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How to set up an income generating website.

These are some of the steps I followed, adjusted for some of the challenges I found along the way.

GETTING OUT THERE

First I established this online presence in the form of a blog some useful tools for this are listed below with considerations.

www.blogger.com - Excellent blogging tool with a lot of cool templates. As you will see, this is what I have been using and it is quite user friendly.  There are numerous templates with quite a lot of functionality to customise your site. It allows you to link a personal domain to your blog,  but the landing page will always be your blog posts. You can also add indexed pages such as this one too. It is a Google product and makes for easy integration with their other services.

www.wordpress.com - also a well known blogging and website building tool. WordPress gives you the opportunity to purchase your own domain name through their site. I might have used them if I hadn't already purchased my domain name from another service provider.

PERSONALISING YOUR SITE

For my domain name I used SADomain.co.za. I found their service extremely user friendly and affordable.  I paid R 100.00 (around $10 US) for my domain. The .com domains are also available and come in at around R 130.00 (around $13 US) These prices are approximate as are the exchange rates used for Dollar estimates.) The online support was very helpful in answering queries and so far all of them have been resolved.

SADomain.co.za also has a Web hosting service which is very reasonable if you want to establish your own stand alone site. I have subscribed to the service and I'm considering the value in setting up a separate site.

SETTING UP SOURCES OF INCOME

To create portals for generating income, I investigated all opportunities for becoming an affiliate for various online services. The process is merely one of registering to get a commission for referal business from your site.

Amazon.com have a very user friendly system that generates HTML code that you can copy and paste into your website or blog.  In blogger this can be done by clicking the "HTML" button on the compose page and pasting the code generated by Amazon. The result looks like this.

Kalahari.com is another site with an affiliate programme that works in a similar way. They provide a portal for buying or selling thousands of products online and they claim to be South Africa's favorite online shop. (It might be worth checking out their prices and seeing if you can take advantage of the favourable Rand exchange rate.)

All of the above links will take you to the relevant sites through the affiliate programmes that I have registered for. It is a relatively easy way to set up an online income source since there is no requirement to set up a payment system for your own site. I will keep you informed as to how well this all works.

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