There are three basic building blocks that are needed to build a website with and to make money. First, a website host to put your website on. Second you need to know how to get traffic to your site, and lastly a way to make money, which can be as simple as placing ads on your site.
Just so you know, all the links on this page are affiliate links. Using them won’t increase your costs by one penny but it might enable me to gain a small commission if you use them to go to their sites.
There’s nothing I like better than getting “free” games of my choice. I put the “free” in parentheses because what I mean by free is earning the money by using my gaming experience to make money. I do that with this website and it’s not as hard to do as you might think. All I do is play games, write about them, typically by answering a question, and then post the article on this website. This approach will work with any hobby you have. The nice thing is that the skills and principles you acquire can be used on any website to make money, not just a gaming site.
One thing that is a hallmark for all three of these companies is their outstanding customer service. As I said in the video, if I can’t get help quickly on something then that’s a company I don’t want to use. These three excel at customer service.
Income School, Learn SEO Secrets That Actually Work (Plus A Lot More)
The cost to join Income School program is $449, a little expensive but it’s been worth every penny of the cost to me. When it comes to getting traffic to my site, I’ve tried many of the major companies over the years, but during the first year my website was live I gained a total of two pageviews per month. Very pathetic for a year-old site.
I’ve tinkered with websites and affiliate programs for years, ever since the Internet first became popular but never succeeded due to various reasons. Primarily it was a combination of things, a lack of time, not knowing what to do, and the poor training resources that I found online.
I can no longer claim to have a lack of time since I’m now retired, and since “failure is not an option” I decided to dedicate as much time as I could to having some fun while making money at it. It’s also fun to research, find the answer, and help people out with questions they have about games. I enjoy writing, and especially enjoy creating websites, plus I like playing PC games, so this website was a natural step for me to take. But I was still seriously challenged by not knowing exactly what to do when it came to getting traffic to my site.
I continued to take courses about how to get traffic to my website, with the latest one (prior to Income School) showcasing a website that hadn’t been updated in almost ten years. Sure, the guy was getting traffic, and a substantial amount of traffic at that, but he established his site in the early days of the internet and was, and still is, a well-known authority on his subject. Tactics used back then are ineffective today.
I was also discouraged by the keyword tools. Keyword phrases with a high search volume (according to the tool) were just too competitive for a new site like mine to break through, although I did try. Keyword phrases that looked like I had a chance to win showed zero traffic, again according to all the keyword tools (and I used several, both paid and free), so I never tried them.
That’s when I started questioning the validity of the keyword tools. Obviously, the search volume wasn’t completely zero or those terms wouldn’t appear in the keyword tool results or in the Google auto-suggest, so I started tinkering with making pages around some of those keyword phrases but still had little to no luck, but at least I was starting to get on the right track.
I found Income School on You Tube, tried some of their free stuff and got pretty good results, so I signed up for their courses. Now, after a little over a year, I’m getting about 14,000 page views per month and page views are still increasing. I’ve had several months when I didn’t work on the site at all due to some personal issues or my pageviews would be much higher.
It was around early January of 2020 when I found Income School while researching videos on YouTube and they were talking about some of the very stuff I was starting to believe, that but they seemed to have it all figured out! I started using some of the suggestions on their YouTube channel and, unbelievably to me, started seeing some moderate success. I finally signed up for their Project 24 program on March 13, 2020 and was not disappointed. Since signing up I experimented by writing about 15 pages for this site (I have many more now) on one particular game (Stellaris) but still didn’t totally follow their recommendations. I did follow their search analysis but I didn’t follow the entire process exactly. The results were still pretty impressive.
Income School Courses
Income School Project 24 doesn’t just give you the basics and then let you try to figure out the rest on your own, like every single other program I’ve ever been a part of does. They have step-by-step instructions that walk you through creating your first site (or YouTube channel) with examples and videos. They also have instructions on how to place ads on your site, how to write articles that draw visitors to your site, plus they tell you how to write them easily and quickly. The area where this program really stands out is in teaching proper search analysis techniques that will get your pages ranked called “alphabet soup,” although that process is undergoing a major update as of the time of this article and I’m looking forward to the improvements. Their process is simple and obvious but everyone overlooks it.
There’s a lot more but the point I’m trying to make is that this is a very deep and excellent program, one that has a lot of supporting videos and not just some dry documentation and is one that I wish I had found years ago. This program will virtually walk you through everything you need to know, and even offer you some stuff you might not be ready for yet (but you know it’s ready and waiting for you when you are) or that you may not even have thought of yet, for no additional cost. And they continually keep adding courses.
Income School has their own WordPress theme named Acabado that is “stupidly fast.” It was free to me since I signed up for Income School. This is a simple, clean theme that is easy to use and is constantly updated. It made my site load much faster since it isn’t bloated with a lot of coding.
How To Get Started With Bluehost
The website host I’ve used over the years is Bluehost. Most webhosting companies are pretty good, but I like Bluehost’s interface, features, and the fact that WordPress is included free of charge with plenty of tutorials. As a matter of fact, Bluehost specializes on WordPress support, which is another reason I like them so much since this site is built using WordPress.
Bluehost is very inexpensive, plans start as low as $3.95 per month and WordPress is free and easy to use, it is almost completely drag and drop when constructing a page or blog post. On the few occasions I’ve had a problem I’ve found Bluehost Customer Service quick to respond and they will fix my problem for me if they can.
It’s real easy to get started with a website.
- Register a domain name. You can use any registrar but things are much more seamless if you use Bluehost rather than transferring your domain name to them from another service.
- Buy a hosting plan and install WordPress.
- Choose a theme to use for your website (blog).
- Choose any plug-ins you want to use. As a new site you should need very few. I have a back-up plug in so I can restore my site if something goes wrong and a plug-in to optimize my images so my site loads faster but those are the only ones I consider a necessity. I had a page builder but stopped using it since it slowed down my site so much, plus I had a premium theme I paid for but it slowed my site down too much also. I now use a simple theme that I acquired through my Income School membership.
- After some other minor set up work, such as what personal info you want to display as an author, you can start writing and start posting articles.
Bluehost has numerous articles telling you how to install and use WordPress plus they’re always ready to help you out if you get stuck. They offer 24/7 support and I’ve always been totally satisfied with them.
To create and administer a website like this you don’t need to be a genius (I’m certainly not) or need to be a website guru who knows websites inside out and who can write code (I can’t). All you really need is to be able to write decently and find something that you either know well or would like to know well that interests you, and let your research write the website for you. WordPress is pretty simple to learn and use. If you get stuck Bluehost is there to help.
Increase Revenue Fast with Ezoic Ads
I like ads and affiliate links for making money (there are other revenue resources) and used AdSense and Amazon at the start (I still use Amazon). Google AdSense will accept your site even if it has almost no traffic but the money you make from their ads is not worth the time and effort. I signed up with AdSense in May of 2020 and so far have made $82.82, and haven’t seen a penny of that yet since their payout threshold is a minimum of $100. With Ezoic ads I’ve already made substantially more per month that I did with AdSense, plus I’ve gotten paid since their threshold is $20 instead of $100.
Ezoic will accept a site with almost no traffic as well (if you’re an Income School member), just like Google AdSense, but their ads pay a lot more. Ezoic says they can increase your ad revenue by up to 60% but I don’t know who they are comparing themselves to. When I compare my last month’s ad revenue with AdSense to my first full month with Ezoic my ad revenue increased a dramatic 474.4%. The switch in ad agencies was well worth it!
Ezoic is an ad serving company but they offer a lot more than that. One of the things I like the most is that they will help you speed up the load time of your site, which is vitally important on today’s Internet.
Besides the opportunity to earn more money on my website with Ezoic ads, another thing that sold me on them was their Ad Tester. This is an Artificial Intelligence system that tests all the possible ad placements on your site, determines what combos your visitors like best and then optimizes your site with those particular ad placements, resulting in better income for you and a better experience for your visitors. Ezoic is easy to set up plus you’ll get assistance from a real person, I always like that “personal” touch.
If you’re already using an ad company they will allow you to “split test” so you can compare how much revenue you earn compared to any current ad service you might have. It was a “no brainer” for me since I saw after the very first day that Ezoic was going to beat AdSense “hands down.”
Ezoic also has an analytics section that is very similar to Google analytics but they focus more on revenue, which is a great feature and saves you a lot of time figuring out which are your most profitable pages so you can learn from them and duplicate what you do on other pages. Their customer service is extremely responsive and helpful, which is a very big deal to me when I’m using a company’s services and have a problem.
Just like Bluehost and Income School, I’ve been extremely satisfied with this company.