Why You Need a Website Right Now (And How to Start)

I can confidently say with almost zero reservation that you need a website and you need it right now that may sound like something you would hear at the beginning of an advertisement but I promise you this video is going to do you a huge favor many of you watching this video may already have a website and that's awesome but even if you have a website you might not be using it to the fullest of its potential

in this video I do want to cover all of these different ways or at least some of the really valuable ways that you can use a website to help benefit you no matter what you're using it for now again I made a bold claim at the beginning of this video that you need a website I don't care who you share this video with if you share this video with your grandmother she probably needs a website in

today's world and in order to help validate that claim I'm going to answer the five W's and the bonus question which we all know is how right who was when where why how all right so let's get started who needs a website the reason I feel so confident saying that you probably need a website is because I can right off the top of my head in a matter of literally a few seconds came up with a

decent list of different groups of people who absolutely need a website and this doesn't even include the many other people who don't fall in any of these categories who probably would still benefit substantially from having one so first Group business owners now you might think okay well yeah of course businesses should have a websites and you might be surprised to find out how many of them don't because it feels like something that's either really expensive or

really hard and so they just don't go about doing it but when I talk about business owners I'm talking about all types of business owners I'm including people that have a little side Hustle No matter what you're doing as a side hustle you would benefit from having a real presence on the web that you own so even if you're just getting products and selling them through Amazon literally fulfilled by Amazon you're ordering them from overseas and

sending them to Amazon and shipping them out now you have a seller profile on Amazon great but that's your only web presence What If instead of just a seller profile you turn that into a brand you created a website with that brand name and you established something about yourself the specific types of products that you're looking for what it is that you have to offer think about the biggest names that you're up against on Amazon as

a seller and and go check them out how much of an online presence do they have they've probably built out their presence on Amazon but there's a good chance that they also have their own website and if they don't well that's an opportunity now for you to one up them another example of this that absolutely you should have a website if you have a rental property we live in the day of short-term rentals people are making

a lot of money with their airbnbs right if you own an Airbnb what if you had your own website also list that home on Airbnb of course because Airbnb is going to bring you a whole bunch of traffic but what if you also had that same information and maybe more on your own website when someone comes to stay at your property what if you have information for them right there so that they can leave you a

review on Google in addition to Airbnb and what if they can bookmark your website you help make it easy for them to find where your website is and then next time they're coming through the same area they can just book straight through you what percentage is Airbnb taking of the listing fee and they're charging all sorts of other fees that I found out from some friends of mine that you might not even know about as the

owner of the house you can control that a lot more by trying to steer those people through your website as often as possible but then of course continuing to use Airbnb VRBO and any of those other services in the way they're intended and the real value that they have which is bringing people to your home in the first place again talking to a friend of mine I was amazed to see how many like vacation rentals exist

in various places all around the world that not only don't have a website but they aren't even listed on Airbnb you literally would only find them it seems if you were driving through the area or knew somebody who knew about these properties that's crazy you can have a website I'm going to show you very easily in this video by the way how we're going to set it up that's that's the how part but also if that's

something where you're like I don't have time time for this that's something that we're offering here as well at income school so I can set up an Airbnb listing for you like your own website with its own domain like if your house is called like the Cozy Abode I can get you the Cozy abode.com or something very similar to it and we can get your website up and running and we can do it fast and pretty

dang cheap because it's really not that complicated I'm going to show you at the end you're going to be like why are people paying so much for websites the next group of people who need a website YouTubers if you're on YouTube you have a YouTube channel and you're like trying to make money or something or even just trying to get famous you should have a website now why well that's another W question we're still on who

okay let's move on then what about athletes actors and artists really anybody that has a portfolio of content or information that other people would want to see that includes artists is a huge group right photographers musicians um composers of music and anything else I guess podcasters you should have a website so that you can showcase the work that you're doing now a lot of people are going to set up their website using um one of these

very simple drag and drop Builders and for a portfolio site you can probably get away with that okay but you can do so much more by doing what I'm about to show you okay as a little aside here I was talking to some other friends the other day who um are parents and they have high school age children and it is amazing to me things have changed changed so much since I went to high school um

but we're athletes who are trying to get recruited especially by like division one schools you like have to put together a very professional package of information to hand off to potential recruiters otherwise you like don't even have a shot so you're putting together your highlight reel and you're putting together a bunch of stats and just information about you and all sorts of stuff that you're putting into kind of a portfolio to hand off to them what

if it was a website then it would be something that they could easily find and that you could easily send them to and it would make you look super dope all right the last group of people I'm going to mention here is what about people who are seeking a career if you're looking for a job yes you can have a LinkedIn but what if you had your own website that could showcase a lot more than what

you're going to show on a resume but also even more than what you can show on LinkedIn yes the social media is great it is designed for networking but on a website you have complete flexibility to include all sorts of video content all sorts of written content and to just showcase everything that you want if you're seeking a job working for a company put together your portfolio put together all of the information that you want to

make available and that could be the thing that really makes you stand out so we've covered who right so let's move on to question number two question number two is what what do we need answer it with me a website the what is a website we can move on to question three when when do we need a website answer it with me now now we need a website now we live in a day and an age

where information is just there's so much of it right and if your information is not available or for whatever it is that you're trying to share with the world again we just went through a ton of examples if it's not readily available to share or they could even find it if they were to go search for it on the internet if it's not available it might never get found okay so now let's move on to the

next question which is where where well I'm going to build it with cloudways now cloudways is actually the sponsor of this video and you might think I'm just sharing all this information with you because they're sponsoring it so they told me I had to actually no I haven't run the idea for this video by them at all yet but they're sponsoring it anyway and the reason that I'm working with cloudways is because they are who I

use to host websites 100% of the websites that I own and build for myself and for clients I do on cloudways we'll talk more about cloudways and the how behind it when we get to that question okay now we got to talk briefly about the why I've touched on this a bit that your information needs to be out there and available and yada yada yada but there are some very specific benefits that you get by having

your own website versus just having your information available on other social media platforms the first one is a higher level of credibility on one hand like I definitely trust a photographer that has their own website where on that website they can showcase the portfolio of the work they've done a whole bunch of work gosh that's great to see I can see if their style is a good fit for me but also a lot of times it's

really handy if I can also interact with that photographer through the website it's through their website that they're able to provide me with the photos that they took oftentimes utilizing a third party service but it's kind of managed through their website and so it puts it all in one place it can be through their website that I pay them it feels substantially more professional and there for more valuable versus someone who just does photography out of

the back of their car and is like here just ven me this amount of money it's just a higher level of professionalism that makes me feel like I'm being taken care of so there's credibility but there's another piece that goes beyond that and that is search engine optimization let's say you have a local business and you're like yeah you know what though I've joined a bunch of Facebook groups for businesses I get Word of Mouth spread

around so I got a marketing agency working for me and they even set up a Google my business list so I'm showing up on Google Maps sure I'm number seven on Google Maps if you search from you know like my block but I mean that's good enough right first of all no that's probably not good enough uh you'll probably get some traffic from that but second of all you want to show up better even as a

Google Business listing have content associated with your business when you have a website not only can you feature a whole bunch of information about your business but you can create content written content video content all sorts of content that in and of itself can rank on Google for a lot of different search queries a lot of questions people are typing into the internet and that's going to help you rank for all of those but all of

those are also going to help strengthen your Authority so that you rank better even on the map and also for non-map related searches just general searches for whatever service or business that you have in your area on that local search you need to have content and you can't have content if you only have a Google Business listing at least you can't have very much content and no a social media profile isn't going to do basically anything

for you when it comes to that the same is true for a portfolio you know if you're an athlete trying to get recruited if you're an artist if you're an actor having your portfolio available on your website makes it a lot easier to find for people rather than trying to get the search engine to help people find you through some sort of other social media platform or even through maybe there's an agency doing this for you

and you just have a listing on your agency's website again your own website boosts you up that much more from a search engine optimization standpoint I mean don't get me wrong if you have your listing also with an agency their website can rank well it's just you're just shuffled in amongst all of the other people with that agency so have your own website in addition to that okay the second reason is if the first one wasn't

enough the second reason is that you can capture leads so again if you have a reason why you want people to see your stuff to come to your content whether you have a business or you're seeking a career you can have your contact info of course on your website but you can have that anywhere but what you can also do is you can use forms to capture leads you can get information from people so they can

provide you their email address um maybe their phone number for SMS text messaging and that gives you the chance to follow up with those people and try to do further interactions or business or whatever it is that you're trying to do when people come to your website and they follow you there you own that contact when they follow you on social media there's no guarantee that they're going to see anything that you post going forward own

your customer list it's one of the most important things you can do in business own your customer list and you can do that on your own website way better than you can on any platform okay and then the next piece is that you can host all of your content all of the information that you want in whatever format you want so it doesn't have to fall within the box of LinkedIn or next door or any social

media platform you can have all the information that you need in the order that you prioritize it in then if you have anything to sell you can sell your stuff right there on your own website and you can do it way cheaper than when you use a third- party platform again there's a lot of platforms out there for selling stuff and some of them will even say yeah it's free we're just going to take a cut

you know it's Airbnb you can list your house it's it's totally fine we just get to keep like I don't know 15% or something like that you're the one renting your house you're the one making it available for them you're the one that owned it and had to pay a mortgage for it and they get to keep 15% that's crazy it's not crazy because they're doing your marketing for you but if somebody wants to come stay

at your home again for a second time or if somebody finds you through a Google search instead of through an Airbnb search you get to keep that money isn't that awesome okay I've briefly got to show you how we get started because this is so inexpensive and honestly really quite easy now this isn't going to be a super in-depth tutorial we've already gone on for quite a while but I want to show you at least the

first steps to get started so number one you're going to click my link in either the description or I'll pin a comment in this video by using my link yes it does support this Channel and I greatly thank you for that okay but once you click that link you're going to end up here on cloudways and we can just go ahead and get started now check this out uh right now they're running a promo so you

can get 30% off your first 4 months and if you have a website hosted elsewhere which I guess is kind of okay but you want to move over to cloudways cuz it's just awesome you can migrate your website well 10 of them for free and these are migrations that they help you with you can actually use their migration tool to do it yourself as many times as you want I do it all the time and it's

actually really easy but they'll help you with 10 of them which is super cool so you can click this button upgrade now or whatever uh even if you're not with them just click the upgrade now and what that's going to do is it's going to apply the coupon code so you automatically get this awesome deal then we're just going to put in some information so I click Start now and I'm going to go with digital Ocean's

good vulture's good and they're both really affordable okay now when you're just getting started and you're building up this site from the very beginning go ahead and go to the smallest size server that you can save the money and then the cool thing is with cloudways I can upgrade the size of my server as needed so you never need to pay more than you need to with a lot of Hosting for websites they're going to do

what's called shared hosting and you're going to pay a certain amount for your first website but then as soon as you hit a certain traffic level they're like oh we got to upgrade you so now it's going to go from $3 a month to $25 a month and the next thing you know it's $100 a month you're never going to get that kind of stuff with cloudways okay the one thing I am going to do though

is choose a high frequency that's just a server that's it's better it's going to be faster and it doesn't cost much more and by much I think it's like an extra dollar a month then I choose the location so this is $16 a month I choose a location now I want to choose a location that's reason going be close to me because that way my interaction with that server will happen as quickly as possible then we're

going to use another tool later on that's called a CDN that's essentially going to spread out the hosting of this website all around the world so that way people that are accessing the website can access it from a server that's relatively close to them it's super cool now if you want to save as much as possible digital ocean does have an option the 1 gab if you're going to do this I would go with the 1

gab premium it's a couple a month cheaper but vulture is awesome now what we're going to do is we're going to install WordPress and so what type of website do we want it's going to be WordPress it's just the latest version and then I name it I can name the server that I'm putting it on and here's the cool thing we set up this server but if we want to we could actually add a second third

as many websites as you want to the same server and then again it's just only once we're using all of the resources only then do we need to upgrade to the next tier and the tiers are much closer to together again than what we normally get with shared hosting okay so we're going to name it we'll just leave this your server project now this is just for your organization and so you don't even need to worry

about it if you don't want to you can create a project if you want but all right so like I said high frequency we're to start with 1 Gigabyte Seattle and now there's one step I need to do before I can actually click this launch button and that is to go verify my email so I'm going to go check my email click a verification code and then we'll be right back here's the email I click login

and activate and then can launch it now this is one of my favorite things about cloudways I can do this for free I haven't even given them any payment info yet for the next 3 days I can work on building my website for free before I even have to decide if I even want to pay for it pretty awesome so I'm going to launch it for free now we have a website set up now there's more

steps obviously because we haven't put any content on it this is going to take a few minutes it's going to do its thing and then we need to start designing and building out this website now I have another video where I walk through all of this I even walk through the these steps we just saw in more detail and so I'm going to go ahead and put that video here for you to watch if you want

to go build your website right now cuz when do we need a website now that's right so go create your website and you can thank me later and I'll just say it right now you're welcome you're welcome [Music]