Hi, I’m Jen. I started this website back in July 2022. It started to grow slowly since then and at the end of January 2023 I signed up for Google AdSense and later Ezoic to show display Ads on my website. Since then this website is making four figures every month with very little maintenance.
People with successful websites charge thousands of dollars to teach their strategies to others. I’m not one of them and this course is 100% free. When starting this website, I didn’t have $1000 to pay for a course and and I learnt everything from the free information available on the internet.
It took me more than 2 years to find the correct way of making websites that make money and this is my way of giving back.
In this guide I’ll share with you everything I did to make this website a success. This is structured as a 10 day guide so you’ll get small tasks everyday and at the end of 10 days you’ll have created a brand new website that could generate passive income for years to come.
Who this course is for
If you’re someone who can spare 1-2 hours a day for a month and wants to earn extra $1000-$2000 a month on the side this course is for you.
The best thing about creating websites is that once you create them (takes about a month) it’ll make you money for years to come with very little maintenance.
The more websites you create, the more money you can make from them. But you have to be patient and follow a proven strategy.
If you need help during this course, you can send me an email to jen@menupricescanada.com
Strategy
My strategy is to find easy to rank keywords (search terms you type into Google) and write blog posts targeting them.
With time Google will rank these blog posts to the top of Search results. When people visit your site, you can sign up for Ad services like AdSense, Ezoic and Ads will be shown to them and when they click on these Ads, they will pay you money.
The process of ranking websites to the top of Google Search is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and I’ll show you exactly how to do it.
The website will be created using WordPress and will be hosted on DreamHost.
How do I earn money from my website?
- From Ads
Ad networks like Google AdSense will pay you to display ads on your website. On average AdSense pay $7-25 per 1000 visitors to your site. If your site gets 100k visitors a month (like my website), you’ll receive $700-2500 from ads alone.
Other Ad networks like Ezoic pays more than AdSense ($10-40 per 1000 visitors). As you can see from the below image my earnings per 1000 visitors jumped from $7.24 with AdSense to $12.01 with Ezoic.
2. Promoting Affiliate products on your site.
3. Paid guest posts.
Realistic Timeline
Before jumping into the creation of your website, I want to give you some realistic expectations so you can choose whether to follow this course or not.
- It’ll take about a month to make a working website with 60 posts.
- There’s a sandbox period for new websites that lasts for about 3 months. After this period you’ll get organic traffic from Google.
- You can start earning from ads when you start to get regular traffic from Google. This will typically take 4-5 months.
If you’ve read everything above thoroughly, its time to build your site.
Selecting your Niche
If you already have a particular niche in mind you can skip this part. (I’d advise you to avoid topics related to Financial Advice and Health as Google is very strict on these niches and only very reputable sites like MayoClinic, WebMD, NerdWallet ranks for them.)
If you don’t have one in mind, you can select one from the below list. This list contains niches that get significant volume of searches and Ad revenue.
- Pet Care and Training
- Gardening
- DIY Crafts and Projects
- Historical Facts
- Home Decor
- Travel
- Book Recommendations and Reviews
- Social Media Captions
- Food Recipes
- Language Learning
- Automobiles
- Personal Development
- Fashion and Style
- Art History
- Gaming
- Musical Instrument Guides
- Sustainable Living
For the example site I’m creating in this course, I’ll be using “Instagram Captions” as my niche.
Setting up your Site
I’ll be hosting my site on DreamHost as its the most affordable web host out there.
All my sites (total 14) including Menu Prices Canada is hosted with them and I prefer them as they provide unlimited storage, bandwidth, a free domain name and free branded email addresses for the site which no other hosting company provides.
- Go to DreamHost
- Click on “WordPress” on top menu and select “WordPress Basic”
- Scroll down and you have three options ; A monthly plan, yearly plan and 3 year plan. Monthly plan costs $67.39/yr, the yearly plan $35.4/yr and the 3 yearly plan costs $93.24.
- You can choose the plan based on your budget. I’d go for the yearly plan as it’s the cheapest.
- In the yearly plan you can select “Starter” or “Unlimited“. Since the price for both are the same, Choose “Unlimited” plan that can host unlimited number of websites for the same price as the “Starter” plan.
- Then you’ll see the following screen where you can get your free domain name. Click “Register new domain“
- I’ll be naming my site as “captionsfiesta.com”
- Here are 3 recommendations when choosing a domain name
- Choose a domain name ending with .com (They are trustworthy and you’ll get traffic from all around the world)
- Keep it short (Less than 20 characters in total)
- Include your keyword (“captions” in my case) in your domain for better Google rankings
- If you’re not certain about your domain name yet, you can click the back button and select “Choose a domain later” and do it later.
- You’ll be taken to the checkout page next.
- Scroll down and Uncheck the additional options “DreamShield Protection” (as it’s not necessary for the site and costs extra $3/month) and complete the purchase.
- After the purchase, DreamHost will email you the login details. Use them to log in to your DreamHost account.
- It’ll look like this:
- Once the creation of the site is complete, it’ll look like this:
- Click “Manage”
- Now we have to install WordPress on our website. To do that click “Install” button.
- During the Step 1 of WordPress install you’ll be asked to choose a domain. By default your newly created domain name will appear there. Click “Next”.
- As the Step 2, you’ll be asked about the purpose of the site. Select “Blog” and click “Next”.
- In the final step of WordPress Installation, you’ll be asked to select “WordPress Plugins” that you want to install. We don’t want any plugins at the moment. So no need to select any plugins. Just click “Install”.
- Now you’ll see the above screen. It’ll take 2-3 minutes for the WordPress Installation.
In the next section of this course (Day 2/10), I’ll teach you how to login to your site, edit the homepage and we’ll create other basic pages.
Some links in this blog are affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you purchase through them without any extra cost to you.
