In this video, I'm going to show you the exact steps and resources needed to start a website
Hey everyone, my name is Kevin Smack and I'm here to answer all your questions about starting a
website in 2021. This video will provide some of the best resources that are out there for people
who want to have an online presence and don't know where or how to get started. We're going
to cover creating a website, what expenses you're going to need right away, and what future expenses
will you need. This is video two out of my series. If you haven't started the series
you might want to start with the first one so you can figure out how I find a niche and you can go
ahead and get started and follow along with me. It's a great time to start a website. Google gets
more searches every day and still 15% of the searches each day are brand new. So why not start
Don't keep watching video after video after video. Get started. It's not that expensive as you can
see, as you will see. There are some costs of course. There are ways of going all free if you
search and I'm sure you can do it that way. It's just more work. I spend a bit of money
gets me exactly what I want, and I'm hoping all this works well for you. At times I will show you
the paid option and if I know of a free option, I will provide that as well. I can't tell you the
exact cost of starting out because we're going to figure this out as you go. I'm going to order
stuff and spend some money because I'm making this site on the website. If you didn't watch
the last episode, make sure you stop it right here because spoiler coming up. All right, here we go
So I have chosen a niche. Unfortunately, comments were not very specific on telling me which way to
go. So I'm going to go and choose the niche that I think I would offer the most knowledge in. It
would be the best for me. It would be the easiest because I don't want to go anything really crazy
especially since I'm still somewhat new at this. But we are going with a niche of fog machines
We are going to have wildfog.com in working order in a little bit of time. But first
before we go and get the website set up, there's some things we need to do. We need to
prepare and get things working and running in the meantime. The idea here is to purchase some things
After this is purchased, my next video will be setting up the website. And after that
everything should be returned that I've purchased. And then we can add on those
and we can start getting into the content. With that said, let's head in and get started here
So the first thing that you want to do for the website, for me anyway, is get a logo
It takes a few days. It's not that expensive. I have a good one that I use on Fiverr here
This guy's got almost 24,000 reviews. He's pretty fast and it's $25 on the basic. And the basic is
the only thing you need as long as you don't need a social media kit, which I don't. This is the guy
I recommend because he's pretty solid. I've worked with him before and he's very upfront about
everything, letting me know how it all works. And the design came out amazing. I don't go for anything
insane. I just go nice colors and everything like that. So I'm going to purchase this for $25 plus
from fees. I do have a list of stuff that we have here and we're going to put this on here
We're going to get back to the donated hosting in a moment, but let's start off with the logo
So if you have the finger and choose continue, if you're not familiar with Fiverr, Fiverr is
basically a place where you can get work done for $5 or more. It's usually pretty good, but you've
got to watch what you buy for art and design and things like that. It's really good. It's also
really good if you need something specific that a lot of people don't know about. That makes sense
If you want an ebook design, it's great for that. Another example. It's like Upwork, but it's a lot
easier because you don't put your job out there. You search their jobs and you buy it that way
We're going to go ahead and purchase this. So now we're going to go through and just give them the
information you need to go ahead and get everything set up. Okay. We got the logo created. The order for $25 after tax
$30.08. Lots of service fee and tax in there. Seems like it's been going up a little bit
So $30.08 for the logo. And what I'll do is I'll also turn that logo into a shade account myself
And I'll show you how to do that once we do receive these options. So what they'll do is
he will create three different designs for the logo, send them to me, and I will choose one
and then he'll finalize them with any additional things I needed. Next would be the domain. You can get a domain name wherever you like. I get it through my
hosting company. And I'm going to tell you about my hosting company in a moment. If you were to
go through my hosting company, it's $18 for a .com address, $12 for privacy, and then tax
You look at $31.80. You can get them somewhere else. Personally, I like to get them where I'm
hosting them, but it's completely up to you. GoDaddy does have great rates, but you got to be
careful when it comes to hosting. You don't want to go with GoDaddy. I've made that mistake. Don't
make that mistake. They're terrible. And I moved to HostGator as a recommendation, and they're
just a little bit better. They were bad. So then I finally came here to SiteGround
probably heard of them, and I really like their service. So I do have a link down below if you're
interested. They are an affiliate, and they will give you a great deal to start off. So here we go
Web hosting on sale, somewhere up to 60% off. So you have choices here. When you get to this screen
if you click on the link below, you're going to see Get Started on the WordPress hosting
and then you're going to be presented with three options. I personally recommend GrowBig. It's
completely up to you. This is still set up for Unlimited. That is supposedly going away soon
so you're going to want to jump in on this before it's gone, because once that Unlimited is gone
it's not going to be as good. I had this, and I loved it because I could make as many websites
as I want, and as long as I had under 25,000 views a month, I was good, which is a lot of views. So
good bargain for the first year. It does go up after the first year. The good thing is that's
about when your website should be making money, usually about a year in. So if you stick with it
I think you'll have a good chance of seeing a return and using that to pay towards it
So let's go to hosting. If you're going with GrowBig, and that's the one we're going to figure
in, the medium one, you can also do the regular startup, which is $3 cheaper, but you only get
one website, and you get lower visitors, and you get, you know, just not as high stuff. But if you
don't think you're ever going to make more than one website, go ahead and choose startup. If you
think you're going to make another website, or you want to just do it as much as you want, dang
you want to stick with GrowBig. Because you got to think about it, if you go with one website and
go here, you're fine, but if you ever want to go to another one, it's not going to be very easy
So we're going to go with the $8 figure here. So 8 times 24, we're looking at $192. Of course
you're going to be taxed on that, but that gives you that basic idea of $192
This is going to be by far the most expensive part of setting up is your hosting. Also
if you do sign up for this plan, the next step, it will ask you to register a domain if you would
like. It's kind of like two steps in one. You just go through, register the domain right away
and then you're all set. I will be showing this whole tutorial through SiteGround
because that's who I have. If you have a different hosting company, it may be a little different
but hopefully it's somewhat similar. I already have the Joe Geek on the big plan, because
because my websites combined have passed 25,000 visitors per month. So now I'm on Joe Geek
and I can be on there up to 100,000 visitors, which is one of those things that's like
oh man, I hit that. And then it's like, oh yes, I hit that. So I'm finally hitting 100,000 and
having to upgrade. So be the month. So those are what we have so far. Next, we're going to be
looking at keywords. Anytime I start a website, I told you it's not an affiliate, but he's amazing
Carl, keyword care. Go there, order them, especially in the beginning of the website
You got to scroll down a whole lot to get where you want to go. Lots of these tricks that I'm
missing. So then you'll get to these booster plans, and you can go ahead and choose your plan
I like the plain booster plan, because for me, I mainly just need the keywords, because I've
been around websites for a while now, and I know what's going on. He also does also quick
read advice. So he'll give you an idea of how the niche looks after he takes a look after it
That's very important to know, especially if it's your first order. So make sure you go ahead and
read that, and you'll be fine. He also gives you the titles, which are great. I love his titles
They're better than mine when it comes to websites for sure. And I can never get the titles as good
Definitely worth it, because you're thinking, if I am going to outsource articles, two articles
for example, can be easily over $90, and that already paid for itself, because I'm going to get
25. So I'm going to look for the best 25 keywords in there. He'll let you know how well they were
if they were hard or not, and go from there. It does take some time, 10 to 14 days. That's
why we're doing all this stuff now. We haven't built the website yet. We're ordering this
so it gets processed. And then next I'm going to build the website, and then probably do a few
tweaks here and there, put a plugin, and then by then, hopefully this order will be complete
And maybe he'll even do this video, and just for us, he'll speed it up a little bit. But as you
know, he gets a whole lot, and I don't want to jump the line, so it's fine. Either way
we're going to go and buy this one here, $90, and we're going to let him know about our domain
There we go. We're going to thank you, and now we're going to go ahead and create what we need
to here. All right. So we need these questions answered, and we're going to do just that. I do
need to change that here, and plan purchase. We've got the booster plan, the URL
If you purchase a silo, we did not purchase a silo. And then your name competitor
All right. There you go. I'm going to take the bold off just to make it a little easier, and you can see where the questions are separated from the answers
Also just change the different colors if you want. There we go. A little extra note on the bottom for him, and let's go ahead and send this over
so we can have him work on wildfog.com. So keywords, we're just going to put $90. It'll
be $999, but we'll just put $90 to make it a little easier. So there's one other thing we
want to purchase, and that's a theme. The theme I'm going to try out is popcorn. It's a new theme
by Alex, Carl, and Bill from spider.uk. So we're going to try this out and see how it goes
I do want to put a link down below if you like it. I've seen some things so far. It's very fast
I haven't got to play with it, and I haven't watched a whole lot of stuff on it, but I know
if they've worked on it, it's going to be good. So we're going to go ahead and choose, yeah, popcorn, and here it is for $99. If you use my coupon code down below, which is kevinsmack
that's S-M-A-K. A lot of people get confused by that old pun. You will get $20 off your theme
Make sure you use my link because they have to work together, and there's some key features of
it, and you'll see this theme through the creation of this website. It looks similar to the one that
I use. If you need a theme and you don't want to pay for one, you're looking to cut corners
you could try base WP. My other websites do use that. It's a good theme. It's just sometimes some
options are a little harder to get to, so I'm hoping this does take care of that, and I really
don't know without trying. So I'm going to go ahead and get this and download it, and we're going to
try it out when we're ready to build. So let's go to buy now. All right, I've got it on this
download it to my computer so I have it and be ready for when we are set up. So there we have it
We've bought a bunch of stuff, so I'm going to go ahead and total this up and also talk about what
we need in the future. So if you do everything as I said so far, you're looking around $443.88
What does this do for you? This gets you a domain for a year. After that, there will be a renewal
fee for the domain. These are around the same price. Posting is for a year. After that, it will
go up. This is a sale right now. Logo, once and done. Pay that, you get your logo, and you're set
If you're good with art or you know someone that can or you want to do something simple, that's
fine. Go for it. First 25 keywords, $90. Like I said, this is huge because your first 20 to 30
articles are very big to get your site moving, but why not get the best one, Carl? Theme, if you want
to use popcorn like I am, it's going to be $100, but you also have the $20 coupon. Make sure you're
using that to attend SMAC. I'm an affiliate for some of these things, not all of them
As I mentioned, and then down below for future, what do we have for future? We have the renewal
of the domain and the hosting, as I mentioned. Plugins, there's two plugins that we're going to
buy in the future, but we don't need to get them right now because usually their licenses are around
six months and there's no reason to start it until you're ready for it. The main plugins I would want
to get is AAWP, which I believe is around $60, and later I would want to get LinkedIn for it
This is about, I think, $100 for three websites. You're probably looking at about $160 here
and then you can renew them if you want to continue support and updates. They're very good
plugins, and I don't use too many plugins, but these are the ones that I use for paid
Keywords, if you run out of your first 25 keywords and you want Carl to get you some more
you got to pay for them. You can do your own keyword research. It's up to you. I recommend
getting one to three from him just to get going, get your site some traction, and then you can use
some tools to find out what your competitors have, and you can get keywords that way
You can't really get that right away until you see where your site's going and where Google
picks you up, from my experience. Pictures are very expensive. You don't want to buy a picture
package. When you're talking about pictures, you're going to look for some free alternatives
You don't need the pictures right away. You can probably get a few months away from it
depending how fast you're putting articles out. Pixabay is free. Pixabay.com. If that doesn't
work, texttools.com. They're free. If that doesn't work, the next is spoonsplash.com
Between these three, they should keep you busy for a while. I was very hard for some niches
and very easy for others, so it all depends on your niche. When you're finally ready to go to a paid version, I definitely recommend Canva. Anyone else is going
take so much of your money for so little pictures, it's annoying. For $10 a month
it's like $119.99 a year for me. I get to use all of Canva, plus I've access to 7.5 million pictures
they have, and they do pretty well. If I search websites, just to give you an example
you get a good amount of pictures, and they just keep going. They have a good amount
and any time you choose a picture, it asks you for the dimensions. You can add filters. You can
change everything. Not for any affiliate, but it's the best one out there that is for the price
There are some cool ones like Adobe Stock or Shutterstock, but they're expensive. A lot of
times, they don't offer unlimited unless you pay the extra, which if you're in that position
go for it. If not, Canva works well for now. For pictures, I would put $120. When you run out of
free content, use the free stuff first though. When you're using the free stuff, try not to grab
the stuff at the top. Try to go more towards the bottom because most people that are using the free
stuff are going to grab the stuff at the top. A lot of times, you want to go more towards the
bottom. Then finally comes content. When you're looking to order content, that's going to cost
some money. You can always write the articles yourself. I suggest you do that in the beginning
if you are a decent writer, or you could do the opposite, which I did, which was order content
keep reading over the content, and then try to make it myself in a similar form. You just have
to make sure you find a good writer for that. Ordering content, if you use My Writer, just go
to requestwriter.com, scroll down, and you'll see some right here. Babu is the one that I use
so go ahead and select him, and you can order it. It's 500 words worth of content. If you want
more, say 1,000, just put a quantity to at the end when you check out. We'll say 2.5 cents a
word for content. That'll give you a good idea depending on how many words you need. You need
your list from Carl before you can get started. That's everything you need. This is video two
Video three is going to be setting it up and showing you the plugins and setting all that stuff
up. I'm excited for that. If you have any questions, leave them down below. If you have
alternatives that you like better, also let me know. Thanks so much for watching, and I appreciate
the view