Totally Free Resources Every Blogger Needs: How To Launch A Website For Free The Quick & Easy Way
Learn how to launch a website for free the quick & easy way in this post!
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Have you ever thought of blogging or trying affiliate marketing so you can start making money online, only to back out because you need to know how to launch a website for free but can’t find a proper way to do it?
Sure, they say that you can start a website with Blogger.com or WordPress.com – they’re free, after all. But, you’re really serious about monetising your website so you don’t want your money-making options to be limited by either of those companies (and they do).
In a hurry?
Also, eventually you’ll be earning money and be able to afford to self-host your own site so you want the transition to be seamless when the time comes to move from your 9-5 and into full-time blogging. You don’t want the headache of having to move from one to the other because trust me, I’ve done something similar and I still have nightmares about it.
So, you obviously want to do it right.
But oh boy, have you seen the cost of “doing it right” these days? They can be astronomical, can’t they? Especially when you’re new and strapped for cash. You have to pay for hosting, courses, advertising and all those nifty plugins (what are those???) that you “need” to get to make sure your website is running smoothly.
- ✦ Managed WordPress Optimised Hosting: from about $50 to $100 per month
- ✦ SSL Certificate: around $60 per year
- ✦ Spam Filter: around $5 per month
- ✦ Enhanced Website Security: around $300 per year
- ✦ Email Addresses: around $10 per year per address
- ✦ Keyword Tool: minimum $50 per month
- ✦ Image Optimisation: minimum $9 per month
You’re not at all techie so wouldn’t you need to get a professional web developer to get all of that sorted?
Devs cost a fortune to hire, don’t they?
Then, of course, you also have this loooooong list of the resources your blog needs to make sure you can actually make money from it.
You’d need to be already rolling in it before you even start, don’t you?
Well, luckily for you, you don’t!
Honestly, you can start your money-making blog right now – this very minute – without paying anything for it AND you can make sure that you have everything you need to set it up so that it can make money before you pay anything towards it.
Wanna know how to do it?
Keep reading!
Hosting
If you’ve been with us a while, then you’d have seen me recommending Wealthy Affiliate, the training centre and hosting provider that has been around for about 15 years.
See all those techie stuff that I talked about above – the ones that cost hundreds of dollars?
Yeah, WA provides all of those for free with their premium membership. That’s on top of all the other goodies you get that will help you succeed at making money through affiliate marketing.
Woah, Jade, you lured me here with your clickbaity title that I can launch a blog for free. Now, you’re talking about paying for a premium membership? What gives?
Hold your horses there, dear reader.
I’m just showing you what you can get once you’re in the position to go premium.
But, if you’re not there yet, if you don’t even have two pennies to rub together (much less pay for some premium membership), that’s totally okay because you can join as a Starter Member and launch 2 blog-style websites for free!
Yes! You can totally start a blog for free with Wealthy Affiliate. No joke!
You also gain free access to 10 of the most important lessons you need to successfully launch your websites and actually fill it with valuable content that your audience would love to read.
Don’t know who your audience is? Don’t even know what you’ll be writing about?
Don’t worry, all of that – and more! – is covered in these lessons.
Trust me, if the only thing stopping you from making money online is the fact that you don’t have money to spare, then this is the answer to your prayers, my friend.
Sign up as a Starter Member right now, follow all the steps, launch your website and then post regularly.
Once your site is generating enough income per month (or maybe you realise that you really want to accelerate your results), then upgrade to Premium, get your domain and just move your entire website from the free hosting to your own. All at only a few clicks of a button.
It really is that simple.
Content
You’re probably wondering why you need this when WA already offers lessons.
Well, because you’re only doing the first 10, remember? The Online Entrepreneur Certification actually has 5 levels, each containing 10 lessons.
So, because we want to know how to start a blog for free, we’re not paying for those lessons yet. In other words, we need to look somewhere else for information.
Unfortunately, the internet can be a proper rabbit hole and you end up all topsy-turvy with information overload.
Don’t worry because I have the answer you need.
And I have to go O-M-G on this one!
Honestly, I’ve been blogging for months now and only just this week came across Lena Gott’s Traffic & Monetization Mini Challenge and I have to say that I learned so much from her that I really, really wish that I’d stumbled upon it a lot sooner. Like before I started because now I have to go back and redo many of my posts.
She’ll give you some great tips on how to write and present your content for maximum results (AKA income).
And did I tell you that it’s totally free?
Seriously. Go sign up now.
Posting Schedule
Now, that you have your blog up and running, you know what your niche is and who your readers are and you’re actually presenting the information properly with the end goal in sight, it’s time to get serious with your posting schedule.
Your main goal if you want to make money off your blog is to drive traffic to it – preferably the kind that comes from search engines (such as the almighty Google). And the more quality traffic, the better.
When you’re just starting out, you should leverage social media because it gets eyes on your site a lot faster. If you get lucky and you get viral, you get instant traffic. Unfortunately, it’s usually fleeting. It spikes for a few days and then dwindles.
Search engines, on the other hand, are super slow but very stable. Rank on Google’s first page and you’ll likely stay there a while.
That’s not surprising since they have to go through so much stuff and run that stuff through their algorithms. I mean, how do they know which website to show first when you search “how to start a blog for free”? They have to go through every single website that has that information, analyse these pages and then rank them in order of relevance – all in the space of milliseconds.
That’s a tough job, even for these intelligent little bots.
Based on personal experience, if you’re just starting out from scratch, Google is slower than a sleeping turtle. And if you have Google Analytics set up (which you should!), watching your stats rise from single digits to even two digits per day is like pulling teeth with no anaesthesia. It’s painful and can be downright demotivating.
So, what’s a new blogger/affiliate marketer to do?
If you love to write, I’m about to make your day.
If you hate writing…well…just think that you’re doing it for the money, the glory or whatever your main motivation is. Whatever your motivation, this posting schedule is for the greater good.
Yeah, you guessed it – you need to write and publish a post a day.
How the heck do you do that? You’re just by yourself, no content creation team to help you out.
Don’t worry, I’ve done all the leg work for you in that I’ve sourced the only information you’ll ever need to help you publish like you’ve got elves churning out content every single day.
Niklas Goeke gives you the exact process he used to drive traffic to his new site, growing it to “almost 30,000 visitors, 837 email subscribers, and a cool $736.00 in affiliate commissions in just 60 days”.
Yep, that’s 60 days of launching the site!
If you’ve tried this whole making money online through a website thing before, then you know that those results are phenomenal.
If you haven’t tried this whole making money online through a website thing before, then trust me when I say that those results are phenomenal.
Seriously, read the article. You’ll need time to digest it properly because it’s a very meaty 6k-word post.
But hey, the success is worth it.
Pinterest Promotion
Pinterest deserves a special mention here because, as another far more experienced blogger describes it, Pinterest is a search engine with a human component.
Just like Google, you need to use SEO and your keywords are important.
But unlike Google, Pinterest is visual. Regular pinners (in other words, not bloggers or other content creators) judge your content (AKA your pin) based on both the image and the text overlay if you have them. Is your pin interesting? Is it beautiful? Does it make people want to save the pin or see what page it’s directing to (AKA your website)?
If you want to leverage the free traffic-driving force that is Pinterest, you need to be strategic. You can’t just pin any old photo and then hope it sticks. That’s just not gonna work.
Your job as a Pinterest marketer is to make sure that people are seeing your pins – your super beautiful, enticingly clickable pins. This means you need to find a way to get them out in front of other pinners.
How the heck are you supposed to do that?
Well, I normally recommend investing in Pinteresting Strategies because I honestly believe that anyone looking to boost their traffic from Pinterest needs it.
BUT, this is a post about how to start a blog for free so we’re only looking for the free but powerful stuff, right?
Right!
In the meantime, you can use this Pinterest strategy, which is slightly outdated but still majorly relevant. Contrary to what you might think based on the title, Crystal Fogleman actually doesn’t just discuss group boards, she also talks about the importance of personal board and then writes about the strategy she uses in order to gain free traffic from Pinterest.
I actually can’t believe that she just gave away this information. She could’ve sold it as a book. It’s that relevant.
Final thoughts on how to launch a website for free
To recap, what do you need to do to start a blog for free?
1. Sign up as a Starter Member with Wealthy Affiliate.
2. Complete the 10 lessons in Level 1.
3. Sign up for Lena Gott’s Traffic & Monetization Mini Challenge and start presenting and writing your content the right way.
4. Create a daily posting schedule. Plan ahead, like Niklas Goeke said, to make sure you don’t waste time researching for things to write about and places to promote your newly published posts ins.
5. Adapt your daily posting schedule to include creating pins for Pinterest and your overall pinning strategy.
6. Rinse and repeat.
And there you have it, everything you ever wanted to know about starting a blog for free.
What do you think? Did we miss anything? Tell us in the comments below.
And hey, if you like this post, show us some love and share, share, share. 🙂
Don’t want to wait?
This is a great post and thank you for the great info! Just out of curiosity…how much is the WA premium membership? It’s never mentioned in the comments or questions.
Hi Donovan, the premium membership costs vary depending on the package you choose. Normally, it’s $49 per month but if you pay for the year, then you get a huge discount. And sometimes it goes on sale, which is what I’m on now. I paid $278 for the entire year so that’s only $23 per month. 🙂 That might sound a lot but I have three blogs so this is actually a steal. 😉
Yes, the need to have a website is a major setback for many beginners like me to get started with affiliate marketing or online business. In my quest, I tried blogger but it isn’t just looking good enough. Then I used WordPress but it suggested a name and extension for me to use. I wasn’t allowed to use the exact domain name I want on the free plan.
Wealthy affiliate is the real deal. I found it last month, then I joined and immediately I was taught and I made my free website. Now, I have joined its premium membership.
One thing I have found out is that as a blogger, it’s best not to stay alone without belonging to a community. In the wealthy affiliate community one can learn latest tricks and strategies and this is far better than just reading books on the subject because they can be outdated strategies in a book. There are so many benefits with joining wealthy affiliate. Thanks Jade and Kevin.
Exactly! Community is so important, especially in the early stages when most bloggers don’t really know what they’re doing and there are so many questions. Also, working from home can be an isolating experience and a strong community can help here too. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. 🙂
Thanks for explaining all this in details. Making money through websites has been a serious issue from me. I can’t count the number of times I’d quit re-start and quit again. Nothing really worked for me. But this post seems different and self-explanatory, I wish I found this earlier. The Wealthy affiliate package (hosting & training) also looks great.
Thanks, Jade.
Hi Jordan, that’s precisely why we wrote this – because we also had failed blogs from previous attempts. Glad we could help. Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
I sure have been reading these blogs regarding affiliate marketing. But, little did I know that there were these many things that were connected with starting a website and the fact that Wealthy Affiliate seems to be offering them for free with just a little amount per month is something that I would definitely look forward to.
But just so I am clear, how much work should a person be willing to put into their websites in order to be successful?(*after they have created their website that is*) Thanks again for getting the word out.
Sid
Hi Sid,
Thank you for your comment. The answer to your question is very subject because each person’s idea of success is different. I will have to go with this: You need to do whatever it takes to get your blog to the level of success you’re going for.
I know, it’s not much help if you’re looking for practical tips so I’ll refer you to the following posts, which can give you an idea of what you really should be aiming for:
https://liveablissfullife.com/how-to-blog-from-paradise/
https://liveablissfullife.com/how-to-make-money-as-an-affiliate-marketer-online/
Thanks and I hope they help. 🙂
Jade
I believe that whoever tries WA and is serious about this whole blogging thing they will not stay fro free for a long time. There is so much value jam packed in WA that is impossible to let such an opportunity go. I also started for free and was planning to stay for some time but after I started to get the hang of it and understand how many tools this platform offers I went premium. For me what I like the most is that I have all my tools grouped together and I don’t have to use various websites when I blog. It saves me time, money and frustration.
That’s actually also been our experience. There were just so many tools that made blogging a lot easier and simpler that we felt the investment was totally worth it. Thanks for popping by and sharing your thoughts.