The Wealth Gang

The great thing about making money online is that it can be done without spending a dime. If you’re looking for the best free blog platform, for instance, you have many options to choose from. By the beauty of open source software, there are many people much, much smarter than me that like to create useful programs for the world to enjoy.

Because of these open source programs, everyday people who have little to no technical know-how can start a website in a matter of minutes. That, I suppose, is a good thing and a bad thing. Because anyone can start their own websites in a matter of minutes, there Internet is full of spam and junky websites. But, I guess it’s the search engine’s job to filter those out and put valuable content accessible.

If you have something interesting to share with the world and you’re ready to start profiting from your very own website, a blog is the easiest and arguable the best way to do that. Even if you don’t plan on “blogging” per say, the blog platform for your website is often an ideal solution. It’s user friendly, easy to use, and search engines love them.

As far as options go, there is always Blogger and WordPress for free sites. If, though, you plan on taking your new website seriously, you’ll want to have your very own website. You can still get the software for free, but you’ll have to pay about $5 a month for web hosting. But that way you completely own the content, you have more control, and you can make money any way you like.

The self-hosted version of WordPress, in this case, is the most popular and favorable option. It is very user friendly and has thousands of templates/themes for you to choose from for free, so you can pick the design you want at the click of a button. Also, if your hosting company provides Fantastico with your hosting package, like HostGator does, you can have your new website up and running in less than an hour. I showed you in a previous post how I did it in less than 15 minutes.

All you have to do is log in to your hosting account, click the Fantstico button, and enter some information about what you want to call your blog. Push install, and BAM – it’s installed. From there you just log in and start typing away to fill up your blog with new content and get that puppy indexed by Google.

You’ve heard of flipping houses, but did you know that you could flip websites for huge profits and make money virtually overnight? Here’s the thing… if you followed the steps in my video on Starting Your First Website, then you know how easy it is to build a WordPress site for super cheap with like 5 clicks.

There are businesses that have hired me to build them a website that literally took me 15 minutes and they paid me $2,500 for. But you don’t have to go out and try to get businesses to hire you. Just flip websites to make a few extra bucks. And when I say a few extra dollars, I mean like 5000% return on your investment.

A domain costs $9 and if you already have a hosting plan than that won’t even cost you any money. But you can get a website up and running in 15 minutes and immediately turn around and sell it.

If you don’t want to bother with the website, you can apply the same concept with domain names. I know people from both ends of the business… those that have paid $5,000 for a domain name they needed that somebody already snatched up, and I know people who buy really common domain names just so they can turn around and sell it.

If you’re a little more savy, you can flip websites like real estate investors do… the good old Fix ‘n Flip.

You find a website that is established and has lots of traffic, but the owner just doesn’t know how to make money from it. You offer to buy this site for pennies on the dollar, tweak it so it’s making money, and then turn around and sell it.

Or, you can build a site from scratch, start getting traffic to it, and then sell it. The fastest method is just to build a site with no content added and just flip websites outright that way. Because you can create a WordPress site that looks really professional by just using free themes, you can make a nice pile of cash doing this in your spare time.

Check this out…  $4,000/week to Flip Websites

WordPress Goldmine… yet another money making program created by the Average Joe (in this case Mark Thompson) who is silently making money from his home office. I like to buy these products and review them pretty regularly. Usually there some small nugget of information that will make the entire purchase worth it, but WordPress Goldmine is different.

Why?

Most of these programs have a big eBook with a “video program” that just recites the eBook back to you — which to me is completely useless. I get it though… the author creates the videos to increase the value of the product and make it more attractive.

What makes WordPress Goldmine different is two things…

1. It’s chalk full of incredibly valuable information that will walk you through the exact strategy to turn a brand new website into a profit producing behemoth. That alone makes it worth every penny since you not only make your money back with these strategies, but it’s a complete business model that can make you money for a long time.
2. It doesn’t focus just on building websites to promote a product. It shows you from step-by-step how to build a real business. From picking a domain name that will rank high in Google all the way through the money making strategies that will work best for you.

Since Mark Thompson’s WordPress Goldmine looks at all the various types of niches and website you can build, it can help you pull more profits out of your existing site or show you how to start from scratch. It’s not just advice and tips… it’s a complete system.

That’s where the videos are really helpful. It’s one thing to talk about how to make money online, but the videos show live examples of various websites and how they’re making money. Thompson pulls the curtain back so you can see who’s making money and exactly how.

Here’s the main breakdown of the entire system:

1. Building a WordPress Blog: From buying the right domain, to installing your free website, setting up a theme, and installing the best plugins
2. Filling Your Blog With Content: This part covers all the ways to fill your blog up with valuable content… from doing it the hard way by writing blog posts yourself, to finding PLR content that you can quickly change to make it completely your own. There’s some good ideas on how to automate the process with good, original content completely for free
3. Making Money: The crown jewel of this system is found here and is the bulk of the program. This is where Mark covers all the ways to monetize your WordPress blog to make the most money. My favorite is the one blog post that made him $15,000 — he shows you exactly how this was done and can be replicated.
4. Traffic Generation: What’s the point of a blog if it’s not getting traffic? It can be pretty and perfectly optimized to make the most amount of money, but if nobody’s visiting than you’re not making money. I learned some great tips on how to increase traffic to my sites. The diagrams here are very well done, which I ended up printing out and hung above my computer. His Direct Traffic Generating System gave me a lot of new ideas that I started to implement right away.
5. Beating Your Competition: The point of this section is that once your WordPress site starts making money, it can plateau. That’s because there’s only so much you can do before your competition places a glass ceiling over your head. This part shows you how to cream your competition so you can take your profits to the next level.

If you have been marketing online for a while, you’ll probably skip right over the fist section of this system. I did learn about some great plugins that I didn’t know existed, so don’t skip over that part. Otherwise, for the person that has never built a website before, this will show you step-by-step how to get off the ground running.

WordPress Goldmine is about 110 pages of goodness, which I think contains very solid, easy-to-follow advice for those who are ready to break into Internet marketing. For those just starting out, this should be your bible to making money online. The parts on effectively monetizing your site and traffic generation alone are killer.

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