A free HTML, CSS design and SEO Tutorial guide to making money: Part I
By: Brendan Fitzpatrick
Many of you who are familiar with my Blog posts know that I touch on all kinds of topics, from creating graphics to understanding key concepts in Social Media. My blogs can be all over the place depending on what I’m working on at that time. I’ve been thinking about how to create something more interesting, more exciting and engaging for a while now and I think I found it.
I’ve decided to build a brochure type website from scratch, from the layout through to earning money using Amazons affiliate program, walking you through every step, highlighting tips as well as nuances learned along the way. Keep in mind, the goal here is to design a brochure type website that atracts as many free visitors as possible while displaying Ads on the page so that your visitors click on the Ads which turn into affiliate money for you.
As of this writing (September 18th, 2019), I have the name of the website and an initial, poorly designed Draft of the layout. The idea is simple, find an area of interest, create a website and earn money. Well, it’s not nearly that simple but these are the key milestones that I will be hitting along the way, so if you’re wondering how to come up with an area of interest, build a website and earn money, you’re in the right place, keep reading.
In this blog entry, I’m only going to cover the initial step of how I identified an area of interest and then barely touch on how to go about creating the website. I will try to write a blog entry weekly for the next 6 weeks or so until the site is built 100% along with monthly updates so that you can see how things progress monetarily. If you’re still reading then chances are you know that this is going to be a fun read and experience to remember. Feel free to contact me with questions along the way.
The Idea! The idea can be anything, the more unique the better, the more keywords and phrases that you can associate to your idea, the better. Finding an idea should be fun, you should ask people that you know for general ideas on your thoughts without exposing the details. In my experience for this exercise I went with my gut, but remember – I’ve made money on the internet in various forms so I have some experience when judging potential in this area. To give you an example, if you wanted to sell gold jewelry on the internet – you have to be able to source that jewelery at wholesale pricing just to be somewhat competetive. You also better have a marketing budget and you should have a high quality site, all of which costs alot of money. However, if you decided to sell hand made or high quality toe rings it would be much easier to capture a market with little or no marketing budget because the market isn’t as saturated for this product.
With this in mind, I decided to go with PortableWirelessCharger.com. You might ask why? Yes, the Portable Charger market is over saturated, however new Qi (ie. Wireless) technology is upon us and there really aren’t many products available – so although the market may become saturated, I felt that it’s early enough for me to jump in and get a head start. Plus, it’s a very good domain name that I was surprised was available when I found out. Another thing that helped me with this idea is the fact that my Samsung S8 charging port on my cell phone is broken, so I was forced to find a Wireless Charger and soon after, a Portable Wireless Charger and a light bulb went off in my head!
On to the next step, I had a decent idea along with a good domain name – now I needed a website. From my prevoius blog entries, you might be aware that I have a fairly extensive background in HTML development, however – I’ve been out of the loop on the latest HTML5 and CSS solutions. I used to design websites by hand but since it has been a few years I figured that I’d check out some of those sites that sell templates. I checked out bootstrap themes, html templates, code snippets and a dozen or so other pre-designed solutions to see if it was easy and cheap enough for me to pay a small fee to expedite results. Afer a short amount of time, I quickly realized that if I truly wanted to be the best site out there for my topic and have the ability to update whenever I needed to that it would be most efficient to design it from scratch. This is a blessing and a curse.. A blessing because I would have to learn the latest HTML5/CSS syntax – which believe me isn’t easy .. and a curse because I would have to learn HTML5/CSS. Wait, What? Yes, although I was going ot have to put some time and energy into learning HTML5/CSS – at least I would be learning something new and have the ability to update on the fly, but most importantly, I would be able to design as many new websites as I wanted to. And as a bonus, I could get back to my $100+/hr side jobs, if I wanted to. But I digress. I will go into some of the basics to consider when choosing your website design solution next.
Whether you chose a predesigned template or go with your own design, if you want to maximize your SEO rankings with the search engines you need to consider the following, but more importantly SEO rules change all the time. You need to be able to modify the source code of your design from time to time so if you decide to buy a template and lay the files down while simply adding content. your website will quickly become out of date. More importantly, you will want a responsive design and from my experience – depending on the idea that you are trying to market, it’s very difficult to find a good solution that looks great on phones, tablets and pc’s for any particular area of interest which is another reason why I decided to design on my own. I have to admin, if you’re not an HTML5/CSS designer, the future steps may be very challenging for some.
I’m currently in the process of still learning how to code HTML5/CSS but you can see my latest updates on my Portable Wirelss Charger.
Follow my blog and stay tuned for my next entry. A free HTML, CSS design and SEO Tutorial guide to making money: Part II