Knowing nothing about websites and how to operate one, I started with a TurnKey website bought through eBay. What this was, was an Amazon astore, Google AdSense advertisements, a hosting package and access to the Control Panel. I found out later, that even though I paid the year’s hosting fee, which gave 12 months for the price of 11 months, that in fact, I did not have complete control of the Control Panel.
Just to be clear at the outset. Amazon astore’s are free. Anyone can join their affiliate programme and set up their own astore. Instructions to do so are relatively simple to follow, even for a newbie and they have a forum with very helpful members for assistance when and if necessary.
The same can be said for Google AdSense, except you need to have a site before you they will accept you on to their programme. Getting a Blog through Google is also free. What’s more, their help resources and forums are excellent as are their templates. All this means that you can actually start out with a website without putting any money down. This is an extremely cheap website. It is also a very good place to start because the learning curve can be quite steep and there are free forums and assistance to help you make progress.
My Turnkey website on small boats used a custom-made WordPress template. You can join WordPress.com for free but the choices to develop your site are limited. On the other hand if you choose to go with WordPress.org, there are a wide range of templates to choose from but you need to find a company to host your WordPress blog. Actually, the way to do it is look at hosting companies and see if they support WordPress. Many of them do. This is where the hosting fees come in.
To the uninitiated, choose your host company as carefully as you can. You should look for bandwidth transfer, file transfer, technical support, site security, email and access to your control panel. It would probably be difficult to predict, at this early stage whether you would grow your site to a full-blown commercial venture which would need a great deal of disk space and transfer width. Check with the hosting company at the outset as to the implications to yourself should you grow big. (It is bound to cost you more in hosting fees)
Starting with a WordPress blog purchased through eBay resulted in having a domain name which I did not own. (The domain name simply means what you see in the address bar after the http:// www bit.) It’s extremely important that you own your domain name. My experience has emphasized this. I put a year of work into my first blog – theboatingstore.co.cc – and found out that I was attached to the hosting company indefinitely because I did not own the domain name. As a result, when I left them, all the back links I had built up got lost.
Your domain name will need to be renewed every year. It is an unavoidable cost. However, it does mean that it is possible to change hosting companies without losing the backlinks you build up.
If it is a Turnkey web site you are interested in, choose one where you have some interest in the subject matter of the site. If you are going to grow it, the one successful way to get organic traffic is to write articles for it, then it is a great help to have an interest in the subject about which you will be writing.
