Making money with a WordPress website is actually pretty easy. WordPress does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, like SEO, etc. To be successful at WordPress, you still want to follow the same principles of any website. You want to build a quality website with quality content – content that is engaging, that people will find useful. You still want to follow the same guidelines of laser targeting your keywords and your niche market.
With all of that being said, the next steps in building a profitable WordPress website is just knowing a few simple plugins!
Classic Editor – This one is more of a personal choice. The new “Guttenberg” WordPress editor may be liked by some. Personally I find it clunky and I like the old editor better.
Yoast SEO – Quite possible one of the most useful SEO WordPress plugins you’ll ever find or use. What Yoast does is guide you along the path. It will tell you if your title tags are too short, if you don’t have your keyword or key phrases repeated enough in the content, if your content is too short, if you have few too many links, etc. Yoast follows a formula and helps you to follow that formula on every single page.
Do I need to know HTML to build a WordPress website?
One of the many benefits of building a WordPress website is you don’t need to know any HTML or programming. When building websites, the most important things are
- Having a subject you’re passionate about and can see yourself writing about
- Don’t give up – even if it seems like your website isn’t popular months after building it – website marketing is an art. We’ll talk about it in another article
- Taking the time to write website content – a disciplined schedule is key.
I’ve created my first WordPress website. Now what?
You’ll want to start creating content. See my article for how to start building content with WordPress.
There’s a number of things that I would say to anyone who is building their first WordPress website:
- Ensure the website is about something you’re passionate about, and know about the subject. Writing about this subject should come naturally to you. If you’re able to record videos and create other unique content, it’s also very helpful to establish a presence online
- Identify early what your website is about. You don’t need to buy or sell anything to maintain a website. If what you offer to the general public is informative and helpful, then your website will do well. If your website content is like every other website out there, it may be difficult to establish yourself or to drive traffic to your site.
- Find a way to make your website engaging.
- Do good keyword research. If you’re trying to optimize for the Paris Hilton search, you may be in trouble! Unless you use some kind of grey or black hat methods to obtain search engine rankings, you may have a difficult time being found for keywords like that.
WordPress plugins to use on your website
WordPress websites excel as blogs. WordPress has many innate features that help you to have very good search engine rankings. All you need to do is install a few select plugins, and follow through on your content writing. The plugins I recommend are Yoast SEO, Updraft (for backups), Classic Editor and Google Site Kit. Google Site Kit is useful once you eventually start running Adsense ads on your website. I don’t recommend setting up Google Site Kit in the early days, unless you need to track site visitor data with analytics. When you have few site visitors, you can also use JetPack to watch the site visitors grow, until they are at the point where you have more traffic. I don’t believe you will need to setup analytics until you have at least 10 unique site visitors per day. Depending upon your niche, that number could be much bigger, too.
I also use a plugin called Limit Login Attempts Reloaded, which will pickup people attempting to brute force the website by attempting to login to the wp-admin area. It can be adjusted to block IPs for 24 hours, or 48 hours, and you can adjust how many tries a user makes before they get blocked from the site for a bit. It will also email you when someone is trying to brute force your website, and will include the actor’s IP address. So if you keep getting hit from the same IP you can block that one with a longer or more permanent ban.
Finding a good Niche Market for your WordPress Blog
Once you’ve got a website with some useful content – I usually recommend 20-30 pages and the same number of posts – then start looking for some relevant places to obtain some backlinks. If you already have other websites that are relevant to your niche, then it’s great if you can post some links back to your new site and help boost it a little. I recommend a home page link. Use content around your link – try to use natural writing styles, and then link to your new blog in a place where it makes sense.
If this is your first website, then you need to establish yourself by finding some places online to obtain backlinks. I talk about backlink building strategies in this article. Relevant forums and community websites that allow you to post links (you may have to work for it) can help you to build backlinks in the early days.