Yes! You can make your own website for free and earn money from it. One of the fastest ways to build a free website is using a free website builder. Sites such as Wix.com, WordPress.com, Web.com offer a means to easily create a website from which to sell something. However some platforms will charge a small nominal amount for hosting of your site. So if you want a totally free website I would recommend Weebly.com. It lets you set up a free site in minutes and start creating content.
Here’s an example of a Weebly website I built totally free of charge:
Make Your Own Website For Free And Earn Money – Downsides
The downside to using a free website builder such as Weebly is that your domain name will look something like this: https://leedswingchun.weebly.com/. This can be a problem because if you want anyone to come visit your website, you’ll need to promote it somehow. Unless you pay for advertising, you’ll need to attract the attention of the search engines so your site can appear on Google, Duckduckgo.com, Bing etc.
This is much harder with a Weebly website because the search engines are less likely to rank it. Google prefers owner domains because they are generally of higher quality. But if you’re willing to purchase a domain name of your own, you can do this for a small for (less than $10 yearly) and point it to your weebly site.
It’s well worth this small expense because your own domain can give you more credibility and authority with your website visitors. Still, Weebly is a good option if you haven’t ever built a website and want to learn some new skills without breaking the bank.
Make Your Own Website For Free And Earn Money – Choosing Your Niche
To monetise a website you can join an affiliate program and promote affiliate products from your site. However, you will need to attract traffic to your website if you want to make any sales. Unless you’re going to pay for traffic, you’re going to need to create content to bring people to your site for free from the search engines. To give yourself a better chance of earning online, it’s a good idea to choose your niche. That is, the topic or area in which you’re going to be writing/blogging/creating video content around.
Sadly, it’s very tricky attracting a large audience to a free website with no content on it. You have to ask yourself “why would someone come and visit your website?”. The answer for free traffic is to create some content which attracts your target audience. To define who this is, you need to get clear on your niche and the product/s you’re going to be promoting on your website.
A good idea is to find a niche in which you have an interest or a passion. When you know about something, it’s a much easier task to create content in that particular topic. If you’re uncertain, you could choose a topic in which you would like to learn. That way, you can create content in your topic while you’re learning!
Make Your Own Website For Free And Earn Money – Monetising
Now you have your free website and your niche decided, you will need a product to sell from your site in order to monetise it. There’s literally thousands of affiliate products available online to choose from. Amazon is often a first port of call but it isn’t the only place to find affiliate products. In fact, Amazon pays pretty poorly with only a 1%-10% commission rate in most instances. Clickbank is another popular choice for new affiliates and there’s thousands of products you can choose from on the site.
You can also search on Google for “{your niche} affiliate program”, inserting your topic/niche into the search. This should bring up products which are relevant for your particular area of expertise. For example, if you were creating a website around the topic of cycling, you would look for “cycling affiliate programs”. Here’s a site I found for cycling affiliate programs.
Find a product or products which you genuinely would recommend. This will give you more credibility and you’ll be much happier recommending those kinds of products.
Make Your Own Website For Free And Make Money – Your Target Audience
Once you have chosen an affiliate program you can grab an affiliate link, banners and other sales materials from it and post them on your site. This means you now have a way to monetise website visitors in a completely hands free way!
But the journey is only beginning! You still have to get people to visit your website. not only that, but you want to attract the kinds of visitors who are going to want the things you’re promoting – your target audience. The target audience is very important for affiliate marketers because there’s millions of people who can see your website once it’s published and online. That’s not to say they will see it, but you don’t want to spend time and energy getting the wrong kinds of visitors to your site.
Spend some time thinking about who is most likely to want what you’re selling and then about what content they would be most interested in. See customer avatar worksheet for more on this topic. Once you understand your customer avatar, you can save yourself a heap of time by creating only that content which will attract the right kind of visitor.
Getting Traffic
There’s lot of free ways to get traffic to your website. One of the most common strategies is to create written content through blogging. For ideas for blog posts you can use Google’s free keyword planner. This free tool lets you see the kinds of searches which are being done within your particular niche.
Once you have created several blog posts you can promote them for free using social media and through linking back to them from other sites. Many bloggers also build a YouTube channel and post relevant videos to attract their target audience. They send them to their website where they can sell their affiliate products. You can of course test out some paid marketing strategies, but since this post is about free strategies to make sales, here’s a few other free strategies you can use for traffic:
- Post your content on social media platforms (this can be automated with free plugin tools)
- Link back to your content from other websites through guest posting and blog commenting
- Post videos on YouTube/TikTok and link back to your website
- Use Quora.com to answer questions in your niche and link back to your website. See affiliate marketing on Quora.
Building An Email List
Another way to make the most of your website traffic when it starts coming in is through building an email list of subscribers. Since most website visitors won’t buy from your immediately, it can be an idea to collect their email addresses from your website and keep in touch with them via email messages.
This is done though offering some useful giveaway on your website, such as an ebook, training course or some other “value add” for your website visitors. Once you have learned how to build an email list, you can update your subscribers when you publish new website content. This leads them back to your products which you showcase on your site. Or, link directly to affiliate products through your email messages.
You can access a email autoresponder service for free through this link.
Expectations
To make your own website for free and earn money from it does take some time and effort. But once you have built the infrastructure, you can work on traffic generation in your own time. If you make good habits out of creating and sharing your content, over time you should start to see a growth in your traffic, leads and ultimately sales of your affiliate products.
How long this takes will depend on a number of things such as your niche, the competition and the habits you build into your daily schedule. See also how long does it take to make money from affiliate marketing.
There are of course faster ways of generating an income online but they are typically involve a greater investment. Learn more about affiliate marketing through the free video series available through signing up on this website for email alerts.
