Launchinga website can be expensive! Should we deprive ourselves of an online presence when we have a minimal budget or nonexistent? Of course not. The challenge will be more difficult to meet without being impossible. If you are in this situation, let me guide you in the steps to follow to complete your project. So in this tutorial, I’m going to show you “where to start”, “what to do” and most importantly “how to do” to show a professional website with a minimum budget. Throughout this article, I will try to show you that the best alternative to money to build a website
will be the time you are willing to invest in your project. Indeed, motivation and commitment over time can allow you to get fantastic results without investing money at the beginning. In addition to this guide, the video that accompanies it deals with the same subject and will guide you. So follow along!Start a website without money
Discover in this video what are the best methods to launch a website without budget:
So for this, I made a quick presentation, so on powerpoint to present you the different elements I found:
What you need to know before you start
Creating a website without a budget is a difficult mission but not impossible as long as you know how to perfectly allocate your resources (time) in the actions most likely to bring results. For this, I advise you to have a methodical and structured approach in order not to exhaust your forces in useless actions with less value.
Moreover, to create a website without a budget you must absolutely be a fan of DIY (Do it Yourself), and tell yourself that you are going to do most, if not all, of the things yourself.
For me, the success of a website lies on three essential factors:
- Having the basic knowledge to create a website ;
- Being able to offer exceptional content;
- Knowing SEO to optimize your website and increase your visibility on Google.
Act as a strategist to save time
I find it important to come back to this point, even if I already talked about it in my other articles. Before you actually go to the stage of creating your website, you need to define at least a few things.
First of all, you need to determine your position in the market, as well as your target. For the successful launch of your website, it is important that your products or services have a unique value on the market. This will allow you to differentiate yourself from other competing websites that deal with the same issues.
Moreover, you have probably noticed that for most topics, there are dozens of reference sites and if you do not want to be “just another site or blog”, you must be able to differentiate yourself.
To do this, I advise you to choose a niche, that is to say a sub-theme less covered by a major theme. By doing so, you minimize the competition or you will even be “out of competition” if you manage to find a good niche.
To succeed in this step, there are basically five points that you must define
- Your target audience;
- Understanding and addressing your audience’s problem;
- The value you offer to your market;
- The strategy to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Creating your website (DIY)
Without a budget, you will have to roll up your sleeves and do as much as possible yourself. This includes creating a website on wordpress.
A functional, efficient and not extravagant website
If you are a beginner and this is your first website, I advise you to create something functional, efficient and without extravagance at first. For that, turn to widespread solutions, which have proven themselves, and that many people use. This way, you will be able to follow step by step the creation of a site, simply by replicating what you have learned.
Tutorials / Videos / Training / Blog
From my point of view, the best way to proceed to create a website without budget today is to do it yourself by replicating identically the actions and methods you will follow on a Youtube video for example. Indeed, by following step by step the construction, you will get a very convincing result, which you can then customize for your activity / business.
On this subject, you can find on my blog and on my Youtube channel, the different steps that allowed me to create my website myself for my SEO agency Twaino
- Youtube channel : Twaino
- Blog https://www.twaino.com/blog/
I also advise you to join facebook groups such as WordPress France to ask questions if you need to or to read about the problems that other website creators may encounter.
Once you have followed the different tutorials and solved the most important work, you will have to fill this website with quality content.
Write quality content yourself
Without content, your site is empty and there is no interest for a user to visit it. So, it’s important to sit down and think about the type of content you want to create, and develop a content strategy to meet the needs of your audience. I personally had the opportunity to play around with creating a content strategy in an article and video. If you don’t know how to do it, I suggest you take a look.
Choosing content formats
The reason to study this step carefully is quite simple: content is ROI on the internet. And there are four types of formats you can use:
- Written: articles and other texts;
- Video: webinars, videos for Youtube, Facebook, etc.
- Visual: illustrations, infographics, images..
- Audio: podcasts.
The first three are the best known and most used. The fourth one is in full expansion and allows users to get information in the subway, in the car, in short in a multitasking environment. Visuals are much more relevant for social networks, but also allow you to enrich the content on your website.
To get traffic for your website, you have two main formats, blog posts and videos. You can nevertheless combine the four formats, but be careful! Put consistency and harmony so that the reader can follow you easily.
For my SEO agency Twaino, I prefer to use mainly three formats to create my content. These are articles accompanied by images and videos.
Create original and relevant content
You have to keep in mind that people go to Google to find answers. So I suggest that you take an extremely qualitative approach. In other words, your content should solve a specific problem and be really “useful” for your audience. To do this, have content that is illustrated, detailed and if possible based on your own research and experiences.
Publish content that your audience wants to read
This is the first point you should focus on. If you write for yourself, no one will come to read you. So by highlighting your products or services on other pages, you need to have a blog where you address the questions your ideal customer may have.
This is exactly the strategy I use when dealing with my SEO Agency’s website blog, with articles dealing with website creation and SEO issues. It is really about popularizing and evangelizing the importance of an SEO strategy for increasing a company’s revenue.
To be successful at this level, you need to be able to touch on relevant topics that your readers will enjoy. In order to understand what your audience wants to read, I recommend using tools such as :
- Google Search Console : to get the keywords that will make you appear in the first search results;
- Quora.com : to find the questions people are asking in your industry;
- Buzzsumo: to see the most successful articles in your field.
This list is not exhaustive and you can find great tools that can help inspire you to find a topic to write about. For this, I refer you to my article: My 5 favorite marketing tools.
Publish regularly
The only advice I can give you is to be consistent in creating content for your blog. And one of the keys to being consistent is to stay consistent in your publishing no matter what the issue is.
This is one of the best ways to keep your readers who have some sort of “appointment” with you. They will be inclined to trust you because of the quality of your content and are likely to use your services and buy your products much more easily.
For a start, I suggest that you opt for at least one article per week that you must respect. You can do a lot more after that, which I highly recommend.
I go further in my advice on this in the following article: How to be consistent in creating blog content.
Publish longer, more detailed articles
Don’t be afraid to spend several hours on a blog post in order to give as much detail as possible about the topic you’re writing about. In other words, make sure you cover the topic completely to offer your audience as much qualitative information as possible. So you don’t have to write for the sake of writing, but don’t hesitate to go over the 3000 word mark when you have good information.
Another reason to do this is that on average articles longer than 1800 words are more likely to be on the first page of Google for a given query. The search engine will tend to prioritize articles that cover the entirety of a topic and include a broad lexical field around the main keyword.
Optimize the On-Page SEO of your articles
Increase your chances by opting for the basic principles of on-page SEO. In other words, use keywords in strategic places to optimize your ranking. To do this:
- The title of the article, the meta description and the URL must contain the main keyword;
- Entice readers with a good meta description;
- Other titles should contain the target keyword and/or other keywords.
Promote yourself!
Having quality content on your website is not enough, you also need to promote yourself. Indeed, SEO is the best way to make your website known on the medium and long term. In order to generate interest in your website, I advise you to promote your content on social networks. But in addition to these channels you can capitalize on the traffic of another website.
Leverage the audience of another website
To capitalize on the traffic of another website, you can opt for the following strategies:
- Write guest articles for influencers or bloggers and on blogs in your industry: for this, write articles on blogs that touch your targets, taking care to link to your articles. This will increase the authority of your website with Google.
- Send emails to influencers so that they relay your articles: if you don’t know them personally, make links to their blog. The idea It’s a give and take by building trust. But make sure your content is of interest to them
Share your articles on social networks
Whether on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram…. feel free to share your articles, videos or visuals. But be careful not to spam so as not to be counterproductive. At this level, I also advise you to use Facebook groups dealing with your theme to benefit from their traffic.
Search for them with your keywords and once accepted, publish about once a week an engaging description. However, make sure that self-promotion is allowed so that you don’t get banned. These methods are interesting, but they are far from sufficient.
Develop a community
Social networks are the best way to build a community, so use them to attract traffic. Regarding Facebook in particular, I recommend you to create a group instead of a page. This way, you’ll promote the exchange around a given theme. Moreover, a community develops much faster because of two very important elements:
- The exchange between your fans themselves;
- The exchange between them and you.
This is favored by groups, unlike pages that often need advertising campaigns to grow quickly.
Since the majority of your visitors do not come back to your website, it is important to optimize your newsletter for those who have signed up. It is a real asset and you need to develop it. So, be regular and don’t spam the subscribers of your newsletter. One mailing per week is enough and make sure you personalize your content.
By doing this, you know if your audience is really engaged, which can serve as a marker to know if your performance is good.
For your website’s SEO: Get trained
Just having a beautiful website is not enough to rank well in SEO and provide an optimal user experience. There are certain steps that I suggest you respect and that are very useful when you have a very limited budget and you want to get organic traffic quickly.
SEO, a technicality that is scary?
If you want to succeed with your website, you will inevitably end up on the SEO. Indeed, it is one of the most powerful marketing levers at the moment to increase its visibility on Google.
Thus, SEO is an essential investment today, and it is essential to take into account. So how to do SEO for your own site when you can’t afford to hire an expert consultant at 500 euros a day on average?
Well, you have to train yourself. As part of my SEO agency Twaino, I help website creators to acquire the technical basics in order to do their SEO themselves for their site.
Have a website with a clean architecture
For your website launch to be successful, you must have a well structured and clean website. You must also take the time to think about the architecture of your website before actually creating it. Indeed, SEO is also played nowadays on the side of navigation and user experience. This is a very important point that I have fully developed in my article on the subject. Nevertheless, I will come back to some aspects that I find important.
A structure for the website
At this level, you must also think about the ergonomics of your website in order to offer the best possible experience to your users since it has a huge impact on your conversions, your sales, in short your results and your performance.
Don’t hesitate to draw inspiration from what already exists. Use either a simple paper, PowerPoint, Canva and many other tools to achieve them.
A site properly crawled and indexed by Google
Google has developed several powerful tools to index and reference websites. Among these, there is Googlebot which is a crawler or a robot that has the function of sucking some or all of the content of a website from an entry point such as the home page. And without crawling, there is no indexation by the famous Google algorithms. That’s why it is important to know what it is and to react accordingly to benefit from a good referencing.
Indeed, this robot can be considered as a browser such as Chrome or Firefox, which saves the contents of a site after automatically clicking on all the links it contains. It therefore scans both new and old pages.
However, note that this robot does not waste time because it has a “crawl budget” which is a visit time per site. Therefore, not all pages are crawled every time, but “a page that is not crawled regularly has no chance to position itself sustainably” as said the director of SEO mission for the SEO agency Clustaar, Alexis Mouton.
So you understand the importance of the previous step concerning the structuring of your website. By taking all this into account, you will facilitate the visit of crawlers on your website. This allows you to have a good indexation and therefore a good SEO.
The importance of speed
Think about everything and do not forget the speed of downloading pages which influences the behavior of visitors on your website. If you have pages that load slowly or if your entire website behaves in this way, visitors will obviously leave it immediately or will avoid it soon and sometimes no matter how rich its content is.
Therefore, don’t hesitate to install powerful tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to detect this kind of problem and know how to optimize the user experience.
I would like to point out that by adopting these tools, you will have an important amount of data to use to monitor the performance of your website. This includes of course the detection of certain problems, the implementation of a strategy for its resolution and the follow-up of this strategy. My articles and videos on these tools will be of great help to you. So don’t hesitate to consult them and to read them.
Conclusion
As you can see, launching a website without a budget is possible, but you must respect certain steps to ensure its success. This requires commitment, organization and a lot of time to be concretized. I therefore advise you to invest in yourself, by training you on website creation, SEO, article writing in order to be able to create your website afterwards. By deciding not to outsource these tasks, you will gradually increase your skills, and be able to build several websites, without any budget.
On that note, I wish you a good start and a great success.
See you soon.
Video transcription
Hi, this is Alex. Today we are going to see together how to launch your website without a budget. So for me, if you want to launch your website from my point of view, there are really two things that are essential to know. Firstly, it is the SEO, secondly it is the content. Why SEO? Well, SEO is ultra important because if you don’t have a minimum of knowledge or a minimum of basis in it, you risk creating content that will ultimately serve no purpose. For example, if you have a website and you don’t set up your website correctly so that Google can index, well crawl and index your website correctly. Finally, it will be useless. So you need to have a minimum of basis in any case at the beginning from my point of view to launch your website properly. Second point is content, indeed content, on your website you must have pages and you must have articles. Without content, it’s an empty copy in fact. Therefore, nobody will go to a website that is going to be empty. So that’s going to be for you, that should be a priority for you anyway if you want to launch your website and if you want to have traction at some point or another, you have to create content. Because obviously when people go to Google, you say okay, they go to Google why? Because they have questions, they’re looking for something. Your goal with your website is to provide answers to the questions people have. If you provide detailed quality answers, it will work for you in the medium to long term. If you ever think ok well what are the questions that people are asking then for that, you can go on the facebook accounts. You’ll see how many questions there are on Facebook groups dedicated to your business. Or you can also go on “Quora.com” to see actually what kind of questions you can have on what kind of sector. There are so many questions that you’re going to have to choose from, so what I recommend is that you choose the questions that are the most popular, for example that have created, that have generated the most responses or that have the most views. In short, see what works best. And then the goal is to create content that is unique and different, well, that is different earlier and very detailed and that allows you to answer these questions that people are asking. Just remember that when an answer is given and a question is asked earlier, it’s quite possible that in a few weeks, a few days, a few months, other people will be asking the same questions. And so your objective is going to be to answer and anticipate this question and to provide the best answer you can. The better your answer, the more detailed and precise your answer is going to be, the better it’s going to be for you because finally, you’re going to succeed in capturing little by little this organic traffic with these questions from people who agree. So once you have this quality content, what I would advise you to do is to try to share it. For example on facebook, twitter, and linkedin actually, you could say ok well, I create my content now I wait for it to rank well in Google. Indeed, it is something that is feasible. You will see results in the next six months or a year. However, you should know that what is interesting when you share on social networks is that it will be a kind of gas pedal in fact, it is a real boost, an element that will allow you immediately to have visibility. So it’s interesting for that, I advise you to share as much as possible the content you are going to create, especially if it’s quality content, you can be proud of it and it will interest people ok. Another thing about content creation. For me in fact? there are several ways to create content. You can create your content on your website but also on other websites. For me at least, it is very important to build what I call the fundamentals. In other words, create content on your own website right away ok. Later on, we can do what we call guest articles to get visibility on other websites. And in the first instance, really try to spend time consolidating your website because ultimately, it’s like each article in the end, it’s a bit like stones that you’re going to add to your building. So in the beginning, rather than going all over the place, focus on your website and make a lot of quality articles. And finally, this is what will allow you in the next six months to have traffic on your website directly. Afterwards, another interesting element is the fact of doing guest articles. This means that you will contact for example other websites and you will ask them if you can create content for them that they will publish on their own site. What’s the point? Well the point is, probably, you will have what is called a backlink. In other words, there will be a link on their website that will refer to yours. So that’s positive overall. And globally what will be important too, well what will be interesting with guest articles, is to try to target websites obviously that will have an audience that is similar or very very close to yours. So it will allow you, it will allow in any case to make you known to an audience that does not know you immediately. And therefore to increase your circle of influence. Another way to do this than guest articles, you can actually write, including making responses on Facebook groups to have visibility. You can also answer on Quora and therefore on Reddit. There is a lot of reliable content that can be posted on this kind of platform and there are a lot of questions that are asked and therefore, the more relevant your answers will be, the more you will tend to help people and the more these people will finally be grateful to you. And they will be curious to know what kind of content you have produced on the side. Another element is the podcast or the youtube channels, so videos, if you have the possibility to participate in a quick way in interviews for example, it’s something that can be very interesting because finally you will be able to establish your expert status or at least make your brand known. Make your product or service known. And so, it’s something you have to work towards. So that’s it, I’m done with this video. I hope you found it interesting. So you’ve finally seen, it’s possible to launch a website with practically no budget. But you should know that it’s much more difficult to start with no budget than with a minimum budget. Nevertheless, it’s not because it’s more difficult that it’s impossible. In my situation, for example with my SEO agency Twaino, I am exactly in that situation. And I have a budget that is almost nothing and so the objective for me is to create content. That I try to make sure that it’s quality content. And so here I am exactly in this same situation and in my case for example, it does not prevent me from making infographics, images, videos and writing my content myself to ensure that I have this visibility afterwards. As I said during my presentation, in my case at least until now, I am really trying to consolidate the fundamentals of my site. Right now, I have about twenty, I’m writing about twenty articles. I’ve made about 20 videos too. The goal is to consolidate this content and then why not go and propose guest articles on my own website. It’s going to be something interesting and also go outside to write other guest articles on other sites knowing that I know that on a regular basis, I publish answers on some facebook groups, precisely to help the SEO community or also obviously to help the wordpress community. In short, I try to be on different types of sites to help as much as I can in any case people who need it. So that’s it for this video, don’t lose hope if you don’t have a budget, you can still launch your website and succeed on the internet. It’s just going to be longer, more complicated, but not impossible. See you soon!
