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People are always asking me how to make a website, so here it is, step by step:

Step 1: Hosting

Your website has to ‘live’ somewhere, I use and recommend BlueHost. You pay for your hosting all at once, and it works out to something like $7 a month.

Step 2: WordPress

Great, now that you have hosting and a domain name, you can use SimpleScripts from within your BlueHost cPanel and install WordPress for free. Starting in your cPanel, scroll down until you find the SimpleScripts icon, this is what it looks like:

Click on the WordPress Icon, that looks like this:

And follow the prompts to install WordPress. Once your site is installed, you can go log into it. This is what the WP Dashboard looks like:

From here you can create posts, pages, change your theme and settings. For finding a theme, I recommend and use Thesis and ThemeForest. Thesis is more complex and robust, while ThemeForest has more templates that are more simple and less expensive. Both sites give detailed information on how to upload and import your theme into WordPress.

Here are a few other helpful links:
WordPress Codex

Step Three: Plugins

Plugins are little bits of code that you add on to enhance WordPress. These are the plugins I use:

You can find plugins to do pretty much anything, just google “WP [blank] plugin” (make sure to change the [blank] part to what you are looking for, of course.

Step Four: Promotion

Web site promotion is an industry in and of its self and too big for the scope of this post. The easiest and most effective way to start learning how to promote your website is to watch these free videos.

I’ve tried out tons of online marketing tools during this whole process. Here’s what I’ve found that works for me. I use and recommend all of the following:

  • Market Samurai

    Market Samurai is THE best all-in-one tool. I can search for keywords, track my rankings, look for content, and do any SEO research I need from this one program. I love it! It is so customizable that I can find anything I need. The knowledge base has been incredibly helpful in helping me understand the finer points of SEO.

  • Aweber

    Aweber is the application that I use to keep track of my subscribers and send out newsletters. It seamlessly integrates with WordPress, so setting it up is a snap! One of my favorite things is that it’s SO easy to create opt-in forms on the Aweber site, and then they are automatically updated on my site, so I don’t need to copy and paste code a million times.

  • WordTracker

    WordTracker I do most of my keyword research in WordTracker because so fast and the user interface makes it so simple. I can save project lists and sort by the Keyword Effectiveness Index which weighs the keyword search volume to the number of competitors.

  • Pluggio

    Pluggio saves my life when it comes to Twitter. I love that I can schedule tweets for later, subscribe to RSS feeds, manage lists, manage followers and friends and so much more. The friend suggester has helped me grow my Twitter followers exponentially.

  • SEO Scribe

    SEO Scribe I didn’t even realize how much onpage SEO I wasn’t doing until I started using SEO Scribe. I put my article text in and SEO Scribe gives a grade to tell me how well or poorly I did. Not to worry, they also provide info on how to improve each article to achieve maximum SEO-ness (yes, I just made that word up).