- So this might be the most valuable video I've ever uploaded on YouTube. I've been doing affiliate marketing for about five years now,
and I've reached a stage where I'm making over $100,000 per month in profit consistently just
from affiliate commissions. So if you're wondering
if it's still worth it to start affiliate marketing today, then I can tell you a hundred percent yes, it is worth it if you're able to focus and if you're able to commit. Affiliate marketing is a long-term game. You're not gonna see money
rolling in overnight, but if you're in it for the long-term, then I believe that there's
no better business model to start than affiliate marketing. Now, I'm not selling a course
on affiliate marketing. The reason I'm able to
make six figures a month in affiliate commissions
is because I dedicate a hundred percent of my time and focus to affiliate marketing, so I don't have time to
also be selling courses. But here's the good news for you, you're gonna get everything you need, all the information and
instructions you need completely for free in this video. First, I'm going to show you how to build your own affiliate marketing website using WordPress and Elementor, which is the best and most
popular way to build websites. We're gonna start from complete scratch, and I'm gonna take you
through it step by step, click by click, how to build a simple but effective affiliate marketing website. We will only be using free tools to build and run this website. So the only thing you have
to pay for is hosting, and I'm gonna show you how to get hosting for less than $3 per month. And in the second part of this video, I'm gonna reveal to you my personal affiliate marketing strategy that has allowed me to scale
to over $100,000 per month, this includes how to find the best and most profitable keywords and how to craft optimized blog posts that actually rank on Google. And don't worry if you don't actually
like writing blog posts, nowadays, we have amazing
tools like ChatGPT, that can do most of the writing for you. I'll show you exactly how to use ChatGPT to create unique and
high quality blog posts that are also optimized for the keywords that you're targeting. I'll even give you the
exact prompts that I use to get the most out of ChatGPT. So if you are really
serious about starting your own affiliate marketing
website that makes you money, the best thing you can do is watch and follow along with this video. My name is Simon. And I'm very excited about
what I'm about to show you. Let's get started. (logo whooshing) (hopeful music) (logo whooshing) All right, so we're
gonna be using WordPress to build our website on. WordPress is by far the most
popular way to build websites, and especially for an
affiliate marketing website, WordPress is the best option because it will give us
access to the best SEO tools, which help us to optimize our content, so we have the highest chance of ranking on the first page of Google
for our targeted keywords. And at the end of the day,
this is what makes us money with our affiliate marketing website. The other cool thing about WordPress is that it's completely free to use. The only thing we need
to pay for is hosting. So hosting is basically renting some space on a server that runs 24/7, so we can have all of our website content stored on that server so
that our website visitors can access our website at any time, and we're gonna be using Hostinger as our hosting provider. Now, the reason I recommend Hostinger compared to other hosting providers is just because I had the
best experience using them compared to other providers
I've used in the past. Hostinger is very
reliable, it's very fast, and it's also very easy to use, which is great for beginners. And at the same time, it is one of the most affordable options. You can actually run your website for as low as $2 per month,
which is incredibly cheap. Personally, I recommend to go with the
WordPress Starter option here because this will give you
some additional features like unlimited bandwidth or a free domain, the domain is basically
the name of your website. So this will come down to $3 per month, which is still incredibly cheap. Now to get access to the
best prices for Hostinger, you wanna use the first link
down below in the description, this will take you to this site here, this is my special landing
page for my audience. As you can see here, it says, "Special Deals
for Metics Media audience." Basically, they gave me a
better deal for you guys because I've been working
with them for some time. I'm also gonna show you how to
actually decrease the prices you can see here by an additional 10% by using my discount code. So make sure you use the first link down below in the description. And then once you're on this page here, you wanna just scroll down, and you want to click on Select here for the WordPress Starter option, and this will take us to the next page where we're gonna have to decide on how many months in advance
we wanna pay for our hosting. So the longer we pay in advance,
the cheaper it's gonna be. As you can see here, the 48 months option, this is the cheapest option, this way, we get four years of hosting
for only 2.99 per month, and the plan renews after
four years for 6.99 per month, so this is definitely the cheapest option. Then we have the 24 months option, this way, we get two years for 2.99, and then it's gonna
renew at 7.99 per month. Then here we have the 12 months option, it's gonna be 2.99 for one year, and then it's gonna
renew at 8.99 per month. Then there's also the
monthly payment option, which I wouldn't recommend
because this way, it's just gonna be much more expensive. After two months, you're already paid more
compared to this option here because here you also get a free domain, which is already worth like $10. So I would highly recommend to
go with the 48 months option, pay a bit more upfront, but then in the long run,
it's gonna be much cheaper. Now for this video, I'm just gonna choose the 12 months option because I'm just gonna
build an example site to show you how it's done, but I'm not gonna really
use this site for myself, so this way I only have to pay
35.88 to create this video. So once you've chosen your
plan, just click on Continue. Then here we're gonna have
to create our account. So choose your country here, and then you can either sign
up using Facebook, Google, or you can also just use an email address. I'm gonna use one of
my email addresses here that I've created for this video, and then click on Continue, and this will take us
to the payment options. Now, before you choose your payment option and type in all the information, you wanna make sure to
click on Have a coupon code? And then you want to type in METICSMEDIA, this is my personal coupon code. When you click Apply, it's going to deduct an
additional 10% off the price so you can make sure to actually have the
cheapest price possible to get your hosting. Once that's done, just choose one of the
payment options here. I'm personally gonna go with credit card, type in your information here, and then click on Submit Secure Payment. And by the way, Hostinger has a 30-day
money back guarantee. So if for any reason you
want to cancel your plan, you can just message Hostinger, tell them you want to cancel your plan. If it's within the 30 day period, they're just gonna give you
a refund, no questions asked, so just keep that in mind. So then here, just type in your password,
and click on Confirm. So now we are in our Hostinger dashboard. The first thing we want to do
is confirm our email address that we have used to sign up. So let's go to your inbox
of the email you have used and then look for the email saying, "Verify your email address,"
then click on the email, and then just click on Verify Email here, and this will take you back to Hostinger. Now the next step is going to
be choosing our domain name, this is gonna be the name of
your website, so for example, the name of Apple's
website is just apple.com. The name of Facebook's
website is facebook.com. And now for our website
that we're building, we also want to choose our
domain name which is unique, which people can type into the URL box, and then they will get to our website. And now on Hostinger here, because we have chosen a plan
that includes a free domain, we can just simply click
on Claim domain here, and then we can look for a
domain that isn't taken yet. So first of all, we want to choose the
extension here at the end, so this could be a .com,
it could be a .net, a .co, or whatever you want. Now, personally, I would
recommend to go with a .com because it's basically
the best one to choose, it's the most legit, it's
what people are used to, so if you can go with a .com. And then you want to type
in the name of your website. Now, you wanna spend some
time thinking about the name because it's not something
you can easily change once you have decided on a name. So if you don't, really don't know what you
should name your website, then the easiest thing you could do is just name it by your own name, so it could be something like samsmith.com if that would be available. And for this website I'm
building in this video, I'm gonna just use the
domain meticsreviews.com because it's gonna be an
affiliate marketing website filled with mainly reviews
of specific products where I'm an affiliate of. So once you type in the name here, just click on Check availability, and then you can see
either the domain is taken, or you can actually get it. So in this case, the
domain is still available, so we can just click on Claim domain. And then to register this new domain, we're gonna have to fill in
some contact information. So just follow the prompts here and fill in all the information, then let's click on Continue. And then don't worry about
what you can see here, just click on Skip, I
don't need a website. And then we get to this page here where we need to verify our email address that is associated with our
new domain as you can see here, Email verification status. So what you wanna do is
go to your email inbox, the same email you've used
to sign up for Hostinger, and then you should get an
email looking like this, Request for email address
validation, click on it, and then you want to click
on the link where it says, "Please click on the following link to confirm you have received this email and to validate your email address." Just click on this link here,
I'm not a robot, Verify. And then once you see something like this, you can just close the tab or the window and go back to Hostinger, reload the window here, reload the page, and then you should be able to see the Email verification
status is now Verified. Great. So now that we have set up our hosting and also our domain name, it's
time to install WordPress. So in the top menu, let's click on Home, and then under Setup, WordPress Starter, let's click on Setup,
then click on Start Now, and then we're gonna
skip all these questions by just clicking on Skip, I don't want personalized experience. So now we also need to create
an account for WordPress, and I would recommend to
just use the same email you have used for your Hostinger account. And by default, they
already put it in here. So all we need to do is
just type in a password and then click on Continue. Then here, we don't want to
install any of these plugins, so we're just gonna click on Skip, I will manage plugins later. We also don't need a template yet, so let's click on Skip,
I don't need a template. And then we're gonna
have to choose the domain of our website, this is gonna be the domain
we have chosen before, so here you can see it's
already selected for us, meticsreviews.com. So I'm just gonna click on Select here. And then here we can also select
the location of our server, This is the place where all of our website
files will be stored, and the closer the server is to the person visiting your website, the faster your website will load. So if you know that most of your visitors are gonna be coming from Europe, then you wanna choose a server
location here in Europe. But if you know that most of people will be in the United States, and then just choose United States. Also, if you're gonna have
an international audience, don't worry, just go with
the default location, it's gonna be fine, and
click on Finish setup. And then once WordPress has
been successfully installed, we can go to our WordPress Dashboard by clicking on Edit Website. So now we are inside of
the WordPress Dashboard, which is basically the
backend of your website. Here is where you can control
every part of your website. And throughout the video, you're gonna get familiar
with how to use WordPress, so don't worry if everything
looks kind of overwhelming now, we're also gonna clean up
this whole dashboard here because there's a lot
of things we don't need, so we're going to delete them in a second. But first, let me quickly show
you how you can easily access your WordPress Dashboard at any time because that's already something many beginners get confused about, they don't know how to get
to their WordPress Dashboard, and you're gonna be going here a lot, especially when you start
building your website. So the easiest way to
get to this dashboard is to just open up your browser, go to the URL box, and
type in your domain. So for me, this would
be meticsreviews.com, and then type in /wp-admin,
and then hit Enter. So wp-admin stands for
WordPress admin, hit Enter, and this will take you to
your WordPress Dashboard. Sometimes it will take
you to a login screen, where you can log in using your
WordPress login credentials that we have set up before. So this is the quickest way. What you could also do is just to go through
your Hostinger dashboard. So when you log into
Hostinger, just go to Websites, which is a new tab that
will be created for you once you have a website, and then just click on Edit website here, and this will also take you
to your WordPress website. What I could also recommend
is to just add this URL as a bookmark to your browser. So whenever you wanna
access your dashboard, you can just click on that bookmark, and then it will open up your dashboard. Now the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna look at some
basic settings here on WordPress that we need to change
before we start building. And we're also gonna
delete a lot of things that come pre-installed with
WordPress that we don't need such as different
plugins, different themes, and stuff like that that make
everything kind of cluttered and makes it a lot harder
to kind of navigate through your dashboard. So you're gonna see that everything is gonna look a lot easier and cleaner once we are done with that step. So we're gonna start
here on the Dashboard. So just click on Dashboard
here on the top-left, and then you want to click
on Screen Options here on the top-right, and make sure all of these
options here are unticked, which will just get rid
of all of these windows that we just don't need. As you can see, it looks
a lot cleaner here. Now, later on, you can just
add any Dashboard boxes, but that's not something we
have to worry about right now. Right now, we just want
to have everything clean. Now let's move on to Posts. Later on in the video, I'm gonna explain exactly
what the difference is between Posts and Pages, but for now, we're just
gonna delete everything here. So we have an example post,
let's just take it here, make sure it's selected,
then go to Bulk actions, Move to Bin, Apply. And then to really delete it permanently, you want to go to Bin, and then you wanna click
on Empty Bin right here, and now we have zero posts. Now we want to go to... We can also go to Media, this is basically where all
of your files and images will be stored. Currently, we don't have anything in here, which is fine, so we
don't need to do anything. Let's go to Pages. Now there's two sample pages, so a Privacy Policy and a Sample Page. We wanna get rid of both, so
let's just take both of them, go to Bulk actions, Move to Bin, Apply, and then we want to empty the Bin, so let's click on Bin and Empty Bin, and now we got rid of these pages as well. Then on the Comments, we
don't have any comments, we don't need to do anything here, we don't need to do anything here. Then we want to go under
Appearance and click on Themes. So as you can see, there's
already three themes that are pre-installed
with our WordPress account. We want just delete all of them basically, so let's click on this one
first, click on Delete, OK, the second one, Delete, OK, and then for the third one,
we can't delete this one yet because we always have to
have one theme installed. So we're gonna leave this for now, and later on once we install
the theme that we're gonna use, we're gonna also delete this one here. And then let's go to Plugins,
and then as you can see here, there are already some plugins
that come pre-installed with your WordPress Dashboard. Most of them, we don't need. So whenever you don't need a plugin, you just wanna get rid of it
because having more plugins will just lower the speed of
your website, which is bad. So if you don't need a
plugin, just delete it. So we're just gonna tick all
of the ones that we don't need. So we don't need this, this,
we don't need the Hostinger. We do need the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, so we're just gonna keep this one, but we're actually gonna
deactivate it for now, so let's just click on Deactivate, and let's just tick those again. And also the WPForms, we are
also gonna need this one, so we're just gonna leave it here. And then we're gonna go to Bulk actions. First of all, deactivate
them, click on Apply, and once they're are
deactivated, select them again, and then go to Bulk
actions, Delete, Apply, OK. And now, we are just left with
the LiteSpeed Cache plugin and the WPForms Lite plugin. Next, let's go to Settings and General, then here, we can change our
site title from just our domain to an actual title. So we're just gonna name
this one Metics Reviews. Obviously, you wanna change
it to your own website name, and then we could also
change the date, format, time format here, but the default settings
are fine in my opinion, so I'm just gonna click on Save Changes. And then we also want
to go to Permalinks here under Settings, and then here we need to
change the Permalink structure, which is basically the default
way our URLs will be created for our blog posts. So for example, this is a
blog post on an example site, and here at the top, you can see the URL, this is kind of what we want, it just should be the
domain of our website and then forward slash and then the blog post
keyword or the blog post name. Now by default, WordPress
sets it to this link type, which is really ugly. So what we need to do to change this is just click on Post name, so it basically adds the
post name here to the end. But if we just use Post name, we have this forward
slash here at the end, we wanna get rid of this, so we're gonna go back
to Custom Structure, and then we're gonna delete
the last character here, the forward slash, like this, and then we're gonna
click on Save Changes. And from now on, we will have pretty URLs for
our blog posts on the website. Then what I would also recommend is to disable the comment
section on your website. So usually when you go to
an article of a website and you scroll all the way down, sometimes you have the ability
to comment something here under the post. But when you're starting a new website, most of the comments or pretty much all of them
will just be spam comments, and you don't wanna spend any time dealing with those comments. I would recommend is just to turn off the
comment feature completely by going to Settings and
then clicking on Discussion, and then here, you wanna
untick this option, Allow people to submit
comments on new posts, just untick this option, and then click on Save
Changes here at the bottom. And now all of your new blog posts won't have the comment section. Now, you can always turn on comments on any post that you have, so don't worry, you're not giving up any
options here for the future, but believe me, it's kind
of a lot less annoying when you turn off this
feature in the beginning. Great. So now that we have cleaned
up our WordPress Dashboard and we have gone through
the most important settings, we can start building our website. Now, whenever you wanna see how your website currently looks like, you can just come over
here to the top-left where you can see your website name, and then right click on Visit
Site, open in a New Tab, and then in this new tab, you can see how your website
currently looks like, it will basically just go to your domain. So you can always check out how the website currently looks like. Obviously it looks very bad, and we're gonna change everything here. And the first thing we're gonna do is actually install a new theme, which is gonna give us the
basic structure of our website. So let's close this tab. And then to install a new theme, let's go to Appearance
and then click on Themes. The currently active
theme is the 2023 theme as you can see here, this comes pre-installed
with a new WordPress account. So what we wanna do is
just add a new theme, so we're gonna click on
Add New on the top-left, and this will take us
to the theme library, where you can see there
are over 5,000 themes you could choose from. And a theme that we wanna install for the kind of website we
wanna build is this one here, the OceanWP theme. So if you don't see it, you can just type in OceanWP
here in the search box, and then you can see it will come up. This is one of the best themes you can use for creating a blogging website, which is basically the same thing as an affiliate marketing website. So just click on Install right here, and then once it's
installed, click on Activate. And now you can see we
have two different themes, the OceanWP, which we have just installed, and the old one, which
we can now the delete. So let's click on the old theme, click on Delete on the
bottom-right, Confirm, and now we're just left with this theme we want to actually use. Now you also wanna make sure to click on Enable auto-
updates, so click here, and that's everything we need to do. Now the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna add a few plugins that will make building
our website a lot easier. So let's go to Plugins
here on the left side, and then you can see we
already have two plugins that came pre-installed
with our WordPress account, these are the ones that
we didn't delete before. So plugins are essentially
an extension to your website that give you additional
features, like for example, you could add a plugin
that gives you the ability to add a chat function on your website, or that gives you some
more design options. And that's one of the great
things about using WordPress, is that pretty much
anybody could code a plugin for WordPress websites, so that gives you
virtually endless options of what you can do with your
website just by applying or by just by installing the right plugin. Now, a lot of plugins are free, and for this video, we're
only gonna use free plugins, but there's also some
paid plugins as well. Now to add a new plugin, we're gonna just click on
Add New on the top-left, and then the first plugin
we're gonna install is called Elementor. So let's type in Elementor
here in the search bar, and then it's gonna be
this plugin right here, this is like a visual page
builder that allows us to use drag and drop when
creating our website, which makes everything very, very easy. And this is also the
most popular page builder for WordPress. So let's click on Install Now. And then the next plugin
we're gonna install is called Ocean Extra, this is like an extension for our theme that we have installed before that gives us a few more design options. So let's click on Install Now here. Then let's go back and click on Plugins. And now the first thing we want to do is we want to enable auto
updates for all of our plugins so that we don't have to manually come into our WordPress Dashboard
pretty much every day and manually update these plugins. So on the right side, you
can see Enable auto-updates. You would just wanna click
on each of these links here so that we have enabled auto
updates for all of our plugins. If you don't see this option, you wanna go to Screen Options here, and then you want to tick this option, Automatic Updates, and click Apply, and then you should be able
to see this button right here. And then with plugins, you can basically have them deactivated or activated once you have them installed. And you can always notice
if they are activated by looking at the
background of the plugin. So here we can see it's
this light blue background, and we can also see a button
that says, "Deactivate." This means that this plugin
is currently activated, and all the other ones that
have a white background, they are not activated. Now, to activate the plugins, we could simply click
on Activate right here, or we could also select multiple ones, like I'm gonna select the
ones we have just installed, and then go to Bulk actions, Activate, and then click on Apply. Then just simply close these
windows here that show up just to make things look cleaner again. So these are all the plugins
that we need for now. Throughout the video, we're gonna install a few more
plugins to build our website, but we're gonna install them as we go so that you understand the
exact purpose of each plugin that we're going to use. Now, before we move on
building our website, I wanna give you a quick
overview of the website structure so that you understand exactly
what we're actually doing. So an affiliate marketing
side has two main pages, it has the Home page, and then it has the Blog page
with all of the blog posts, and then usually there's
also an About page, where you can talk about
the website or the business, and then you can also have a Contact page, where people can just fill
in a form and contact you. Sometimes there's also other
pages like, for example, different categories that you could add also
to the navigation menu, but these are basically
just a specific summary of some of the blog posts that get into, that belong to this specific category. Now, you could also add a resources
page or different things, and I'm gonna show you how to do that, but we're just gonna
build the basic structure, which is everything you need to make money with your affiliate marketing website, because the money's actually
here in the blog posts. So I'm gonna go to the next slide here where I kind of illustrated
how the website works and how you actually make
money with this website. So as you probably know, blog posts are just informational posts where people can read them and then they get some information that they were looking for. So what we wanna do with our
affiliate marketing website is we wanna create blog posts about topics that actually lead to a
customer buying something. So, for example, when somebody types in
best email marketing tools, they're looking for an overview of the best email marketing tools. So then we're gonna write
a blog posts, a roundup of, let's say, the seven best
email marketing tools, and then for each tool, we are gonna sign up for
the affiliate program of that specific tool, and then we're gonna
add our affiliate link to the blog post, and when
somebody clicks on that link, we may receive a commission. So that's basically how we make money, and that's how we wanna
structure our page. All these pages here, they're actually not that important, they're just gonna give
our website a structure, but most people won't
even see these pages here, most people will just see the blog posts because these are the pages that come up when people type in the keywords that we're gonna create
our blog posts for. So 99% of traffic will just
go to these posts here, and then sometimes, people will also check out the Home page, the About page, or the Contact page. So this is the Home page that I'm gonna show you how to build, very easy, very simple, very clean. There's gonna be a logo at
the top here in the header, then here you can see different links, so there's the Blog page we talked about, the About page and the Contact page, and then here, there's just a email
newsletter signup section, which is also a great way to
get some additional commissions by creating a newsletter and then putting some
affiliate links in those. So that's something you wanna do. Then we below the hero
section of the Home page, we're gonna have the articles. So we're gonna feature a
couple of articles here on the Home page, and then
that's it for the Home page. So we're gonna keep things very simple because you wanna focus
on creating blog posts and not really on creating
the most beautiful website, so that's why we're gonna
create something very simple, very easy, but very effective. Then we also have the Blog page, where you can see an overview
of all of the blog posts with the different categories, and then there's also a sidebar here, where you can talk about
yourself or the business, and another Newsletter signup section, some social media links, and
then the Recent Posts here. When people click on each of these posts, they will obviously go to the blog posts, where this is just a dummy post here, and then at the bottom,
you can see suggested posts that are related to this post here. And then, again, the same
sidebar as on the Blog page. Then we have a simple
About page right here, where you can talk about yourself, and then the Contact page, just a simple contact signup page, where people can get in contact with you. And then obviously, there's
also the footer of the website with the Privacy Policy
and the Terms of Service, and I'm gonna give you templates
for both of those as well. Now to make it absolutely clear what the difference is
between a page and a post. So for this website, right here, you can see
these are all posts. And when we go to Blog, to the Blog page, here are all the blog posts, this is the content of your website, this is the thing that will rank in Google and should get people to our website. So to show you how this
looks like in a WordPress, I'm gonna go to the example
site and go to Pages right here. So here you can see these
are all pages, the Home page, the About page, Blog page, Contact page, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service, these are all of the pages right here, Blog, About, Contact, and so on. And then these right here,
like I said, these are posts, and you can find them
right here on under Posts. And then these are the six posts, the dummy posts that I'm
gonna show you how to import. And when we click on them, we can see that this
is just basically text. So this is text, this could
also have images or buttons, and then what will happen
when you add a new post, then when you click on that post here, then it would automatically
be structured just like this. And we can also customize
how this structure will be. And this is the difference
between a page and a post. What we're gonna do is
we're gonna first create all of these pages, which is gonna give our
website the structure. And then after this is done, you're basically finished
building your website, and you just have to focus on creating these text image posts. So this is gonna be the work of building an affiliate marketing
website, just creating content, adding it to the to the posts right here in the Dashboard here under Posts, and it will show up on your website. So the first page that we're gonna build is gonna be the Home page, which
again looks just like this. We have this hero section here,
a newsletter signup section, then we have the Popular Articles, so these could be the latest
articles or popular ones that you wanna feature on your Home page. And in order for us to see how this will eventually look like, we do already need to have
a couple of blog posts on our page, this is what I'm gonna give
you, these sample posts, these placeholder content posts, and then we can see exactly
what you're actually building, how it will look like once you do have some of your own content. So to save you some time, I've already created
these dummy blog posts that you can simply import
to your WordPress website. And I've created a Google
Drive's folder for this video. You can basically access it by using the link in the description, it's gonna say something
like, "Google Drive," and then you should get
to this Drive folder here. And once you're here, you
wanna click on Website Content, and then you wanna click
on Dummy Blog Posts, and then you wanna download
the dummy blog posts.xml file. So right click and
Download, Download Anyway, and then just save this
somewhere on your computer, and then we're gonna go
back to the Dashboard, and we're gonna go to Tools,
and then click on Import, then we're gonna go to WordPress,
and click on Install Now, and then let's click on Run Importer. And now we're gonna drag
and drop the file here into this window, or you could
just click on Choose file and then find it there. I'm just gonna simply
drag and drop this file just right here, and then click
on Upload file and import. Then here you wanna select
you yourself as an author, so your account here, and then also take Download
and import file attachments, and click on Submit, and then all done. So now we can go to Posts. And now as we can see, these
dummy blog posts are imported. And now we also want to add
some images to these posts because when you go to
the example website, you can see each of these
posts has a featured image, which is also visible here
on the Home page right here. So to get these images,
you want to, again, go to the Google Drive's folder,
go to the dummy blog posts, and then under blog post images,
you can double click here, and then you can just
download all of these images. When that's done, you wanna
unzip the download file, and then you want to come back
to your WordPress Dashboard, and then open up each of these blog posts. So I'm gonna just hit
Command or hold down Command or Control if you're using Windows, and then click on each
of these blog posts, so it opens it up in a new tab. You could also just right click and then click Open in a New Tab. And then we have these six tabs open with each off the blog posts. Now to add the featured images, we're gonna first close this down, and then on the right
side under the Post menu, we're gonna go to Featured Image, and then we're gonna
click on Featured image, and here we can just
import all of the files at the same time. So I'm just gonna drag
and drop all of the images right here. And then to add the first
image to the first blog post, I'm gonna select the first one here and click on Set featured image, and then simply click on Update. And I'm gonna do the same thing for the other blog posts as well, so again, go to Featured
image, Set featured image, then you could choose the second one, Set featured image, Update,
then the third one, again, Featured image, Set featured image, choose the third one, Set
featured image, Update. And when that's done for
all the six blog posts, we can just close all of these tabs. And now let's create our Home page. So let's click on Pages, and
then let's click on Add New, and then let's name this page Home, and then at the bottom, we
wanna change some settings. So under Content Layout, we wanna change this from
Default to 100% Full Width. And then we also wanna disable
the Paddings right here. Then you also want to go to Title and then disable the
Title by clicking here. And then you want to click on Publish, again, Publish. And now we can look at how
this side currently looks like by right clicking on View Page and then opening this up in a new tab. Then we can open up this tab, and we can see this is currently
how the page looks like, it's basically an empty page, but when we look at the
URL here at the top, we can notice that that it has a /home at the end of the URL. So when we delete this section of the URL and just hit Enter and
actually go to our domain, which our Home page should show up for, we can see another page actually show up. So what we need to do is
we need to tell WordPress that we want to have the
other page we've just created, this one, as the Home page. So let's go back to the Dashboard by clicking on this icon
here at the top-left. And then you can see here under Pages, we have the new page
created, the Home page. And now what we need
to do is go to Settings and then click on Reading, and now we want to go to
Your homepage displays, and select A static page,
and then under Homepage, we wanna select a page we've just created, which we called Home, so
we're gonna select Home here, and then we're gonna
click on Save Changes. And now when we go back to our domain, so to our website, by clicking here, we can see that this new
page that we've created is now assigned as our Home page. And you can also see this by
going back to the Dashboard, and then you can see
next to the Home page, it says, "Front Page," this means that this is now
assigned as the Home page. So now to edit this page, we're
just gonna click on it here, and then we're gonna click
on Edit with Elementor. Elementor is the page builder
that we have installed before. So this is the visual page
builder that we're going to use to design our website. It's very easy to use. You can just drag and drop in
elements from the left side to your page and visually
build out your website. We're gonna start with the
first section of the Home page, which is this section here. And we're gonna start with this text here. But the first thing that we notice is that we have two columns, so one column here for the text and the email signup section, and then one column for the image. So that's what we're gonna do first, so here we're gonna
click on the plus sign, and then we can see we
have different options for the layout, so we have
just one column, two columns, three columns, and so on. We're gonna use the two columns layout, and that way we can have
two different spaces to add elements for. Now, to add an element, we're gonna go to the nine dots
right here on the top-left, and this will take us to
all the different elements we can drag in. The first thing we're
gonna drag in is a heading. So let's just click and hold, and then drag the heading
into the first column here, just like this, and then we can already
like change the text, so let's just see, it says, "Helping You Choose The
Right Marketing Tools." So we can just either just
write it right in here, or we can also write it in here. So wherever you want works,
I'm just gonna type it in here, so, Helping You Choose
The Right Marketing Tools. Obviously, you can just
type in whatever you want, whatever kind of website you wanna build, the tagline is gonna be a bit different. Now the next thing you notice
is that the color of the text is actually blue, which is the default color
that comes with a new website. And if you look here, the color is actually
like this very kind of, like this almost black, but
it's a bit more gray as well. So we want to change the color. So what you could do is when
you click on this element here, you could go to Style,
and then go to Text Color, and then change the color right here, but you don't wanna change the color for each single element. What we wanna do is we wanna
set up some global colors, basically, our default colors
for the entire website, so that when we add new elements, then we always have the same color that we want for our website, and that also makes it easy
to change the colors later on once the website is finished. So to set up our default colors, we want to go to the hamburger
icon here on the top-left, and then go to Site Settings, then go to Global Colors here at the top, and then here we can
see the default colors that are currently active, so we have this blue that
we've seen here with the text, which is the Primary color,
then we have a Secondary color, a Text color, and then
also an accent color. And then we can also add
some more colors here at the bottom. So now we want to define what
kind of colors we want to use for our website. Now for the example website that I'm gonna build here in this video, I've used this green
here as an accent color, and then for the text colors, I've just used this very dark gray. And then for the bottom, I've also used some kind
of dark gray as well as the background here. So a very simple color setup, which I'm gonna recommend to you, to use a simple one when
you're starting out. You can always change this
later on for your website. Now the easiest way to set up your colors is by going to a site called coolors.co. I'm gonna leave all the website links and tool links down
below in the description. And then here, click
on Start the generator! And then you can set up your colors here. Now I'm gonna simply do
three different colors. So I'm gonna click on the X twice, so we only have three different colors. And then what you can
do is just hit a Space, the Space bar on your keyboard, and then it will just generate
different color pellets that you could use for your website. So if you like a specific color, so for example, we like this one, we could just click on the lock icon, and then this color will
basically stay here. And then if we hit the Space bar again, it will just change to other
colors that will fit well with the first one we have chosen here. So you can do this and just
find out the colors you want. I've basically created my own
palette for this website here, which I'm also gonna link
down below in the description. So if you wanna use the same colors for building the website, and then later on you
can still change them, you can use this palette as well. So this is gonna be the accent color, this is gonna be the text color, and then this, we're gonna
use as a background color. For some parts of the website, I believe it's just the footer. So I always have this open here, so I can just click on the copy icon here, and then it will copy this color code that I can simply paste
into my default colors. So first, for the Primary color, I'm gonna copy this code here, so I'm gonna click on copy here, and then I'm gonna go back, and I'm gonna change this Primary color, I'm gonna just paste that
in here, Control + V. And as you can see, now
the color has changed. I'm gonna use the same color
for the Secondary color as well and also for the Text color,
just to keep things simple, like you don't wanna do
too many complex things when you're just starting
out building a new website, especially if you're a beginner. So then for the accent color, we're gonna go back to our palette, then we're gonna use this one here, copy, and we're gonna paste
that in here as well. And then I'm also gonna add a new color for a background color, I'm
gonna click on ADD COLOR here, then I'm gonna name this
one, Background number 1, and I'm gonna copy this
last color by clicking here, going back, and then
choosing the color like this. And that's everything we need to do. So these are the colors I'm gonna use. I'm gonna click on UPDATE here
at the bottom to save this. And you can also see that the
heading we've added before, the color has now also changed
the default Primary color we have set here. Now what we also wanna do
is define our default fonts for the website. So let's go back by hitting the back icon and then going to Global Fonts. And then here, if you want to, you can just keep the Global Fonts that are set up by default for
all the Primary, Secondary, and so on. I personally gonna change this, so I'm gonna click on the pen icon, and then the default one
for the Primary is Roboto, I'm gonna change this to Open Sans, so I'm gonna choose this one here, and then it changes as you can see here. If you want to, you can also choose Roboto or any other popular fonts. I would just make sure you use basic fonts that are easily readable and
not use like very fancy ones because people just don't like
to read text in fancy fonts, it's kind of more difficult to read. And what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna use the same font for all of the different text types. So I'm gonna use Open Sans here as well, and then for the Text as well, Open Sans, and then for the Accent as well. So most of it was a Roboto,
which, again, is also fine, so you can use that if you want to, but I wanna make sure
you know how to change your font styles. So once that's done, let's
click again on UPDATE. So now let's close the Site Settings and go back to our Elements. So now we want to change
also the size of this text, of this heading here, so we're gonna select it by
clicking on the pen icon, and then we're gonna go to Style, and then under Typography,
we can change the size. So we can just drag
this to the right side, I just wanna have it on three
lines, kind of like this. Then we can also change the
the Weight to make it bolder by making this 700, a bit bolder. And then maybe we're gonna
change the Size again a bit less like this. And then we can also change
the Line Height here, so I'm gonna just increase the Line Height just a just slide bit like
this, looks fine to me, then let's click on UPDATE. And now we're gonna add
the second text here, we're gonna add this section here, the text saying that you should
sign up to the newsletter. So we're gonna go back, and then we're gonna go
to the nine dots here, and we're gonna drag in
the Text Editor like this just under the Heading, and then we're gonna just change the text, so I'm just gonna copy and
paste it from this example site, copy, and then paste this in here. And then it just takes
the default colors again and the default fonts we've
already set up, so that's fine, but we want to go to Style, and
then again go to Typography, and then also change the size little bit, kind of probably like this, and then you can also change
the Weight if you want to, I'm gonna leave it here as it is, and the Line Height is fine as well. So let's again click UPDATE. Next, we're gonna add
the email signup section that you can see here, so let's go back, then click on the nine dots
and go to the Elements. And then let's scroll down all the way to where it says, "WordPress." So click the dropdown arrow, and then we wanna look for MailChimp. So here we go, here is MailChimp. We just want to click and
drag this below the text, and then here we wanna
do some adjustments, so we're gonna first
delete the Title here, then we're gonna delete all of the Text because I just want to have
the email signup section and not any text above, and we're also gonna delete
the Accept GDPR Term section, and then we're gonna change
the text for the button. I'm gonna change this to Join now, and then I also want to, have this a bit closer to
this text here at the top. And to to get this closer, we're gonna have to go
to Advanced right here, and then we're gonna change the Margin. So with Margin and Padding, you can basically control
how close the elements are to each other, so the gap
between each of the elements. Now what's the difference
between Margin and Padding? Now there's a an overview here. So just look at this image here, and you can see this is the content, and then this is the
border of the content. For example here, this is the content, and then this line here is
the border of the content. Now, when you increase Margin, it will add spacing
outside of this border. If you add Padding, it will add spacing inside of the border. So just keep that in mind. Now we're gonna remove some Margin here at the top of the email signup section. So first we're gonna
unlink these values here by clicking on the link icon, and then I'm gonna remove
some spacing here at the top by clicking on the down arrow. And as you can see, by clicking it, the spacing here at the top decreases, so let's just, let's do -25, or let's actually do -30, that's fine, then we're gonna click on
APPLY, and there we go. And now we can notice that the
color of this JOIN NOW button is in blue instead of
the accent color green that we have added before
under Global Colors. So we actually want to change
this to this green right here that we have set up before. And the reason it's still blue is because we also need to
set up our default colors on the WordPress level and not just here on the Elementor level, which is our page builder. So we we're gonna do that now. So let's first click on UPDATE to make sure we save the changes, and then we want to go to our website. So we're gonna simply copy
the link here of our URL here at the top, and then open a new tab, and just paste that in here, hit Enter, and then you're gonna just gonna see how the website currently looks like, how the Home page looks like, and you can see this bar here at the top, you can always see this bar when you're logged into WordPress for the site you're on right now. So let's just click on Customize here, then let's go to General
Options, then General Styling, and then here you can
see we can also set up our default colors on the WordPress level. So let's go back to our color pellet, and I'm gonna copy this green here by clicking on this icon, going
back here, or actually here, and then changing the Primary Color, I'm just gonna paste
in the color code here. All right. And then I'm gonna also
set a Hover Primary Color. So usually, I use the same color, and then I just make this
a bit lighter or darker. Now, let's just make this a
bit darker, kind of like this, that's fine. And then we can also scroll
down and go to the colors here. So for the LINK COLORS, I want to set this to the
black that I've set here, the gray, and then just
paste in the color code here, and do the same thing for the Hover. I'm gonna also use this green. So I'm gonna again copy this, and then change the Hover
color to green as well, and then click on Publish. And now we should be
able to reload the page. So let's maybe just delete
all this at the end, go back to our website, hit Enter, and then we can see the button color has now changed to green,
and when we hover over it, the color has changed to the Hover color, which is a bit darker, a darker
version of the same green. So now we can go back to
our Elementor page builder, and let's also reload the page here to see if the color changed here as well, and there we go, it's also green now. Now later in the video, I'm also gonna show you
how to connect your website to the email marketing tool, MailChimp, so that whenever somebody
types in their email address on your website, it will go to
your email list on MailChimp, and you can send them out
email sequences or newsletters, and so on. So for now, we're gonna leave it at that, but later on, we're also gonna connect it, so that this signup
section actually works. Now, you don't need to collect
any emails on your website, so if you don't want to, you can just right click
here on the pen icon, and then just delete this
email marketing section. So next, we're gonna create the second
part of the hero section, which is adding the image here. Now, you don't need to have a person here, you can also add another image, but this is a very popular design, so I'm gonna show you
how to do it like this. And I'm also gonna show you
how to remove a background from an image, because this
image here of this guy, I actually found it on
a website called Pexels, I believe, pexels.com. This is a website where you
can find free stock images that you can use copyright
free on your website. So for example, you could
just type in guy with laptop, something like that, and then
different people come up, and you can basically
just use these images completely for free. Make sure when you download
one of these images, you go to, you download this version here, Large or even Medium. Don't go with the Original size
because it's just too large, and it will decrease the
loading speed of your website, which is very bad. So I would just go for
the Large image here. Another side you can use is unsplash.com, so this one here, Here, it's basically the same site, you can just also find stock
images that are copyright free. Now if you want to just
recreate the same side, you can just go to the Google
Drive folder for this video, which, again, you can find
in the description below, then go to Website Content,
and then go to Hero Section, and here you can see, this was the original
image that I've found, and then I actually
removed the background, so it just was this guy. So the tool that I've used
to remove the background very easily is I've used canva.com, and I'm gonna leave the link to this down below in the description as well, it's a very nice design
tool, very easy to use, so I've just uploaded the
image of this guy here, and then I would click on Edit photo, and then click on Background Remover here. But as you can see, this is a pro feature, meaning, you have to pay for Canva, I believe, it's like 10 bucks a month, to be able to access this feature. I think there's also a free trial, so you could just use the free trial, then remove the background,
and then download the image, and then you don't have to pay anything. But when you remove the background, you wanna click on Share,
and then go to Download, and then make sure you take the Transparent
background option, and then click on Download, and then you get this file
basically without the background. Now if you wanna get another free tool, there's also this website here, remove.bg, and there you can also remove background, so I'm gonna show you
quickly how this works. So I'm gonna just drag in this image here, and then it'll automatically
remove the background, and you can download the image for free. If you want to have it high quality, then I believe you have
to pay something as well, but it's very little, so
that's basically how it works. So let's go back to our website here, and let's add the image. So let's go to the nine dots here, and then look at the elements, and now we want to add an image, so I'm gonna drag in the
Image from the left side, put it here, and then to change the image, I'm gonna just click on Choose Image, and then I'm gonna drag in
the image I have created. So I'm gonna just drag this in here. Once it's uploaded, click on Select. And now before we do
anything with this image, let's just align both of these
columns here in the center. So we're gonna click on the section here, we're gonna select this section, and then we're gonna go to Vertical Align, and change it from Default to Middle. And this way, we have the both of the
elements here in the center. And now, when we go back
to the example page, we can see that there's like a gradient in this hero section, going from the bottom
all the way to the top. So it starts here at a light gray color, and then goes all the way
to the top to a white color. So we wanna add that as well. So we're gonna go back, and then we're gonna again
highlight this section, or select the section, and then we're gonna go to Style, and then click on this gradient icon here, Once we click on it, we can
select the gradient colors. So for the first Color,
we're gonna select a white, so a complete white with the code six Fs. And then the Second Color, we're gonna change this to a light gray, so we're gonna do something
like this, that looks fine. And now we wanna also
have this guy come up right at the border of this section, just the same way as we can see here. So to do that, we're
gonna select the image, and then go to Advanced, and then keep the values
here for Margin linked, and then just remove or
go down with the value by clicking on the arrow. And then by clicking on it, you can see that the image gets larger and slowly gets to this
border here as you can see, so maybe one more, maybe,
yeah, just like this. Now, if for some reason
when you add the gradient, the gradient stops here and doesn't go over the
whole width of the page, then you wanna make sure
to select the section, and then you want to turn
on Stretch Section here under Layout. So go to Layout, and then click on, turn
this on, Stretch Section, and then it should look just
like what you can see here. So now we're done with the
first part of the Home page, and we can move on to the second part, which is this one here, the
Popular Articles section, where we just feature a few blog posts. And in order for us to
create this nice layout, we need to install a plugin. So let's go, come back here, and then let's go back to
our WordPress Dashboard by going to the icon here,
and then going to Exit. But before you actually click Exit, make sure you update your page, so all the changes are saved,
and then click on Exit. And then you can simply click
on the WordPress icon here, and this will take us back
to the WordPress Dashboard. So now let's go to Plugins,
then click on Add New, and then the plugin we're
going to use is The Post Grid, so we're gonna type
that in the search bar, and it's the first one that comes up, so let's click on Install
Now, then Activate, and then we can just scroll
down and click on Save Changes. And now, let's go back to
Plugins, and look for our plugin, which is this one here,
it's already activated, but we also want to enable auto-updates, so let's click on Enable
auto-updates here. And actually, let's also
enable it for this plugin here, the WordPress in Importer, which we have used to
import our dummy blog posts. So now that we have the plugin installed, we can go back to our Home
page by going to Pages, and now, as we have
already used Elementor, we can just go and click
on Edit with Elementor, and this will take us back to our editor. So now let's first create the new section by clicking on the plus icon here, then this time, it's just
gonna be a one column section,, so we're gonna click here. And now, let's go to our elements by
clicking on the nine dots. And now, we wanna use this element here, which is the TPG - Grid Layout. Because we have installed the plugin, we can now see this element, so we can now drag this
inside of our section. And now we can already see that our posts basically show up here. Now we wanna go into some of the settings. So here, for the Layout,
we're gonna keep the Layout 1, Then we're gonna click on Settings, and for Field Selection, we're
gonna deselect a few things. So let's deselect the Section
Title and also the Meta data, Then let's open up this
Excerpt/Content menu, and decrease the number of
characters that should be shown as the preview text here to, let's say, 170 should be enough. And then we also wanna click
on the Read More button. And I'm gonna change,
for the Button Style, from the Default style
to Only Text Button, and then Read More is fine. And I also want to have an icon, so I'm gonna activate the icon here, and I'm gonna choose an
icon by clicking here, and then I want to have
something like an arrow, so let's maybe choose this
arrow here, click on INSERT, and this will insert this arrow here. Then let's go to the Style
settings by clicking here. And then let's click on
the Read More section here, and change the text color, so I want to have this in my
accent color, which is green. So under Text Color, I can
just click on this globe icon, and then all of my Global
Colors will show up. And I'm just gonna choose the accent color we have already set up. And then as you can see, it
will change to this green. Now we can also go to Post Title here, and this is about the title. And as you can see when
we hover over the title, it's actually blue, and we wanna change this
to our accent color. So under Post Title, let's switch from Normal to Hover, and then here we can
define the Hover color. So I'm gonna just gonna
click on the globe icon again and choose my accent color, and then we can see when
we hover over the title, it changes to green. Next, let's click on Card, and then we're gonna add
a radios for the post, like the blog post cards
here, this entire thing. So we're gonna just go
to Card Border Radius, leave these values linked, and then we can just click on the up arrow and then change this to, let's say, 20, and this will add to
these rounded corners, which looks a lot better. And then we also wanna add a box shadow just like you can see here. And we can do that by just
clicking on this pen icon next to the Box Shadow, and that's everything we need to do. You can also change the
values of the shadow here, but I think it already looks pretty good, so that's how I'm gonna keep it. Then we might also wanna change
the text size of the title and also of the preview text. So let's scroll up and
first go to the Post Title, then we can look for
Typography right here. Click on the pen icon, and then here, we can change this size, so we can make it bigger or smaller. I think I'm gonna make it a bit larger, I think this looks pretty good, and then I'm also gonna go to the Excerpt, and then go to Typography and
also adjust the Size here. I wanna have this a bit
larger, this is too much. So I think maybe like this. Actually, let me go back to the Post Title and decrease the tex
size just a little bit, maybe we could do 22. Okay, now I think that looks great. So to save this, just click on UPDATE. And now the only thing
that's missing is the title for this section, just
something like this, like Popular Articles
or recent blog posts, something like that. So let's go back here,
click on the elements icon, and then drag in a Heading just
above our blog post section. Then we're gonna change the text here to, let's say, Popular Articles. And then we're gonna change the size, so we're gonna go to
Style, go to Typography, and then first of all, change the size to something
a bit bigger, 36 is fine. And then maybe also change
to Weight to let's say 700 to make this a bit bolder. And then let's also add a bit of padding or bits of a margin here
to the bottom of this text, of this heading. So let's go to Advanced and
then unlink the Margin values and increase the Bottom Margin to, let's say, 10 pixels is fine. And then we also want to
add a bit of a margin here to the top of the entire
section and also to the bottom. So let's select our blog post
section, then go to Advanced, we're already here, and first of all, unlink these values. And then for the Top, I'm gonna
add, let's say, 30 pixels. And at the Bottom, I'm
gonna add 100 pixels. So this will be added here
at the bottom of this section and before the footer. And that's it for the Home page. Now we're finished with our first page. Let's make sure we update the changes. And then we can also check out how the page currently looks
like by looking at a preview. We can click on this eye
icon here on the bottom-left, and then a new tab will open up so we can see how your website looks like or how the Home page we've
just created looks like. We have the margin we
added here at the bottom, we have the margin here, and then we have these two sections. Looks pretty nice and clean in my opinion. Obviously, we have some more work to do like the header and the footer
and all the other pages. But now that you understand exactly how the page builder works, it's gonna be a lot easier. So also here on the site map overview, we can see our Home page is now done. And the next page we're gonna
work on is our Blog page. So when we go through the example site and click on the Blog page, then we can see what the
page is gonna look like. And we don't actually
need to design a lot here because it's already
pre-designed by our theme and WordPress. So we're gonna have all
the blog posts here. And then we're also
gonna create this sidebar with a search bar and About Me section, a Newsletter section, and
the Recent Post section, and then also some social media links. So let's go ahead and create that page. We're gonna start in the
WordPress Dashboard again. So let's go and open up a
new tab, type in our URL, so this would be
meticsreviews.com/wp-admin, hit Enter, and this will take us to our dashboard. Then let's click on Pages
and create a new page. Then we're just gonna
give the page a title, I'm gonna name this one Blog,
and then click on Publish. Again, Publish. And now just like we've
done with the Home page, we need to tell WordPress that this page is gonna be our Blog page. So let's go back to
our WordPress Dashboard and go to Settings, click on Reading. And then here under Post page, we're gonna select our page
that we've just created, the Blog page, click on Save Changes. And now when we go back to our pages, we can see that the new Blog page is assigned as the Post
Page, which is what we want. Now, when we click on View here
and open this in a new tab, then we can see that
there's already content here on the page because we
have assigned this page as our Post Page, but we still wanna make some changes here. So let's click on Cstomize. And by the way, the changes that we're
gonna do for the Blog page is gonna be in the WordPress Customizer and not in Elementor. So this might be a bit
confusing, but just follow along, and everything is gonna be fine. So first we're gonna change the layout. So let's go to Blog,
then go to Blog Entries, and then here, change, under Blog Style, change it from Large image to Thumbnail. And this way we get to this
kind of thumbnail design, which looks a lot better in my opinion. The next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go back by
hitting this arrow here twice, this will get us to the main menu again, then we're gonna go to General
Options and go to Page Title, and then here, we're gonna go, and for the visibility, we're
gonna Hide on all devices, so we get rid of this ugly
page title here at the top. Then let's go back again twice, then let's go to Typography
and click on Body, and then here, we also need
to set our default font, so we wanna set this to the same font we have on our Home page, which we have set on the
Elementor Global Settings. So I'm gonna go with Open Sans again, but you wanna choose whatever
you have chosen there, so, Open Sans, and then you can see it
changes for all of the text. Then I also wanna change the size, I want to increase the size
of the text just a little bit, so I'm gonna change it
from 14 pixels to 16 pixels to just increase the size, then let's click on Publish. And now we're gonna take
care of this sidebar here, we're gonna make this look
exactly like you can see it here like I've shown you before. So let's go back, and then let's go just
to the main menu here. And then let's go to Widgets,
go to Default Sidebar, and then click Got it here. And then we wanna first
delete everything here, so we start with a blank canvas, so this is kind of cumbersome sometimes, so you just wanna click on these items, go to the three dots, and
then click on Remove Search. Do the same thing here,
three dots, Remove Heading, remove these links, this
group, remove the comments, and also remove this
text here, again, remove. So we just are left with this plus icon, and now the first thing we're
gonna add is a search bar, so let's click on the plus
icon and type in search, and then we're just gonna
click on search here, and there we go, we already have it here. Then we're gonna add the next thing, which is the about section, so let's type in about, About Me, choose this one, and there we go. Now here, we can basically
change some settings. So About Me is fine, I can change the name right here, so let's say Sam Smith,
or basically, your name. And then we also wanna add an image. Now, you can't really click on this button and just upload an image here, so we basically need to
upload it to our media library and then copy the link
and paste it in here. So let's click on Publish first, and then let's go back to our Dashboard. So I already have it open
here, you can just go to it. And then we're gonna
click on Media right here, and here we're gonna
upload our profile image. Now, again, you could
just use the profile image I've provided in the
Google Drive's folder. I'm gonna just use one
that I have prepared here, I'm going to use this one here. So I'm gonna drag it
into the media library. And then once it's uploaded, we just wanna click on the profile image, and then I'm gonna copy
this URL right here, then we're gonna go
back to the Customizer, and then click on the About Me section, and then just paste in
this URL here, Paste. And just like that, it has now changed. Then you can also add a
description here if you want to about yourself. So I'm just gonna copy and paste it from this example page
here, paste that in here. And then you can also
add some social links just below this text. So you can just paste those links in here. So for your Facebook page,
you wanna just add your link, so I don't really have one, but I'm just gonna type
in the Facebook URL. And once you type in the URL here, the Facebook icon would already show up, the same with Instagram, LinkedIn, or all the other social media pages, just paste in the URL to your LinkedIn or whatever you want to add, and then it's gonna show
up here at the bottom. Then I wanna add the
newsletter signup section, so let's scroll down, click
on the plus icon once again, then type in mail, so the
MailChimp widget will come up, let's click on it, and then you can see
the signup section here. So I'm also gonna just
gonna copy the text, so just gonna copy the text here, paste it into this text box,
which will show up here. And then I don't want to have
them accept the GDPR terms, you can if you want to,
I'm just gonna delete it, and then this part will be gone. And then for the last part of the sidebar, we're also gonna add the recent posts. So let's click on Add
Block, then type in recent, and then we want to do
Recent Posts right here. And there we go, that's all we have to do. Now, the most recent posts will show up. Now if you wanna show more posts here, I would actually show more, so I would just change the
number here to something like six or even even more if you want
to, but I think six is fine, and that's all we need to do. Let's click on Publish. And now I also wanna change the text size of the sidebar titles and
also of this text here. So to do that, we're gonna go back to
the main Customizer menu, then click on Typography, then go to, first we're
gonna do the heading, so we're gonna click on
Sidebar Widget Heading, and here, we're gonna
change the heading to, let's say, 18 pixels. And then we're gonna go back and also select the Widgets here. And then we're gonna
change the Font Size to, let's say, 15 pixels, and this will increase the
text size here as well. You can have it a bit
smaller if you want to, maybe 14 is fine as well, just like this. All right, let's again click on Publish. So that's it for the Blog page, we're pretty much done already, and we've also already
taken care of this sidebar, which will be not only shown
on the Blog page itself but also on the blog posts. So when you click on
one of these posts here, then you can see that on the
right side to the sidebar will be visible as well. So when we go back to the overview here, we can see we are already
done with two pages, the Home page and the Blog page. And now we're also gonna
really quick look at the layout for our blog posts, so
how the page looks like when somebody clicks on a blog post. So let's come back here, and then we're already in the Customizer. If you don't know how to get here, you can just type in
the URL of your website. And once you're logged into WordPress, or if you're logged in, you can see this bar here at the top. Once you see this, click on Customize, and this will take you into
the WordPress Customizer. So we're gonna click on Blog, and then now we've
already added the Entries, now we're gonna edit the Single Post. So now this is how the single post page currently looks like. We have the featured
image of the blog post, the title, the metadata,
and then the content here, the sidebar, we already have
created here as you can see. And then at the bottom,
we have the the posts that are related to the post
that we are just reading. So as you can see, this
already looks pretty good, so we don't actually
need to do a lot here. The only thing that I wanna do is I wanna do some changes
here to the metadata. So we're gonna go to
the Meta section here. And what I wanna do is I
wanna deselect the Comments and maybe also the Category. If you think it's important, then you can just leave it here, I'm gonna probably deselect it. And then for the Date,
I'm actually gonna change, I'm gonna delete the Date,
I'm gonna disable it, and then I'm gonna change
it to Modified Date. So whenever you update your blog post, then the date will be updated as well. And that's actually the only thing that we're gonna change here. Now, I also wanna show you how
you can change this name here that shows up for the
author of this blog post. So let's click on Publish
just to save the changes, then let's go back to our Dashboard, and click on Users here, and then we can see we
only have one user so far, this is gonna be your own account, so let's click on it, and
then let's scroll down. And then here under Nickname,
we can just change the name. So let's say it's Sam Smith. And then we also wanna change
the Display name publicly as we wanna change it to Sam Smith, and then we are gonna
click on Update Profile. And now when we go back
here and reload the page, we should be able to
see that when we click on one of these blog posts, that the name here has now
changed to our new name. So next, let's take
care of the About page. So just to show you how this
page is gonna look like, we're gonna go to the example page, click on About in the navigation menu, and then you can see how the page is approximately gonna look like. As you can see, it's a very simple page, because it's really not that important to spend too much time on these pages or even the text that
you're gonna add here because people are not even gonna see it, you don't even have any traffic yet. Once you have enough blog posts and you have some traffic on your website, then you can spend some more time perfecting your about page. But for now, you just don't wanna spend
too much time on these things that in the beginning don't really matter. So I'm also gonna show you, by the way, how to easily create a
customized personalized text here for your about section
using the ChatGPT AI tool. But first, let's create this page. So we're gonna start again
in the WordPress Dashboard, we're gonna click on Pages, and then we're gonna add a
new page here at the top, we're gonna name this page About. And then under Content Layout, we're gonna go with Full Width, we're gonna disable the Paddings here. And then under Title, we're gonna disable the Title,
and then click on Publish, confirm Publish. And then already from here, we can click on Edit with Elementor, and then, we're gonna add a section. So when to click on the plus icon, add the single column section here, and then go to the Elements
and drag in our Heading, then I'm gonna change the text to About me or whatever you want to have it titled. And then I'm gonna change the size, so go to Style, Typography, Size, I'm gonna do 36 again as the title size, and the Weight is gonna be let's say 700. And then let's go back to our elements and drag in the Text Editor
just below the title. And now, we need to come up
with a nice About me section. Now, the way I did this
for the example site, like this text, I just used ChatGPT, which is a tool that I'm gonna
show you more about later when we get into writing your blog posts. So this is a free tool, you
probably have heard of it, I'm gonna leave the link to this down below in the description as well, it's an very cool AI tool that can basically write a
very well written text for you. So we're just gonna ask it
to write an about section for out website. And so I'm gonna type in something like, please write me my about section for my, let's say, blog website. And then we're also gonna give
this AI tool some information about ourselves so it's
actually personalized. Here's some information about me and things that I'd like to include. So I just came up with a few things that I wanna have included
in the about section, like I have five years
experience in online marketing, every week, I test new marketing tools
and review them on my website. And my goal is to help you
find the perfect marketing tool for your business. Now you can add as many
things you wanna add here as you want, but for
the sake of this video, let's just use this, and then hit Enter, and then ChatGPT will basically
write your about section for you. You can basically copy
paste this, or you can, I mean, you'll probably
wanna read through it and make sure it's
actually truthful to you and your website, but this is gonna give
you a basic structure that you can use, and then you can basically
rewrite it however you want. But for this video, we're
just gonna use this. So we're just gonna copy
the text here, copy, and then go back and paste this in here. And just like that, we
have our about section. Now, obviously, you wanna change all these
things in the brackets here, so I would change this to
the blog name Metics Reviews. And just to make this
a bit easier to read, we're gonna just drag the text box just a bit to the left side. And then you also wanna go in here and make sure you add some spaces here, maybe you also wanna
make some sentences bold, like let's say we wanna
make this sentence bold because it's kind of important. Just give this text a bit of structure so it's easier to read. But again, don't worry
about it too much because, like I said, probably nobody is gonna look
at this page in the beginning. Then obviously, you also add
your name here at the bottom. And then I also like to add
an image here at the bottom. So let's go to the Elements
and drag in an Image, then click here. And I'm also gonna just
use this image here, click on Select, and then we're gonna
align this to the left, and we're gonna decrease,
we're gonna go to Style and decrease the width just like this. We can also change the Border Radius here, so when we click here
and increase the radius, it will become a circle,
which looks great. And now we're also gonna add some padding or some margin here to the top and bottom. So we're gonna click on the
entire section, go to Advanced, and then unlink the Margin values. Go to 30 pixels for the Top, and then for the Bottom,
I'm gonna do 100 pixels. And that's it, let's click on UPDATE. And that's gonna be our About Me page. Now again, you can spend
some more time here, add some pictures, and so on. Personally, I like to
do this once the website actually starts getting
traffic, so I don't, so I focus actually on
the important things, which is writing blog posts. Now to see how this looks like, you can always go to the
preview icon here at the bottom, and then you can see
how the page looks like. So now we only have one more page to go, which is the Contact page. So let's go to our demo page and see what the Contact
page is gonna look like. So we're just gonna have a
simple title, some text here, and then this form field where people can type in their
name, email, and the message. So the first thing we wanna do in order for us to create this form field is we need to install two plugins. So let's go to our Dashboard,
and then head over to Plugins, and then the first plugin we need, we already have installed, which is the WPForms Lite plugin, so we don't need to install that anymore. So let's install the second one, so let's click on Add New here on the top, and then we're gonna type in
the search bar, qi addons. And we're gonna look
for a plugin like this, this Qi Addons For Elementor. We wanna install this, Install Now, and then we want to activate it, Activate, and this plugin is gonna enable us to have some more styling options when it comes to our
form fields with WPForms. So the next thing we wanna
do is we want to go to, we're just gonna do NO THANKS here. And then let's go to
Qi Addons For Elementor and click on Widgets, and then here, we can basically deactivate the widgets for all of the options except for forms. So deactivate it for Business, Creative, Showcase, SEO, Infographics. And then for Form style, we're
gonna leave this turned on, and we're gonna turn it
off for everything else. And now because we have
installed the WPForms plugin, we should now be able to see
this menu item here, WPForms, so let's click on it, and then we're gonna click on
Add New to create a new form. Then here, we're gonna
use a simple template. So let's click on Simple Contact Form and click Use Template. And then here, we're gonna do some changes
to this simple contact form. So let's click on the first field here. And then for the Format, I'm
gonna change this to Simple, so we only ask for one name,
then I'm gonna go to Advanced, and I'm gonna just hide the label here, so I'm gonna tick this option, and then the Name text will be deleted. And then for the placeholder content, I will just type in Your Name so people can see what
they need to type in here. Then let's go to the second
field or the email field, here, again, I'm gonna go to
Advanced, go to Hide label. And then for the placeholder
text, let's type in Your Email. And then for the Message, I'm gonna change this
to Advanced and go to... Field Size, I'm gonna do a Large. Placeholder text, I'm
gonna do Your Message. And then we're gonna
hide the label as well to just keep things very simple and clean. And then actually, I'm gonna make the
message required as well, so let's go back to General, and then take the Required option so people actually need
to type something in here. So that's gonna be our form. So let's click on Save,
and then close the window. And now we can see we have a new form, which is called Simple Contact Form. So now we have everything we need to create our contact page. So let's head over to
Pages, then click Add New, and we're gonna name the page Contact. And then here for Content Layout, we're gonna do this 100% Full Width. We're gonna disable the Paddings. And then for Title, we're
gonna disable the Page Title, and then hit Publish and Confirm. And now, let's click
on Edit with Elementor, then let's add a new section, and let's do a one column section. Then we're gonna need a header, so I'm gonna go to the Elements
here and drag in a Heading. So I'm gonna just gonna
change this to Contact or just contact us or something like that. Go to Style, and go to Typography, then I'm gonna change the size
of the title to 36 pixels, make the Weight a 700. And then we're also gonna add some text, so let's go to the Elements again at the text editor just below. And then here, I just wanna say that they
can also send an email, so just like here on the example page, I'm gonna copy this text here
and just paste that in here. And I think the size is actually fine, so I'm gonna leave it at that. And now we can actually drag in the form we have created before. So let's go back to the Elements here, and then we gonna type in wpforms, and then we have two options. Now because we have
installed the Qi Addons, we're gonna have this option also, which gives us more design options. So we wanna use this
one, see this red one, so I'm gonna just drag
this into the canvas. Then you can see this is the
form we have created before, and we can now go to Style over here, and then we can make some changes. So eventually, I want to have
this form look like this form on the demo page. So we have this green button, we have this shadow here around the form, so that's what we're gonna do. So let's go back here,
and then under Style, let's first go to the Button Style, and then we're gonna scroll down and go to Button Background Color. So here, let's check
out the default colors, and I'm gonna change it to my
accent color for this website. And then I also want to
have the width of the button go through the entire page. So for the Button Full Width option, I'm gonna change this from No to Yes. And just like that, we
have this larger button. Then let's go to Spacing Style, and then under Input Padding, we're gonna add 15
pixels to all the sides. And then let's go to
the Advanced menu here, then we're gonna open
up the Border menu here, and we're gonna click onto this pen icon next to Box Shadow to
activate the Box Shadow. Then let's go to Layout and add some padding to
the inside of this form, so let's unlink these values, then we're gonna do one here. We're gonna do 30 for the right side, for the left side, also 30, and then for the bottom, we're gonna do, let's say, 20, or let's say, 18. And then what I forgot to
add are the rounded corners, so let's go back to Border, and then for Border Radius,
we're just gonna add 30 here. And now it pretty much looks the same as here on the example page. Now the only thing we need
to do is add some margin to the top and to the
bottom of this section so it's not as close to
the header and the footer. So let's click on the
section, go to Advanced, then I'm gonna unlink the Margin values. And for the Top, I'm gonna add 30 pixels. And for the Bottom, I'm
gonna add 100 pixels, and click on UPDATE. Now, just for you to understand
how this Contact page works, it's very simple, so I'm gonna
do a quick demonstration. So let's open up this new page by clicking on this eye
icon at the bottom-left, and then let's just type
in something random, so I'm gonna type in my name, a random email, example@gmail.com, and then type in just a message, Hello. And then when we click on SUBMIT, we should be getting a message saying, "Thanks for contacting us.
We will be in touch shortly." And now what happens is that
you, the owner of this website, will get an email to your inbox of the email account you
have used for WordPress, and you're gonna see this email, so it's saying, "New Entry:
Simple Contact Form." And then when you click on the
email, you can see the name, the email, and then also the
message we have just typed in. When you wanna get in
contact with this person that has filled in the contact form, you can just click on Reply, and then it will already put in the email they have given you as the recipient, and then you can just type in whatever, or just respond to them,
and send them an email, and then just keep in contact via email. Great, so now we're done
with all of our four pages. And we can see that in the Dashboard, we can see under Pages, we have an About page, a
Blog page, a Contact page, and the Home page. When we visit the website by
hovering over the website name, and then right click, Open in a New Tab, then we can see this is the Home page, but there's still one thing missing, which is the header here
at the top and the footer. So what we're gonna do
now is create a header, which looks like this, where we have the logo
here on the left side, and then we have the navigation
links here on the top-right, which will take us to
all of the other pages we have created. And then the footer, we're gonna also add the logo once again. And then our legal pages, the Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, or any other policies
you want to add here. So let's go ahead and
create our website header. And the first thing gotta do is create our main menu
that you can see here. So let's head over to
our WordPress Dashboard, and then go to Appearance
and click on Menus,, and then we wanna create the
menu by giving it a name here, so I'm gonna name it Main
Menu, click on Create Menu, and then we need to add
pages to our Main Menu. So under our Pages,
let's click on View All. And then what we want
to add is our Blog page, our About page, and our Contact page. So let's click on Add Menu here. And now we can see we have these pages in the main navigation menu. We can also move them around
by just dragging them or down. So the ones that are at the top here are the ones that will come up first. Now, under main Menu Settings, we want to choose the Display location, so where this menu will be displayed, and I'm gonna choose Main, which will then mean that it will be shown in the website header. So let's click on Save Menu. And then let's look at our
website again by going here, and then right click, Open in a New Tab. And now we should be able
to see we have this new menu as you can see here. And now to customize this menu, to make this look exactly
like what we see here, we're gonna have to go
and click on Customize. Then here, the first thing I want to
do is disable this top bar, which is the bar above the header. So let's click on Top Bar
and then go to General, and then just untick the
ENABLE TOP BAR option, and now you can see the top bar is gone. Let's click on Publish. And now the next thing I wanna
do is disable this border that you can see here
just below the header. So let's go back to the main menu, then let's go to Header, General. And then for the HEADER BORDER BOTTOM, we're just gonna click on disable, and that way, the border is
gone, let's click on Publish. Then let's go back one
step and click on Menu, and then here, what we
can do is add an effect that will be shown whenever
we hover over the links here. So what I wanna do is just
add this underlying effect that you can see here when we hover over this navigation menu. And you can do that by
going to Link Effects, and then it's this first
one, Underline From Left. And then when we hover over the links, you can see you have this
under underlying effect. We just need to change the color as well. So under Links Effect: Color, we're gonna change this from the blue to the accent color that
we have for our website. So I'm gonna take this color here and then paste the color
code in this field, and then just click out of the window. And now when we hover over here, you can see we have this green underline. Then let's scroll down. And for the Link Color, this is just the color of the text here, so I'm gonna change this to
also one of my default colors, which is this one here for the text. So copy this code, paste that in here, and now the color has changed. And then I also wanna disable
the search function here, so I'm gonna scroll down
and look for SEARCH ICON, and then I'm gonna
change it to a Disabled, and now it is gone. Let's click on Publish. And now the last thing I wanna
do is change the font size of this menu. So let's scroll all the
way up, go back two steps, then go to Typography, go
to Main Menu right here, and then we can change the font size here. So currently, it's 13 pixels, I'm gonna change this to 17 pixels to just make the menu here a bit larger, then click on Publish. Next we're gonna add
our logo to the header. So let's go back and then back again, and then go to header and click on Logo, and then we can click on Select Logo here, and we can drag in our logo. So I've prepared one for this website, which looks like this. So let's click on Select. And then obviously, we want to have it, we wanna see the entire
logo, click on Crop image. And there we go, this is far too large. So for the Maximum Width, we're gonna set this to be a bit smaller, probably something like, this looks fine. So now I wanna quickly show you
also how I created this logo because it's actually really easy. I've used a tool called Canva, you can find the link down
below in the description. So once you have an account with Canva, just click on Create design. Then for this logo, I've
used a custom size here, then I've used 1,400 times 200 pixels. You can also use other dimensions, depending on what your
logo should look like, then Create new design, then I took the Text tool, Add a heading, then type in the name, so meticsreviews, then make this all caps, make
this larger kind of like this. And then I also just
added an element here, so going to Elements on the
left side, type in marketing, and because this should
be about marketing, then under Graphics, See all. And then I have a lot of
different marketing graphics that I could use for my logo. So I wanna have something simple, maybe something like this would work. So I have a premium account with Canva, that's why I have access to
probably more elements than you with a free account, but obviously, you can also
upgrade if you want to. So then you can also change the colors, so for example, REVIEWS, I would change to one
of the website colors, which could be this one here. Then we're gonna go to colors
and then add this color code. And then for the logo, we
can also change to colors. So I would change this screen
to my accent green color, and then the yellow, I would
change to, that was wrong, the yellow, I would change to black, or do it the other way round, or have this one green and this one black, so whatever you want. But this way, you can really easily create
a quick logo using Canva. Now what you wanna do
is you wanna have a logo for a light background, like a white, and then also one for a dark background. So what I like to do is just click on the duplicate icon here, and then everything that's black, I'm gonna change it to white. So just highlight the black part, and then change the color to white, here, the same, change the
black to a white color, then click on the background, and then change the background to a black. And now you have a logo
for a light background and a dark background. Now to download these logos, we're just gonna click on Share, and then click on Download, and then we're gonna activate
the transparent background, then click Download, and then we have the
files on our computer. Now, again, if you don't have a
premium account with Canva, you can use a site called remove.bg, and this way, you can remove
the background for free, and you don't need to pay for Canva. And then here, as you can see, we can also add a retina display logo, this should be twice the normal logo size, so you can also do that in Canva, just right click on your
design, click on Make a copy, then open up the design
again, and then go to Resize, and then just double the
values, so hit this lock icon, change the Height from 200
to 400, click on Resize, and then you have twice the size, and you can download it
again and then upload it. Here for the retina logo,
I've already prepared it, so I'm just gonna upload
it here from my computer, Choose Image, there we go. So now we're already done with our header, so let's click on Publish. But there's one more
thing I wanna show you, which is if you wanna add categories here to your header navigation bar, which is something you see a lot with affiliate marketing
websites and blogs, you can also do that as well by going to your WordPress Dashboard, and then under Appearance and Menus, you can also add categories. So here, Add menu items, you wanna click on Categories, and then I have one category
so far for this website, and we can just click on
it, click Add to Menu, then Save Menu on the bottom-right. And now when we go to
our website, Visit Site, we can see we have now
a category link as well. So you can add as many
categories as you want, or you can add also other pages, and then add them to the menu as well. Next we're going to
create the website footer, which is gonna be visible at
the bottom of the website. And this is what it's gonna
look like, we have a logo, then we have this separator,
then our policy pages, and then we have a copyright notice all the way at the bottom. So let's go to our page, and then we're gonna click
on customize here on the top. Then the first thing we're gonna do is change the text here
at the footer bottom. So let's click on Footer Bottom, and then to change the text, we can just change it right here. So I will just copy what I have
here on my example website, just copy this text,
then paste that in here. Now you can also get rid
of the footer bottom. If you don't want it, you can
just untick this option here, and then the footer
bottom will be disabled. Then I also wanna change
the background color of the footer bottom. So I'm gonna use this color
here, so I'm gonna copy it. And then let's go back to the Customizer, click on the Background Color, and then paste in the
color code right here. There we go. And then let's save the
changes by clicking Publish. And now let's take care of the footer, which is this section above, so let's go back, and then
click on Footer Widgets. And then the first thing we wanna do is determine how many
columns you want to have in that footer. And here for this example,
we only have one column, so that's kind of the
simplest version you can do. So we're gonna change from
four columns to just one column like this, then I'm gonna scroll down, and for the Text Color, I'm gonna change this
to just a total white. And for the Links Hover Color, I'm gonna change this to my
accent green, which is this one. So let's go back, paste
that color code in here, and then save the changes, click Publish. Actually, I forgot to change
the background color as well. So we wanna have the same color like we have on the footer
bottom, which is this color here. So let's copy it, then
go to Background Color, copy or paste in the color code. And there we go. Now we can click Publish again, and now we're ready to
add content to the footer. So to do that, we're gonna go back, and then we're gonna go
to Widgets, Footer 1, and then here we can
click on this plus icon to add different elements to our footer. So the first thing I want
to add is my logo for, that I have made for a dark background, so I'm gonna choose Image, and then you can either click on Upload, or you can also just
drag and drop your logo to the window here, and
that will also upload it. And then we can see it's much too big, so we're just gonna click and
drag this to the left side to make this logo smaller. So this is a bit too small, so let's just experiment
how it looks the best. So maybe a bit more, I
think, this looks fine. And now before I add to the policy links, I want to add a separator, so I'm gonna click on the plus icon again, type in separator, and there we go. We can just use this one here, and there's nothing more we need to do. So let's click on the plus icon again, and now I'm just gonna add some text, so I'm gonna click on Paragraph, and then I'm gonna just
gonna type in the policies that I wanna add. So I'm gonna add a Privacy Policy, and then I'm gonna add this line, and then I'm also gonna add
a Terms of Service page link. And then to center the text, we're gonna click here,
and then Align text center, and now it should be right here. And that's pretty much it for our footer. Now there's one more thing we need to do, which is make this text a link, which then goes to the
Privacy Policy page. So we would have to click
here and then add the link, but we don't have made our Privacy Policy and and our Terms of Service page yet. So first we need to create those pages, and then we can link
them to the footer menu. So first, let's click on Publish, and then let's go back to our Dashboard and create to those pages. So let's click on Pages, then click on, first close this here,
and then click on Add New. We're gonna start with the Privacy Policy. Then for content layout, we're gonna do 100% Full Width, and disable the Paddings. And then for Title, we're gonna
disable the title as well. Then click on Publish, confirm, then let's click Edit with Elementor. Then we're gonna do a simple page, so we're gonna click on the plus icon, do a one column section, and then we're gonna click
here and add our Heading, so let's just add this here. Then I'm gonna change the
text to Privacy Policy, and then go to Style, change the Typography Size to 36, and make it a 700 in Weight. And then I'm gonna click
on the Elements again, and I'm gonna add the Text Editor and drag this just below the title. And now to create your privacy policy, you have a couple of different options. You could either just go to other websites that are very similar than yours, and then basically use their
privacy policy as a template, and then just change all the information to your own information, or you could use a
website called termly.io, this is one I really like. And then here, they have a
Privacy Policy Generator, so you could use that to
create your own privacy policy based on your own individual case. So they're gonna ask you
a couple of questions about your website, and then they will give
you the privacy policy or terms of service and
everything that you need. Now to make it as easy
as possible for you guys, I've created a basic privacy
policy that would be applicable for an affiliate marketing
page or a blogging page, and you can find that in
the Google Drive folder link down below in the description. So when you click on that, you can just click on
Policy Templates here, and then I have one for a Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. So I'm gonna add this
template in this video, so I'm gonna click on
Privacy Policy first, and then before you copy and
paste that onto your page, what you wanna do is just look
at these placeholders here, and make sure you replace them
with your own information. And the easiest way to do
that is if you're using a Mac, just click on Command + F or Control + F if you're
using Windows, I believe. And then you wanna type
in this open bracket here, and then it will show
you all of the places where you need to replace the content. So it would be the company
name, the website URL, and then here at the bottom, it's also the contact email address. Once that's done, you can
just highlight everything, and then right click and Copy, and then go back to Elementor, and then just paste that in here. And there we go, that's
everything we need to do. And also the headings should
be already a heading 2, an H2. When we go here, we can see it's an H2, so it should be formatted correctly if you just copy and paste
it from this document. Now we also want to add some space to the top and bottom of this section, so let's select this section here, go to Advanced, unlink the Margin values, then I'm gonna add 30 pixels
to the Top and to the Bottom. As always, I'm gonna add
100 pixels, and that's fine. Let's click on UPDATE. So now we're done with
the Privacy Policy page. Let's go back to the Dashboard by clicking on the hamburger
icon, clicking on Exit, that should take us back to this page. Then let's click on WordPress icon, and that takes us back to
the WordPress Dashboard, and here, we can see under Pages, we have now a Privacy Policy. Now the quickest way to also create the Terms of Service page
or any other policies is to just copy this page, and then change the text, obviously. So we have to install a plugin to be able to duplicate this page because this is the quickest way. So let's click on Plugin
here on the left side, and then click on Add New. And then we're gonna
search for duplicate page. And here we can see we're gonna
just use this plugin here. So let's click on Install Now, Activate, and then let's go back to our Pages. And now when we hover over
our Privacy Policy page, we can see we have a new button
that says Duplicate This, so let's click here. And there we go, now we
have a new page as a draft, so to change it, let's click on it, then we're gonna change the
title to Terms of Service, and publish the page, Publish, and then click Edit with Elementor, and then we're just gonna
replace the content, so here, instead of Privacy Policy, we're gonna do Terms of Service, and then also replace the content here. So I'm gonna, again, use my template for a
Terms of Service page. So go back to the Google Drive's folder, click on Terms of Service, then we wanna make sure to replace all of the placeholders here, so, again, Date, Command + F, type in the open bracket, and then we can see all the places where we need to replace
the content, so do that, and then once that's done, I'm just gonna highlight
everything, right click, Copy, go back to the Elementor, and then I'm gonna highlight
everything here, delete it, and paste in the new content, and everything should
be formatted correctly. So there's nothing more we need to do. Let's click on UPDATE. Then let's go back to the
WordPress Dashboard again. And now we have our Privacy Policy page and Terms of Service page. The last thing we need to do is link those pages to the footer menu, so let's go to our page
by hovering over here, right click, Open in a New Tab. And there we go. And now we want to link
those pages to the menu here. So let's click on Customize,
then go to Widgets, Footer 1, and then for the text here,
we're gonna add the links. So to get those links, we're just gonna go back to the Dashboard, then we're gonna just click on this page, the Privacy Policy, and
then here's the URL, so I'm gonna just copy
the URL from here, copy, Copy Link Address, then go back here, make sure this is highlighted, go to link, and paste that in here. Make sure it looks good. All right, click here. And there we go, now it's a link. We're gonna do the same
thing for Terms of Service. So let's go back and click
on the Terms of Service page. Then we're going to click on
the URL, highlight the URL, right click, Copy Link
Address, go back here, then highlight the link, and
actually paste that in here, hit Enter. And there we go. Make sure we publish the changes. And now to test this out, we could close the Customizer here. And then let's actually
click on Privacy Policy, that will take us to the privacy policy. And then when we click
on Terms of Service, that will take us to our terms of service. So now we have a website
that looks great on desktop, but we also wanna make sure that it looks great on
mobile phone screens as well. So we wanna make sure to
look at each of our pages and make sure it's optimized
for a smaller screen size. So let's start with the Home page, let's go back to the WordPress Dashboard, click on Pages, and then
look for the Home page here. Let's click on Edit with
Elementor, and then here, we wanna go down to the left
and click on Responsive Mode, this will open up this
tab here at the top, where you can change how your
website will be displayed. Now we are on the desktop view, we can change to the tablet view, and then also to the mobile
phone view as you can see here. And right off the bat, we can see that we need
to do some changes here so that it looks great on a
smaller screen size as well. So we're gonna start
here for the tablet view. And what I noticed is that text
is a lot, it's way too big. So I'm gonna click on the pen icon here. And then under Style, I'm
gonna go to Typography , and then just decrease
the text size a bit, maybe kind of like this. And then here, I also need
to change the Line Height. So for the Line Height, I'm gonna go down to something like this, and that already looks a lot
better, that text is fine, that image is fine as well. And when we scroll down, we
have the blog posts here, that looks all good. So we're already done
with the tablet version. Then let's move on to
the mobile phone version. Here we can see the text
was now also changed, the size was taken from
the changes we've done on the tablet view. So the changes are kind of
trickling down from desktop to tablet to mobile phone. But everything we change
on, let's say, on tablet, it doesn't affect the the desktop version, so you don't need to worry, you can change the sizes,
the gaps and everything. Also, on mobile phone, this won't affect the tablet version. So here the mobile phone version
looks quite good actually, so we don't need to do a lot here. But what we notice is that
the logo is kind of too large and kind of pushes the Menu
link here to the bottom. So we need to take care of the header, and we can't actually do
that here in Elementor, we need to do that in
the WordPress Customizer. So let's click on UPDATE
to save the changes. And then let's go to our
website and click on Customize, then click on Header,
Mobile Menu, and then here, we can add a separate logo
for the mobile version, which is what we wanna do, so
let's click on Select image. Then I'm gonna choose one
of the images of the logo, so I'm gonna choose this
one here, Choose Image. And then for the Maximum
Height for the logo, I'm gonna change this to 35 pixels. And now when we click on Publish and then go back to Elementor
in the phone portrait mode, then when we click and reload the page, we should see that the
logo size has now changed. We actually need to go
back to Responsive Mode, click on the mobile phone screen. And there we go. Now we can
see the logo is smaller. So another thing you can
do to see if the logo works is you can open up your
website on your mobile phone and then just play around
with this value here, the Logo Maximum Height, and make sure you enter
an amount or a value that will end up in the logo looking great and not pushing away this menu here. And then there's a few
more changes I wanna do to the mobile menu, which is I wanna get rid of the text here, I just wanna have this hamburger icon. So I'm gonna deselect
the DISPLAY MENU TEXT, and then when we click
Publish and reload here, Responsive Mode, click
on the phone screen, then we can see the Menu text is now gone. And I also want to, for
the hamburger button, I wanna change from Default Icon to 3D X because I think that's a
a nicer animation design. And click Publish. And then the last thing I wanna also do is get rid of the search function. So when we click on the menu here, we can see that there's a search bar, and I wanna get rid of this. So I'm gonna deselect
the MOBILE MENU SEARCH. And then, again, click Publish. Then to see if it worked, reload the page, go to Responsive Mode, and click
on the mobile phone screen. Again, this would be faster
if you just use your phone and then reload the page there
so you can see the changes. And now you can see
the search bar is gone. And that's already it for the Home page, it now looks good on every
screen size that we have. Now we want to go back to the Dashboard and also look at the other pages. So let's go back here. And the next page we're gonna
look at is the About page. So let's click again
on Edit with Elementor, and then let's go to Responsive Mode, go to the tablet first. And I think this looks fine. We can actually make this a bit wider here for the tablet screen, kind
of like this, that looks good. Image size is good as well. Let's go to the mobile portrait
mode, the text looks good, the heading looks good. And here, I noticed the
image is a bit too small, so let's just click on the
pen icon here, go to Style, and then let's go to Width, and then change the
Width just a little bit so we can increase the image size. And maybe let's go back here and maybe increase the image
size here as well a bit. Let's go to Width, and
then do it like this. And that's everything we need
to do for the About page. Now I've already went through
all of the other pages to see if we need to do some adjustments, but there were already
optimized for mobile, so there's nothing we need to do. But to be absolutely
sure for your website, you wanna go through each of the page, go to the Responsive Mode, and then see if everything looks good on smaller screen sizes. You can also open up your
website on your phone and then go through all of the pages there just to make absolutely sure. So one thing we haven't covered yet is how to connect your website to an email marketing provider so that you can send out email newsletters and email marketing campaigns
to whoever signs up here on your Home page with
their email address, or when they read a blog post, and then sign up through
the sidebar right here, or maybe you also have signup sections inside of the blog post itself. So what we're gonna do is
we're gonna connect our website to an email marketing
software called MailChimp. MailChimp is one of the most
popular email marketing tools, and they also have a free plan that you can use if you
have under 500 contacts, and that allows you to send up to a thousand emails per month. Now I do have a complete
MailChimp tutorial that I'll link down below
in the video description. So you wanna watch that if you wanna really get into
how to set up your campaigns, how to set up your MailChimp account. But for now, I just wanna show you how to connect your account
to your WordPress website. So I've already created a new
account here on MailChimp, so you wanna make sure to
have your account created, then we wanna log into our account and go to our account icon
here at the top-right, click on Profile, and then
we want to click on Extras, and then click on API keys. Now to connect our website, we
need to create a new API key. So let's scroll down and
click on Create A Key. And then to name this key, I'm just gonna name it by the
website, I'm gonna connect, so let's say Metics Reviews Website, and click on Generate Key. And now I'm gonna copy this key right here and go back to the WordPress Dashboard. And now to connect our website, we're going to use the
the OceanWP menu here, click on OceanWP, and then
we're gonna scroll down and click on Integrations right here. And then we can see here, MailChimp. So what we need to do is just
copy and paste that API key into this field. And then we also need the Audience ID. So let's go back to the MailChimp account. And now let's go to Audience,
and go to All contacts, and then from here,
let's click on Settings, Audience name and defaults, and then you should be able to see your Audience ID right here, so this is the ID we need to copy. So right click, Copy,
and then go back here, and paste that into this
field as well, Paste, and then click on Save Changes. And now to test if this works, let's go to our website
and type in a random email, so randomemail@gmail.com,
click on JOIN NOW. Thanks for your subscription. Now let's go to our MailChimp account, go to Audience, All contacts, and now we can see we have the new email we have just typed in in our email list, and we can now start to
send them newsletters or send them an email automation campaign, whatever you want. Again, if you want to learn how
to set this up step by step, I'll leave a complete MailChimp tutorial down below in the description. And now the last thing I recommend you do is install a security plugin
called Wordfence Security. So let's click on Plugins and Add New, then we're gonna search
for wordfence security, and then we're gonna install
this plugin right here, just click on Install Now, Activate. And then here you can see we need to get our WORDFENCE LICENSE. So let's click on this button, and then we're just gonna
go with the free plan, let's Get a Free License, then click on this link here,
type in your email address, then here, I'm gonna choose Yes, and then tick this option
and click on Register. Now let's go to our email
inbox to get the license key. So I already opened it up,
it's this email right here, so let's click on it, and then, I'm gonna click on Install
My License Automatically. And this will take us back to WordPress, where we just need to
click on INSTALL LICENSE. And that's all we have to do. Now we have the free
security plugin, Workfence, which just makes sure
our website is secure. Now let's go back to all of our plugins and then make sure everything's activated. So the one thing we can now
activate is LiteSpeed Cache, this will then make sure
our website is faster because it will enable caching. So let's click on Activate, and now the caching is activated. We also wanna make sure that your auto-updates
are enabled everywhere, so I'm gonna just enable
it wherever it's disabled, and here, Qi Addons,
and then also Wordfence. Make sure all the auto
updates are enabled. All right. So now I'm gonna show you
how to actually make money with your affiliate marketing website by creating high quality and search engine optimized blog posts that rank on the first page of Google and that are optimized
for transactional keywords that actually make you money
through affiliate marketing. But first, I wanna give
you a quick presentation that will teach you how to
think about affiliate marketing and creating content to
actually maximize the revenue you can make with your
affiliate marketing website. And you wanna make sure
to stick around for this because if you don't understand what I'm about to show you here, then you don't have any
chances of making money with your website. So first of all, what is the
goal with affiliate marketing? Many people tend to
overcomplicate the entire process, but it's actually quite simple. And this is what you have to keep in mind whenever you make decisions
about creating content and optimizing your site. So first of all, how do
we actually make money? So the first thing that needs to happen is people have to see your blog post on a search engine like Google, they have to click on that blog post, and then they have to click
on one of your affiliate links inside of that blog post. So that's the first thing
that needs to happen. And then the second thing is that after they click
the affiliate link, then they actually need
to purchase something, that's something that many
people seem to forget. It's not all about getting
clicks on your links, it's also about actually
people who click on those links buying something at the other side and the product that you're promoting or that you're recommending, otherwise, you will not make any money. So the goal is to make sure we increase each of these two elements, which is, we wanna get as much clicks as
possible onto our blog posts, because people are not gonna just randomly find your website, people are gonna find your
site through your blog posts that are optimized for specific keywords that people are actually searching for. And then obviously, people
need to click on those links, you want to get as many
link clicks as possible. But we also wanna make
sure that the people who are actually visiting our
site and click on those links, that these are actually people looking for a specific product and they're ready to make
a purchasing decision, which will then happen here. And at this stage, we wanna make sure we increase
the potential of money we can make per single click or per lead we send to that product. And then also we wanna make sure that people actually
converge to a customer, it doesn't make sense to
have a thousand clicks, but none of them actually buy something, that will just make us zero money. So keep that in mind at all times. Now to look at this a bit more closely, what do we actually need here to increase this part of the equation? So the first thing we need is traffic, meaning we need people
to be actually interested in what we are posting,
the content that we create. And then we also need
to look at competition, which is also something
many people underestimate, or they don't even look at it,
which means that obviously, when a lot of people look
for a specific search term, then we're not the only
ones that create content for that search term. So there are already tons
of website trying to rank on the first page of Google
for a specific search term with their blog post. So we can't just look at, okay,
what people are looking for, what actually makes money,
let's create content about that, because then we probably will end up on on page 30 on Google, and we will not get any
clicks on our blog posts. And no clicks on our affiliate
links means we make no money. So we want to keep in mind, we
need to look at the traffic, because if there's nobody
looking for the content, then we also don't get any clicks. But if they are people looking for it, but there's too much competition, we also don't get any clicks. So you wanna always keep in
mind traffic and competition, these two things always
play against each other. And then for this part here, we wanna increase the revenue potential, I would say this is the part that most people tend to forget, and they just create an
affiliate marketing website promoting Amazon products, where they make like, I don't
know, like a 1% commission, so a couple of cents every sale, where they could actually make
100 or more dollars per sale if they would just go in a different niche or maybe promote different
kinds of products where they get a higher percentage or a higher one-time payout. So this is consistent
of three main things, so the first thing, and this is one of the
most important things, is you wanna publish
transactional content, meaning you don't want to
just publish something, I don't know ideas for
creating something weird, I don't know. You wanna make, you wanna create something
where people are actually, people have searched that
specific term, like for example, best camera gear or best website builder. People who research that topic
and click on the blog post, they're in the market to
actually purchase a product. And this is what we want
to create content about, because when those people
land on our blog post and click on those links, these people are actually very likely to make a purchasing decision. This is why we need to
create transactional content, I'm gonna show you exactly
how this looks like, but always keep in mind, the content needs to be transactional, meaning needs to be a content
that somebody would read that is about to purchase something. Then we want to have a
high conversion rate, now this is really hard to
judge when you're starting out because you don't have any
experience with products, but you wanna make sure that the product you are recommending actually
converts and makes you money. It doesn't make sense to
send clicks to a product that is actually not good and that doesn't convert and
doesn't make you any money. Now, you can't really
see how this really works in the beginning, but
once you get some traffic, once you get some
conversions or just traffic, you can see if people convert or not, and then you might wanna
move on to another product. And then here at the bottom, this is, you can't really see it, but
it says, "High commissions." We wanna make sure to promote products that actually pay out high commissions and not just a couple of cents. So there's not even that
much traffic we need to send in order for us to make a lot of money. So this is key as well. So, again, these are the three
things we wanna keep in mind when deciding what
content we want to create. So the search term we want
to create our content for needs to have some traffic volume, meaning people are searching
for that specific term. Then we wanna look at competition, if there's too much competition, meaning there's too many
high authority sites that already rang for that term that we can't compete against, then it doesn't make sense
for us to create content about that term. And then we also need to make sure that that search term actually
has a revenue potential, meaning people who are
searching for that term are about to make a purchasing decision. So just to make this absolutely clear, we wanna make sure that every
one of these three things is actually in the green. So for example, if you have a lot of traffic,
and there's no competition, but there's no revenue potential,
we don't make any money, we would get a lot of clicks, but none of these clicks
convert into a customer, so we don't make any money. Then if we have a lot of traffic, and there would be revenue potential, but the competition is too high, we would end up on page
20 or 30 on Google, and we wouldn't get any clicks,
we wouldn't make any money. Then if there's a high competition, or if there's no competition
or little competition, and there's also revenue potential, but there's no traffic, so nobody's actually
looking for that term, that means also we don't get any clicks. You might be on the first page of Google, but nobody visits that first page because nobody types in that search term, meaning we don't make any money. So only when there is traffic, when there's not too much competition, and when there is revenue potential, this is when we make money. So on a more practical level, how do we actually find out
how much traffic there is, how much competition there is, and what's the revenue potential
for a specific keyword? So for the traffic and the competition, we can use a tool called Semrush, this is gonna tell us exactly
what the traffic volume is for the keyword, what the competition is, and we can get a lot more
data inside of this tool, which I'm gonna show
you how to use in a bit. Then for the revenue potential, we wanna first think
about if that search term would actually lead to
somebody purchasing something, so whoever searches that term, is that person in just about
to make a purchasing decision? And then we also wanna
think about the niche, so there are niches that are
more profitable than others, and I'm gonna leave you a document down below in the description, giving you a list of the
most lucrative niches in my opinion. But when you look at different niches, what I would recommend you do is just look at the top
websites in that niche, look at what products they promote, and look at the affiliate
program for those products, and look at the payout they're getting. Then when you look at the
traffic that the website gets, then you can estimate how
much money they're making based on the commissions they're getting for the products they're promoting. So look at your market before
you decide to go into a niche, but there's no shortage
of niches you can go into, you just have to do some research before you actually commit to one. And then in my personal experience, I have to say that I find it a lot easier to make a lot of money
with digital products compared to physical products. And I also see other people
in affiliate marketing and that make a lot of money, most of them are promoting
digital products. Now there are major sites promoting physical products as well, but the amount of traffic you
need to make a lot of money with physical products is actually insane. So for beginners, I would highly recommend to
focus on digital products, and so those could be like
online courses, platforms, softwares, things like that, where there's not actually a
physical product being shipped when somebody purchases something. And the reason is because those companies are able to pay you a
much higher commission because they have a lot lower overhead. So when somebody signs
up, let's say, to Wix, then they don't really
need to ship out anything, they're just allowing that
customer to now use their site, so that's why they're able
to pay you a high commission. So usually, it's between
10 and 40% of the sale or of the recurring monthly
payment of the customer, or you just get a one-time
commission between 50 and $300, that's kind of what I've
seen in the industry. Obviously, it depends
on the niche as well, but with physical products, because there's so many costs involved like the production costs, the shipping costs, and all that stuff, they're only able to pay you
like a 1 to 3% commission, which like, again, like I've said, you're gonna have to have
tons of clicks and traffic to actually make a few dollars. That's why I would recommend
to focus on digital products. And then when it comes
to choosing your niche, what I recommend is to
start with a broad niche, and kind of make your website
about that broad niche, but make sure it's also
a profitable niche. And again, I'm gonna leave you a list
of the most profitable niches down below in the description. And then you wanna test
different sub niches within your broad niche, so an example this could look like is, for example, you choose the tech niche, this is gonna be a website or a affiliate marketing
website about tech, and then you're gonna test
these cybersecurity sub niche, and you're gonna create
blog posts about topics in that niche, or you
could even niche down and go with web application penetration, and this is just a sub
niche of cybersecurity, depending on how the competition
is within that niche. If the competition is too
high in the parent niche, then you wanna niche even further down and build your authority with
Google inside of your niche. Now usually you're not gonna be able to just choose your
niche with your website, you're probably gonna find it, meaning once you test
out different sub niches, you're gonna notice that
Google kind of rewards content in a specific sub niche
more than the other, and this is the content
or this is the niche you wanna lean into. So Google will kind of determine
where you are an expert in and kind of give you authority
in that specific topic. So what you have to do is
just continue posting content, then you wanna read the data, so what content actually ranks, what content gets clicks,
and what content makes money, and then adjust based on that data. And then what you also wanna keep in mind is probably the most important thing when it comes to affiliate marketing, which is that it's a
marathon and not a sprint. Affiliate marketing is
really a long-term game, and in the first couple
of weeks or even months, you're not gonna see much
results or even money rolling in, that's why you need to be committed and you need to be willing to do this for at least six months
until you make a decision if this is for you or not. And this is also a reason why
you want to choose a niche or at least somewhat interested in, otherwise, it's gonna be very
hard to just continue working when you don't see many
results in the beginning, and that's the biggest risk of your affiliate marketing business, which is you giving up to early before you see your first
commission, your first results. So just keep that in mind
when choosing your niche. Now we're almost done with
the presentation here. I just wanna go over
two or three more slides before we start with the tutorial. I just wanna get everything
out of the way before we start so that you have the highest chances of actually becoming
successful with your site. So what is actually
content that makes money? What do the blog posts look like? So these are the four main
posts that I would focus on if the goal is to increase
your revenue, to make money, the first one is best X
for Y, which, for example, could be the 7 Best
Website Builders of 2023 or the 7 Best Website
Builders for small businesses. People who are looking
for this search term are in the market for
a new website builder that they want to use, so it's a perfect transactional content. Then we have how to do a specific thing, so how to, let's say, create a website. People who do a specific thing, they probably need a
tool to do that thing, and you're gonna be the affiliate and promoting or recommending that tool. Now for building websites, obviously, it's gonna be a website
hosting or a website builder, so you can make commissions through that. And then we also have a specific review. So if somebody's looking for a
review of a specific product, this person is really close to actually purchasing that product or an alternative of that product, which is why this is a great
type of article to create if you wanna make money. Then we also have X versus Y, so, for example, Wix versus Squarespace, people who are comparing
different products against each other, they're also, and just before a purchasing decision, and they're highly likely to
go ahead and pull the trigger once they read your article
and then make the decision and click on your affiliate link, and then you get to the
referral commission. So here's my personal strategy that has worked quite well for me. What you're gonna notice is when you do some keyword
research is that posts that are how to do
something or Best X for Y, these posts for most niches
usually have a lot of traffic, but also have a very high competition, meaning in the beginning, it's very hard to rank for these terms. So in the beginning, I would focus on these terms right here, which is specific product review, then another product review, and then another product
review all in the same niche. And then once you have done all these, you can go ahead and
compare these products against each other and
create separate blog posts for these comparison content posts. And then once you have done all these, you have a lot of knowledge and
also posts about this topic, and this is when you can
create a post like this, so this would be like a pillar post that has a high traffic potential, and then you can link to all
of these other posts here, and you can have these
posts linked to this post. So this is basically how
I would build authority within a specific niche. And again, I would start
with these search terms that are either a review
or that are a comparison between two different or
even three different products because usually these
have a lower competition compared to these kinds of posts here. So, for example, for the
website builder niche, this could look something like this, like you would create a Wix
review, a Webflow review, and a Squarespace review,
which are all website builders, then you're gonna compare
Wix versus Webflow, Wix versus Squarespace, Webflow versus Squarespace, and so on. And then once you've done that, you can build your pillar content, how to build a website using Wix, or how to build a website
for a small business, or the best website
builders for small business, seven best website
builders for photographers, stuff like that. Perfect, you did it. That's all the theory out of the way. Now let's get practical and
start with the tutorial. And the first step is gonna
be setting up Rank Math, this is a free plugin
that we're going to use to optimize our blog content, and this will also automatically install the Google search engine, sorry, Google Search Console,
and also Google Analytics. Then we're gonna spend some
time finding profitable topics for our niche. And then we're gonna do
some keyword research using the tool Semrush. And then once that's done
and we found our keyword that we want to write a blog post for, I'm gonna show you how to
create an optimized blog post for that specific keyword step-by-step. All right, so now we are back
in the WordPress Dashboard. And before installing
the Rank Math plugin, we wanna go ahead and click on Posts, and then here, we can see
all of the dummy posts that we have just created to make sure we can build our website and
see how it will look like. But now before we actually index our site, we wanna make sure to
delete all of that content because we don't want to confuse Google with just fake content
that is random on our site. So make sure we make sure
to select all of them by clicking here, then
let's go to Bulk actions, Move to Bin, Apply, and then let's go to the Bin
here, and click on Empty Bin, and that's it. Now let's go to Plugins,
then click Add New. And in the search box, we're
gonna type in rankmath, and it's just this plugin right here, so let's click on Install and Activate. Then it automatically prompts us to connect our Rank Math account, so let's click on Connect
Your Account here. Now because I've already
created a Rank Math account, it kind of wants me to activate
it for the old account, but I actually want to
create a new account here, so I'm gonna click on Loginin here. And then you probably don't already have a Rank Math account, so what you're gonna do is
click on Register Now here at the bottom, and then you
can sign up for Rank Math using Facebook, Google, WordPress, or you can just use an email address, so I'm gonna click on USE EMAIL ADDRESS, then type in your name and email address, and click on REGISTER, ACTIVATE NOW, then make sure Advanced is selected here, and click on Start Wizard. Then we can say what
kind of website we have, so I'm just just gonna
stick with Personal Blog. Then the website name is fine. We don't need anything here. This is also fine. Then logo for Google, you wanna upload a square
version of your logo, so I'm gonna do that quickly now. There we go. And then for Default Social Share Image, this will just be displayed for when somebody shares your blog post and you don't have a featured image, but as I always add a featured
image for the blog post, I'm not gonna add anything here. Then let's click on Save and Continue. And now in the next step, we're gonna add our website
to the Google Search Console and also to Google Analytics. So let's click on Connect Google Services. And here we want to
choose our Google account that we wanna add our
website to as a property. Once you're logged into
your Google account, we wanna make sure to
click select all here to give Rank Math access
to all of our data,, and then let's click on Continue. And then here, if
everything worked correctly, Rank Math has now added your
site to Google Search Console and Google Analytics. So you should be able
to see your site here and also your Google Analytics account that they've created for you right here. Now, the first few times I've done this, I ran into some issues where
I didn't see my website here, so I couldn't choose it, and if that's the case, what you wanna do, then you wanna first wait
like 30 minutes to an hour, sometimes it takes some time
until they can add your site to these services. If that still doesn't work, then you might want to
use another browser. As you can see here, I'm in Safari and not in
Chrome as I usually am, and that's what worked for me actually. But if that still doesn't work,
you have two more options, so the first one is to
add your site manually to Search Console and Analytics. I'm gonna leave some instructions in the video description down below to show you step by step
how you can do that, or you can also reach
out to Rank Math Support and basically tell them
that you need some help adding the Google
services for your website. But this is how it should look like if everything works correctly. So choose your site here, make sure Enable the Index
Status tab is enabled. And then for Google Analytics, we want to choose the account here that they've created for us. Then for Property, we wanna choose Create new GA4 Property, that stands for Google Analytics 4. So let's click OK here. And then here, we want to choose Website. Then let's scroll down and
click on Save and Continue. Then here for Sitemap, we're gonna leave everything turned on and click on Save and Continue. And here as well, keep
the default settings, and click Save and Continue. And that's it. So let's click on Return to dashboard. So now our website is
successfully connected to all the Google services that we need. And now when we go to Rank
Math and go to Analytics, we should be able to see
the data for our site, like Search Impressions, Total Keywords, Search Clicks, and so on, that will be imported directly
into this dashboard here from all of the Google services data that is directly fed into
the Rank Math plugin. We can also go to Site Analytics
here and SEO Performance to see every data that is
interesting for our website, but it does take a couple of days the first time you set this up until the data will actually be visible here in the Dashboard. So now it's time to do some
research to find a good topic and eventually a good search term that we can create an
optimized blog post about. And one of the best tools
that I find to get some ideas is to use the AI tool, ChatGPT. You've probably heard of this tool, and it's actually free to
use for the basic version. I do have a tutorial about this tool down below in the description, if you wanna see exactly how
to set up your ChatGPT account, it's very easy. I'm gonna leave this link
down below in the description, you can just click on Try ChatGPT, and then you wanna sign
up with your account. I'm already signed in here as you can see. And then with the basic version, you just get the GPT-3.5 at this moment. And then if you upgrade
to the pro version, which I think is like 10 or $20 a month, you get access to GPT-4, which is a lot better in my opinion. And we're gonna use this one later as well to create our blog content. But for now, we can just stick with 3.5 because for getting ideas,
this is gonna be enough, and now we can just talk to
ChatGPT as if it was a person, that's kind of the idea of AI. So to get some ideas for
content, I would just type in, I'm starting an affiliate
marketing website in the niche online marketing. So just tell ChatGPT what
your actual broad niche is, and then let's say, "What
would be some good sub niches?" So we want to get some sub niche topics, "that I could write about if my goal is to make money through
affiliate marketing," then hit Enter. And then as we can see, we
already get a lot of ideas about what we could write about
like social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, PPC
advertising, and so on. So you could just go and
do some additional research for these topics, look at the different
products you could promote. Let's say we want to go into
the email marketing space, so then we can follow up
and ask for some the best, like affiliate programs
for email marketing. So let's type in something like, I would like to write about
email marketing tools. What email marketing tools have
the best affiliate programs in terms of how much
money you you can make? Hit Enter, and this will give us a list of some good email marketing providers that have an affiliate program, like for example, ConvertKit, they pay out 30% recurring
commission on referrals, which is great. Then we have GetResponse, they pay out a 33% recurring commission. So that's very common with
email marketing providers, that they just pay out
a percentage commission on basically forever as long as the customer
stays with their platform. Now to do some additional research and see if this actually
has a revenue potential, I would actually look up all of these email marketing providers, like go to their websites, for example, let's go to ActiveCampaign, just copy it, paste it in the search bar, then go to their website here, and then look at the pricing here, and then see what people actually pay for using this software. So here for example, you can say, you can see that there's,
for the marketing plan, it's like $49 per month, $149 per month. And as we can see here,
what do they say here? "Offers a commission
for referred customers." So they don't actually tell
us what the percentage is. So to really see what they
offer for the affiliate program, you want to go to the actual
website of the product, then scroll all the way down, and then you wanna look for
something like partner program, affiliate program. And so here, let's see, it's actually BECOME A PARTNER,
and then here is affiliate, so let's click here, and then we can see, they first of all say, "Earn an average of 1,350 per referral," which is insanely high. And they actually pay out 20
to 30% recurring commission per a paying customer that
you bring to the company. So just by looking at this, I can already see that there
is definitely revenue potential with this provider. I would also go to the
other providers here, like for example, ConvertKit,
GetResponse, and so on, and see if it would make sense to write about email marketing providers, and if it has a revenue potential. But based on what I've seen here so far, it does definitely have revenue potential. And now just to show
you that this assumption would actually be correct, I'm gonna show you my dashboard because I am actually an
affiliate with ActiveCampaign. I'm actually in the highest tier, so they pay me 30% of every sale they make for the life of the customer. So as you can see here,
this was actually today, I got a payment of 31 Australian dollars. Then yesterday, 229 Canadian dollars. This was the day before, $21, and also same day, $86, $21, $55. So these are recurring
commissions as you can see here, so far, the total commissions
have been 71,000 US dollars. So this is kind of what I mean when I talk about digital
products or physical products, the revenue potential, and looking at how much
money you can actually make with a specific product
and an affiliate program before you invest a lot
of time into promoting it or into promoting this
type of product in general. So here for example, when
I go to Paid Accounts, here you can see every new
customer that has signed up and then the estimated annual commission that I will be getting every year for the lifetime of this customer. So as long as this customer
stays with ActiveCampaign, I will be getting this amount every year for the customer that I bring. Here, for example, somebody has purchased a
professional plan, and every year, I will be getting $1,735 as long as this person stays on this plan. So after doing some research and looking at the affiliate programs of these email marketing tools, we can find out that
email marketing in general can be a very lucrative topic or niche to create content about. So the next step is to actually choose one of these products here after we've looked at some of
them to create some content, because when we go back
to this overview here where I talked about my strategy, I told you that most of the time, like post like these where
it just like, let's say, ActiveCampaign review or
ActiveCampaign versus MailChimp or ConvertKit, these usually
have a lower competition compared to these main topics, like, how to set up email marketing, or what are the best seven
email marketing tools for small businesses, these usually are very hard
to rank for in the beginning when your site doesn't
have a lot of traffic yet and a lot of authority. So I'd like to start with these. So now we're gonna go further
into some keyword research to finally narrow down the search term, the keyword we want to
create our blog post about. So let's come back to our list here. And then let's say we wanna look into the
MailerLite search terms, those terms that have
MailerLite in the term. So we're gonna use a tool called Semrush, which kind of looks like this, this is a keyword research tool, to find out what the traffic is and what the competition is
for each of these keywords. Now I do have a special offer or a special link you guys can use, which will basically
give you a 14-day trial of the pro version of this tool instead of the regular seven-day trial. So by using the link down
below in the description and signing up for Semrush, you can get a 14-day trial
instead of a seven-day, and you can actually just
find all of your keywords that you wanna write about
for the next couple of months in your 14 day trial period, and then you can upgrade
to the paid version once you are making some money. So if you wanna get some
additional days in your free trial, make sure to use the link
in the description below. Then once you signed up for your trial and you're logged into
your Semrush dashboard, you wanna go to the left side here and click on Keyword Magic Tool. Then here in the search bar, you wanna type in the keyword that you wanna do some research on, in my case, this is MailerLite, which is the email marketing software we might wanna do some content about, then let's click on Search, and now we can see all
of the related keywords, and we can also see how
many people approximately are searching for that
keyword under volume. So for the keyword, MailerLite, there's approximately 27,000 people searching for that keyword. However, we can also see the KD, which means Keyword Difficulty, telling you how hard it will
be to actually rank your site or your post for that keyword. So here we can see it's 79, meaning you'll need lots of
high quality referring domains and optimized content in order
for you to rank on that page. Now for a new website,
this is almost impossible. This is why we don't
want to go for keywords that are this hard. So to only see the
keywords that are like easy or that are doable to
actually rank your post for is we wanna go to the filters here, and then under KD, Keyword Difficulty, we're just going to look at the Easy and the Very Easy search terms. So to actually see both of them, we're gonna use the Custom range, we're gonna type in 0, and then here, we're gonna type in 29. This is just a percentage
number for the KD, the Keyword Difficulty. And then for the results, you wanna make sure to
sort this by a volume here as it's already done. You can see the highest
volume here is at the top. And then you just wanna
go through this list here and look at what are some keywords that are actually transactional, meaning that when people type that in, they're very likely to
make a purchasing decision and go for one of these
options that you can see here, or maybe for MailerLite, which is the platform
we write content about. So here, the first thing we can see is
MailerLite versus ConvertKit. This is actually a great
keyword to write content about because this is a transactional keyword. Somebody who's looking to get
an email marketing software, they know both of them, or
they've seen both of them, and now they want to know which one is the right one for them, and then you basically
give them the answer with your blog post. So there's 390 people looking
or typing that keyword into the search bar a month. Now, that's obviously less
than what we've seen before, like 27,000 searches a month. But because we're going
for affiliate programs that actually have high commissions, we don't need that much traffic to actually start making money. So we need to start out with
these lower difficulty keywords to start building up the
authority of our website. So this would actually be
a good keyword to go for. We can see Keyword Difficulty is 21. So it says, "You need high quality content focused on the keywords intent." This is what we do anyway, so we still have a chance of ranking. Then we can go down and also
look at even easier ones. So for example, we can see this one here, Flodesks versus MailerLite, this is actually a Keyword
Difficulty of zero, meaning it's probably
gonna be very easy to rank your blog post on this, for this keyword. However, there's only 30 searches a month, so we might wanna go with something that has a bit of a higher volume but still a low keyword difficulty, like for example, MailerLite versus ActiveCampaign,
320 searches a month, with a Keyword Difficulty of 17, so that's lower than this one here, the ConvertKit. and we've seen that ActiveCampaign also has a very lucrative
affiliate program, so this might be a good keyword
that we wanna look into. Now here you can see CPC, this is basically what advertisers
are paying to display ads on people who type in that's keyword, and the higher the number is here, or if you see a high number
here, that's also a good sign that this is actually a valuable keyword to create content for. So to further check out this keyword, we can just click on it here. Here we can scroll down and
look at the SERP Analysis, this will just kind of
show you the websites that are currently
ranking for that keyword we are looking at. So the top ranking
website is this one here, thedigitalemerchant.com. So we can also check out
how the site looks like or how that post looks like
by just going to the links. As we can see, it's just
a regular blog post, nothing special. And then what I also like to
look at is the Authority Score, so this will tell you how much
authority this website has with Google, and it goes from 0 to 100. So the closer to 100, the
higher the authority is, and just by seeing that this is only 6, this tells me that it's quite possible to rank for this specific keyword. And because all of these websites, they don't really have
a high Authority Score, like this one even has
a 0 Authority Score, then this one as well
0, this one as well 0. So this number 10 search
result has 0 Authority Score, 0 Referring Domains, 0 Backlinks, and is still at page 10 of Google. So this just again tells
me that it's quite possible to rank for this keyword, which is why I would
actually add this keyword to my keyword list. So let's scroll up, and then
here next to the keyword, let's click on the plus icon, and then let's create our first list, so let's just name this
list Email Marketing Tools, and then hit this check mark. And now when we want to
get to our keyword list, we simply go to Keyword Manager here, and then we can see our
category email marketing tools, we click on it, and then we can always see the
keywords that we store here, mailerlite versus
activecampaign is the keyword that I want to create some content about. Great. So now that we have our
keyword that we wanna optimize our blog post for, it's time
to create the actual post. So here in the Dashboard, let's go to Posts, and
then click on Add New, and this will take us to the editor that we're gonna use to
create our blog post. Now first, let's clean up a bit by just hiding these windows
here by clicking on this arrow, and this will just give us a blank canvas. Now, using this editor
is actually quite simple. So as you can see, we
can add a title here, we can add some content here, and it's just like using or
creating a Word document. But there are some things
that you have to know in order for you to have a good structure and in order for you to have a perfectly optimized blog post. And what's really gonna help us with that is using the Rank Math checklist. So when we click here on the
top-right on this button, then we can see, because you have added
the Rank Math plugin, we can see a checklist. So it says, "Add a Focus
Keyword to the SEO title," and that will just help us to make sure we tick all the boxes when it comes to optimizing our blog post. So we're gonna go through
all the things here in the checklist so to eventually have the
highest possible SEO score. The SEO score will be
visible here at the top, so currently we have a 7 out
of 100, which is quite bad, but obviously, we haven't
added any content, and we haven't optimized anything. And you're gonna notice
that when we add content and optimize it, the
score here will increase, and this button will actually turn green, which will show us that
it's gonna be a good, a well optimized blog post. Another thing that we have to understand before creating our content is how a blog post is structured. And to make it easier for you
to create your blog posts, especially for an
affiliate marketing site, I've given you a few
templates that you can use. So when you go to the link
in the description and click, in the Google Drive folder, you should get to this place here, where you can click on
Affiliate Blog Posts Templates, and then here, I've added four templates of
the most commonly used posts for an affiliate marketing site or a affiliate marketing blog. So this would be Best X for Y, which is like 7 Best
Website Builders of 2023. Then we have how to do
something, a guide post, a review post, and a comparison post, so let's say Wix versus Squarespace. Then when you click on those,
this is just a Google Doc. And then here you can see a structure that you can use for your blog posts. So this would be the title, Number, Best Product Type for
Target/Year or Target Customers. So for example, seven best email marketing tools for 2023 or for small businesses, and then you would have an intro here, then you would have the first H2. So here you can see it says, "H1." H1 is always what you type in
here, so this here is the H1. These are title tags, it helps Google to see the
structure of your content, and it's easier for
Google to understand it, and it's also determining
what will be displayed in search engine. So you absolutely have
to use these title tags and use them correctly. And just by using these templates here, you can see a good
structure that you can use. So for example, here it goes
on by first of all, the H2, what is the best email marketing tool? Then you give some information about how you came up with this decision to add these products, and then you list each of
these products as an H3. And you can also add affiliate
links here for this text, and then you describe them. And then at the end, you have a summary, which is an H2 again. So to add these title tags in your post, so let's say we add, let's say just intro or let's say a title. And then we can just
highlight the text here, go to this icon here, and change it from a
paragraph to a Heading. And then once that's done, we can choose what type of heading it is. So you can see H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, so this is kind of a hierarchy. So here on this website, semji.com, they kind of explain how
this works quite well. Here you can see H1 is most important, then we have H2, H3. So these are just kind of subtitles. So as you can see here down below, this would be the title,
Search Engine Optimization, then we have What is SEO? This would be the
subtitle of this main one. And then here the H3 would be a subtitle of What is SEO? So this is just how you
structure your blog post. So this is something that
you have to be familiar with. Now in this video, we're gonna
create a comparison post, which would be X versus Y. So when we click on this template here, we can see that it is
just first product name versus second product name. So in my example, MailerLite
versus ActiveCampaign 2023, Which is the Best, Product
Type, email marketing tool, which is the H1. And then we just move on
with different categories that we use to compare these products in. So usually I like to
give a quick comparison for people who don't have time or don't wanna spend the
time reading everything. And then we go into the
categories like Features, my Personal Experience,
Pricing, and so on. Now these aren't set in stone, so obviously, you can just
change them however you want to, whatever is the most
relevant for the reader. And then at the end, we just
give a conclusion as well. Now if you want to, you can just copy and paste
that into your blog post and create drafts or
templates for your blog. And then by copy and pasting
it from this document, it'll also be formatted correctly. So this will be a H2 and so on. So just to show you how this would work is let's just delete this, and let's also, let's just delete the
heading, and also delete this. And then we can just
right click and Paste, and this will just give
us the basic structure, so this would be an H1,
this is a paragraph. Then when we click here, we can see this is already in H2, this is an H2, and so on. So this is a quick way how
you can basically import a structure to your blog post
that you're about to create. So now let's actually
start creating the content for this blog post. The first thing you wanna do is go to the Rank Math
checklist here on the top-right by clicking here. And then under Focus Keyword here, we want to enter the keyword
that we want to optimize this blog post for, this is the one that
we found using Semrush. So in my case, this would be MailerLite
versus ActiveCampaign, these are the two email marketing tools that we are comparing, so let's just type that in here. And this way, Rank Math knows exactly what keyword we
want to optimize it for, and it can give us
suggestions and instructions on how to do that. So then the next thing I'll
do is basically add the title, which should be already optimized. So we're already gonna
use the search term here in the title. So I'm just gonna replace
this, MailerLite versus, let's just delete this, and then let's just add ActiveCampaign. Then the current year would be 2023, and then Which is the Best, Product Type, is Email Marketing Tool. And then we can delete the H1. And there we go. Now we
already have the title. And when we look at the checklist, we can see for the Basic SEO, we already have the first one checked, which is, Your Focus
Keyword is in the SEO Title. Now we're gonna move on to
create the actual content of this blog post. And I'm gonna show you how
to use a method with ChatGPT, the AI tool, and this is gonna
make creating the blog post very, very easy and very,
very quick at the same time. And don't worry, we're not just gonna ask
ChatGPT to create a blog post, and then just copy and
paste in the entire post. We're gonna do this step by step for each of the topics
that we want to add. And this way, we still
have a lot of control over the blog post and a lot
of quality control as well, and we can change whatever we don't like. But we more so use ChatGPT
as a writing assistant, as just a copy and paste tool. So I'm gonna show you
the method that I use and the prompts that I like to use to create the blog content. So we're gonna go to ChatGPT, and the first thing that I
would highly suggest you do is get the ChatGPT Plus version, which is like 10 or $20 a month, but it's gonna be so worth it in the end because that's gonna enable you
to be able to use ChatGPT-4, which is so much better
compared to ChatGPT-3.5, which is the free version. I've been using both of them, and I've noticed that the
content output of the GPT-4 is so, so much better,
quality is so much higher, that it's totally worth it
to spend a bit of money. Now maybe when you watch this video, the GPT-4 version is
gonna be free already, or there's already gonna be GPT-5, so probably this would
be then even better. But for now, I would
upgrade and then use GPT-4 for creating your blog content
as a writing assistant. And then what I've also
done is, in the folder, the Google Drive folder that
you find in the description, when you click on Affiliate
Blog Post Templates, and then go to ChatGPT Prompts, I've created some prompts that you can use for creating a comparison blog post. So when you click on this Google Doc, you can see the first prompt,
second prompt, and so on, so this is just a step-by-step
checklist, basically, how you can start creating your content. I'm gonna show you exactly how I do this. So to first of all, we wanna
create the post outline, which is what you can see here. So let me just delete all
this, we keep this in mind, that this is the kind of the
structure that we wanna use. So let's just delete all this. All right. And then let's first
copy this first prompt. And here, what you see in
these brackets in yellow, this is what you wanna replace
with your focus keyword, your target keyword, so
let's just copy this. And then we're gonna go
to ChatGPT, choose GPT-4, then we're gonna paste that in here. And before we hit Enter, we
wanna replace the placeholders, so let's go here, and we're
gonna go to our Focus Keyword, So this one here, MailerLite
versus ActiveCampaign, so this is our keyword, so I'm
just gonna copy it from here, and then paste that in to
the target keyword here and then also here, and then hit Enter. And this will give us
all of the categories that we can compare these two
email marketing tools with. And based on my own experience, these are actually great topics to compare email marketing softwares, like Pricing, Email Marketing Features, Automation, Design and
User Interface, Templates, Landing Page Builder, these are all things that
people are actually looking for when deciding what email
marketing tool to use, and that's why you should use GPT-4 because it's a lot better
than GPT-3.5 in my opinion. Now you can either just copy and paste all of these categories that
you want into your post, and then format them as an H2. Now I'm gonna experiment something here, so I'm gonna ask ChatGPT
to actually do that for me. So I'm just trying something here. I'm gonna ask ChatGPT to
just give me the titles, so this here, and then
format them as an H2 so I can just copy and paste them into my WordPress blog post editor. Now, I've never tried this before, so let's see what happens. All right, so it actually works, but I had to give it another prompt. So the first thing that it came up with is just the H2 formatting here, but it still had these
numbers in front of it, so it didn't work, so
I just asked ChatGPT, "Please remove the numbers
in front of the titles." And then it came up with this here, so I can just copy all
of these titles here, then copy and then paste that in here. And there we go. Now we can see when we
click on these titles, it's already formatted as an H2, which, again, saves us some time. So the next thing I would do is just look through all of these titles and that they're actually relevant, and make sure I'm gonna delete the ones that I don't wanna cover in my blog post. But just to save some time,
I'm gonna skip this step. And to be honest, this all
looks quite well anyway, so I'm gonna leave it. The only thing I'm I'm gonna do is delete the introduction part because we're just gonna
add the introduction after the title right here as a paragraph without an H2 title. And in the next step, we're
gonna create the content for each of these H2 titles, and we're gonna start
with pricing structure. So let's go back to our prompts here, and this would be Prompt 3. There's also a Prompt 2 asking for potential
titles for this blog post. I've already set the
title as you can see here because it's pretty obvious
the title that I'm gonna use, so I don't need this for now, but I'm gonna use this prompt here. And you can experiment with these prompts, you don't need to just type in
exactly what I give you here, this is just an idea, so you know kind of how this would work, and then you can refine
it to your own process. But I'm gonna just copy this one and then paste that in here. It's basically asking for the
content for a specific topic. And then I'm gonna paste
in that topic here. So copy, paste that into this bracket. And then I also always ask to make sure the focus keyword is included so that it's actually
optimized for this keyword, then click Enter. And I also ask ChatGPT to tell me where it would make sense
to add images or graphics that would increase the
quality and readability of the actual content. Now here we can see we
have a network error that sometimes happens
with GPT or ChatGPT, so all we gotta do here is
click on Regenerate response, and hopefully, it'll work. Okay, great. So it
worked on the second try. And as you can see, here is the content, that it has written up for
us for the pricing structure for MailerLite and ActiveCampaign. Now, what I would suggest you do is actually read through the content and see if it's actually good. In my experience, it's actually quite good,
and it's mostly accurate. You wanna check if all
the numbers are true, like, for example, here it says, "This plan allows up to 1,000 subscribers for essential features." You wanna make sure that
this is actually true because sometimes, it can be
wrong or it can be outdated, so you wanna make sure
it's actually up to date. But let's say we've done that, so let's just copy all
this content, and copy, and then paste that just
below the actual title here. And we can see it's
automatically using an H3 for the subtitles here. When we click on it, it says, "H3," and the rest is a paragraph. And we can also see right here in italic, this is where the image
suggestions will be because we've asked ChatGPT
to give us some suggestions of what images we could add, what graphics we could add
to improve this content. And this is really useful in my experience because it's just making the
entire process far easier and more streamlined. So I actually add all of the
graphics and images at the end, the first thing I do is
just add all the text. So now we can move on
to the second category, which is Email Marketing
Features Showdown. So, again, we do the same thing, we go to the prompts, and
copy this prompt right here, copy, paste that in here. And then we wanna replace the topic, so now we're gonna use this
topic here, actually this one, and paste that into the topic. And then just, again, hit Enter, and it will start writing up the content for the second category. Now for the sake of this video, I'm not just gonna copy
in all of the content for all of these titles here, let's just say we've already done that, and we're ready to add the conclusion. In this case, I would move on to Prompt 4, which is pretty simple, you
can just also type it in. Now write the final part of
this blog post, the conclusion. So I just paste that
in here, and hit Enter. And what you also wanna make sure is to keep the same window
open here on ChatGPT. just because this tool
remembers everything that came before, so it's kind
of like talking to a person that remembers what you're saying, and it's gonna make
everything a lot more coherent in case you go back and forth
with ChatGPT, like you say, "Maybe rewrite this in a more casual way," and stuff like that. So make sure you do
everything here in one tab to make sure all the content is coherent. Great, so now we have our conclusion, again, proofread it, and
then copy, and paste that in, make the changes that you want to make. And next thing we're gonna
do is go to the prompts, and this would be the Intro. So I always go with the Intro
last because I want to have, like I want ChatGPT to
have all the information. And before, first of all,
writing the conclusion, we'll have to cover all the topics first, and then the Intro at the end. So I'm gonna copy this part,
and then paste that in here. So please write the intro. And here I also ask to
make the focus keyword, to add this in the first
part for SEO purposes. Great. So let's copy and paste this intro, and paste that just below the
title, so just below here. And this will also be the
part that Google reads as the meta description for this post. So when we look at this Preview here, we can always see the preview
content, which is right here, Choosing the right email
marketing platform, and then you can see this
is the part of the intro that we have added. Now we can also click on Edit Snippet, and change that here on the description. But what we wanna make sure
is to use our focus keyword in the first sentence basically so that we can actually get
a green check mark here, The Focus Keyword was not found in the SEO Meta Description. This is why in this case
I would go back to ChatGPT and tell ChatGPT, "Please use the focus keyword
in the first sentence" just for SEO purposes. And then ChatGPT will
rewrite this intro for you to add the focus keyword
in the first part. As you can see here, it adds it, MailerLite versus ActiveCampaign. So let's replace the intro,
copy, and then paste. And now we can see this now turned green, The Focus Keyword was used inside the SEO Meta Description. And you can also see
for the SEO score here, we are at 61 out of 100, so we're definitely on the right track. We have now also added
all of the text content, and the next step would
be to add a few images. So in this case, what I would do is just look
at all of the image suggestions that ChatGPT gave us, usually,
they do make a lot of sense, so, for example, here on
the MailerLite Pricing, it gives us the suggestion
to add a breakdown graphic of MailerLite's pricing tiers. What we can do here is
just do a screenshot of MailerLite's pricing. So let's go to MailerLite, and then just go to their
website, then go to Pricing, and then we will just take a
screenshot of the Pricing here, Accept cookies, then take a screenshot. Then let's go back to our editor here, and we can just drag in that image just below where it says, right here. And now we have the image
inside of the blog post. Now we can actually delete
this suggestion here. And now when we go to the SEO checklist and look at the additional points, then we can see here, Add an image with your Focus
Keyword as an alt text. So this is what you always have
to do when you add an image, so I'm gonna show you how to do that. So let's go and click on this
icon here, go to Settings, and then we're gonna click on the image, and then here is the box where
you can add the alt text, which is where we want
to add our focus keyword, which is MailerLite versus ActiveCampaign. And I usually do the actual image, so this would be MailerLite Pricing, but still we do have the focus
keyword here in the alt text, which is important for SEO, and you would do exactly the same thing for the other images. So here we could add a
breakdown or a screenshot of the ActiveCampaign Pricing. Also go to the all text, and change it to MailerLite
versus ActiveCampaign, ActiveCampaign Pricing. Now let's save the
changes we've done so far by clicking on Save draft. We don't wanna publish it just yet because it's not finished. And then let's go back to
our Rank Math checklist. We are currently at 65
out of 100 points for SEO. So we do still have a
few things to look at. Under basic SEO, we can see the only thing that is not perfect is the content length, but that's just because we
haven't added a content here for the other categories, so this would be fine if we add all those. Then under Additional, we can see the Keyword
Density could be higher. Now, Keyword Density just
means how often you use your focus keyword in your blog post. I wouldn't worry about that too much because if you use your
keywords too often, then it can be classified
as keyword stuffing, and you'll get penalized
by Google for doing that. So I would just use it naturally and don't worry about it too much, but still make sure you use
it wherever it is applicable. Then we can see the URL
is 98 characters long, so that's definitely
something we wanna fix. So let's go scroll up,
click on Edit Snippet, and then here, we wanna make
sure we have a nice Permalink. So as you can see here, mailerlite-vs-activecampaign-2023, and this is far too long, so what I would recommend is
to even get rid of the 2023 because you want this blog post to basically live on as long as possible, forever, optimally, and you don't want to have an
old date here in the URL when, let's say, it's 2025 already, because once you've
published that blog post, it's very, like it can't
really change the URL here. So what I would suggest you do is just mailerlite-vs-activecampaign, and that's gonna be the entire Permalink. Then let's close this window
and scroll down again. And now we can see the
URL is 54 characters long, which is great. Then the next thing is, Link
out to external resources. Now usually that happens
naturally inside of your content, whenever it makes sense to
link out to another resource, then you can put in those
links, make those do followings. So when you're, for
example, here, add a link, and then you just paste in that link. Now, whenever you add an affiliate link, which is what we're gonna
talk about just in a bit, then you wanna set this
to a nofollow link, that's also just for SEO purposes. But if you just link out to
other valuable resources, you can just paste in the
link, and then hit Enter. And then this will also turn green here. And this is basically the same thing, Add DoFollow links pointing
to external resources. And then the next one, Add
internal links in your content, and this would just be
links to other blog posts, which also naturally happens once you have some more blog posts, for example, for this article at the end, we could like talk about alternatives, and then link to our
other comparison posts or our other email marketing tool reviews, and to our other blog posts, and then this will turn green as well, which also helps SEO. The Focus Keyword is fine, then we have Content AI, now, this is a tool you
could use with Rank Math. So this is just this over here, we could just click on Research. And here, it just gives
us some more suggestions of keywords that we could use. Like for example here it says that we should be using also the keyword, activecampaign vs mailerlite, which definitely makes sense because that's the same content, that's just the words or
the terms here switched. So these could be useful
suggestions as well. So here you would just go in and then just turn around the
words, so you also cover this. And when people search
ActiveCampaign versus Mailerlite, rather than Mailerlite
versus ActiveCampaign, your content has a higher
chance of actually showing up in the search results. Then you also have some other things that people are searching that
you could implement naturally in your content. Great. So let's go back to our SEO checklist, and then let's go to Additional, we've talked about all these,
we've used the Content AI, Title Readability,
everything looks good here. Then Content Readability, here, they suggest using a
Table of Contents plugin, this is just especially
useful for longer posts, which this one definitely looks like it's
gonna be a longer post. And what you could do
is just hit Enter here, and then you could click
on the plus icon here, and then type in Rank
Math or table of contents. And then if you have installed Rank Math, you're gonna have access
to this here, click here, and this will just add a table of content for your blog post. And then when people click
on each of these links here, it will go directly to the
content just below here. And you can also hide specific links, so, for example, here I would
only show the H2 headings, so for all the H3s, I would
just hit this eye icon and make sure this is disabled, so then people will only
see the H2 headings, otherwise, it will just be
too large this entire section. And the last point on the checklist is, Your content contains
images and/or videos. So once we add a few more images, then this would definitely
turn green as well. And along with some links
and also some more content, we would be pretty close
to an SEO score of 100. And now in order for us
to actually make money with this blog post, we also need to add our affiliate links. Now, you don't absolutely need
to add your affiliate links just when you're starting out
with a new site and new posts because you probably
don't get any traffic yet. So what you can do is just wait
until you get some traffic, and then spend the time signing
up to the affiliate programs and adding all the links. But I'm still gonna show
you how to actually do it. So the easiest way to find
the affiliate programs for the tools or products
that you are writing about is just to go to the product itself. So for me, this would be
MailerLite, mailerlite, and then go to the official website. And then you always, when you're on the website
for whatever product or tool, you just wanna scroll all the way down, and that's usually where
you can find a link saying, "Affiliate," or, "Partner." So here it says, "Become a partner." So we're gonna click here, and then we can see they
have affiliate partners, and you can get a 30% commission for every sale that you make. Then you wanna just click
here, click on Get started, and this is where you wanna
basically click on Register. So sometimes it's gonna
be hard to get accepted into affiliate programs if you don't already have
an established website that at least gets some traffic. So you might need to wait
until you have a site that is a bit more established
until you get accepted to all these programs. But if you send them a
good message and say that, show them your website, and show them that you
have quality content, they're gonna be very likely to accept you into their affiliate program. Now, personally, I am an
affiliate for MailerLite, so I already have a dashboard with them. And so this is gonna be what it looks like once you are an affiliate with them. Obviously, this is just an example. I don't suggest you promote
MailerLite, necessarily, but there's gonna be a dashboard for any affiliate program that you're in. Sometimes it's also an affiliate network, where there's multiple affiliate programs in the same dashboard, but for MailerLite, it's
just a separate dashboard. So usually what you wanna do is just look at where
your affiliate link is, so here it says, "Share your link to refer
people to a MailerLite." So here you can see this is
my personal affiliate link. So here, we would just
wanna click on Copy URL. And by the way, you can always see that
it's an affiliate link when it just have these
weird characters here. So here you can see /a, and then you can see this code here, this means that this is a tracking link, and whenever somebody clicks on that link and signs up to MailerLite,
I will get credit. And as you can see, I
already made over $26,000 with this particular affiliate
program with over 6,000 users that I referred to this
email marketing tool. So let's copy the URL here, and then let's go back to WordPress. And then what I recommend is before you add the affiliate link by just highlighting the word
and then adding the link here, I would suggest you actually use a plugin called ThirstyAffiliates to
cloak your affiliate link to make it look a lot nicer
than what you can see here. So what we're gonna do
is first Save draft, then we're gonna go back to
our WordPress Dashboard here, and we're gonna install this plugin, so we're gonna click on Plugins,
and then click on Add New, then we're gonna look
for ThirstyAffiliates, and it's just this first one here. So let's click on Install
Now and Activate, close this. And now we can go to
ThirstyAffiliates here, click on add New Affiliate Link, then I'm gonna name this Mailerlite. And then under Destination URL, we're gonna paste in our affiliate link. Then what we also wanna
do is go to Link Options, and then we want to make
this a no follow link, so we're gonna turn this to
Yes, No follow this link? And then also make this
open up in a new window, Yes, right here, and
then click on Save Link. And now we can actually
use this cloaked URL, which is a lot nicer, it says, "meticsreviews.com/recommends/mailerlite." So let's just copy this link,
then go back to our blog post, go to Posts, click on the blog post. And then in terms of where
you wanna add your links, you don't wanna add 'em every
time you mention MailerLite. What I like to do is just add them like the first time I mention it. So for example here, I wanna add the link, so click here, click here, and then I usually also
set this to nofollow and Open in a new tab, and then hit Enter. And there we go. Now we have this as a link where the first time we
mention this platform. And the second way to add your links is to add them as a button,
wherever it makes sense. So definitely at the end of
your article, for example, you wanna add the buttons. So let's click on the plus icon here, and then type in button, and then we just click on the Button. And then we type in,
let's say, Try Mailerlite, and we're gonna click on link, and we're also gonna paste in our link from ThirstyAffiliates. There we go. And then we can also make this text, or actually, let's align
this in this center, items in the center like this. And then we can click
on the plus icon again and add also a Try ActiveCampaign button. And then obviously, also
add these affiliate link for the ActiveCampaign tool here. Now if you're wondering
how to change the color of this link right here, I'm also gonna show you how to do this. So first of all, let's
click on Save draft, and then let's go to Preview,
Preview in a new tab, and this will show us how the
blog post currently looks like on our page. And to change the color here,
we wanna click on Customize, then go to General
Options, General Styling, and then here under LINK COLOR, we can change the actual color. So let's change this to,
let's say, an orange, maybe a bit darker, kind of like this. And then I'm gonna make the Hover Color just the same as the the normal one, So just paste in a color code. And there you go. Now we have these kind of
orange links in the blog post. Let's click on Publish. And then we can close this page
and go back to this editor. Now when we reload the page, we should be able to see
the changes here as well. And now there's a few more things we need to do to finish up this post, like for example, we need
to add a featured image, which will be shown just
above the title here. And we can add that right here when we click on this icon and go to Post. And then just below here
under Featured Image, this is where we can
add our featured image. Now you can go to sites like Pexels, here, to get some copyright free images, or you can also go to Unsplash. I'm gonna leave all these
links in the description below. Here, you can also get some
free images that you can use. Make sure to download the
Medium option here, otherwise, it will just take too long
to load your blog post, which will hurt your SEO rankings. You always kind of wanna make
sure that your image files aren't too a large on your page. But in case of, in
terms of this post here, I would actually create a custom image, a feature image for this, like a MailerLite versus
ActiveCampaign image, just to show visually what
this blog post is about. And the best tool to
use to create this image is actually canva.com. So I'm gonna quickly show you how I would create a featured
image that I'm gonna use here. So I usually type in
whatever I wanna create here, so, for example, this
would be a versus image, so I'm just gonna type in versus here, and then I already get some
of these pre-made designs that I could just use, so
let's just take this one here, click on Customize this template. Then the size or the format that I use for the featured images is an
800 times 500 pixels image. So I click on Resize here,
and then I change that. So I'm gonna go to 800, and then 500 here, and click on Resize, and this will resize the
the ratio of this image. Then I obviously wanna just
delete all of the images here, all of the graphics, and
add a MailerLite graphic and then an ActiveCampaign
graphic at the bottom. So first, let's just turn
this, make this horizontal, drag this out. And then I usually download the logos, I've already done that to just
speed up this video a bit. And I've downloaded a MailerLite logo, I'm just gonna put that right here. And I've also downloaded
an ActiveCampaign logo, gonna put that right here. And now we obviously also
wanna change the colors, so what I like to do is
just go to the website. And then to get the exact color
of the website that I'm on, I use a tool called ColorZilla,
this is a Chrome extension. You'll find the link also
in the description below. And once you install this, you
get access to this icon here, then you can just click on Pick From Page, and then you can hover over any color that you see on the page. So I just use this green that
I can see here in the logo, then it will copy the color
code to your clipboard, which then I can just come
back here, click on the color, I wanna paste that in,
go to Color, click here, and then I just paste in the
color code in right here. And that will put in this
branded green to the background. Then for this background, I'm just gonna change it to this blue. And with Canva, you already get the colors
that are in your graphic, so I can just choose it from here. And there we go. So this is how I really
quickly create a featured image for this kind of post. Now, to download this image, I just click on Share on the
top-right, go to Download, and then just click Download here, and then we have it saved
in the Download folder. And now to add it to the Featured Image, we're gonna click on
Set Featured Image here, and I'm just gonna drag this in, the image that I've just created, click on Set featured image. And there we go. Now let's click on Save draft. And to see how this looks like, we can click on Preview,
Preview in a new tab, and now we can see we
have the featured image here at the top, and then we
have the content just below. What we also wanna do is add
a category for this post, and we can also do that here
when you click on this button and then go to Post. Here under Categories, we can see currently it
is under Uncategorized. So we only have one category so far, which is Affiliate Marketing, so I wanna add a new
one for email marketing, so I'm just gonna add this
here, Email Marketing, and then click on Add New Category. And then I'm gonna untick
the Uncategorized option, click on Save draft. And an additional way
to organize your content is by using tags. So when you go to Tags here, you can basically add relevant tags, like let's say email
marketing or also email tools, so whatever is applicable
to the type of content. So now we're pretty much ready
to publish our new blog post. One thing I like to do is
go back to the SEO checklist and go through all of the checkpoints here and make sure everything is optimized before I go ahead and publish the post. And then another thing I
like to do is first of all, save this as draft, and
then click on Preview, click on Preview in the new tab, and then just read through
the blog post again myself, make sure all the images are correct, make sure everything
is displayed correctly, make sure all the links here work, and go to the correct page. And once that's done, we are pretty much ready
to publish this post. To publish the post, we just need to click on
this button here, Publish, and then confirm Publish. And now the post is live on the website. And you also notice
that the Publish button has changed to an Update button. So we can always come in here and make any changes and
update our blog post. Then we can click on Update, and then the changes will be
visible on the actual website. So let's quickly go to our website. So let's go back to the Dashboard,
click on Visit Site here, and then we can see now
this blog post is live on the website, it's visible right here, it's also visible here under Blog. This is the first blog post, we can click on it, and then
we can basically read it. Now, before you click off this video, there's one more thing
I need you to understand so that you can maximize your
chances of becoming successful with your affiliate marketing site, and that is not just need
to post more blog posts in order for you to get more
rankings and more authority. The other thing you need is
links from other websites linking back to your
website and your blog posts. So that's the two main things
you need to care about, more blog posts, more
high quality blog posts. So you could maybe do
a schedule for yourself to publish two to three
blog posts per week. So you wanna actually take this seriously if you wanna make money with your affiliate marketing website. Now you know how to create
high quality blog posts and how to optimize them
for the right keywords. But then you also wanna work
on building relationships with other websites that
already have authority so that they can link
back to your blog posts, which Google uses as a metric to see what websites have quality content. They basically look at the links and the websites those links come from, and determine if your blog
posts or if your website has some authority
within a specific topic. So, again, next to publishing blog posts, you wanna reach out to other websites. Like for example, we've
published a blog post now about MailerLite versus ActiveCampaign. Now, I could reach out to
MailerLite and ask them if I could do a guest post on their blog in exchange for a link that links back to one of my blog posts. That way, I get a high quality
backlink to my website, which will increase the
authority of my domain, of my website, which will help our rankings
so that our blog posts have a chance of ranking
on the first page. That's the part that most people neglect when starting a blog,
because to be honest, this is the part that
can be like quite hard, especially in the beginning when you don't have any authority yet. But actually, that's good news for you because if you do put in the work to build these relationships
with these other websites and get backlinks to your own blog posts, then it's gonna be very
easy for you to outrank all of these other sites
that don't put in the work to build these relationships
and to get these links. So, again, in the beginning, you're gonna be be reaching
out to other websites in your niche, offering them to write
a customized blog post, a valuable blog post so that they can publish on their website, so they get basically free content, but in exchange for a link linking back to your own blog post. So keep in mind, there's two
things you need to focus on, which is publishing more
high quality blog posts on a regular basis, the more, the better, and then building relationships
with other websites in your niche, and get
backlinks to your own websites, so your blog posts, which
will increase your authority, which will increase your rankings, which will increase your traffic, which will increase the
money you're gonna make.
