CMS

You’ve done your research on your niche, selected your keywords and purchased a domain name. The next step is to set up your website. Since you’re trying to maximize your profits in a short amount of time, you want to get this done as quickly, easily and most importantly cheaply as possible.

Your best bet is a content management system, or CMS. A CMS allows you to dynamically add information to your site and graphically make changes to the site’s layout. There are many choices for a CMS, such as Drupal or Plone, but the most popular is Wordpress. The reason for this is Wordpress is very easy to install and use, and it has a vibrant community offering themes and plugins that help beautify and extend functionality to your site. I recommend you use Wordpress, but I encourage you to research the popular CMS’ out there to find which would best fit your situation and style, since it is ultimately your site and you will be the one doing all the work here.

The next step is installing your CMS. Depending on your webhost, there are a couple ways of doing this.

1. Manual Installation – The universal method is manual installation. Download the CMS of your choice from their website, and follow their instructions. This typically involves uncompressing your CMS and uploading it to your webhost via FTP software and setting up a relational database on the webhost server. Typically, these steps are not very difficult, but if you’re not technically inclined, they can be daunting. Fortunately, there is an even easier way.
2. Automatic Installation – If your webhost uses cPanel, they may have software that can automatically install popular website scripts and CMS applications with a couple of clicks. That software, called Fantastico De Luxe, asks you a couple questions about your site, such as where you want to install it and your username for your site, and it handles all the rest.

Now that your CMS is installed, your next step is installing any plugins to extend functionality. The plugins you install have much to do with how you plan on monetizing your website. For example, if you’re using Wordpress as your CMS and you want to create an affiliate store, you may want to install the phpBay or Associate-o-Matic. For a membership site, you may consider integrating aMember with Wordpress. No matter the site, other plugins you should consider are All in One SEO Pack, MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer and Google XML Sitemaps. These last three can greatly help in generating traffic to your site.

Next, you should beautify your site. You can go all out and develop a custom template or hire someone else to, which to some may be a selling point to have a unique design, but you don’t have to. Many of the free templates out there look great and in the long run, it doesn’t really matter if the appearance is unique.

By now, your site should be ready to post your content, be it articles with adspace, an ebook, or an active membership site. The Equity Millions system has lots of good information on how to best monetize your site. Good luck and happy flipping.

Market research for your website is in many ways easier than most other market research online. You can use traditional niche research methods, which does work, but it can be time consuming. It is simply easier to go to places where you list websites for sale, and emulate ones that have sold. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

One of the most obvious places to go is the Sitepoint Marketplace. If you’re starting out, it may be best to view the Startup Web Sites for Sale, though if you have some capital or are a bit more experienced, you could take a look at the Established Web Sites for Sale or Premium Web Sites for Sale. Though sometimes listings are taken down prematurely due to private sales, you may notice that the web sites that do sell through Sitepoint are “grayed out” when viewing the listings. Click on one of the “grayed out” listings. The higher the selling price, the better.

Another place you can do some research is at the Clickbank Marketplace. Select any categoy that interests you, and sort by High Gravity. Gravity, according to Clickbank, is a weighted score determined by the number of disticnct affiliates who have recieved a commission from referring a customer to the product. Take a look at any program or product with a gravity score of over 100.

Once you have found a site, your next step is to imitate it. I’m not advocating plagirism here, but try and match the layout and featues as closely as possible. Don’t be too concerned with truely unique content or the software involved. An open source CMS package like Wordpress or Joomla will do in most cases, and there are plenty of free themes and plugins available to dress up your site and add functionality.

All you need now is to add content. If it’s articles you need, there are many sites that list articles with reprint rights. If it’s a product such as an ebook, you can purchase a product with master resale rights and repackage it, or go to sites like GetAFreelancer.com and get something custom made. After that, all that’s left for you to do is list the site for sale on Sitepoint, or use some methods from the Equity Millions system and sell it for even more money. Not a member of Equity Millions? Click Here to join now!