Website Help Please

[cah1234]

Hello,

I have a large social media following in a through Twitter and Facebook for a Sports account that i initially setup for fun.

Id now like to start earning money from it but am a complete novice.

My idea is to setup up a website with affiliate banners and discount codes and drive traffic to my website from my social media accounts.

I have never built a website before but would like to give it a go. Is trying to build a site like i have mentioned fairly simple?

Also could you recommend a good UK web hosting company based on my needs above?

Many Thanks

 

[ryedale]

What reason will you give people to make them want to visit your site from the social media pages - it's hard to drive people onto a site from there unless there is a real incentive to do so

 

[cah1234]

Thanks for your reply. Id only be posting a small amount of info and discount codes on the social media sites, meaning that if people wanted to see all the offers available they would need to visit the website.

 

[TimS]

One of the easiest ways to build a website is to use a ready made Content Management System such as WordPress. It is not difficult to install and most web hosting services have the ability to install it with a few mouse clicks. Once it is installed you can add as many pages/posts as you like and it is very well supported with loads of forums and developers around the internet and videos on Youtube. Here's a good one

 

[ryedale]

It's very important as well that whatever you design is responsive (easy to read and use on any size device) given that you are targeting social media users who will be more likely to be using mobile devices.

If the site is hard to read on a phone for example, they're not likely to return to it

I would also have a look at Joomla - we have numerous clients with no IT experience at all, happily managing all their own content using it

 

[Tim Coulter]

As mentioned by TimS, building the site itself should be very simple if you are happy to use a templated design and simply plug in your content. There are many free tools that automate building a website and, although it won't have quite the finesse of a professionally designed site, it may be a good low-cost way to test the feasibility of your idea.

On that subject, you might want to prepare yourself for some hard work to actually make money out of this. You didn't mention exactly how big your audiences are or how well engaged they are, but the click-through rate from social media is typically very low, and then you have the challenge of making a sale off that visit. Here's an case study that discusses email marketing, but which also includes some useful stats about what can be achieved from social campaigns:

https://convertkit.com/2013/email-subscriber-worth/

Once visitors arrive at your site, you have another challenge. Simply displaying affiliate banners will convert very poorly. At the very least you will need some real content that justifies the visit and, ideally, content that warms visitors up for the products that you are promoting.

The most successful affiliates ignore the banners that are provided by their product vendors and use in-context text links to generate click-throughs to the product pages at the optimum point. In other words, they create their own unique content that pre-sells the products that they promote (which also has a big SEO benefit). However, even with this approach, the conversion rates are still often very low, so you may need to build your own email list in order to maintain direct and ongoing engagement with your audience.

 

[broadex]

You can get a website done for as little as £100 - try elance.com or freelancer.com

 

[Trish_Mundus]

As it creates on elance and freelancer - the auther of this them can do it itself for free
To choose hosting, choose the CMS, buy damain name, install the CMS on hosting, set template, change some temp images and that's all. The reason if he will order the website from true specialist is the best design, security and support.

 

[Alex - A2 Hosting]

Good luck with this!

You can use a sitebuilder which most hosting providers offer, we use Rvsitebuilder. Other options (more click-and-go) would definatly be WordPress as mentioned numerous times above. With WordPress you can select one of the thousands of themes and place pre-made widgets wherever you want making it really flexible.

The developer community for WordPress makes it also very appealing to use.