Are you interested in learning how to build a website in South Africa? A lot of people have been looking for this information. Blogging has been catching up in South Africa, in spite of the slow start. There are a number of people earning decent money off their sites, and you are here because you wish to join them. Having your own website gives you an opportunity to earn passive income. But what do you need to do to build your own blog?
How to start a blog
Building a website is something that any one of us can do. You could hire somebody to handle the technical aspects of building your site, but it’s not really necessary. With YouTube and with the information that is given in this post, you will have your site up and running in no time. The following is how to build a website in South Africa;
- Decide what your site is going to be about.
- Chose and buy a domain.
- Pick a web host.
- Create your site.
- Start blogging.
- Promote your content.
- Monetize your website.
Decide what your site is going to be about
The first step if you are looking to build a website in South Africa is to decide what you are going to be talking about. There are literary as many topics out there as there are grains of sand on the country’s beaches.
You can blog about your business
It’s easy enough if you are a company to know what you are going to talk about. Let’s say you are creating a site for a shop-fitting business somewhere in Pretoria. In that case, your content will be about your business.
However, if you are an individual who has decided to take up blogging, you may need to put serious thought into what you are going to talk about. There is often the temptation to talk about everything under the sun.
That’s not really the correct approach. You need to narrow your focus as much as is possible without being too myopic. If you are a football lover, you may talk about football. If you love holidays, you may talk about the your experiences. That could include reviewing the best hotels in South Africa.
Find the best WordPress hosting in South Africa
Should you blog about what you love?
There is often the fantastic believe among beginners that they need to talk about the topics that they love the most. That is not really the case. In fact, what you love may not be viable when it comes to the long term goal of monetizing your site.
And yes, monetization is the ultimate goal, whatever type of website you may be creating. It’s true that things are easier if you are talking about something that you like. But there is nothing stopping you from talking about any topic, even rocket science.
Yes, there are hobbyist bloggers out there, but you will abandon your quest if you do not think of blogging as a business. In any case the moment you start earning money, you will fall in love with whatever topic you may be talking about. Just to illustrate the point, there are men out there who run successful mommy blogs.
Choose a domain
A domain is your site’s address on the internet. For this site, the domain is sabroadband.co.za. Again, it’s pretty easy for companies to pick domain names. If you run a company called ABC Electricians, then you may have a domain along those lines.
But for bloggers, there may be something of a challenge. It’s usually advisable to choose a domain that’s in line with what you are going to be talking about. That makes your site easy to find within the clutter that is Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS).
You may discover that the domain that you have been pining for is already taken. Does that mean you can no longer build our website? The good news is that the domain does not really have a bearing on the success or failure of your site. What matters most is the content and your marketing efforts.
Here are the best domain hosts in South Africa. It’s usually advisable to buy your domain and web hosting from the same place. That makes making managing your site and payments easier.
Choose a web host
Your site needs to be hosted somewhere. As you set out to build a website, choosing a web host is probably the most important task on your hands. There hundreds of web hosts in South Africa and millions across the world.
We have an article in which we talked about how to choose a web host in South Africa. For most people, price tends to be the single most important factor when choosing a host for their website. However, there are other important considerations, such as support, reliability and backups.
This website is hosted by a company called Truehost. They have servers in South Africa and around the world. What we like about them is that they have support 24 hours a day, which makes it easy for us to get our issues resolved. You may wish to check them out. Note that we are affiliates.
Create your site
Once you have signed up with your chosen web host, they will provide you with login details for your site. From within your Dashboard, you can then start the process of creating your site.
Most people think it’s very difficult to create a site. In fact, it’s easy. You can have one up and running in a matter of minutes. Once you are familiar with cPanel and your hosting dashboard, everything will become a breeze.
South Africans can use one of many CMSes to build their websites. We recommend that you use WordPress. That’s the easiest CMS that’s out there. Ease of use is the reason why WordPress is so popular. In fact, the vast majority of websites that are out there were made using Joomla. Other options include Joomla and Drupal.
Start blogging
The next step for South Africans looking to build a website is to start blogging. You could have a very beautiful website, but it won’t do you much good if it does not have content. Content is what Google and other search engines are looking for. And they are the ones that bring people to your site.
We recommend that you install the Yoast plugin on your site. You can start with the free version. It will help you create content that is optimized for search engine visibility. That’s important. One thing to note is that when writing your content, you won’t only be writing for people. You will also be writing for search engines.
There are things that you can do to make your content more successful. The following are some of them;
- Do keyword research
- Use your target keyword in your title and in your content.
- Have internal links.
- Link to relevant external sites.
- Your article needs to be an optimal length. Generally, longer content fares better, though that is not always the case.
Promote your content
Now that you have build a website, something that a lot of South Africans can only dream about, it’s time to promote it. Without that, there is very little chance that it will be a success. The competition out there is rather stiff.
Whatever it is that you are focusing on, chances are high that there are players who are already established. How, therfore, can you beat them? It takes time for a website to start ranking well on Google and on other search engines. It could very well take over a year.
The good thing is that you can promote your site in the meantime on social media and elsewhere. Make sure that ever post that you publish is promoted on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. That way, you will be able to reach more people.
You can also create groups that are populated by likeminded people. The more people that you attract to these groups, the better your chances of having a meaningful audience filtering through to your website. Also make sure that you build mailing lists as part of the process of building your site.
Monetize your site
We come to the ultimate goal of building a site, monetization. Remember what we said at the top, that you should think of your site as a business. If you think of it solely as a hobby, you will get nowhere. That’s because hobbies do not demand as much time as businesses.
And your site will definitely demand a lot of your time. In any case, there are may ways through which to monetize your site once you have enough of an audience. What’s enough? In South Africa, you can start earning something meaningful if you have at least 500 visitors to your site per day.
In terms of monetization, you can do affiliate marketing. You can also display AdSense ads on your site. Another option is to sell you own products. And of course if it’s a business website, monetization will be through the earnings that you get from marketing yourself online via your site.
Summary
In this article, we showed you how to build a website in South Africa. It was noted that a lot of people in the country have been turning to blogging as a way of earning extra income. Established companies and small businesses have also been building websites to reach out to people online.
The process if you wish to build a website is not that difficult. You need to have an idea what you are going to talk about. You also need a domain and a web host. With these, you should be able to create a website and you should be able to start writing content for it. Once that takes off, you can then monetize your site.
Here are cheap web hosts in South Africa