starting a website

If you'd like to open your own storefront and don't have much upfront cash building a website could be your best bet.

There's a ton more competition online so you'll have to invest a significant amount of time, but if time is your greatest asset a website is a perfect fit.

With more than a billion people online websites offer the world market at your fingertips. You can literally become an expert in a niche and create a career based off what your site is about.

You ask, why build a website? I ask, why not?

Building a website is fairly easy and the how to can be broken down into five steps which include:

1. Choose a domain - If you're building a niche website that's targeting a keyword make sure the keyword is in the domain. If you're building a brand be sure that there aren't any trademarks with similar names before you go ahead and register the domain.

2. Choose a host - There are a ton of useful hosts out there, but the one I use for all my sites is bluehost.com.

3. Build out the site - It's not as hard as it used to be and you can even create a website using wordpress as a content management system which is quite easy. You don't need to be a programmer by any stretch, but you do have to be able to write content about your website topic.

4. Market the site - You can market your site in several ways, but if you'd like to be found on Google you're going to have to get backlinks to your site. This can be done a number of ways including guest posting, reciprocal linking, commenting, and article marketing.

5. Maintain, grow, and update - Once the site is up and has a substantial amount of backlinks you'll be able to relax a bit and just make sure that proper site maintenance is performed and that you've still got more backlinks than the competition.