The most important advice for anyone that wants to build an online business (plus lesson one, to be completed today!).

This post is one of my free weekly LIONS CLUB newsletters and is unlisted (and therefore exclusive to my subscribers), but you somehow made it here (you sly dog!). Now that you are here, feel free to share, comment, or ask a question below. And if you haven’t already, sign up for my free weekly LIONS CLUB newsletter to receive more great posts just like this one. Enjoy! 🙂

The most important advice for anyone that wants to build an online business (plus lesson one, to be completed today!).

If you get stuck at any point along the way or have any questions, use Google or your own experimenting to figure out a solution. This will help you out a lot more than simply getting an answer from me and will help you develop the most important skill for any entrepreneur: problem solving. Every single problem you will encounter has been encountered by lots of people before you and there will be documentation online on how to solve it (plus additional information so you fully understand why the solution works). My background is in Finance and I had never built a website until after I graduated from college; everything I’ve learned I’ve learned through Google. Use it to your advantage!

Regarding the business I teach, as long as you follow through with the directions in my website / videos, not only will you start to generate some income, you’ll learn A TON about how to build and run an online business. And because there are hardly any overhead expenses, there really is nothing to lose. There are very few businesses that are this inexpensive to start in that offer such high potential (the amount of money that can made online is virtually limitless once you get good). I recommend you give it your all, learn everything you can, and try to do some of your own experimenting as well. Try and think how you can take everything you are learning to build something even bigger than what I teach (be creative). That’s the best way to approach this business.

Also, every time you sit down, you want to make sure you grow your business in some way. The most important thing in this business is to build and maintain forward momentum. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your business grows with each month that passes if you work this way. In other words, don’t be someone who isn’t taking action because they want to understand everything first and things to be perfect; this isn’t a perfect business and the people who are successful are the ones who just keep building more websites and more links and trying more things and learn as they go (I have too many students that spend too much time analyzing and not enough time doing; they are the ones that end up with a few small “perfect” websites while other students are going crazy with 3-4 new websites each month and have 50+ new ones by the end of each year – who do you think is going to make the real money??).

When I spent my year building 160 websites like a madman, it taught me more than any class ever could. Also remember that I had nobody to ask questions when I got stuck and I believe this is what made me successful in the end; it forced me to experiment and just move forward. You really don’t need anything more than what is taught in the video series; that will give you your entire foundation and from there you can take this business in all kinds of directions.

Additionally, I would recommend building a freelancing website as a side business (making websites for others), especially at the beginning while you are just starting to develop your passive income portfolio. This is a good way to consistently make some fast cash too (just two gigs per month will make you an extra $1000). Some freelancing advice on how I used to do it can be found here: freelancing advice.

And that is exactly the point of this first lesson! To build your first website. 🙂

Set aside one hour and make your first website TODAY!

NOTE: Throughout my course you will be referred to video lessons. While everything in the video lessons is as up to date as possible (I frequently update the video lessons), the place to check for the most up-to-date information is in the video descriptions (on the same page you watch the videos). This can be the video descriptions on the pages of the LIONS CLUB website, or the video description of the Udemy or YouTube pages. Be sure to read the video descriptions of each video before watching the video itself.

Here is your first lesson. Enjoy!

Make Your First Website and Start Blogging in Less than 1 Hour

If you are serious about making money online, the first thing you need to learn is how to make a website – if you don’t learn to do this, you’ll never be able to make any significant amount of money online, ever.

Today I’m going to show you how to make a website (or blog) on its own domain, without coding, using WordPress (it’s a surprisingly simple process). These are professional websites with any look that you want (and can incorporate anything that you want, including social media buttons, “buy now” buttons, mailing list forms, Google maps, etc.).

Note: When I say we will be creating a website using WordPress, I don’t mean creating one through the WordPress website. Websites created through there are severely limited in what you can do with them and offer very little flexibility overall. The method I teach enables you to create truly professional websites by installing the free, open source, WordPress software and you won’t be limited in any way.

Not only is WordPress very easy to use, it is 100% free and makes your website completely customizable. Over 15% of websites online have been created with WordPress; if you can use Microsoft Word, you can make a website using WordPress (my LIONS CLUB website was made using WordPress…and I don’t even know any code!).

The point of today’s exercise is simply for you to get your feet wet and to get a website online that you can play and experiment with. Don’t worry too much about what this first website is going to be about; just get something online. After you complete this first project and feel comfortable with the process of putting together a professional looking website, then you can start developing your passive income website portfolio.

If you don’t know what to make your first website about, a fun first project could be building a website for your new side business: freelancing websites for others. After all, once you’re done with the first four lessons, you’ll be qualified to build fairly basic, but professional looking websites. Then you can start charging people $500 per website to make yourself some extra money! When I first learned how to make a website with WordPress, I used to post my services on Craigslist daily, and I would get at least two to three gigs per month. You can simply make your website YourName.com or YourNameWebsiteCreationServices.com. If you decide to go this route, here is some freelancing advice to help you get started. 🙂

You can also make yourself a blog about your favorite hobby or one that follows your experiences with building an online business – personal blogs that develop a regular readership make A LOT of money.

Remember: Everyday you don’t start, money is being left on the table.

You want to make sure you take action as you read through my emails or you will find yourself a month down the road without having accomplished anything! If you do have any trouble with building your first website today, simply hit the reply button and I will be happy to respond to your email.

What will be the total cost of your website? About $15 / year for the domain and $10 / month for hosting (the hosting can be used for as many domains as you want, so the price never goes up).

You can watch the entire process of me creating a basic blog on its own domain on the video on the following page in under 15 minutes:

How to Make a Website or Blog on your own Domain without Coding using WordPress

This is the first of four video lessons where I will show you the entire completion of the website Mike Omar Photography ALL IN UNDER ONE HOUR TOTAL! Follow along in the video lessons and you’ll see just how easy it is to build a website. 🙂

If you prefer, you can also build your website using the instructions in this email as well (although they are in much less detail than the video tutorial, so I suggest watching the video). 

If you have trouble getting your first website up, send me an email and I will personally help you set it up (although please make your best effort first!). 

Step 1: Buying a domain name.

I’m always creating new blogs because you can literally set them up and make them look professional in less than an hour. Any idea pops in my head and I make the website – after all, it only costs $15 / year for the domain.

When picking a domain name, make sure it is simple to remember, fairly short (ideally 3 words of less), and easy to spell.

To purchase your domain, click on Black Steel Hosting. There you can buy all the domains you need at a great price.

For more details about the checkout process and recommended settings, please watch the video tutorial I linked to above.

Step 2: Next you need a hosting account.

The most important thing for running an online business is having reliable hosting. If you don’t, you are risking your entire online business (this is because unreliable hosting companies have servers that go down making your websites crash or go offline, and some of them don’t even keep backups of your websites, making you lose your hard work forever).

I use Black Steel Hosting to host a huge portion of my website portfolio. They offer high quality hosting at a good price and offer 24 / 7 tech support (which is really nice to have whenever things go wrong and you aren’t a technical person, like me!).

Go ahead and sign up for one of their three available plans (small, medium, and large). Small is appropriate for people that only need one website, the middle plan allows up to 10 websites, and the large one allows unlimited websites. Sign up for whatever plan is appropriate for what you are doing.

For more details about the checkout process and recommended settings, please watch the video tutorial I linked to above.

Step 3: Installing WordPress.

Once you have purchased your domains and your hosting account, return to Black Steel Hosting and click on the “Client Area” tab. Once you are logged in, go to the “My Products and Services” page (under “Services”, then “My Services”). Your hosting account should be listed there, and then press the “View Details” button of your hosting account. Once you do that, click on the “Login to cPanel” button and a new page will open up.

Once you are at the cPanel, you’re going to scroll down and click on the button that says “WordPress” under the “Softaculous Apps Installer” category. Then press “Install” on the domain you’d like to install WordPress on and you’re all set!

Like I said before,the video tutorial is much more detailed, but that is the basic rundown on how to install WordPress on a new domain!

Using Your Blog

Once you have the basic WordPress installation on your domain, to start playing with your website and customizing it, you’re going to have to login to the backend of your website by going towww.YourDomain.com/wp-admin (in other words, type in your domain URL and add /wp-admin to the end). Once you are there, login using the information you registered when you installed WordPress.

From this point on, anytime you want to modify your website, you would do it from this backend area. For further information on how to use WordPress to customize your website, you can watch the remaining video lessons on the following pages:

How to Add Posts, Pages, Links, Widgets for Your Sidebar, and New Themes to Your WordPress website.

How to Add Images, Use Plugins to Add Social Media Buttons and a Contact Form, How to Add Google

Maps, and How to Add a Buy Now PayPal Button.

How to Set Up a Mailing List and Autoresponder Newsletter – No website (or Facebook fan page, etc.) is complete until it has a sign up form to collect email addresses (otherwise, you’re leaving money on the table). Every business in the world should have an email list, as well as a newsletter they send out on a regular basis. No matter what kind of online website you have (business website, personal blog, etc.), get a sign up form on there and start collecting emails immediately (even if you don’t have a clear idea of what you’re going to do with that mailing list yet). One of the most common regrets of anyone with an online presence is “not having started collecting emails sooner.”

Once you watch those four additional videos (less than 20 minutes each), you’ll have completed your first website (and will be pretty good at making websites too!).

Congratulations on having built your first website and having realized just how easy it is! 

Building a website (and getting past the fear of “web design”) is a step most aspiring entrepreneurs never get past, and you just built one in less than an hour! A lot of times simply doing something and realizing it’s not as hard as you thought is the best way to gain some forward momentum and start taking concrete steps towards building a business. 🙂

Mike Omar

Register for my video course(s) on Udemy (100% free)

P.S. 1 – Take action now and build your first website TODAY! Remember that the longer you take to start, the more money that is being left on the table.

P.S. 2 – You can also learn my entire Make Money from Home LIONS CLUB lesson plan in book form (also available on Kindle)! To learn how to build a $5,000 per month passive income website portfolio, completely step-by-step in book form, click here!

P.S. 3 – You may also be interested in my book that teaches you how to start a profitable blog (also available on Kindle). It has similar principles as my other book, but the overall strategy is different. If you’d like to learn how to build a blog about a topic you love, develop a loyal readership, and make money online doing it, click here!

P.S. 4 – My personal website portfolio is made up of both of these types of businesses (generic passive income websites and cared-for blogs), and I suggest you build both kinds of websites for your business as well.

About the LIONS CLUB:

The Make Money from Home LIONS CLUB was founded by me (Mike Omar) to help people learn how to make money from home and escape their dependence on an outside job. Remember that the goal here is not only to make money from home, but to gain FREEDOM and TOTAL AUTONOMY.  The more money you can make on your own, the closer you are to never having a boss or a work schedule or limited vacation time again.

An introduction to my website:

The LIONS CLUB – On the homepage of my website there is an introduction video to everything you need to know about the LIONS CLUB and an overall breakdown of the free action plan to build a $5,000 per month passive income website portfolio. If you haven’t watched it yet, start there!

About – The about page is my FAQ page answering who I am, why I created the LIONS CLUB, how my free online school works, how to get the most out of it, and other common questions.

My Story – Here you can read my story about how I went from a corporate drone to broke and unemployed to a full time passive income earner.

Resources – This page lists the best tools I’ve come across to build my online business. I would recommend bookmarking this page for future reference. Every important tool I’ve come across and used regularly to develop my online income is on this page.

Required Reading – Here are some of my most highly recommended books ever, for financial success, personal philosophy, and good ol’ pleasure reading. It’s really hard to not keep adding books, so I narrowed it down to my absolute favorites.

Inspiration – This is a list of the top 20 earning blogs online today.

Action Plan – Here is my step-by-step, 100% free, video series on how to make money online, with an intended initial goal of $5,000 / month in passive income.

High Quality Outsourcing – My services website where you can outsource the entire SEO backlinking process through my personal team (if you don’t understand what that means yet, you’ll understand after you’ve watched the video course). 🙂

A few things you should know about my blog and newsletter:

·  I will never share your email address with anyone for any reason.

·  You will never get more than three or four emails from me per month.

·  The information in the newsletter cannot be found on my blog.

·  All the information in my newsletter and on my blog is, and always will be, 100% FREE.