- What's going on, you guys
welcome back to the channel. So in this video today, I'm gonna show you a step by step tutorial on how to build a profitable WordPress blog from scratch. This is actually my first
video in my brand new video set here so I'm
super excited for that. Let me know what you guys think of it down in the comment section below,
because this has literally been about a month and a half
of work and about $10,000 invested here in equipment
and lighting so super excited about that and definitely
looking to push that quality to the next level with this new set here. Now, I will say this before getting into the video here guys, if
you're looking to create a blog about what your cat is doing
or what you ate for lunch, this is not going to be the video for you because that is the type
of blog that somebody makes for a hobby and they're not
really looking to make money. Well at the end of the day,
as much as I do enjoy writing and sharing information with the world, my goal is to figure out how to monetize these different online platforms
so I'm not gonna teach you how to write about your cat
or what you had for lunch, am instead going to show you how to make a real side business with a blog. Now, first of all guys, I
wanna go ahead and give you a little bit of background
on myself, just in case this is the first time
that you're seeing me here, that way you know that I'm
not just a complete moron teaching you about blogging. So, I actually entered the
blogging space in 2018, when I started the Investing Simple blog. So I own investingsimple.com,
I actually have a couple of business partners in that now, but we launched that blog
back in 2018 and since then it has grown to be quite successful. It is now one of the fastest
growing personal finance blogs and in December of 2020,
we did over $20,000 of revenue from that blog. And so believe it or
not based on, you know, profit and revenue, this
blog is actually worth North of half a million dollars,
even though we started it just two and a half short years ago. Now that is my one blog
investingsimple.com, but I actually started a
different blog fairly recently in fall of 2020, called farmlandriches.com and that's a brand new blog
that I started from scratch, and it's already making money,
even though it's only getting like 20 hits per day from search. So you don't need to have
a heck of a lot of traffic in order to make money and
I hope to show you guys that throughout this entire video. So I have a older blog
that's very successful, but I also have a brand new
blog that was just started, that's already making money
and I'm gonna show you guys both of those and all
the inside information about how those blogs actually work. Not only that guys, I'm gonna
show you actual earnings proof for Farmland Riches, which
is the blog I started most recently and I
started that in November. The first month that I
actually started, it made $100 and then in December it made
$245 and then in January, I expect to do somewhere
around $500 from this blog. And that may not sound like
a big deal to you guys, but for me, this is an
additional revenue stream for me and it's also another blog
that I plan on building up and selling down the line. So if you're excited about building a blog that can potentially put
extra money in your pocket and then maybe eventually
become a larger business such as Investing Simple,
well I can promise you guys, you are in the right place. And I think one of the most
interesting aspects of the blog Farmland Riches, is
that I have not touched this blog since November 12th. I built it with my team
members and I paid somebody to write most of the content,
but once the whole site was designed and built,
it's on complete autopilot. I don't touch it, I don't
do anything with this blog, it just simply sits out
there on the internet and gets eyeballs every single
day, a certain percentage of those people click on the links and I earn money in the process,
but I'm gonna show you guys how that all works step by step. So if you're ready to invest
a couple of hours here with me guys to learn about three
years of information here, I'm excited and I'm really
glad that you guys are here and I'm literally gonna teach
you the mistakes I've made and my successes and my
losses over the last two to three years of blogging,
it's kind of like a college curriculum of blogging right
here in one YouTube video. So as you guys can probably tell, I put probably 20 or 30 hours
of research into this video, so all that I ask from you
is if you do enjoy this video at any point in time, if
you've gotten value from this, please just drop a like for
that almighty YouTube algorithm as this will help this video
to be shared with more people. Now real quick guys, I do
have to give a quick thank you to our video sponsor
today which is none other than Bluehost, which I see as the simplest and easiest to use web
host for getting started with blogging in 2021. Not to mention guys, they're
actually offering my viewers a exclusive discount on
their hosting packages, and it's a price that you're
not going to see anywhere else. So if you want to follow
along, step-by-step, I'm gonna show you how to get
started with your web host, and we're going to be using Bluehost, and I'll show you exactly how
to get that exclusive discount for my YouTube viewers. Full transparency here guys,
I am affiliated with Bluehost, so if you do decide to use my link, it is a way to give back to me
at no additional cost to you. With Bluehost, you're gonna
be able to get your website up and running for as little
as $2.95 cents per month, not to mention it also
comes with a free WordPress auto installation, a
free domain for one year, a free SSL certificate, as
well as free website migration if you're already working with
an existing host and maybe you're looking to switch,
but more on that later guys, when we about Bluehost and
setting up your web hosting. That being said guys, I do have to make a few quick disclaimers
before we get into this. Number one, if you are
watching this on your laptop, or your computer right now
and you do have your phone next to you, please just go
ahead and put that on silence just to eliminate any
potential distractions, because we're gonna
move pretty quickly here and if you look away from the
screen for 30 seconds to text, you might be totally lost. So I encourage you guys
to shut off distractions and tune in here because I'm not going to waste any of your time. Second disclaimer, if you
are looking to take action on this advice today, you're
going to need to invest around $100 in website
hosting, if you're not ready to make that type of
commitment, you should probably still watch the video
that way you are aware of how blogging works,
but if you are looking to take action, just understand
you might have to spend around $100 to get the best
pricing on that web hosting. Also guys, full transparency, I am not here to sell you anything, I don't have any course on blogging, it's funny I was actually going
to make this a paid course, but I decided to just
give it away for free guys because I'm not really
in a position anymore where I'm trying to just
make the most money possible, I'm just trying to add as
much value as possible. And of course if you
want to give back to me, you can always use that
affiliate link down below, and I will earn a small
commission in the process and that's pretty much it guys,
that's the whole deal here. So let's jump right into
it and start off by talking about hosting platforms before
we jump into my computer for the screen share section of the video. So the very first thing to
figure out when starting a new blog is your hosting
platform and this is essentially where your website is going to live. Because your website is going
to consist of images and texts and different elements
that have to be hosted on the internet so you
could buy a server yourself and build your own
server, but that's gonna be very expensive and
probably not cost effective. A better strategy is to
utilize the resources of others by using a web host. These are companies that have
servers all over the world and they offer space on these servers for a monthly subscription,
allowing your website to actually live on the internet. Now, since we're actually
doing a WordPress website which is all I personally
use, I don't use Wix or Squarespace or any
of those site builders, I just build WordPress websites. Since we're doing that,
I chose Bluehost based on number one, the low
and affordable pricing, number two, it's very
user-friendly and third and finally they have that one
click WordPress installation that I'm gonna walk you
through step by step. That being said guys, let's
now jump into the computer and get to the screen
share section of the video. All right guys we're gonna
go ahead and start off here with the signup process over on Bluehost. So if you wanna go ahead
and open up that link from down below a new tab
here, or you just simply go to ryanoscribner.com/bluehost
and essentially by doing that, you're going to ensure that
you get the best possible pricing here of 2.95 per
month for the package. If it says 3.95 per month,
that means you're not using the link in the description
and you're gonna pay more potentially for no particular reason. So if you want to get that discount guys, you gotta make sure you
use the link down below. And again, the reasons
why we're using Bluehost first of all, you're
getting a free domain name for the first year, you're
getting a free SSL certificate which I'll explain what
that means shortly. We're gonna have one
click WordPress install, and they have releases solid 24/7 support which is helpful if
you have any questions. So we're gonna start off here
by clicking, get started. As far as the plans go here, in order to get the cheapest
deal, you should probably go with the basic plan which is
what I use and it's going to be for a 36 month term and
I'll show you exactly what's gonna cost you here. If you do the shorter monthly
terms here like 12 months or 24 months, you're still
gonna get a discount, but you're gonna be paying
slightly more money. So it honestly depends on
whether or not you guys are looking to sign up for
one year versus three years. If you're looking to build
a legitimate business here, you're probably gonna have
it for more than three years. So I always do a three-year
term when I make new hosting accounts for my blogs and I
also have every single blog that I create under a
separate hosting account, that way when I eventually sell the blog, I can literally just
hand over those passwords and I'm not gonna have
to like transfer a domain and go through that whole process. So for me, every single
different blog that I operate is under a separate hosting platform which if you're building
blogs to sell them like I do, I would certainly recommend that. But anyway, we're gonna
go with this right here, we're gonna go with this which is the 2.95 per month basic plan, it comes
with pretty much everything you're gonna need here,
I can't think of anything that you're not going to need
that's offered elsewhere. Just to get started, I mean
to be honest with you guys, they have a lot of
bells and whistles here, but I don't use any of this stuff. I don't use Office 365,
different things like that, domain privacy I actually
do pay for that separately, but honestly for the
most part, you'll be fine with this basic plan right
here, that's what I use. So you're gonna hit select,
and now you're going to pretty much decide what you're going
to be using for a domain name. Now, if you already have a domain name, you can go ahead and fill that
out over here and essentially start the process of porting
that domain and moving it. So for example, I have a couple
of domains that are hosted on Google domains, that I
simply ported over to Bluehost, but the good news is with this plan, you get a free domain anyway
and so if you're starting off this blog from scratch,
you're going to a name. Now obviously, you're gonna
wanna have a general idea of what type of website
you're going to be creating as far as the niche goes. And so for me, for
example Investing Simple is in the finance space
and then Farmland Riches, my other blog is related
to farmland investing. And what you'll notice
about both of those names is that they're both short
and they're both two words. I don't recommend three word
domains, they're too long in my opinion, the shorter, the better, and it should be pretty memorable. So you might have to get
creative here when it comes to picking your domain name. So for this example here, I'm
gonna pretend I'm creating a website about rowing,
because I've become really into roaming in the last
couple of weeks here. I got a rowing machine, I've
actually lost a lot of weight and been just rolling
like every single day, like a 5k, I'm obsessed
with it, it's a lot of fun. So let's say for example, I'm
making a website about rowing so let's just start thinking
off the top of my head and try to come up with
some good two word names. So right off the bat let's go
ahead and just type in rowing, that's like the main thing
we want in the domain, and then we're gonna follow
that up with a secondary word and hopefully that domain is available. And surprisingly
rowingbasics.com is available, I'm actually shocked by that because that's a pretty good name there. So Google domains is actually where I keep a lot of my domains,
unless the domain is hosted on a web host which will be
the case here with Bluehost, but I actually like this
better because they give you better suggestions here when
you're looking for a domain. So let's say I'm just gonna type in rowing and just search get it
and see what it shows me. Basically what Google is going to do here, is they're gonna give me
ideas for what's available because they're gonna populate
these ideas right here. So there's a lot of different
extensions available like .com, .net, .org.,
I specifically use .com, I don't mess around with .net or.org, if you're building a business,
get the .com, all right? People are gonna want that,
and I would never recommend paying a lot of money for a domain. With investingsimple.com,
we actually did pay a lot for that domain, it was like $5,000, but that was a very lucrative
name and that's not something that you're gonna be
able to just get cheaply because it's a short
name and it's got really good search terms in there. And believe it or not,
the term investing simple is actually something
people search in Google, so it ranks for that by default. Anyway, if you type in
rowing it gives you some good options here, and I
think you can pick.com, or if you go to all endings here, it'll show you what's available, but it kinda shows you like
the different things that you could be choosing from and
it might give you some ideas. So for example, I dunno
if I can pick .com, you can't specifically
search for .com but anyways, it does give you some
options like roamingteam.com, that's 3,900 bucks, I would never spend that much on a domain. Rowingboat.com, but you might
scroll through here and find that it puts some words in
there where you're like, hey, wait a second, you know, this is a pretty good domain name. Rowingmachinesale.com,
that's not really, you know, helpful to us, but you may
find that the information over here is more helpful. Let's try typing in like rowing machine and see what other domains are available. Definitely looking for .com. So rowingmachinessale.com,
we saw that earlier. Use rowingmachine.com, that's
actually not a bad one. I know it's three words,
but use is pretty short so, that might be a possibility if I couldn't find a good domain. But yeah, you just might wanna check here, sportrowingmachine.com,
that's also not a bad name to be honest with you guys. Rowingsetup.com I actually
liked this one a lot too, it could be all about setting up your at-home rowing machine. So there you go, there's a
couple of options, but I'm gonna go ahead and use
rowingbasics.com as my example. So at this point, you would
fill in your first name, last name, address, et cetera, email, and this is going to cover
the different pricing. So if you change your
mind about your package, you can change that here, but
I would definitely recommend the 36 month pricing for 2.95 a month to get you the best possible price. But now we've got to talk
about some of the extras here, because I wanna talk about what is, and isn't necessary, okay? And this simply comes from what
I do and do not use myself. Other people may have different opinions, but this is what I do for my
websites and I've been doing this for many years, okay? Domain privacy and protection, in my opinion that is well
worth the $12 per year. Otherwise people are going
to be able to look up your information on public
databases and get your email, maybe even your address and
phone number, and what happens is when you sign up for
a website domain name and you don't protect your information, you're gonna start getting
a lot of spam emails and spam phone calls from
people looking to help you with your new website. It's a pain in the butt,
not a huge fan of it myself so I do the domain privacy protection. Code guard basic, I have
no idea what this is, I don't use it, I uncheck the
box, leave all these unchecked and then SiteLock Security Essential, I also do not use that. Literally, the only thing I use, is the domain privacy protection. So if you include that
for 99 cents per month, you're looking at a
total here of about $118, to get this business off the ground for the next three years. And other than that, everything
else I'm gonna show you is free, so that's pretty much
your only out-of-pocket cost. At this point, you drop
your credit card number, your code expiration, you're
gonna check the box here and then you're going to submit, and then you're going to
be ready for the next step. I already have a Bluehost account, so I'm not gonna do this, but
I will go ahead and log in now and show you more of the process. So I just activated this domain here, I thought about it for a little bit and I said, you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and lock
that down on the off chance I ever decided to do a rowing website, because rowingbasics.com,
I liked the name of it and I wanna hold on to
that so I locked that down and I also bought the privacy
protection on that domain for the 99 cents per month,
that way I'm not getting bombarded with phone calls and emails. So now, I'm gonna go ahead
and log in and I'm gonna show you what this dashboard
actually looks like, and then we're gonna cover
how to install WordPress very easily on this blog. So here's what I like about Bluehost is they're so user-friendly
that even if you didn't watch this video and you didn't
know how to set things up, you know, they still have
a lot of tools available to help you where you can
follow step-by-step instructions on things you're looking to do. But the good thing is you got me here, I'm gonna show you how I do this so we're gonna go ahead and
skip this step altogether. What we're looking to build,
we'll go ahead and just tell them we're building a blog. Are you comfortable
with creating websites? I'm gonna say we're pretty
comfortable building websites. And as far as the type
and stuff here goes, I'm gonna just skip this because, that's not necessarily what we need. This is gonna give you
basically different pages, they're going to install on
your website so they're going to install a blog which is super helpful, but we don't need a store,
we're not gonna sell anything and as far as the About me
goes, I'm just gonna show you how to do that manually so for now, we'll just let them add the blog. And this is helpful here
too, because you can edit this manually at the end, but
I'll show you how to do it right here just because
this is pretty helpful. This is going to allow you to
change the name of your site, as well as the tagline. And just to show you an example here, I wanna open up Farmland
Riches just so you guys can see what my name is and my tagline. So as you can see, my name
is simply Farmland Riches, and my tagline is, your
number one resource for farmland investing. Pretty simple, nothing crazy, but you wanna have a
similar name and tagline that is relevant to your site. So for me, I'm gonna name
the site Rowing Basics, which is the same as the domain,
I actually like that name. And I'm just gonna do
something similar here, I'm gonna say your number one
resource for rowing machines, because I'm gonna be specifically talking about rowing machines on this
blog, I'll probably review them if I were to actually
do this blog so the name on the site is Rowing
Basics and the tagline is your number one resource
for rowing machines. That looks good to me I'm gonna
go ahead and click continue. At this point, it's looking
to get us to pick a theme and I use the Astro theme, it's free and it's going to install
this theme for us. So just go ahead and click on Astra, and then we're going to continue. Here we are now inside
of the Bluehost dashboard and to be honest with you guys, they have a really helpful
guide here that will help you through these different
steps of getting started, like writing your first blog
post, setting up categories, putting in images, logos, or other media. You may choose to follow some
of these steps on your own, because I will be honest
the one area that I don't have a ton of information
for you is website design. And by that, I mean the
visual look of your website. So real quick I wanna jump
over to Farmland Riches and just look at it a little
bit more and show you guys what my website looks like. It's really basic, not a
heck of a lot going on here, you can set this little
icon up here yourself, I'm gonna show you at
some point how to do that. But I'm sure in this portal here, that would be under
this section right here, learning about visuals and
they have tutorials for that so if you find that what I'm showing you is too far over your head,
or if you miss something, there's a lot of great resources
in the Bluehost dashboard or portal there. But when we're talking about
the design of a website, we're talking about things like
this, the grass background, the logo up here, which I
literally just made in Photoshop. And we're also talking
about this right here, which is the look of
the images on the site. And I'ma go ahead now and I'm gonna click on one of the articles just so you can see what that looks like. I made a really simple
template in Photoshop, where I basically just created this little farmlandriches.com, I made a green border, and then you just plop the logo in there of whatever you're reviewing,
but I'm gonna be honest with you guys, this looks
ugly, it's not that good. So I think if you do a little
bit of research on your own about some graphic design
and creating featured images, I think you can do a lot
better of a job than me here. I made this template in about
two minutes and then I made all of the featured images
for every article on my site. And I'm gonna be honest with you guys, it is nothing glamorous. I mean, some of these are
just texts, not that great but I guess it's good 'cause it shows you, you don't need to have
anything spectacular for this to work. This website actually makes
money and I'm gonna prove it to you guys in a little bit
here when we take a look at the actual affiliate dashboards. But when we're talking about the design, that's basically what we're
talking about here is things like this, I'm gonna show
you how to make these tables and a little bit here as well. And adding images, that's
a piece of cake as well, but the main thing you're
gonna want to design is your homepage and
it's really quite simple to make something that
looks about like this and we're gonna cover some
of those basics as we go through the rest of the tutorial. So the way that Bluehost
is set up by default, you're going to basically get
into the backend WordPress section of your website
through their website. And you don't have to keep it
this way if you don't want to, but it really doesn't
hurt you in the long run because you're pretty much accomplishing the same exact thing so
what you do is you click on this button here
called log into WordPress, and then Bluehost is going
to connect you securely into your backend WordPress website. With some of the other web
hosts, you're going to just go to the website itself and go
to a specific page to log in, but with Bluehost, this is the
way that that process works. And the next thing I wanna
do here is actually uninstall some of the bloatware that comes on your WordPress website to begin with. And that's just software
that you really don't need, that's just taking up space for no reason. Bluehost does install
their own plugin here, which shows you step-by-step
how to build your website. I don't need this and I don't
use this 'cause I already know what I'm doing, but you
may wanna use this yourself because there is a lot of good stuff here that may be used in your website especially when it comes to designing it. But again, I'm gonna show
you how I designed my website with Astra, which is a free theme, and you're not gonna have
to spend any more money on some kind of premium theme. So now what I wanna do is go
down here to plugins and see what's already been installed on our blog. And as we can see here, if we
scroll down here to active, we can see there's a
good amount of bloatware, which has been installed here
that I personally am not gonna use this stuff but you know you guys may decide that you want to. I'm gonna deactivate and uninstall
quite a bit of this here. The anti-spam don't use it so I'm actually going to delete this. One of the things that I
do, I disabled comments on my website that helps
me cut down on spam because people can't leave spam comments if there's no way to comment,
so I'm gonna go ahead and delete this right off the bat. Bluehost, I'm going to leave this on here, this is the plugin which
links your Bluehost dashboard and allows you to go over
here and connect directly through your Bluehost portal
so I'm gonna leave that, but if you want to, you can
remove that and just log into your or WordPress
website through your website, rather than going through your web host. Constant contact, this
we definitely don't need, I'm gonna deactivate that. I use a different plugin
for email opt-ins, which I will teach you later. So we deactivated it and
I'm now going to delete it. Next up, Google analytics for
WordPress by MonsterInsights, I don't use this so I'm gonna
deactivate it and delete it. This one right here, I
have literally never heard of this in my life, I
don't know what this is so I'm going to delete that. Next we have Jetpack by WordPress, I don't use Jetpack either so
I'm going to deactivate that. I'm gonna deactivate
opt-in monster as well. Pretty much the only two plugins
I'm going to leave myself here are WordPress Forms
Light and that default Bluehost plugin that allows you to follow these helpful steps here
in setting up your website. That being said, now let's go ahead and get to the next setup step. So I'm gonna go ahead and
follow what Bluehost has set up here for us with these steps
for setting up the homepage and different things like that. So we'll start with this here, let's start with your homepage. We're going to click
the get started button and we'll see what options we have. So what do you want people to see when they land on your site? Well, if we look at Farmland Riches here, my other blog we're modeling this off of, they're brought to a static
homepage where they have a link to the core articles down here, which is the different blog articles and there's also a link to the free guide which is an email opt-in which
I'm gonna show you later. So that's what I recommend
is setting up a static page for your homepage so we'll go
ahead and click on that now. And we're gonna create a page
that we're simply calling Home, so now we'll go ahead and update it and it's gonna make that page
for us right in the backend. So now we have ourselves a
homepage and now we'll go ahead and follow step two which is
to start with a page or a post. So let's click add a page to our site. So by doing that, this made
this sample page here for us which is going to be something
we don't actually use, and we're actually going to change back to the traditional view here
for the WordPress editor, I'm not a big fan of this, I think this is a harder to follow. What you're gonna do, you're gonna go back to this icon here, and it's
going to bring you back to your backend of your website. Now we're gonna go back here
to plugins and we're actually going to add a new plugin to bring us back to the classic editor. So what you're gonna do is
go up here, click on add new and I'm gonna have you
install a couple of different plugins right now that you may need. First of all, the one we want
right here Classic Editor, we want that, install this. If you don't see this right here, just go ahead and search for it. And then when you click activate, now we're going to have the Classic Editor when we're editing pages and posts. So that's the very first one. Click on add new again
and now we're going to add another plugin called Pretty Links, which I'll show you how to use shortly. For now we're just installing it that way it's ready for us when we need it. So let's go ahead and find that, for some reason that didn't
pop up so let me see here. It looks like I had to
put the space in there for some reason, but
this is it right here. Pretty Links-Link Management, go ahead and install that now and then we're going to click activate. And then the only other
plugin that I want to install for now is called Ninja Tables, we're gonna go ahead and do that now. And this right here is Ninja Tables, so we're going to
install that and activate this on our website. Now I use the pro version
of both Ninja Tables and Pretty Links, you don't have to, I will show you how to get
away with the free plan, but I'm also gonna show you
some of the features available with the pro plans that you
may decide to use down the road and honestly guys, I'm a
big fan of starting small and scaling up over time so honestly start with the free plans and then
once your site is making money, maybe that's a good time to
reinvest some of those profits and upgrade to some of the pro plans that really don't cost that much. But for now this is what we
want, we wanna have Bluehost installed, the Classic Editor
activated, Ninja Tables, Pretty Links and WordPress Forms Light. Now, when we go back to Pages
and take a look at that page that we just created, it's
gonna look a lot different. And here we are with the old school look, I think it's a lot easier to work with, and so that we're going to use. So I actually switched over to the backend of my Farmland Riches website
since we have more going on here rather than just
that static, basic website, because I wanna show
you guys what different visual elements you have
control over because this to me is a lot more helpful than simply looking at an empty website with no content. So I'm gonna show you
some of the basics here. This is the one area where you
may need to do a little bit of research above and beyond this video, is the overall design
aspects of your website. First of all, in this mode down here you have different selections
here looking at desktop and then a tablet version of your website and then a mobile version
and this will allow you to see what your website looks like, in these different formats. So let's start off here looking at desktop and just go through some
of this information. So under the Global menu
this is going to allow you to change colors and
fonts on your website. We click on Typography, we
can see my Base Typography is this one right here,
it's the Montserrat size 16. And if I change that it
would change the fonts across my website. And then under the Headings category here, this is going to be related to headers on your blog articles themselves. So if we jump over to my article here on AcreTrader versus FarmTogether, this is going to be relevant to headers which is something like this. So this for example is
an H2 and then I also use throughout here, some H3 and
smaller headings as well. So that is essentially going
to change things like this. Outside of Typography, we have colors, this is where you're
setting your base colors for your website like your
text color, link color, link hover color,
different things like that. These things you can change
later on when you are tweaking the design of your website. So under Site Identity this is
where you're changing things like your site logo, as well as your icon, which you're gonna have
to make at some point. Or you can go on Fiverr and if
you wanna invest a little bit of money you can have some logos made. I made all this myself I'm
pretty handy with Photoshop so watch a couple of Photoshop tutorials and make up a logo
here, as well as an icon for your website which you can upload. Site Title we set earlier. This is where you could
change that right here is with Site Title and then my
Tagline which we already saw. That's everything under Site Identity. The next thing I wanna talk
about is Menus which is actually pretty important because your
menu is going to be your site navigation which let me get
back into that section here, because this moved me, but
if we go back into Menus, that's gonna be your
site navigation up top and I have Main Menu by default and that's essentially what you have here. So if we take a look at the
menu set up for my website and I'm gonna just open
it up in a separate tab just so we're not being confused. This is the menu up here
is these different options that we have available to us
and I put all these in myself. So we have my homepage, which
is what you're looking at now. We have my Beginner's Guide
To Farmland Investing, which is my main article on this website that brings in the
majority of the traffic. We also have a option
here for platform reviews which has this nice dropdown,
where I can pick and choose different articles to read and
if you click on one of these, it's gonna bring you over
to that specific review. Under Guides I have the different Guides that I've written here
that I'll drop down. And then under Comparisons,
I only have one comparison content that I've written so
far and then there's Contact Us which is where you can contact
the owner of the website. That is probably something
you're gonna work on down the road when you
actually have content, but that is all being controlled over here in the menu section, where
you have main menus and then you have sub menus where you
can create these dropdowns. This is pretty easy to
put together here guys, you just click and drag
these things left and right so for example, right
now I have AcreTrader versus FarmTogether as a
dropdown under Comparisons. But if I click on this and
drag it back to the left and separate it, now
it's gonna show up up top as a separate menu item but
if I want, I just drag it over to the right and
it becomes a dropdown as part of the Comparisons. So that's how you set up
those menus with the dropdowns and I think that looks pretty nice to me. All right guys so it's another
day here in the process of us building this website from
scratch and as you can tell, I've done a couple of
different things here to kinda dress up the site a little
bit, but don't worry, I'm going to go through and show you guys how I did everything that you see here and so basically what I've
done since we last talked, and since I finished the
last part of the video, I added this little tagline here up top, and I added some header
menus here that way it can go to different parts of the
website and I made some blank pages for some different
things that you may need on your website and I'll show
you exactly how I did that. I also started this home
page here with a stock image of a woman on a rowing machine
and I added the text here, best home rowing machines
2021 and as far as the goes, you can kinda decide
what you wanna do with it if we go over to Farmland
Riches it's very basic, it just has this image
here of some farmland and then it has the transparent header. And then you have a button
to go to the articles, or it leads to the lead
magnet here where they can drop their email and
download this free guide. And then down below it simply
has this auto-populated section with different
categories for articles and this is all really
easy to set up guys, the only issue is I don't
have any real articles for rowingbasics.com and I
don't plan on creating any because it's just a dummy website for now. Maybe down the road I'll
actually do something with it, but for the time being, it is strictly for demonstration purposes, but this is where we're at
right now with this site. And these are just some
names of some popular rowers, I didn't actually write these articles, I just wanted to use this as an example, because let's say you
actually made this blog while this may not look
pretty, you could probably get away with what we have
right here as your homepage. What we're looking to create
here is what many call the MVP or the minimum viable
product, because you can always expand on this and
make it bigger and better, but what we're trying
to do early on is make the simplest website that
is able to get traffic and hopefully make some
money and if you're unclear on how you would actually
monetize this blog, I wanna go ahead and
cover that quickly now, but later on, we're gonna
go into much more detail. Essentially what you would be
doing is earning a commission every time somebody
purchases a rowing machine. So for example, I have some
rowing machine reviews here, and this doesn't actually
go to a link it just goes to a blank page on the
website as you'll see here, where there's literally nothing here, but if this was a real blog
I would include some links to my rowing machine reviews
and then I would write reviews about these rowing machines
or what I would really do is hire somebody to write those articles, which is what I did over
here with Farmland Riches. And then basically let's
say somebody's reading Concept2 rower review and they say, "Hey, this was a great
review, I'm gonna go ahead and buy that rower," well,
basically they would just click that link and if they clicked
it and made the purchase, you might earn a commission. So for example, if we
just go to Google here, when we type in like
best home rowing machines you're gonna see that a couple of sites are doing this already. So menshealth.com has
this article here called the 18 best indoor rowing
machines for your home gym and if you scroll down
here and take a look, well if you find one that you like, for example, the Nordic Track RW900 rower, they have a button right
here called shop now. And if we click this link as
you can see this is an Amazon affiliate link so if we
actually made this purchase, they would make a
commission and just to prove that you right here,
look at this right here, we see tag Men's Health, so
we know that this is in fact an affiliate link and if somebody clicks over from that website
and makes a purchase, you would earn a
commission in the process. Now I don't personally monetize my blogs with Amazon affiliate links
as the main revenue source, because I find you can make a
lot more money by establishing relationships directly with the company. So what I would do is I would
reach out to Nordic Track independently and say,
"Hey, do you have a separate affiliate program where
I can refer sales right to your website and earn a
commission in the process?" But that's a very basic
understanding of how you would make money is you write articles
like this or individual reviews of different things like
this so if I look up like Nordic Track RW900 and then review, we'll see who has a review
of this and it's PC magazine which is kinda strange to
be honest with you guys, I would expect there to
be something different because that's not really
what you would expect as far as somebody who
makes a review of a rower but anyway let's check
out this one right here, it's called a waterrowingmachine.com and they have a review. So there we go, this is a perfect example of what we're trying to build here. This is an affiliate blog I
have no idea if it's making a ton of money or a little
bit but it's a very basic blog and it's similar to like what
I would be building here. So basically this person has
written a review of this rower and by the looks of it, it's
a pretty comprehensive review, but you would be ultimately
making this type of content yourself or hiring somebody
to do that and again the whole point is to get
people to click this button right here, which is an affiliate
link and then this person is able to make commission on that sale. So back to our website, let's go back under the
hood and talk about a couple of these tweaks I made to
our site that you can follow along with now as you're
building your site. And then eventually we can
get into the fun stuff, such as mapping out content
and monetizing the actual blog. The first thing I wanna
cover is the SSL certificate and it looks like it was activated
by default using Bluehost so once the domain is officially
registered, it looks like it already and it activated
the SSL certificate because if we click here it shows that there is a SSL
certificate through Cloudflare and this is what you get for
free because you used Bluehost but just to show that to you
guys, let's go to bluehost.com and log back in and I'll show
you where you would go to turn on or turn off that SSL certificate
and again, all this does is shows somebody visiting your website, that the information there is secure and it allows them to
trust the website versus getting a notification that
the website is not secure. But what you would do is
go over here to My Sites and then you're gonna go
ahead and click on Manage Site then you're gonna go over here to Security and under Security we can see
SSL Certificate:Let's Encrypt and it's already turned on. If this is already on, you
don't have to do anything, if it's off, simply turn
it on and that is going to take care of the SSL certificate. Now I'm gonna show you how
to set up your permalink structure and if you don't
know what that means, don't worry guys, I'm
gonna show you right now. So over here on Farmland
Riches, we're using the permalink structure that I recommend, which is simply putting
the post name immediately after the slash on your website. So what I mean by this is
some websites actually include like dates here or categories
or different information like for example, maybe it
would include today's date so what if it was like
01/01/20/acretraderreview this could be a permalink if
you don't change this setting. And the problem is you have a
really long and crowded link for no reason and it
actually could hurt your SEO because you want basically
whatever is included here after the slash to be
relevant to the keyword that you're looking to
rank for so for example, /acretrader-review, brings
me to the AcreTrader review on my website so basically
I just wanna make sure there's not any random gibberish
in here before that slash, and it gives you a nice clean
link structure on the site. So how you do that we're
gonna go to the actual website itself and start over there and it's gonna take you about 30 seconds. So really easy tweak here
you're gonna wanna go into your backend WordPress
Dashboard, once you get here, you're gonna go down here to
Settings and then permalinks and you simply want to make
sure you've checked the box for Post name which by
default is simply going to include the name of
your post as your article and you wanna put a dash in there if there's going to be a space
so that's your next step. So for example, if we go
over here to my Posts, I made this fake post called
best home rowing machines if we click on it, I've set my permalink to rowing
basics.com/besthomerowing machines, which might be a keyboard
I was going after. You can change it by
clicking the edit icon, but once you've published the article, don't change this permalink
without doing a redirect, but I'll show you how to do that later, just in case you do decide
to make that change. So for example, if I decided I
wanted to get rid of the home and just make it best rowing
machines I would simply do that since I've already made
this article on my site, I don't actually wanna make that change since this is a published article so I'm gonna leave it as
best home rowing machines, but you pretty much just
wanna include your keywords here when you do an
article so for example, if I was doing a review
of the Concept2 rower, let me go ahead and add a
new post and I'll show you what I would do I would
simply do this right here I'd go Concept:2 Rower Review 2021 and then I would do Best Rower? I would just do something like this and then if I click Save
Draft it's going to give me a really long permalink
here, which is pretty much the entire sentence I've
just written up there so we don't want it to be this
long because at that point Google is not gonna look
at all of this information it's just simply way too
long so what I would do is just get rid of some
of the stuff at the end. And you also do not want to
include any numbers or dates in your permalinks because
when 2022 rolls around, you don't wanna have to do
all these crazy redirects for the new year. So I always leave the
year in my article titles, but I don't put it in the
permalink so I would simply backspace this out and
then I would click okay and then after I write
this article in order to find it on the
website, you would just go to rowingbasics.com/concept-2-rower-review and that is an SEO friendly permalink that is nice and organized. So that is how you wanna set
up permalinks on your site and the same thing goes with pages, which I'm going to show
you now, so before I get into that let me just show you what I'm talking about by
looking at Farmland Riches, because there's a couple of
pages that you may decide to include on your website, just because you typically
find these on all other blogs. So we already have the
homepage, which is just this really basic image
that I've put together, but I'm gonna show you how
I did it in a little bit and we're actually gonna
spice up this design to make it a little bit
more visually appealing. But anyway, going back
here to Farmland Riches, you'll see in my header
menu, we have the homepage we have the link to my main article, we have Platform Reviews and my dropdown, we have Guides, Comparisons
and then we have a Contact Us page so, let me show you that right now, something you probably wanna set up that way people can get a hold of you. If you click on Contact Us first of all, pay attention
to my permalink structure you see it's just
farmlandriches.com/contact-us nice and clean. I keep it super simple
guys, I just made this page that says for all inquiries, please email farmlandriches@gmail.com,
that's it all right? And if you wanna see how I would do that, if I go over here to rowingbasics.com, go back into my Dashboard,
go over here to Pages and then I made the page
called contact but if you don't have this already just click Add New and then call it contact. So you would literally just put contact. I don't need this because
I already have it, so let me go back here to
Pages and it shouldn't save because I didn't save anything so that's how you'd make that. So if you go in here to Contact this is where you would
edit what is on this page. So for example, you can see this page is rowingbasics.com/contact
and then I would say something similar here so I mean, you can literally just
copy this if you want to, and then paste it in here and
then just change the email so let's just pretend I
have, well we wanna get rid of this bullet point here. Let's say we have rowingbasics@gmail.com, which I don't own that Gmail
so if anybody steals it and tries to email you with
that email, it's not me so I don't know who that is
probably a scammer, but anyway, I have now made that the text on this page and next thing I wanna do is just show you what that looks like. So if we go back to rowingbasics.com, I've already added the
contact page up here in the header menu, which I've
shown you how to do earlier, just for a quick recap
in case that is something that's confusing you, I
will show you at the end, after we get into these pages here, because those are also very important. But now if you go over
to the contact page, you have a very similar looking text here. You could probably
dress it up a little bit and mess with the spacing if you want it to have less spacing here, you could also change these
fonts if you wanted to, but I don't really care
about that because at the end of the day, someone isn't
going to be on your website and say, "Oh, I don't wanna
read this because of the font." I'm not a huge design person
as you can tell from this blog, it's really very, very basic, but I just wanna reiterate
the fact here that even though this doesn't look
that good, it makes money. People read these articles
like they're not here for all this, they're
here for the information, you know and at a certain
point you can get more detailed with design, but when you start out guys, I would just keep it
simple you know, this works and this is making money
and it's basic and boring, but it works and gets the job done. So anyway, that's how I made
this little Contact page for the About page you just make the page and I'm not actually going
to fill anything here because I don't even have an
about page for Farmland Riches I don't even have that page
because it's just like to me I don't feel it's necessary
it wasn't really worth it in the beginning to make that page, wasn't gonna be a revenue driver for me so I just figured I'll skip that. Going back here, though,
we do need to talk about these pages that
I put in the footer, which is your Site Disclaimer, Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Now this gets into something
a little bit complicated because you do need to
have these on any website out there especially if you
are collecting user data, such as the email opt-in
which I am doing with my site. So down here in the
footer which is the bottom of the website just to show
you guys this is the footer and the very top is the header and then you have the sidebars
left and right sidebar, just so you have some terminology here. Down here on the footer,
you can see I have links to Disclaimer, Terms of
Use and Privacy Policy. So if we go to my Disclaimer,
you're gonna see it brings you to this nice disclaimer
that mentions my company, which is Scribner Media LLC. And this gives all of my disclaimers here, I have an affiliate disclosure,
Amazon affiliate disclaimer, sponsored posts, fair use and
if you're wondering if I hired a lawyer no I didn't, I paid for a service and I'm gonna show you that shortly, but I just wanna show
you what this looks like if you are curious what these things are. So I have a Disclaimer,
I have Terms of Use, which is a separate page and
also includes a bunch of random information to be honest
with you I don't even know what 2/3 of this is and
then I have privacy policy. All that I know is this
is what helps you operate a legitimate business
and it helps you to avoid any potential lawsuits and
I'm not saying it's gonna you know, mean you don't get
sued I mean there's always the possibility of that I
think it's a minimal risk with what we're doing here with blogging I've certainly never
run into issues myself and I don't really know anybody
who has, but I will tell you that you need to have this privacy policy, terms of use and disclaimer on your site. Now, is it the very first
thing you need to do? Probably not I would maybe
focus on making some articles for your site and then
maybe once you get traffic, you can set up these
pages but you don't wanna have this be the last thing
on your list and forget about it and then realize
you're not following the rules with your site. The only other disclaimer
that I include site-wide is a free plugin I'll show it to you later and that is merely my
affiliate disclosure, which is required by the FTC. So pretty much all it does
is before every article on my site it includes
this text right here, which says, "Some of
the links on this site are affiliate links." You could literally just
type this in yourself if you want to, but I
prefer using this plugin because it does it
automatically that way I know every single one of my articles site-wide has the affiliate disclosure. So I made the pages, all right? And right now they don't go to anything there's nothing on there
it's just says Disclaimer, Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You're gonna wanna add these to your site. If you're making a legitimate business and you're investing a little
bit of money right now, I will show you what
service I used but you know, you might decide to do this
down the road after your site gains some traction I'm
not saying you have to dump a bunch of money into this right now, but anyways I have a link
down below for the service that I use to be fully
transparent I am affiliated with this company it's
called plugandlaw.com and it's pretty much a plug
and play process for getting your disclaimer, terms of
use and privacy policy. So it doesn't cost very much
I'll show you guys the website now if you do decide to use it,
I would very much appreciate your use of my affiliate
link, seeing as I'm taking very valuable information that has made me tens of thousands if not hundreds
of thousands at this point and I'm handing it to you for
free, because the thing is, this didn't happen
overnight I've been doing this for three years now and I've learned a lot of this and I'm giving
you guys all the shortcuts here so if you wanna give back to me, please consider using
those links down below. So anyway, this is Plug
and Law, if we go over here to pricing you can get your
legal bundle for 97 bucks it's not a heck of a lot of money guys that comes with your privacy policy, terms and conditions and disclaimer, she also gives you a bonus trademark guide and bonus affiliate marketing legal guide, but that's really all you need right here as these three core documents,
it's going to be tailored to your name or your LLC if you have one and it's 97 bucks and it
helps you to rest easy and honestly guys, every
single website has it even this one right here, plugandlaw.com has terms and conditions,
as well as privacy policy so you need this stuff on your website, and if you want to run
a legitimate business, you should probably just do this now but if you're looking to save some money, you could have this be a
later step in your process. But now what I wanna show you
guys is how I actually added those pages in the footer, you're familiar with the
process of making a new page, because I showed you how
to make that Contact page and if you want it to make
this About page you could too just to recap guys if
you're forgetting here, you just go here, click on
Pages and then you would click the plus button or Add New
and you'd create a new page. Once you've made that
page now you may decide okay, I wanna put this
in my header or footer and in order to do that,
you're gonna go into Menus and I already made these
menus, but I'm gonna wipe 'em out and start from scratch
just so you guys can see what this process looks
like so I just deleted my footer menu it's gone
forever and I just deleted my main menu so watch up
here this is gonna disappear. So there goes my main menu. It recreated a basic one
up top where it's simply by default it looks like
it just listed every page from my website manually
up top but you might not wanna have disclaimer, privacy
policy, terms of use up top I personally don't
because 99.99% of people are never gonna to click
on these they're just there because it's required by law. But anyway, what you do here
is go to Create a New Menu and then you're gonna name the
menu so I'm just gonna call this header and then I'm
going to check the box 'cause this is gonna be my
primary menu, which is up here. Then you click next and then
you're going to add some items, so now we have this blank
menu with nothing up there so now we add items and this is where you pick and choose what goes up there. So this would be my cornerstone piece I would add that first. And then I would do my About
page and then I would do Contact and that now shows up over here and you can literally just
reorder them if you want to. So now you can see About
is first and let me just get this out of the way
so you guys can see. So now we have About, best
rowing machines 2021 and Contact. If you wanna do the nesting
thing all you do is click and drag that forward so
now About becomes a dropdown and best rowing machines
is in that dropdown. That doesn't make any sense
so I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna just leave it like this where you have best rowing
machines, About and Contact. Like I said I personally
wouldn't even do this About page myself because it's unnecessary
and that doesn't really follow the MVP model of building
a minimum viable product, but you may choose to add
that if you decide to. Now for the footer menu, we're
gonna go ahead and go back here and Create a New Menu
and I'm just gonna call this one Footer and then I'm gonna say, it's the Footer Menu and
then click next and I'm gonna scroll down so you can
see the changes live. So right now in the footer,
there's no menus down here. But if we go to Add Items,
we can add Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy
and then all of a sudden those guys are down there
let me hit publish to save my updates and then I will close this out. And now just like that, we
have created the header menu here with our cornerstone
article which I'll explain what that means later About and Contact and then down below, we have Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy. At this point, it would be just up to you to go through Plug and
Law or whoever you wanna go through and have those
documents written up and then you would just
paste them on those pages and I also recommend
including a way for people to contact you at the
bottom of those documents. So that's how you set up those pages, adding them to your menus and that's also how to make sure you have
the correct legal documents that way your site is compliant. Okay so now I wanna go
through a bit more detail here on how I dressed up this home
page very slightly by adding this image I also added the
tagline here for the actual blog and we're actually going
to be making an icon for up here as well, so
if you look over here on farmlandriches.com, Facebook actually is a good example, too they
have this little icon here. We're gonna make one,
so for Farmland Riches, it's this little piece of grass and for rowingbasics.com it's this default of just this globe, but it is kinda cool to dress it up a little
bit and I'm gonna show you how we do that I'll also show
you how I added the tagline here below this name and
how I uploaded this image and how I made this little
dropdown here with some different links which you could
send to review articles on your website. So first of all, let's cover
the image just for some basics. So let me go back here to Edit page and I've already uploaded
this image and compressed it, which is very important but I
have a whole section planned for the end talking about image
compression so don't worry about that too much right
now, but I'm just gonna show you the steps so you are familiar if we were to remove this
image and I'm gonna just get rid of all of this here
too like we're gonna start from a completely scratch
homepage all right? So if I click Update and
then I go back to my homepage of rowingbasics.com,
well, now I have nothing I'm back to zero you know,
I've got nothing here, okay? So the first thing if you
wanna have that image back is you go here to Add Media
now I've already uploaded this image myself so I'm
not gonna re upload the file because later you're gonna see
this process that we're gonna talk about filling out
these different areas here and we're gonna talk most
importantly about this file size, which is very important 'cause
we compressed it to make sure it's as small as possible. For now I'm just gonna
click Insert into Post and the main thing is I
wanna make it full-size since this is the homepage. So insert into post and there
is our rowing lady once again. So now if I click Update and
we go back to my homepage, all that we've done done is
simply get back this image of a woman utilizing this rowing machine. And if for some reason you
wanted to change this text right here, all you would do
is change this and it's gonna update that so let's say for example, you didn't wanna have 2021 in there well take it out, click Update
and then if I refresh this, now it just says best home rowing machines so you could really make that
say whatever you want it to. So after this, now we're
going to make a sub-section assuming this is the homepage so what you do with your
homepage is kind of up to you. like I said, over on
Farmland Riches I just used this very basic format of
having just the start here and the free guide and
then latest articles this is really basic but
just to do a different blog, like let's just go to Listen
Money Matters that's a blog that I'm familiar with and I
haven't looked at it in like six months so let's just
jump on their homepage. There's is pretty simple too actually they just have your header
menu which you're familiar with now with their
different pages, they also have the email drop here,
which is gonna be something I'm gonna show you how we do that later. who they're featured in, and
then just some different things here about their podcast
and it's just kind of like a get started piece here that
shows you the different ways you could go and it points
to some of their best guides on their website with some
fancy looking links and buttons. Then they have some
reviews of their affiliates and then down below the
menu so this is actually a really simple website
I'm a big fan of this and this would be very
easy to create on your own. And you can see here, they
have their own icon too up top and they have a little logo
here, which I'll show you how to create that if you want
to use something different than just the basic
text name of your site, whereas on rowingbasics.com, you can see it's literally
just text but if we look at Farmland Riches I actually
made a very basic logo. And that's why it looks like
this is bolded and this is not so I'll show you how we did
that in a little bit here, but this is basically
one version of a homepage this didn't happen overnight,
this blog has been around for probably the better part
of 10 years is my guess. So you're not gonna get
something that looks this good from start but just look
around and get some ideas. If I was doing something
really basic like I said, what I would do is under
this image, I would just link to my top reviews so you could literally just write down Rowing Machine Reviews. And then at that point
you would go underneath and start a bulleted list. Now there is one thing
we're forgetting here and that I'm gonna show you
in a second but for now, let's just pretend these
are links to my different rowing reviews that I've
already written on my site. I don't have any real
reviews so this is just for demonstration purposes
this is as if you have written these articles already. You would write the name
of your review, select it, click on the link icon, you
always wanna click the gear here and open in a new tab, every
single link on your website, it's gonna help with your
bounce rate, so always open link in a new tab and let's say,
for example this article best home rowing machines was
this review so we're gonna add link we're gonna do the
same thing for these, we're gonna pretend these
are all different reviews when in reality it's not,
but we're just doing it for the show here, just so you guys know what we're doing for demonstration. So if I click update now
and we go back to the blog, you're gonna notice that
we're not quite there yet in terms of where we were earlier, okay? Because you'll see best
home rowing machines up top, but then rowing machines
reviews, well that text is really small and if you weren't
looking, you might miss it so how do I get this text
down here to look big? Like this text right here? Well that is very simple and
it comes to this dropdown menu right here where you can
choose paragraph headings and pretty much guys,
all I use is paragraph and then H1 through H3
very rarely do I use H4 so let me explain now. If I was down here, I
would make this an H2 I never do as another H1 on
a page because this becomes your H1 so just so you're
aware when using headers and I'll explain what
headers do in a minute, but you wouldn't make this an H1 that's because you
already have an H1 up here so you'd make that an
H2 that's the biggest you ever start with all right? Now, if I click Update and I
go over here and I refresh, you're gonna see that this
is nice and big now okay? But this is just one way to do headers, because that is just header
2 you could also utilize header 3 or header 4 and
basically you wanna think of this as a system of breaking
things down into more specific parent and then child categories. So for example, let me
just make one down here because this will make
more sense so let's say our main category was types of food okay? This is the main parent
category I would make this an H2 All right? And then in that let's
say I was gonna cover different types of food
let's say I wanted to do American food and then I wanted
to do Spanish food, okay? And then I wanted to do
Chinese food, all right? These, I would actually make
an H3 because they still fall under the category here
of types of food, okay? So like, let's say under types
of food, I was gonna say, here are the different
types of foods that I like. Just so there's more texture
on the screen American foods. And then if I said, my favorite
American foods in order. All right this is where now you could go into more detail like
the burger all right? I don't even know if that's American. French fries let's say that's
another one and let's say salad all right? I don't know who makes
who these foods belong to, but anyway you can now make these an H4 because they're all
related to the category above it so let me actually
get rid of these just for organization sake so
H2 would be types of food and under that you have American
food that would be your H3 'cause it still fits under
types of food and then if you have specific American
foods, you wanna talk about, those would sit under an H4. So we're gonna talk about
this more when we get into content, but I
just wanted to give you a explanation of headers right now. And the point is now when I
update that and I refresh this, it just makes things more
organized for the reader. So your H1 is always gonna
be your biggest text, okay? This is your H1. This is your H2, this is another H2. This is your H3, this
is your H4 beyond that I don't use H5 or H6 but you
might decide to if you wanna organize things differently, but that is how you would
keep everything organized and that's how I'm slowly
building my homepage all right? I would just include
links to my main reviews and what I would basically do, with this homepage is
I would just make this almost like a choose
your own adventure, okay? On your website where you point
to the different resources available on your site
and simply give people an easy means of navigation
and also understanding what your website is about. So that's how I did the
image, that's how I did these headers and these links
and the different reviews. Now let me get into more
details about how I added this tagline and let's
actually make a logo for this website that
way it's not so boring. All right, so let's cover a
couple of more design aspects here for the website we're
gonna make a logo up here and I'm gonna show you how I
got this tagline to show up and we're gonna also make a new icon so that way we don't have
this boring globe up top. Of course, we go to
Customize to get started, and next we're going to
click on the Header menu and then we go over here to
Site Identity, all right? And as you can see in here
we have a couple of different options we have a site logo
we can upload, a site icon and we already have the
site title, all right? All I did to show this
tagline is this box right here you check a box that says
Display Site Tagline. When I uncheck that no more
tagline, when I check it, we get our site tagline so if
you wanna have that show up, that's that easy. Display Site Title if you don't
want your titles displayed, you can uncheck that and
it would get rid of it. And that's pretty much
the main options here but what we wanna do now is
create a logo and create an icon in order to replace this and replace that. I have a Photoshop
subscription, I'm gonna show you how to do this on Photoshop
if you don't have Photoshop, look up a Canva tutorial or
there's free alternatives, but this is what I use so
I'm just gonna show you that. All right, so we're gonna ahead
and make a new project here in Photoshop we're just gonna
make this a width of 250 and a height of 100 pixels
with a transparent background. Since it is a logo after
all and then we just click on Create and we're gonna
make sure our logo fits within this boundary
here and I'm pretty lazy when it comes to logos guys, I don't really do anything fancy, okay? So I'm just gonna make
something really simple here using text and I'm just gonna follow what I did with Farmland Riches, and I'm just gonna make half of it bold. And then we have to get
this down to a smaller size, just so we can see what we're doing. And then all I did is
I took half of my word and I just made half of
this bold rather than making it regular font right here so if I go here and I just make that bold,
now we have the Rowing which is bold and the Basics which is not. I'm pretty lazy but that's pretty much all I'm gonna do here
and then I'm just going to make it black because
I want to just keep the site super simple. So I would change that color up here, and you just drag it down
here and make this black. But if you want it to, you
could also make it red, or dress it up however you want to, but I'm gonna keep it super simple and we're gonna go with this as our logo. So let me go ahead and save that as a PNG to make sure I maintain
the transparent background so we'll just call this site
logo and go down here to PNG. And this should be a
pretty small file size, if I click save, it should
give me some options. And I'll see how this ended up coming up, what it came out file size wise, but it should be pretty small. So now if I go here and I select a logo, I'm gonna upload this file, go to select files and site logo. Yeah this is only four
kilobytes so that's very small, that's totally fine, doesn't
need to be compressed. And then I would just have my site title, be site logo and then I
would just type in this here, logo for website, I'm gonna explain what this alt text is later on. And now we just have to
crop it so we wanna get rid of some of that white space, so it really doesn't matter
what resolution you start with because you're gonna crop it anyway. Go ahead and crop the image
and then we now we'll see this being replaced. So now we have duplicates and
in order to get rid of that, that's pretty easy, you just go here and uncheck display site title. So now if you wanted to, you could leave it with Rowing Basics, your number one resource
for rowing machines, or you could simply get rid
of that tagline altogether and just display Rowing Basics. You can make your logo
wider by doing this, or smaller by adjusting that
if you wanna have a bigger versus smaller logo on your
website, you can just adjust it so, you know, you don't
have to necessarily change the size in Photoshop, you can build it and then just adjust it here. So that's very basic instructions on how to make a website
logo, this is not very good but that's all I did
for Farmland Riches too is I literally just typed
it out in Photoshop, and then I just made Farmland bold and it's a really basic looking website, but if I was actually doing this this is exactly what I would do. So let me go ahead and publish that now and now we're just gonna make
one of these little icons for the website itself so we
have this little grass here. All I'm gonna do for that
is go to Google images and look for an icon. I haven't really thought
of a good icon for this because I don't know if
there's gonna be rowing icons, but let's try it, I'm just
gonna search rowing icon. And the main thing that I
always make sure to do here is I go to tools, go to usage rights and I use Creative Commons licensing that way I'm not gonna get in trouble. We have some basic icons
here but I don't think any of this is really gonna
fit me because, you know, but this might work right
here, this is the rowing icon with the rowing machine
itself, or maybe you'd wanna go with something like this. We'll go ahead and grab this one just because, this would probably work for us, although it's not gonna be seen very well because it's black, and a black on gray is not gonna be great so let's try this one. All right, this isn't
really what we're doing because this is rowing in a boat, but, you know, we're gonna
just go ahead and go with this, let me just call this rowing icon, use creative comments or
make your own logo here. And even using creative comments, I would also recommend
like, just make sure you have the licensing rights to use this for commercial purposes. You can also use that
option for commercial and other licenses just
to make sure you're good, but I generally make my own logos so you can make 'em
yourself, I'm not gonna get into logo design because I
don't actually make 'em myself, I hire it out on Fiverr and
I have a graphic designer on my team as it is now. So I don't design stuff myself guys, that's not my strong point,
I'm just showing you guys how to do this so if you
design a logo yourself, you can follow these steps, or you can hire someone on Fiverr. So now let's go to site
icon, select site icon, I'm gonna upload that file. Assuming it is truly
transparent which it is, we should have no issues. Click on open and then
we're just going to call this roaming icon and
then I'm just gonna make this icon of a person
rowing for the alt text. Basically for alt text, what
you're doing is describing the purpose of the image
so that's all you do is write a quick description of it, and the reason you're doing
that is because images can rank in Google, which
means you can get clicks to your site from images
so more on that later, but you always wanna fill that out. Click select, and there
we go so now the icon is a guy in water rowing on a boat and it doesn't look that
good, but I don't really care because this is just a basic demo. All right, I wouldn't
actually use this in real life 'cause I can't tell what
that is and if I didn't know it was a person rowing a boat, I would have no idea
what I was looking at. Not to mention that as
somebody rowing in a boat and I'm gonna talk about rowing machines, but that's how you change that icon. That's how you change that logo, and that's also a very
basic idea of how to make the world's simplest logo in Photoshop. So if we start taking a look
at these sites side by side, you can see that we are
making some progress and we're working our way towards a
somewhat functional website. If we look at Farmland Riches
we'll see we have the logo, we have the icon, we
have a nice header menu, we have a footer menu and
I'm not gonna be able to show you guys this part because I
don't have any real articles for the site but the main
thing you're gonna find as you get good at blogging
is that your best bet is just to Google what questions you have because the good thing is by
using WordPress so many people, millions of websites,
probably tens of millions I don't have statistics on this, but I'm sure they're out there,
so many people use WordPress that if you're having an issue,
someone has had that issue before and you can simply
Google it and figure out how to set these things up yourself. So that's the most
valuable skill you can get to be a successful blogger, is learning how to figure
things out on your own and Google things and
have questions answered. Now, I wanna show you how
I made featured images for my articles since we're
doing some Photoshop stuff, and what I'm talking about is
these images right here, okay? I follow a very basic format
of this border and I added my icon with my logo and then
I have just the platforms. And so let me show you
guys how I made this. I'm gonna start off with a new project and the actual size I use
here for these featured images is 1200 by a height of
628 and that's what I used for the images on my Farmland
Riches website so we're gonna follow that same process
here for this website. So the first thing I
did if you look at mine, they have a white background
so we're gonna follow that same suit because
why reinvent the wheel when you don't have to so we'll
go to our paint bucket tool, we're gonna make our main color white and then we're just gonna go
ahead and make that boy white. You might be wondering
why I didn't just choose a non-transparent background,
and that's because I don't have an answer, but you
could do that as well. Next, we're gonna make a border, I'm gonna use this box tool
and I'm gonna pick a less boring color so I dunno,
we'll just do green again since I did green last time,
we'll pick like a dark green and just make a border that
looks something like this. Probably don't want it to be that wide, but that looks pretty good to me, then I'd move that up to the top. Now I'm just going to simply go over here and I'm gonna duplicate that layer. Now I will drag that extra
rectangle down here to the side, and I know I screwed up
the background so let me just move that quickly
here and then I would add some on the side as well so I
would just right click here, duplicate layer again, and then
you're gonna hit control T, that's going to allow you
to rotate that 90 degrees. And that should lock you in
for me but if it doesn't, you can just go up here
and make that a firm 90 and press enter. I'm gonna click that now, drag that over to the left-hand side, it
snaps into place, hit enter and then go over here and
I'm going to duplicate that one more time for my right side. And then I would simply
put that over here, and we have essentially now
created the same type lint that I had made for my other site. This is really not that
great, looks kinda crappy, you could certainly do
better if you wanted to, but this is just what I did for my site. Now we're gonna go ahead
and place our logo, we're gonna place embedded 'cause I wanna have my website URL on every
featured image on my site. So I would grab my rowing icon,
I would place that in here, make that much smaller, put that over here in
the right-hand corner and then we're gonna size
it based on how much space our text takes up so let me just go ahead and place that zoom in a little bit and we'll pull our text in here now, which is just gonna be rowingbasics.com, I'm gonna make that black. And if you wanna follow
that same process of making the front half bold, I always
think that looks kinda cool. And it's actually all bold right
now so maybe I'll just make this regular and then it would look like that rowingbasics.com. It just dresses it up a little
bit, I think it makes it look a little bit more appealing without very much extra work whatsoever. And then I'm going to just simply, oops, I don't need two of these
so let me delete that. Now I'm just gonna move this down here and that would sit at the
bottom corner of my image so let's say that sits right there, and I think the rowing icon
is still a little bit big so let me shrink that down and I will put that centered
with the actual logo. So now if I'm to zoom out, we
have created a template here for a simple featured image. Certainly not anything
to write home about, nothing glamorous, but
this is a basic template for a featured image. So now let's say for example, I was doing a review
of the Concept2 rower, now I'm simply just gonna go to Google, and get an image of that rower or the logo so I'm just gonna search Concept2 rower, and then we're gonna go here to images. And generally speaking,
I don't usually pick a copyright free image here
because you may not find one, and if you're writing
a review for a company and you're using something
from their website, or maybe from Amazon, you
generally not gonna have issues, but if you're playing it safe,
you might wanna just reach out to them and make sure,
but this looks pretty good, I'm gonna save this image
as our Concept2 rower. Then I'm gonna go over here
and I'm going to place this on my featured image
template that I've made so we're gonna hit place
embedded and grab that image. And it's probably gonna
come in way too big so we'll shrink it down. And we're just going to put
this somewhere on these page so let's say we wanna have this
over on the right-hand side, this is how I would do this image, I'd put it on the right-hand side, make it a little bit bigger
and then I'd move it down a tiny bit. Let's put it right about here. All right, and then up here
is where I would put my text so now I would make other
texts and I would say. Let me get rid of all this. Concept2 Rower Review, all right? This I will manually make
larger just because we want it to fit that space so
let me just get my box about the right size. And now I'm gonna select my
text layer control T and I can just now make this whatever
size I want to so I can now drag this and move this into
a more appealing spot. So I would probably put
it right about there, and I know a lot of design
people are probably looking at this and they're horrified
and they can't believe that anyone in their right
mind would ever make something that looks this awful, but
it gets the job done guys. And this would work, I promise you this would work on a website. So there's a featured image,
now I'm gonna go up here, I'm gonna do file, save as,
I'm gonna make this one a JPEG. And then I'm gonna show
you how to compress the image that way you're
not loading up your website with large files. So for now, we're just gonna
call this Concept2 rower and it's JPEG so we're going to save it. Oh, that already exists
so we're just gonna have to make a Concept2
rower featured image. Click on save and it's 129 kilobytes, which may not sound like a lot, but we're gonna get that
file size a lot smaller. You would want to save
this as a template too if you're using Photoshop,
you would do file, save as a Photoshop format
and you would just call this like template. I don't need it 'cause I'm
not actually using this, but you would wanna
save that as a template for future reference. So for now we don't need to
save, I'm gonna close this out and now I'm gonna show you
how to compress that image and upload it to the website. All right, so we made our
featured image but the issue is the file size is a little
bit too big so we're gonna use a completely free website
called Short Pixel in order to shrink up that image
size so it's not so big. So all you do is go to
Short Pixel, you can sign up if you want to, but you don't need to. All you do is click compress
then you're going to leave this as lossy and you're going to drop the file you just created. So I made the featured image, it starts off at 125
kilobytes, I'm gonna open it and it starts immediately
and then once it's done, it's going to give you a
much smaller file size. So we just got this thing down by 80% to just 25.9 kilobytes,
click the download icon and you get your file. No funny business here,
no, you know, spam, this seems like a pretty good
site maybe down the road, it might change but for
now this works pretty good. Now you have a featured
image and let's say you're making a post, let me
show you how you would do that. So we go back to Rowing Basics, okay? Now we're gonna go to
posts and let's pretend we have a review of the Concept2 rower. Well, we already made
this draft right here which I actually forgot about
but that's pretty convenient. The permalink is not gonna
work for us, it's too long, I would get rid of the
end part and so it would just say Concept2 rower review. Let me go ahead and now
upload our featured image. That's gonna be right
here under featured image, go to set featured image, upload files, select your file that you just compressed. Make sure you have the
smaller of the two files, this one's 125 kilobytes, this one is 26, that's the one we want. So now we'd click open and
then you're gonna fill out your alt text and title. So, title you can leave
that the same assuming you made it something relevant,
you wanna have your keywords in this title and then in your alt text, you just described the image. So I would just say review of
the Concept2 rowing machine, that's all I would do, set featured image and
then you're gonna see it pop up down here and now let me go ahead and click save draft. We're gonna cover the other
stuff about an article soon, but for now I just wanted
to show you how to do that featured image. So if we do a preview,
now we can see our image in full glory on our website
of Concept2 rower review, got a picture of the
rower, got our little icon and our website listed down here. You will notice the image
might be a little bit granular or pixelated, but no one's
really gonna care about that to be honest with you
guys and what you gain by having smaller files on your website far outweighs potentially
having a granular looking logo because I'm telling you guys this stuff really doesn't matter that much. Having smaller file
sizes does matter a lot so that's an important step to follow. So at this point now you
know how to make a logo, you know how to make a crude
looking featured image, you know how to set this
icon and that's literally all I did on Farmland Riches. If we go look at it, there's
no other design aspect here. That's it, I've just taught
you everything, all right? How to make this logo, how to make this little icon
and then this background image you could just set yourself if
you wanted to have something on your homepage and
then my featured images, I just literally showed you
guys my secret sauce here. If we go to AcreTrader versus
FarmTogether, you can see we're literally following
the same format here, this is almost identical here,
we just have the green border with rowingbasics.com
and then Farmland Riches. My border is a little bit too big here you could probably shrink
that down and, you know, get away with a smaller looking border and maybe a smaller logo down here, but you could also just leave it like this and I promise you, it would be fine. Very few people are gonna
find this and be like offended by the fact that it
doesn't look that good. This stuff really
doesn't matter that much, but it does dress up
your site and gives you a little bit more going on. So that's it for featured images, now you understand image
compression and anytime you upload any image on your
website, even for example, if we go back to Rowing
Basics the homepage, this image right here I also downloaded through Creative Commons to make sure that it was an image that I
could utilize and then I put it through Short Pixel to compress
it and then I uploaded it and added a title and an alt tag, that way it is a much smaller file size. So that's how you make images,
that's how you upload images, you've really come quite a ways here guys so now let's get into the next subject. Now we're gonna talk about
one of my favorite plugins out there, which is called Pretty Links. And this is a plugin that
allows you to set up your own separate links on your website
when you are pointing out to somebody else's site, and
it's important to do this for a couple of different reasons. Number one, it allows
you to track the number of clicks each of these
links gets so for example, if you're sending traffic
out to an affiliate link, you're gonna wanna use a Pretty
Link that way you can track how many clicks it's actually getting. Second of all, it's very
common in this industry for companies to change
the affiliate platform that they work with so for
example, one of the popular ones out there is called Impact Radius. However, there are also
other ones out there like CJ Affiliate or Ambassador. So let's say for example, you're working with one particular company and they give you an affiliate link, but then three months later
they work with a new affiliate platform, and then you have
to go change that link. Well, if you have to change that link across every single article
that you've written, that's gonna take you many hours and yes, I am speaking from personal experience. When I first started blogging, I didn't use Pretty Links
and I would constantly have to chase down and change links and it was a huge pain in the butt, but I'm gonna show you how to
avoid doing that very easily using Pretty Links. But first of all, what I wanna show you is Pretty Links in action so
you guys are able to understand what I'm talking about. So let's go over to
comparisons on Farmland Riches and open up the article
AcreTrader versus FarmTogether. So I'm affiliated with both
of these different companies and I earn commissions when
people click these links and at the end of this video
guys, I'm gonna show you the real money that this blog is earning just so you guys know that
I'm not blowing smoke here and that this small website
is actually making money almost every single day. But if we scroll down
here this table here, I'm gonna show you how to
do later, but if you see this button right here
that says View Investments, and you look at the bottom left here, you can see it says,
farmlandriches.com/go/farmtogether. Then we also have the same
thing here for AcreTrader, farmlandriches.com/go/acretrader
and we have the same thing here for Farmland LP,
farmlandriches.com/go/farmlandLP. So anytime I'm linking to these sites, I'm not putting the actual
affiliate link or web address, I'm using a Pretty Link which
is going to redirect it. So for example, and again,
the same thing right here, you'll see these links
are exactly the same and so let me just show you
what that would look like. So let's say you're sitting
here and your reading this article, and you
decide you wanna learn more about farmland investing
so you click on AcreTrader. When you click on view investments,
I want you guys to watch up here because this
link is going to change. So it goes to Pretty Links
first and then redirects to the affiliate link and
it's very easy to set up guys, and again, the advantage is number one, now you can track how many
clicks you're actually getting, and number two, now if
AcreTrader down the road has to change their affiliate link, all you have to do is change it once and it updates every link on your website, no matter where you use it. One of the most important
things when it comes to blogging is having a good system for
organization because the better your systems are, the less
time it's going to take to actually make these changes
and you're gonna be able to focus on creating content
and scaling your blog and you're not gonna be
bogged down with activities like going through and changing links across your entire site. So one of my philosophies
guys is build it right from the beginning and that's
why I'm teaching you guys three years of tips and
tricks that I've accumulated with my blogging career. So now let's go back to this article guys, I think you have a good idea
of what I'm talking about here. So anytime I mentioned
AcreTrader or FarmTogether, I use this link right
here, this go/acretrader, but now I wanna show you the backend so you understand how this actually works. So we already installed Pretty
Links when we were doing the different plugins at the
beginning so you should already have this on your WordPress site. Now you're gonna click on Pretty Links. Now I have the pro plan
because it gives me a couple of different features, but
you can use the free plan and you're not gonna have any issues, the only thing you can't
really do with the free plan is advanced reporting, but
you probably don't need that. This right here is the
backend of Pretty Links and I also use this to set up redirects which I'm going to explain that next. But anyway, for every one
of my different affiliates, and even for the non affiliates,
I have Pretty Links set up so when I mention them I use that link and it redirects to their website. So to be fully transparent
with you guys here, I am affiliated with AcreTrader and I'm affiliated with FarmTogether. I'm in the process of
creating an affiliate program with FarmFundr as well as
Steward and Harvest Returns just approved their affiliate program. So I'm gonna have three more
affiliates for this blog in the near future which
will mean it's gonna make more and more money, but
there's a couple of things I wanna to show you. First of all, let's look
at the actual clicks here because that is one of
the most useful pieces of data through Pretty Links. So there's two ways to look at this. Number one, you can look at
clicks on an individual link by clicking over here. So for example, AcreTrader has received 125 unique clicks so far. So if I click on this, it's
actually gonna show me a chart and I can see exactly how many clicks this article is getting per day. So you can literally
hover over it and see, okay, every single day this not article, but this affiliate link is getting traffic so it shows you that
people are clicking on it. But the other thing that's really cool if you go back here to Pretty Links, okay? And you hover over it and
then you click on clicks, this shows you total clicks
across the entire website. So it shows me where people are clicking and where they're going. So every single day on farmlandriches.com, I'm getting anywhere from
seven to 20 clicks per day on all the different links. Some of these are affiliate
links and some of them just point right to the website, but you can see right here
exactly what's getting clicked. So for example, today somebody has clicked on the FarmTogether affiliate link, the AcreTrader affiliate
link, the Farmland LP, FarmFundr links and Harvest Returns. And again, these are not affiliate
links but these ones are, but it gives me an overall
snapshot of what people are clicking on on my website
and this is what you're going to use to monetize your site. So now I wanna go back into
Pretty Links and show you guys what this actually looks like, because I wanna show
you two examples here. Like I said, AcreTrader is a
company I'm affiliated with, so if I click on this,
you're going to see my actual affiliate link pasted
in here, and right here is where you paste what
you want the link to be. So I take my actual affiliate link from the affiliate dashboard
that I'll show you later, and I paste it in here
under the target URL or where you want this person
to actually end up at the end. And then the Pretty Link is
the attractive looking link and the one you use
for organizational site across your entire website,
which is go/acretrader. That's the format that
I recommend is go/blank whatever the name is, but
you could get rid of that and just do/acretrader if you wanted to. So this here is an affiliate
link, that's why there's all this extra code in here, but
if we go back to Pretty Links and then we go to Steward for example, I don't have an affiliate link for Steward so I just redirect right to their website. However, it's just important
to have access to this data because this shows me how
many clicks this is getting. So for example, I'm in
negotiations right now with Steward and FarmFundr about how
much they're gonna pay me per referral, but if I'm able
to show them data and say, "Hey, my website is generating traffic almost every single day
for your investment, sometimes, you know, two
or three hits a day," you can then give them a
value proposition that shows, "Hey, I am generating traffic
and I want an affiliate link." So it gives you more leverage
when you can actually show companies data and say, "Hey, I'm directing this
traffic to your website." And then if you need to play hardball, you can actually turn off the traffic, which is probably not
something we're gonna get into in this tutorial, but that's more of an advanced negotiation strategy for negotiating with affiliates, but that's why we use Pretty Links, it allows you to track and see everything, I'm gonna show you how to make one and then we're gonna talk about redirects. So to make a new Pretty
Link, it is very simple, you go over here to your Pretty Links and then you're going to click add new, and then you're going to make that link. So let's say for example,
Fundrise was one of the people I was mentioning on my website, I would make that here the title Fundrise. that's a real estate investing platform. Next I wanna fill out my Pretty Link, by default it is one NKU, but
that's not very pretty at all so I'm gonna make it /go and
the slash is already there you don't have to type it in. So go/firsttrade. Go/fundrise so that is my Pretty Link. Now I actually am an
affiliate for Fundrise, but let's pretend I'm not. So let's just go to
fundraise.com and let's say, we're just looking to send
people to this website when we are mentioning it in the article, I would copy that and I
would paste this in here. So now, I click update and
you're gonna leave this as a 307 temporary, you don't change that. But now anytime somebody
clicks on this link, which is farmlandriches.com/go/fundrise, they're gonna be
redirected to fundrise.com. So let me show you guys
a live example of that, I'm gonna copy this link,
I'm gonna go up here and I'm gonna close this out
and I'm gonna do a new tab, I'm gonna paste that in
and I'm gonna hit enter and it brings me to fundrise.com. Not only that, it's also tracking
this so I can see exactly how many clicks I'm getting. So for example, if I wasn't
affiliated with Fundrise, and I wanted to pitch to
them a value proposition of hey, this is why I
should be an affiliate, I could literally show them the data and be like, "Look, I'm generating
clicks every single day, can I be part of your affiliate program?" So that is Pretty Links, it's free, you don't need the pro
plan, but if you wanna do advanced reporting, you
will need that pro plan, but you can do that down the road once you have some actual earnings and revenue from your blog to reinvest. Now, I wanna talk about
setting up a redirect. But before I show you
how to set up a redirect on your website, it's
important to understand what a redirect even is. And a redirect happens when
you're moving the address of a certain page or a
post on your website. So for example, let's go
to my Beginner's Guide To Farmland Investing. This guide lives at, farmlandriches.com/farmland-investing-for-dash
beginners/. If I wanted to change this URL, let's say I wanted to
make it farmlandinvesting and get rid of this for
beginners part here, I would need to set up a
redirect and change that URL. So what would happen is
every time somebody went to farmland-investing-for-beginners, it would redirect it to that new website, which would just be farmland-investing. The only time you're really gonna do this is if you're changing your permalink which if you do things
correctly from the beginning, you're not gonna have to do that. But let's say for example,
you make a mistake and you end up needing
to change that permalink, well you need to create a redirect, otherwise you're gonna get
a 404 error on your website, also known as page not found. So if I just go to a random
part of my site here, it's gonna bring me to a 404, which is this right here. This is not good because if
somebody ends up on this page, they're gonna abandon your website and it's not gonna be good
as far as the analytics go, they're gonna see a high
level of abandonment, so you wanna redirect any 404s. So anytime you're deleting an old article, or changing the permalink for a page, you wanna set up a redirect
to send that traffic to the new location or send
it to a different page. So for example, like let's
say one of the platforms like Farmland LP, let's say
they went out of business, okay? And then I didn't want this
article on my site anymore, I wanna redirect that
traffic somewhere else, that way I don't have
broken links on my website. So I might set up a redirect
and send all of that traffic just to my Beginner's Guide
To Farmland Investing, that way, you know, I don't
end up losing that traffic and getting a bunch of 404s, which is gonna send bad signals to Google. So the way you do that
is through Pretty Links which I showed you in the last section. And all you're going to
do is set up a redirect that links from the one
article to the other. So I have to set up here on my site, I labeled them as redirects and this one has actually gotten 27 clicks
so it's actually being used and I'll show you how it works. So I ended up screwing
something up here and I left all of this text in my permalink
when I posted this article. So let me actually go to this site and show you guys what happens. If I go to farmlandriches.com/. Oop I got to get my slash in there. /acretrader-versus-farmtogether-2020 - best-farmland- investments,
we already talked about permalinks earlier, you
guys know that's way too long so let's say you wanted to
shorten it after you publish that article, while you would
need to set up a redirect that way this doesn't bring them to a 404. And as you will see when I click enter, it redirects to just
acretrader-versus-farmtogether, which is a much better
SEO friendly permalink. So if you screw something up
in you're redirecting people somewhere else, set up a
redirect over in Pretty Links, and you do this by posting
the new article location, or new page location and
you make the Pretty Link, the old location of where it
was versus where it now exists. And that is going to allow
people to have a seamless transition with your new
address for that article. All righty guys so now I wanna show you how to set up tables using Ninja Tables when putting together
your WordPress website. And I wanna start off by
showing you how I use tables over on my blog Farmland Riches. Now, this is where I'm using
tables is I run this site-wide so on every article I have
this little table here that says best farmland investments for accredited investors. And it includes the
logos of these companies, as well as the minimum
investments and then a button where they can click and view investments. And as we already covered,
I utilize Pretty Links in order to have clean
linking that is easy to change so even within these tables, you'll notice that I'm actually using a Pretty Link because it's bringing us to
go/farmtogether and I will just show you that as
well by clicking on it, it brings us to this website
first and then redirects to the actual affiliate link. Now the bad news is, I have
the pro version of Ninja Tables which allows me to put
these logos in here, as well as these buttons and links. So with the free version,
you're not able to do that, but I still wanna show you
guys how the tables work, because it's very useful when
conveying information clearly on your blog, because the truth is, while you can explain a lot
of stuff with text and images and bullet points, there are some things that are just best
explained through a table. So let me show you how to make a table over on the Rowing Basics
website and then we'll put it into our blog article just
so you guys can get an idea of how this actually works. So, now here we are in the
backend of our rowingbasics.com website, we're gonna
click on Ninja Tables, which we've already installed, and then we're going to
create our first table. So the first thing you wanna
do is give your table a title, this is mostly just for your own use. So I'm gonna call this
best rowing machine deals and then as a description
I'm going to say, the best prices on rowing
machines right now. And that's just a brief
description of the table. I don't believe this
actually matters for SEO, but I always fill out little
descriptions here and there because you never know what
Google is going to be using in order to find out about your site. So that's all I'm gonna do and
now I'm going to click add, this is going to add
this information in here, and now we are going to
add data for our table. So the very first thing we
have to do is figure out our first column of information, which I'm gonna create now
by clicking this button here Add Column, and then you're
gonna type in a column name. So I'm going to make this
called Rowing Machine, that way we can have the name of the rower and then that's gonna be the first column, I'm not gonna change anything else here. And I'm going to click Add Column and then we're going to add another column which is going to be called price. So basically what I'm
doing with this table, is creating a list of
popular rowing machines and the corresponding price
associated with that rower. So once I have all the
columns I'm looking for, now I can start adding data which is going to be the actual machines
and the actual prices. So lemme go ahead and add that data now and if you check this box, it's gonna keep adding new data as you go. So let's say the rowing machine system, we're going to make something up here, we're gonna call it the the Gore 64, let's say that's a rowing
machine and that the price of that machine is $875, okay? Now I'm gonna hit Add. Next, I will be able to add more data in here for this table
so let's say for example, the Row Jr costs $499, okay? So I would add that and
let's say I'm just adding a bunch of pricing for
the rowing machines here so another one is called
the T65 and let's say that that one's more expensive at $1,999, we'll click Add and then when
I'm done adding information, all I would do is click this X. So now I've created a very
basic table that shows us here a couple of different
rowing machines available and the corresponding prices. And if I wanna get an
idea of what this table is going to look like,
all I have to do is click the preview button and
it's going to show me what my created table
is going to look like. Now there's a couple things
that I don't necessarily want being shown here for
example, the search bar, as also the ability to sort,
this is just not something that I personally wanna have on my table. So I'm gonna turn these
functionalities off because it's just something
that's going to be too much for the average user and it's
not actually helping people 'cause there's not that
much information here. So in order to fix that
guys you're gonna click on table design and we're gonna do a couple of things here. First of all, we're gonna
uncheck the box that says, enable sorting of the table by the visitor so now you can't sort which again, it's gonna make things easier
and then uncheck the box that says, enable the visitor
to filter or search the table. That is also not something
that I want people to be able to do and so now
we just have a simple table of information and I'm
gonna click update settings. So at this point we've created a table and now if I do a new preview,
you'll see that the search functionality and sort
functionality has been removed. So let's say you're happy
with this table at this point, and you're looking to
add this into your blog. Well, this is how you would do that. You're gonna go back here
and you're gonna copy down this short code and then
you're gonna paste it in the post or the page where
you're looking to add it. So if we go over to posts here, you'll see I have my Concept2 Rower
Review 2021: Best Rower, if I click into this article, I can go ahead and just
paste that in there and then I'm gonna click
the publish button. So now all that's visible on this article is the table that we just created. So let me go back to the website now and show you guys what that looks like. So here we are on the
Rowing Basics homepage. Once again, we have our image there and our basic design elements we created and we have this demo front page. Now I wanna go ahead and show
you what the actual article looks like, that we just put together. Now, I didn't actually set
up any links to that article so I don't really have a
good way of getting to it so let me actually go to
the backend and show you how I would preview that. So I would go here, I'd go to posts. I would then click on Concept2 Rower, this article we just put together. And then I'm going to click
on the link right here, which is gonna bring us to the website. And as you're going to see,
we have this featured image that we put together in
the previous example, right up top on our page
and then right below that we have the H1 header,
which shows up automatically as the title of our
article, and then we asked to have that table placed right here within the article as well. Now you're gonna notice
a blue edit table button, this is only visible to you,
and if you are logged out, it is not visible. And what's helpful about
that is if you find that you're on this article
and then you wanna change some of that information, you
can just click on edit table rather than having to go
all the way into the backend and finding it through Ninja Tables. So that's how you create tables
and it's a very helpful way to organize information on your website that may not be as easily conveyed just through paragraphs and bullet points. Like I said, if you wanna
pay for that pro plan, it is going to enable you
to add images and buttons to your table however, you can
always wait and upgrade down the road and decide to put together tables like this at a later date. We also use these tables
over on investingsimple.com for conveying information
in a helpful way. So for example, let me look up an article we have on robinhood versus acorns, I will show you how we use this table. If we click on this article right here, and then I scroll down, you're
going to see we have a couple of different plugins
here, we have a summary, and then we have a table that
conveys important information, such as minimum balance,
fees, commissions, assets, et cetera, et cetera, this
right here is all done through the Ninja Tables plugin. So the main point here guys
again, you may look at a blog like Investing Simple
and think oh my gosh, look at all these fancy widgets and tools, how am I ever gonna get there? Well, keep in mind this
took one step at a time and this doesn't happen overnight,
this is a two and a half, almost three years of work
now that you're looking at, but that's how we use tables
is for conveying information and we also have this free
stock promotions table that we run site-wide as well, which allows us to earn
additional affiliate income. And the other thing that's
great about tables is you can have tables in many different articles. And then when you change the
table itself it's gonna update that information across
all of your articles. So it's a good way to update information without having to manually
go in and change it in every single article. So now I wanna show you guys how I set up my email collection through ConvertKit and that is a completely free
email provider that I use, it's free to get started
with, but once you grow to a certain number of subscribers, it is going to require
you to have a paid plan. But right now I am personally
using the free plan, and I wanna go ahead
and log into the backend of my ConvertKit dashboard,
just to prove to you guys that this small little website
is in fact collecting emails every couple of days. So let me log into that dashboard now and show you what that looks
like and then I'll show you how to implement this for
free into your website. So here we are in the
backend of ConvertKit and as you can see I have collected 13 total email subscribers from this list. Some days I get a couple in a row, some days I don't get into any at all, but I am getting a
consistent number of emails. And since this is a brand new website, anything that you're getting
is honestly pretty good. I'm not monetizing this
on the backend at all, I'm basically just collecting
emails and maybe down the road I may decide to
do some email marketing to boost my affiliate commissions. But let me show you what
that looks like starting off on the Farmland Riches website. Well, first of all, when
anyone is on the website for awhile, then they hover
over to the back button or they try to exit, a pop-up shows up where they have the option
to opt in for the free guide. Since I'm logged in it may not show up, but if I click on the free guide button, you're going to see that pop up. And you're going to see
here a ebook cover called "Beginner's Guide to
Investing In Farmland," I paid somebody on Fiverr
about $15 to put that together so very minimal effort there. All you would do is drop your email, click on download the free guide, it's going to start a download
and add you to my email list. So how did I put this together? Well, let me go ahead and cover that now. So first of all the free guide
that I'm actually emailing them is actually just a copy
of my cornerstone article here called Beginner's
Guide To Farmland Investing. So this is the main article on my website that brings in a lot of the traffic and I simply took this
entire article and again, I paid somebody on Fiverr to
turn this article into a PDF and have it available for download. If you wanna do it
yourself, you can do it, but you can get a pretty
decent looking guide on Fiverr for under $100. So that's what I did,
but I wanna show you now what that looks like in the backend. So I'm gonna go over
here to Farmland Riches, and there's a plugin called Convert Pro. I have the pro version of
this, but you can usually use the free version for a
little while until you get to a certain point when it's
not working well for you. And I already have my
call-to-action here called lead generation but if you didn't, you would click on Create New. It's turned on, it is a pop-up and so if I click on Lead Gen, it's going to give me more
information about this pop-up. And so here we have all
the different visuals that I've added here, I'm
not gonna show you guys step-by-step how to do this
because to be completely honest with you I didn't do this myself, I had my web designer do this for me. I can't go into everything
with such insane detail, otherwise we'd have like
a 10 hour video here, but I can point you in the
right direction and show you what I'm using to derive
income from this website. But it's a pretty simple
drag and drop builder here where you guys can set up
and change these different elements associated with your
email opt-in and then you just have to link it up with
your Convert Kit account, and you'll be in business
collecting emails. And then what you can do
is over on a Convert Kit, you can set up an email
autoresponder if you want to, or you can simply just start
collecting those emails and then down the road,
once you build this up into a larger business,
that's when you can figure out what you're going to do with those emails. But, I always say it's
good to build it right from the get go so you're
better off building this system and collecting emails from the beginning, because even though this
website is getting probably 10 to 15 hits a day, I'm
still collecting emails every couple of days. All right guys so now I
wanna give you an overview of the different metadata on your blog and kind of explain to
you guys what that is, and how this allows Google to
find and rank your website. So metadata is anything on
a website that gives Google or a search engine
information about the type of resources being
shared and there's a lot that you can control when it
comes to this information. you're supplying to Google. So I'm actually gonna show you
this over on Farmland Riches, because we don't have any
real information on this blog. And I don't actually plan on
building this blog right now so I'm not gonna invest
any money into content. So let me go over to
farmlandriches.com instead, and I'm gonna show you the
metadata that I'm talking about. So let's jump over to our Beginner's Guide To Farmland Investing and
cover some of this metadata. So the first thing I'm gonna
do is go into the backend so let me go ahead and click
on post and we're just gonna start off at the top of the
page and work our way down. So the very first thing,
when it comes to metadata is the title of your actual blog post. And you wanna make sure
that this is SEO friendly and includes whatever keyword
you're looking to rank for. So for example, if I was
starting my blog on rowing and I was doing a review
of the Concept2 rower, I would wanna have
Concept2 Rower Review 2021 in the title, all right? So you wanna have your
keyword in there and you wanna make sure that your title
here is written for a human. So a lot of people often will
make the mistake of loading something up with keywords,
or they're trying to do some black hat SEO
thing, none of that shit works anymore guys, I promise
you it's a waste of your time, right titles for humans. So this for example, How To invest in Farmland
For Beginners in 2021, my keyword is how to invest in Farmland, that's what I'm trying
to rank for in the next one to two years, pretty
competitive so it might take a little while but it is a
long-term investment after all. Next up let's talk about the permalink which is listed right here. I tried to keep this
at three to four words, you don't wanna overload it
here and I already showed you how to make sure that it is minimal and doesn't have any
unnecessary categories or dates or things like that. So I made this Farmland
Investing For Beginners, I actually should change this
because I'm not trying to rank for that keyword, I'm trying to rank for how to invest in farmland
and you want your keyword that you're trying to rank for, to be included in your permalink. And of course guys, if I
did change this permalink, we would have to set up a
redirect using Pretty Links. So, I'll actually go ahead and do this because this is an important lesson here. And I'll show you how to
set that up here real quick because this really
should be what I'm trying to rank for which is how
to invest in farmland. So let me go ahead and set that up now, I'm gonna open up my Pretty
Links here in a new tab, and then we're gonna go
ahead and make a new one. And I'm gonna call this one,
Redirect: and then it's going to be Farmland Investing
For beginners, all right? So what we're gonna do first
is take the existing URL for this article and if
we wanna get there easily, just click on that and
then we can copy this URL, and we're going to paste this
here as the Pretty Link, okay? We actually only need
the back half of this because we just need the
existing URL for this website, and then the target URL is going to be whatever we change it to. I'll get rid of that slash
and now we're gonna go over here and we're gonna click on edit post, and we're gonna change the permalink. So now we're going to click on edit and we're going change this. So I wanna actually make this
how-to-invest-in-farmland. Now that is five words,
but a lot of these words are pretty short here like two and in, so not too worried about
it, still pretty concise. So now I've changed my
permalink and I wanna go ahead and click update, but guess
what I did in that process, I may have broken my website. Now, every link that I have
on my website referencing to that article is not going to work because we just changed its location. So now that I've gone ahead
and changed that permalink, now we just wanna finish
up creating that redirect. So we pretty much make
the new address here, which is going to be what this points to so we are going to go
ahead and copy that URL for the post we just updated
and then we're gonna go ahead and paste that in here as the target URL, and then we're gonna go
ahead and click update. So what we've done here
is created a redirect, that way every time
somebody goes to the URL, which is farmland-investing-forbeginners, it's instead going to redirect them to How To Invest In Farmland. That way if there are
any 404 errors showing up from that redirect, this
is officially in place. Next up on the category
of metadata, let's go back to edit post and talk more
about this, all right? So we've talked about the title, we've talked about the permalink,
next up let's scroll down and talk about the headers. So we've already talked
about how these headers work, but you wanna make sure you
have your keywords showing up throughout your headings, okay? So you see Best Farmland Investments, What Is Farmland Investing? Types Of Farmland Investments. Just use common sense here guys, you wanna include your keywords
and other things people may be searching for in your headers. Again, when you're writing
these resources guys, you're not writing them for the algorithm, you're not writing them for Google, you're writing this for a human being. Do not try to make it too complicated, do not try to load it with keywords, it's gonna hurt you in the long run, write content for humans and
optimize for user experience and that is how you win with Google, okay? Other than that a couple of other things surrounding metadata. Categories, I just have a
couple of different categories set up here, I have platform reviews, comparisons and guides and if
you wanna make a new category, you just press add category. I don't really use tags to
be honest with you guys, it can be a way you can
organize your site's content, I might've done tags with
some of the other posts, for example. Yeah so over here you can see tags I used, the only time that I've
used tags on this website is if a specific investment
platform is being mentioned. So for example, the tag AcreTrader, if I click on that this
shows me all articles that mention AcreTrader so
that's good for organization, but that's all I do with tags. Let me go back to Posts here
and click on our main article, How To Invest In Farmland For Beginners and we'll go back into it
and talk more about metadata. Categories same thing, tags
we already talked about that, images on the site, you wanna make sure that when you upload your images not only are you compressing
them using Short Pixel, you also wanna fill out some alt text here which basically describes
the purpose of the image. This is additional
information that Google crawls your website for, and they
can use this information to understand what your
website is about so you wanna fill out a description of
what the actual image is. This is a pretty lazy description so you could honestly go into much more detail, and it's gonna benefit
you in the long run, but you wanna make sure
you have something here rather than nothing. Other than that guys, again,
making sure that your website has images that are
compressed is very important, but you really just wanna make
sure you organize information in a way that is designed for humans in a user-friendly manner
and then, you know, you also have internal
links to other articles. Obviously when you're starting
with your first article, you have nowhere to link people to, but over time as you
build this resource out, you're gonna do a lot of internal
linking to other articles on your website to give people an easy to navigate and helpful resource. Then at the very bottom here guys, the last thing regarding
metadata is to fill out this Yoast SEO portion here. And I do apologize 'cause I
don't think I had you install this plugin, so if you
haven't yet installed the Yoast SEO plugin, it is
free and it's gonna give you a couple of helpful tools here, okay? The main thing is it allows
you to edit your snippet, okay? Also known as your meta description and this is just a quick
synopsis of the article. So for me, this is what I've written here. Interested in farmland investing? Here is our comprehensive beginner's guide to investing in farmland
with no prior experience. This green bar tells you
whether or not you've written too little or too much, and
I don't really pay attention to the actual SEO
analysis or anything here. So you wanna fill out this
snippet with one or two sentences of information that do
include your keywords, and make sure that this bar is green. The other thing you should check out is this readability score,
which is gonna help you improve the readability of your article. I make sure that almost every article I do has green readability, which
looks at different things, such as passive voice,
consecutive sentences, subheading distribution, paragraph length, sentence length, et cetera. So I always get this to green, which means I'm making sure
that I'm optimizing my writing for human beings. Other than that guys,
that is literally all I do in terms of metadata and this
allows me to supply Google with enough information that they're able to rank my articles over time. So the next thing I wanna show you guys is how to disable comments on your blog and this is totally up to your discretion, whether or not you wanna
leave comments on or off. In my experience, when I leave
comments on with my blog, I find that 80% of the comments
I receive are actually spam, where people are looking to
promote things in your comment section that are not
relevant to your article. I deal with a lot of
spam comments across all of my different social media platforms, so I'm always looking to minimize
the number I'm receiving, so wherever possible I
always disable comments. So if you scroll down to the
bottom of my blog article where the comment section
would ordinarily be, you're going to notice there's
no comment section here and that is intentional,
the way that I do that is I click on the edit post button here and then if you scroll down
here to the very bottom of the article, you're
going to see an option of not allowing comments. So right here I uncheck the
box that says, allow comments and I've done this across all
of my articles to cut down on spam, totally up to you if you decide to use that functionality. So now let's talk about the
type of content that you may decide to create on your
blog and it's going to be different based on the
niche that you get into, but there's basically four
different types of articles that we create for the
blogs that I'm a part of. The first type of content
is a review article, and this is the most straightforward. This is where you are
reviewing a product or service and sharing things that
are good and bad about it and overall giving
people a big picture idea of what this company or
product has to offer. So the first type of content is review. Second of all, the next
type of content is called comparison content and this
is when you're comparing one thing to the other. So maybe you are writing an article called apples versus oranges, that is you talking about the similarities and differences between apples and oranges, whereas in a main review
article, you would just be doing apple review and orange review. The third type of content
is called FAQ content and I got a pretty
distorted feature image here I definitely have to fix it at some point. But anyway this is where
you are just diving into one particular
question that somebody has, about the particular thing. So let's say for example,
if we're using the oranges and apples analogy for FAQ,
maybe somebody was wondering, do oranges have vitamin C? So that is a FAQ type
content that we can answer through our articles. So in the case of Webull, that's this article here
called Webull Taxes Explained: How Do Taxes Work With This Brokerage? That is the third type
of content that we make and then the final type is value content which is not related to
any specific company, but is meant to provide
value to the reader. So Roth IRA 2021. You can of course open
up a Roth IRA with dozens of different companies
we're affiliated with, but we're just talking broadly
about the Roth IRA here and covering a beginner's
guide for investors. So back to our rowing example, an example of a value
article could be best at home rowing exercises
where you just share some good training regimens
for rowing at home, that would be an example
of a value article. An example of an FAQ article
related to rowing could be how to set up your
Concept2 rowing machine, or how to assemble your
rowing machine at home. If it was about a specific rowing machine, you're answering a
question that somebody has about that specific unit,
that would be an FAQ article. The comparison article pretty simple, let's say I was doing Concept2 rower versus peloton rowing machine. That would be an example
of a comparison article where we're looking at the pros and cons, prices features and
comparing these two products and then the dedicated
review would just be like Concept2 rower review. That's literally all that
I do, I keep it simple and those are the only
four types of content you will ever find on any of my blogs. So if we go back to
farmlandriches.com for example, you're gonna see all of that reflected. We have Beginner's Guide
To Farmland Investing, this is of course a
value piece of content. It's not about a specific platform, but as we get into the article
you'll see specific platforms are being mentioned and
some of these I'm actually affiliated with so if people
actually click on these and, you know, visit
this website and sign up, I may earn a commission in the process. But this is the value article right here, we also have platformed reviews. I have all these different reviews, this is the review content. Under comparisons, this
is the comparison content, I've only done one of
these articles so far comparing AcreTrader to FarmTogether which are two very popular platforms. And then under this is all value, so I have Farmland versus Stocks, Farmland versus Traditional Real Estate, this could technically be called
comparison content as well, but that's the only four types
of content I make is value, FAQ, comparison, and main review content. I don't actually have any
FAQ articles on this website just because I'm not looking
to get that complicated, I only have like 14 articles
on this entire blog. And I think that is shocking
to some people because you would that to have a successful
blog that makes money, you need to have hundreds of articles. And the answer is no
this blog for example, if we go over here to posts I'll show you, this blog has 12, it only
has 12 total articles on the entire website. I wrote one of them in the
other 11 I hired somebody else to write them and this
blog has 12 articles total, and it's an entire website,
that's actually making money. So you don't need to
have hundreds of articles in order to make money, you
can keep it pretty simple, but that is pretty much it as
far as the content I create, it is those four different
types of content. So now we're gonna talk
about how to find affiliates for your blog and if you guys
are not aware of that yet, that is the 100% monetization
strategy that I follow. I don't run ads on my website,
I don't sell my own products, I literally just generate
commissions by sending leads over to different companies
through my review content, comparison content,
FAQ, and value content. It is a simple formula that
is scalable and repeatable and very easy to follow. Some people overly complicate
it or they do different things and that's totally up to you. If you wanna sell your own products, if you wanna run ads, go ahead, I hope it works well for you,
I am merely able to show you what works for Ryan Scribner, okay? And what works for me is
keeping it simple in terms of monetization and solely
relying on affiliates. So, how do you find
affiliates for your blog? Well, there's a couple of
different things, all right? First of all, if you know what
companies are in your niche, which would mean you're a
credible person in your niche, you should be aware of what
companies exist in your niche. So for example, with my niche
here of Farmland Investing, there's only like seven different
platforms available today that offer them and I've
actually written reviews of all of them right here. It's FarmTogether, AcreTrader,
FarmFundr, Farmland LP, Harvest Returns, and Steward. And you better bet I've
reached out to all of them and I've affiliated with two of them, and two of them are working
on a program for me right now. So for me, since this is a pretty small little community here
of farmland investors, I basically just emailed
these companies directly. And I said, "Hey, I've started this blog of reviewing farmland investing platforms, do you have an affiliate program?" And that is how I became affiliated with these different companies. Usually you'll email them,
they'll get back to you, they're gonna wanna jump on a phone call, talk about what it is that you're doing, and then you're going to explain
to them what your blog is. So in the case of Farmland Riches I said, hey, I'm creating a resource
that helps people understand what options they have available to them as far as farmland investing goes, and they were interested in
that and they let me be part of their affiliate program. That being said, if
you're looking to find out what affiliates are
available, I wanna show you two affiliate networks
that I am a part of. The first one is CJ Affiliate, the second one is Impact Radius, okay? Also guys, just to show
you an example here, like for my rowing example,
if I was looking to contact someone at Concept2 to ask
about an affiliate program, I would simply go to their
website, scroll to the bottom and look for their contact information, which is info@concept2.com. So I would then email
them and I would say, "Hello, my name is Ryan, do
you have an affiliate program? Who would I reach out to about that?" It also may be wise to just directly look for their marketing department
because affiliate marketing is part of the marketing department, okay? That being said though, let me go ahead and log
into my CJ Affiliate. But anyway if we go over
here to advertisers, CJ Affiliate this is
completely free to join, and then you can search
for different advertisers. There are literally thousands
of different companies on CJ Affiliate looking for
your leads and so you can poke around here and look
for different companies. You can do it by advertiser, by keyword, by category, all kinds of stuff, I'm just gonna show you by
category just for example, let's say you have a sports and
let's say sports and fitness because we're looking
for exercise equipment because of the blog that we're doing they're related to rowing, okay? So let's go ahead and do
that and then I'm gonna go ahead and click search and
this is going to show me 45 different affiliates
related to equipment, exercise and health, all right? So if I scroll through
here you'll see a couple of different companies FitTrack,
Fit On, HealthLabs.com. You would obviously wanna
do your own research about these companies and
I'm kinda not a big fan of this strategy because you don't know a lot of these companies,
like I would never recommend or use links for a company
I've never heard of, but if you happen to
find a company in here that you know of, then you may apply and be a part of their program, okay? But the thing I'm getting at
here is don't just randomly send traffic to some company
you've never heard of, because that is not ethical
affiliate marketing, and that's not something
I would recommend. But if you do find a company
you wanna be a part of, you would click on apply to program, and then you're going to apply and then you're gonna hear back from them whether or not you are accepted. So this is one way to find affiliates. You can also do that through
Impact Radius so let me go ahead and log in there and I will show you a couple of affiliates so
give me one second here. We'll log into my account. And again, just to show you
guys my real earnings here, this is not for Farmland Riches, but this is just one of my
affiliate programs in the last, it looks like seven days here. That's $1,700 or 1,715 in
payouts from Betterment, Robinhood, Wealth Simple and Prosper, but if you wanna look for more brands, you click on brands right here
and you can see what brands are available broken down
into different categories. So again, I'm gonna go with fitness, so let's look at sports,
outdoors and fitness, and this shows us 156 different brands. So there we go, Adidas is
a pretty well-known brand, Ariat I've heard of them. So maybe for example, over on your blog, where you talk about rowing, maybe you do an article talking about the best rowing apparel
and what's the best clothing to wear while you are rowing. And maybe Adidas has
some compression shorts that you recommend, maybe
you become an affiliate for Adidas and you recommend them there. One other affiliate program
I wanna show you guys quick which pretty much every
bloggers should be part of is Amazon Associates, because pretty much anything
that you can purchase on Amazon, you can earn a commission from. So if I go over here to Amazon Associates, you'd wanna sign up for this and put in your information for your blog. I'm not affiliated with
Amazon for Farmland Riches just because I didn't have any books, or apparel or things like that. So these are my actual
earnings over the last 28 days. If I go over here to the Reports section, we'll get a better idea of my earnings, but this is my actual
Amazon Associates account for my entire YouTube channel. So let me go back to a
different report here, this isn't what I was looking for. So if we look at the last 30 days, I've earned $495.17 cents
from Amazon referrals. And again, you can pretty much link to pretty much anything you can think of. Like, for example, we'll go
to Product Linking, okay? And we'll go to product
links and you can create a link here, just searching for it so let's just search Concept2 Rower. And I know they sell it on Amazon 'cause that's where I
bought mine, all right? And there it is right there for $1,249, you'd go here to get your
link and then you would simply go here to text only and you would copy the shortened link right here and this is your Amazon affiliate link. Now, you might be wondering how much would you earn from this rower? Well, let me go ahead and
show you that right now. So this right here is
the standard fee schedule for Amazon Associates and
depending on what you are selling, it's a different
commission ranging from 0% all the way up to 10%. You guys can check this out yourself, if you wanna familiarize yourself with the different commissions
but right here we have sports which would incorporate fitness
equipment, I'm pretty sure. And that is a 3% category so
if you did successfully refer a sale of the Concept2
Rower, real quick let me pull it up again just so we
can get an exact number. The Concept2 Rower we said
this sells for 1,249.96, let me just pull up my calculator. So we'll just go witH1,249,
multiply that by the 3% and that would mean you would earn a commission of $37.47 cents. So if you refer the sale to
Amazon and somebody bought this rower, you would earn yourself 37.47, 3% of the total cost of that rower. Again, I would still reach
out to Concept2 anyway, and see if they have a
separate affiliate program. For example, for a while
guys, I was referring sales to Amazon for the Ledger
which is a hardware wallet for storing Bitcoin offline. I was referring sales to Amazon
and I was making like 4%, I think commissions, while
I found out that Ledger has their own affiliate
program on their website, which pays a 10% commission. So you're not always gonna
get the best commission by referring sales to Amazon, but the advantages you
can earn commissions on hundreds of thousands of
products so this is probably where most people are gonna get started, but down the road you
may decide to reach out to companies directly
and establish one-on-one affiliate relationships
directly with them, rather than going through an
affiliate network like CJ, or Impact Radius or
utilizing Amazon Associates. Now on the topic of affiliates,
if you are going to monetize your blog with affiliate
marketing, you are going to need a affiliate disclosure on your website. I use a free plugin that's going
to add this text right here to every single article on my
website and that simply says, some of the links on this
site are affiliate links that is required by the FTC,
you are legally required to disclose if you are receiving
compensation from brands on your online platform if
you don't disclose that, you could get fined by the FTC. So trust me guys when I
say it, don't do that, make your disclosures known. I use a free plugin, I'll show you guys what that is right now. If we go back to my website, it is called WP Affiliate Disclosure and if you wanna download it, you just go to your plugin section, but if you click on this right here, I have a rule here
basically for every article, I'll click on edit and it
shows this affiliate disclosure before my post content at the very top. And I have this being shown
on every single article, you could just do it yourself
by pasting that in at the top, but I would rather do it
this way that way I know that I didn't forget it and this shows up at the top of all of my posts. So this is a free plugin called WordPress Affiliate
Disclosure, that's gonna add that little piece of text
to all of your articles and make sure that you
are following the required disclosures for affiliate marketing. So here we have the last
28 days and here we have the different conversions. So December on 27th I earned a commission, December 28th I earned a commission and on January 4th I earned a commission. These are $100 commissions each, you can see one pending approval and that is a $100 commission. So that's 100 bucks, that's
200 and $300 from AcreTrader. Hopefully more to follow, you can see I am getting clicks every single day sometimes a lot of clicks,
sometimes not so many. And again, this is why I
love having Pretty Links because I can go over
here to my Pretty Links and I can click on the
button here that says Clicks and it shows me exactly
how many clicks I'm getting on my website across all of my links and I can see what's
getting clicked on here. So, there's my earnings
proof for AcreTrader, now let me log into CJ
Affiliate and show you $75 of commissions owed and if I
go here to this entire year, it should show $30 in commissions so yeah I earned $215
commissions that's for two leads, I've had 11 total clicks
this year and hopefully a lot more to follow. All right guys, so now I'm gonna talk about how to figure out your
content roadmap for your blog. So assuming that you
already know what niche you want to be into, and now you're ready to start creating content,
I wanna talk to you about how I decide what
articles I want to write and it all starts with
the almighty Google, because the truth is that
is where your traffic is going to come from, it's
gonna come from Google. It's gonna come from people
looking for information and then stumbling upon
your online resource and this is going to allow
them to visit your page and then eventually click on your links. So it all starts with the Google search, so I wanna start off here by
entering an incognito mode that way we know that
nothing is being skewed by my individual searches. So I do that by going
up here and doing File, New Incognito Window and
you should do the same exact thing before doing this
because your search results are personalized based on
what you're looking for. So if I go here and I
just type in my niche which is farmland investing, I look at what is followed up, okay? I see farmland investing platforms, farmland investing for
non-accredited investors, farmland investing
Canada, farmland investing an overview book returns, et cetera. So this is what I use to figure
out what content to write. For example, I wrote an
article on farmland investing for non-accredited investors, I don't know if it's ranking
yet let's go ahead and see. And number one, literally
ranking number one for search term, that's incredible guys. This is an ad, this is
an ad, this is an ad and this is my blog farmlandriches.com. So if I click on this, it's gonna bring me right
to my website and I think I actually have an article
specifically on that topic. I'm pretty sure I wrote an
article about farmland investing for non-accredited investors, but the fact that my
blog showed up period, regardless in first place
is really good so anyway that is basically, actually that's funny there's my other blog
investingsimple.com so it's populating in the results here, my article for non-accredited investors, I'm surprised that didn't show up unless I'm confusing it with something. I do have best farmland
investing platforms, maybe I don't have the
one for non-accredited, but anyways this is
where I do my searches, it is whatever populates in Google. Same thing with comparisons for example, I'm affiliated with AcreTrader, if I'm wondering what
articles I should write, I just type in AcreTrader and
I see what populates, okay? So for example, AcreTrader review, I already have an AcreTrader review, but I'm not ranking for it
'cause that's highly competitive, but these other things are
things that I would potentially write articles about like
AcreTrader, minimum investment for example, but this right here, acretrader versus farmtogether,
if we click on that, again, you're gonna see I
ranked number one for that because I wrote the article
AcreTrader versus FarmTogether. So that is a comparison
article and that is something that I would right. So essentially the first
thing you're gonna do is take your keywords or
basically take your topic and see what people are looking for. So with our rowing example, I would just type in rowing
machine and I would see what people are looking for. Rowing machine versus treadmill,
there's a good comparison article or value article. Rowing machine versus bike, rowing machine versus elliptical, rowing
machine versus recumbent bike, rowing machine Concept2,
these are all things I would be jotting down,
which will eventually become part of your
overall content roadmap. You can also do specific
searches for rowers, like Concept2 rower and see
what people are looking for. Concept2 rower review for
sale, model D, dimensions. Another thing you may do is
start following up that search with the letters of the alphabet. Concept2 rower A, people
are searching assembly, alternative, availability so
then I would try the letter B and see what people are
searching for and then I try the letter C, the letter
D, E, F and so on, and just look at what
people are searching for. And I'm gonna write all
this down in a spreadsheet of things people are searching
for and then you're gonna take that whole list and
you're gonna compile it into your content roadmap. So, this is something
that's gonna take you awhile to do here guys, I'm just
gonna show you how I did this for Farmland Riches and
it will hopefully allow you to understand how this works. So back to my blog here, we understand now that
I have my main article which is my Beginner's Guide
To Investing In Farmland, and this is what we call the hub, or my cornerstone piece of content. This is the longest article on my blog, it's over 5,000 words and this
is the article I'm ultimately trying to rank for and so for example, for the blog on a rowing machine, so we'll go to rollingbasics.com, if I was going to do this
blog, the very first article I would write would be a
very thorough article about, you know, best at home rowing machines, or how to start rowing at home. Something like that would be
my main cornerstone article that I'm ultimately
looking to rank in search. And then what you're
gonna do, is you're gonna have this be like a choose
your own adventure book, where basically as
people are reading along, this article is gonna point
out to your different articles. So here we have a section on
What Is Farmland Investing? I just have some sources mentioned. Types Of Farmland Investments, but then we're gonna get
into some other stuff. We have farmland investing
trends, how to earn money, how to invest in farmland. So now it talks about
accredited investors and then I have a link here to my best
Farmland Investing platforms, which is another article
on my website, okay? As we keep going down, it talks about crowdfunded
investment platforms and then I have a dedicated
review section of my website which includes all of my platform reviews and it also includes a
recent posts and categories. I also have individual reviews
of these platforms all linked up here so for example, if
you're reading this and you read about harvest returns and you're
curious so you click on it and it links to that review. I hopefully you guys are
beginning to see how this is a bit like a choose your own
adventure story here, where as you go through here, you can read the full articles. So you have this main piece
of cornerstone content that links out to all of your
smaller articles on your site. So that being said guys, like I said, I only have 12 articles
so let me draw out for you what the actual content roadmap
looks like for this blog and obviously the bigger
your blog becomes, the more complicated this is going to be. And that right there is
a perfect example guys, of how this opt-in
works when somebody goes to exit the website, this
shows up and people can drop their name and email to get
that free guide and as I said, 13 people have already done
this, even though my site's getting a very small amount of traffic. All right, guys so don't
mind my handwriting here, but this is the main
cornerstone article here called how to invest in farmland
and this is the main article, it's gonna point out two
other areas on my website. So it points out in this direction, to different types of
farmland investments, so one of the ways to
invest in the farmland is through crowdfunded
real estate platform so let me go ahead and draw that out now. So in the main article, it talks about crowdfunded
investment platforms for farmland investing
and that's pretty much all of the different companies
that I talk about on my site. So FarmTogether, AcreTrader, Farmland LP all these different
companies so I mentioned the farmland investment options, I talk about crowdfunded investments, and then I link out to all
of the different reviews that I have written on my blog. So this is gonna link out to
things like AcreTrader review, Farmland LP review,
Harvest Returns reviews, all of my different review articles so I'll make a note of that here. So any of my review
articles are linked out to in that section. I also link out to an
article on Farmland REITs so that's another way you
can invest as you can invest through crowdfunding, you
can also invest through REITs so let me make a note of that here. So, it also mentions Farmland
REITs as an investment and I have an article about that. I also have articles comparing
investing in farmland versus investing in the stock market
and other things like that. And so this is pretty simple guys, it's only 12 different articles, but this is basically what it is. You have this main
resource at the top called how to invest in farmland, it
talks about different avenues for investment like
crowdfunding platforms or REITs. I have a separate article
that points to about different farmland investing REITs,
I have a separate article that points out to on the six best farmland investing platforms which is this one right here. And then I also have
individual links to all of those reviews. Again, every single
article too that links out is going to link back to the
main articles so for example, all of these individual
review articles link back to this main article, this
crowdfunding platform links back, the REITs article links back,
and each of these articles also all link back to that main resource. So the point is, your main
cornerstone article is gonna link out to all of your smaller
articles in a choose your own adventure style or format, but then all of those individual articles. But then all of those
individual articles themselves are gonna link back to your main resource, which is going to point
links back and that is how you're gonna set
up your content roadmap is you're looking to set up these choose your own adventure
series within your website. Mine just has one since this
website has just 12 articles, but bigger blogs are gonna have
multiple cornerstone pieces that all link out and link
back to that main resource and this is how you build
authority with your blog. So once you get all of
your content together or a couple of key
articles on your website, the next thing you wanna start thinking about is link building,
because this is ultimately what's going to allow you
to have a successful blog and this is receiving links from other reputable resources online. And this is all going to give
you a number which is called your domain authority or
other sites are gonna call this your DA. So when you start off, you're
gonna have a very low domain authority of probably
like a one to a three and then over time, that
number is going to increase based on getting links from other blogs. So right now just for
example, Farmland Riches, we are sitting at, I'll write this down. The Farmland Riches website
is sitting at a DA of around seven and then Investing Simple, just to write this down here. Investing Simple has a DA of around 35. So Farmland Riches is a brand new website, it started off as a one,
but because of getting a couple of links, it
well went up to a seven and Investing Simple has been
around for about three years but the domain itself investingsimple.com is quite a bit older,
which gives it a boost so that's sitting at a DA of 35. So by building links
to your website itself, that DA is going to go up
over time and the higher that DA is, the easier it
is to rank higher in search. So for now let me just clear
all of this out of here and I'm gonna tell you my
strategies for building links and it's pretty simple. So my biggest source for
links for my blog is something called HARO or help a reporter out. This is an email service that
goes out three times a day on business days and non
holidays where it's basically reporters who are writing stories, who are looking for sources. So I have literally gotten
dozens of links from HARO, I've gotten links from
blogs like GOBankingRates, Yahoo Finance, really big blogs. I've gotten links from
filling out HARO queries, it's completely free, what you're gonna do is go to haro.com, sign up with your email and then three times a day
you're gonna get an email about the source requests
and you can fill them out and supply information and
give them a link to your blog, and if they do use your quote, oftentimes they will give you
a link back to your website so that is one of the easiest ways. Another one is going to be guest posts so we're gonna call that GP, that's when you reach out
to other blogs in your niche and ask them if you can
guest post on their website, it's pretty difficult to get
these because so many people are asking for them but usually I find I have about a 5% success rate
so if I send out 20 emails, maybe one person says, yes. Another example or
option is cross-linking, but that's not really gonna help you until have higher domain authority. This is where one blog links to you, and then you link back to them. Now Google does frown upon
this, or they kind of make it so it's not as important
in terms of ranking because it's kind of a gainable
strategy where somebody can, you know, set these links
up and it's not really a true indicator anymore of
like a good quality website. So what people are doing instead, is like a three-way linking
so that's a little bit more confusing but let me
show you what I mean by that. There are some blogs out there
that try to do this thing where they'll have three websites, okay? And so what they'll do is
they'll have website number one, website number two, and then they'll have website number three, okay? So this right here, this is your website, website number three,
they would say to you, "Hey, will you link to this resource here? And then we will actually from
a different website link back to your website that
way Google doesn't see this two way street thing happening, which may invalidate the link." So that's common these days too, is to have three websites
involved with a cross-linking process for building links. So that's pretty much it
guys, you've got to go on HARO and fill out queries,
or you have to reach out to blogs for guest posts, or
you can ask for links swaps, those are not very popular
or effective anymore, but this three way link
swap is pretty effective because it doesn't have
this two-way street thing that kinda cancels out the link. But that's pretty much the main thing, I don't recommend buying
links that's a bad strategy so don't buy links, don't sell links, that's not really a good strategy and it's kind of a
slimy business practice, but that is how I build
links for my website and that's pretty much
the entire process guys. Once you have good content and
good framework for your blog, you start creating these
cornerstone pieces of content that all link back to each other, and then you get links
built for those pages on your website over time
and that's going to allow you to slowly begin showing up
in Google's search results over the next six to 12 months. So the last thing I wanna
cover here with you guys is some tips on
outsourcing certain aspects of this business to other people. So if you are somebody who
is fortunate enough that you have some money that you
wanna invest into your blog, in my opinion your best use of that money is investing in content. In my opinion that's the
most time consuming aspect of blogging is writing all
of that necessary content so I recommend Upwork for finding writers, you can literally click right
on the writing section here and look for writers based
on what you're looking for. So Upwork is pretty useful for that. I also utilize friends and family, I actually have a couple
of family that work for Investing Simple and
do content creation for us. You could also literally just
go right up here and type in WordPress and you can
get all kinds of experts, WordPress developers, SEO security, and you can hire somebody
right here if you're looking to invest a little bit of
money in optimizing site speed or on page SEO, all
kinds of different stuff. I also recommend Fiverr
and as I said to you guys, that's where I got my ebook designed. So you can literally just
type in like ebook cover and it's stupid cheap for
some of these like 35 bucks, I will do a cover layout,
design and formatting for a PDF. For $50 you can get a pretty
decent looking lead magnet for your website. So that's the main sources I
use for outsourcing is Upwork and Fiverr and like I said, the
main thing I would recommend is outsourcing content
creation as that is typically the most time-consuming part. However, if you are brand
new, getting started, you could do it all yourself
and you're gonna learn a lot in the process and you can
bootstrap and save money, which means you will
have a profitable venture in a much shorter period of
time because you're putting your own sweat equity into your business. So anyways guys, that is
going to wrap up this video, I hope you enjoyed it. If you made it to the very end, go ahead and drop me a comment down
below, I'm always curious how many people actually
stick around to the end of these marathon videos. I had a lot of fun making this video guys, and I hope it helps a lot of people launch a successful blog this year. And if you end up having
success with your blog, please feel free to
come back to this video and share that with others. That being said guys, if
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