Now that we’ve got how to get traffic to your site I feel kind of silly for not mentioning that you need reliable website hosting!  Ok, so here’s the thing.  You can use a lot of free services online, and believe me, I do.  Everything from blogger.com, wordpress.com, squidoo.com, etc.  Every time I launch a new website I put up a new account on all of those (and more, generally have a list of at least 23 social networking websites that I use to promote new sites to get incoming links from every IP address and major site I can to get the site indexed ASAP!).  The problem with using those free services as you MAIN site is that if you truly plan on running this buisiness you’re giving power away to these guys!  Every time you promote your blog, or squidoo lens on one of the sites I listed off their sites and networks become more powerful but what does it do for you?  Follow that link up there for reliable website hosting and check out their plans (I always have and will use Linux), you can do what I did when I first started and get the plan for $4 a month, it gives you a FREE domain, and they’re only $7 a year after the first domain!  Now if you can’t make $4 a month after 6 months or so you need to be looking at something different.

Take the new site that you’ve just registered, download the latest version of WordPress from wordpress.org and upload it via FTP (I like to use SmartFTP but they’re starting to charge after 30 days of using their program it’s like $36 or something but it’s a great program)  Go into your 1and1 control panel and click “MySQL Administration” and create a database, keep the information that they give you for username, password, hostname, etc. (accessible any time) you’ll need that info later to install WordPress.  Now once both of those are done go to the domain you registered (ex. joeschmoe.com) and from there it’s a snap, walk through the wordpress setup, this is where you’ll need the database information, I suggest having it open in another window, or tab.  Now configure your site how you like, find a template you like to make your site pretty, maintain it for 3 months, then refer to my previous post on how to make money online to start with traffic, and a few dollars.  This method will easily get you your minimum $5 a month (because who doesn’t want to make a profit) and very soon you’ll be making a much higher profit with this easy to use technique.