- YouTube
Gutenberg
WordPress, which is continuously improving itself, has launched a new internal publishing system called Gutenberg. Without going into great detail here, I’ll just say that Gutenberg has made publishing on WordPress about 50% easier. And more fun. It’s not exactly “drag and drop.” More like cut and paste. Or maybe just paste. It’s all about using “blocks” to arrange every component of your content, from photos and videos to all types of text. I love it, and I have only just begun to use it in the creation of this site.
There are also “page builders,” like Elementor, which control every possible element of site design, without requiring any actual coding/programming, but Gutenberg can handle much of what they do. Elementor, by the way, is very popular and a very powerful “page-builder” for use in designing your site. I plan to experiment with it as I refine my site’s design.
Do I sound like I’m a designer? Not even close! But I’m learning how to use these tools and experimenting with tweaking my site. Building that talent stack!
Themes
We’ll talk more about themes later in this post, but the bottom line is there are just so many themes available to choose from, and many of them are free. When you combine the building blocks of Gutenberg with modern theme design, you’re almost good to go as soon as you install the theme you want. No web designer needed. Really!
In fact, one blogging instruction school encourages students to begin with a basic, flexible theme and not spend too much time on how it looks. The content is the most important piece of the project, so, they say, start writing and posting. You can always play with design elements later.
YouTube
The real killer app is YouTube. There you can find excellent tutorial instruction on all of this. How to use WordPress. Specifically, how to use Gutenberg. How to choose, install and use various themes. How to blog. How to use advertising on your site. How to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to gain visibility. Just about everything I plan to experiment with here is covered in YouTube tutorials. I’ll include links below to the videos I’ve found most helpful.
If you can afford it, of course, you can still skip the whole DIY approach and hire the whole job done using a site like Fiverr or Upwork. I’ll experiment with both of those sites in future posts for other pieces of projects. I know you can get a basic WordPress site set up through Fiverr for $100 or less, which will save you time, but also skip the learning process.
I think you’ll be better off in the long run if you invest the effort in learning how to work with the appearance elements of your site, even if you use a contractor to set you up in the beginning. It’s easier than you think.
I Chose Bluehost for My Hosting Solution because…
I liked their user interface. I have used HostGator for years for my other sites, and I can’t say that I’ve ever had a problem with HostGator. But Bluehost and WP Engine seem to get lots of promotional exposure, and they stress their focus on support for WordPress. WP Engine seemed to me to be kind of pricey as success pushes more traffic to a site, although both platforms were about equal at the package I wanted – about $300 annually. Bluehost included unlimited sites in its package. WP Engine included only one. I signed up with Bluehost for a year. At renewal time, I’ll do an update report on my experience with them. So far, so good, but I have made no special demands on them up to this point.
Choosing a theme means deciding how you want your site to look. Themes are built to suit the way information is to be displayed — titles, text, images and video. An art gallery will want a different arrangement of these elements than a retailer or a consultant or a blogger might. Themes are shortcuts for us non-techies. We browse theme designs, trying to imagine whether they will make our content come across with powerful impact, but it’s hard to imagine how our content will look, because we haven’t created it yet.
A good first step to figure out your site design is to consider which sites really grab you when you land on them. Why do they grab you? Think of which magazines you read that are most visually appealing to you. How do they differ from others? What kinds of design turn you off?
I find that I like a wide open sensation with larger font sizes and large images. And I just hate thumbnails. There’s no cost to website space, so why waste the impact of an image by making it a thumbnail? If it’s worth including at all, let it make a statement. One of the detrimental effects of web publishing on traditional publishing is how magazines have embraced thumbnails, cluttering their pages with tiny images, often without captions. IMHO
So much for my sophisticated design sense.
Content is king, of course. But design is important. Images are important. Distinctive images can snag a reader who might otherwise bounce without giving your post a chance.
How do you experience a page when you land on it? My progression – and this is also true with most magazines I read – is image, caption, headline, body copy. Sometimes the headline grabs me first, but a unique image is more often the grabber.
In future posts, I’ll explore sources for images. There are many, and many are free. We’ll get into video, too, because I’ll embed most of my YouTube channel posts here on this site.
I Chose Kadence As My Theme…
mostly because I saw a few YouTube videos on it praising its flexibility. It’s a relatively new theme, but from a company that serves the web publishing business with a number of software packages. And it’s free. Some experts are ranking Kadence at or near the top of all WP themes available, primarily because it’s fast, flexible and very Gutenberg-friendly.
I had a particular look and feel that I wanted for this site, which I didn’t see readily offered in any of the themes available elsewhere. To be honest, I have always gotten a little frustrated browsing themes. I’m not really a design kind of person, and themes all look very similar to me. I figured I could get what I wanted by starting with a blank slate on a flexible theme, then find my way. The “finding my way” part will extend for months, I think, as I add more types of content to the site.
What You’re Reading Here Is the Final Step…
creating and posting content. This is a WordPress.org site, hosted on Bluehost and designed on the Kadence theme using Gutenberg.
Important Next Steps are…
- Implementing an email management package to begin building my mailing list,
- Figuring out an SEO strategy, so that Google starts sending me traffic,
- Hooking up Google Analytics, so that I can understand how my readers find and use my site.
When do I start making some money?
Maybe very soon. Every link in this post identified with an * is an affiliate link. If you click it and buy the offer (i.e., a subscription to Bluehost), I’ll earn a commission. As soon as commissions start showing up in my bank account, I’ll begin doing a monthly sales report here to document progress towards the million $ million goal.
Stick around. There’s lots to do. Lots to learn.
If I can do it, you can do it.
Thanks for reading. Please subscribe to see more.
Riscorick signing off — vertical, self-propelled, with my wits about me and a total attitude of gratitude.
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Resources:
For a wide variety of tutorials on WordPress, Kadence and other themes, Elementor, Site Design, Hosting and many other related subjects, I have found the following to be very helpful:
