How To Build An Affiliate Marketing Website 2023 (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

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- 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.
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Channel: Metics Media
Views: 85,869
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: affiliate marketing for beginners, affiliate marketing tutorial, affiliate marketing, how to start affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing step by step, how to make money with affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing 2023, make money online, how to make money online, how to do affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing course, how to make affiliate marketing website, make money with affiliate marketing, metics media
Id: e2EImNQLsao
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 199min 28sec (11968 seconds)
Published: Mon May 29 2023
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