Making money online in Ghana is easier said than done. My company gets a lot of request from entrepreneurs that ask how they can create a simple website on their own. I decided to put a comprehensive guide to help them.
When you first start online, the thought of developing your blog/website can seem very overwhelming and confusing.
Understanding what steps you need to take to get your business online and generating money from it requires a butt-load of work. I am here to make it easy for you.
Check out this overview of everything we’ll be discussing in this article:
We have many website builders. All come with great features, you need to check them out here. As for us, WordPress is the best and the number 1 platform. So we will focus on this specific platform in this post.
The first important step to develop a website is to decide on a domain name. Your domain is your website’s name.
Domain names can cost you from $10 to $50. The average price is around $20. If you have not chosen or registered a domain name for your site, these sure-fire tips will help you out:
Selecting a hosting web service with your domain name is a must! Web hosting is a service that stores and hosts your website content on a safe server that is always running. Without it, your website will never be up. My advice is to buy your domain and hosting at the same time and from the same platform.
Bluehost is a feature-packed web hosting service with some incredible WordPress plans. Its top features and impressive page loading speed are reliable reasons to give it a try. Remember the faster your website loads, the better it is.
Dreamhost offers a superb web hosting service that is simple to use and provides a series of plans for small businesses. It is one of the top choices for many novice webmasters.
Greengeeks contains various features, excellent shared hosting and an outstanding uptime – all necessary for improving your website’s performance.
Kinsta is also a fantastic hosting provider for personal websites. It has stable and fast servers. It also provides automatic site backups to secure your data.
Once you’ve finalized your domain and hosting you are ready to start building your site. You need to choose a website building platform, commonly known as CMS. (Content Management System)
Our recommendation is WordPress. It is easy and comes with plenty of add-ons that would give your site all the features you need.
When it comes to setting up your WordPress site, it is effortless, and your web hosting service does most of the work for you.
Please check our video below to install WP in a few clicks.
If you aren’t using Bluehost as a hosting service, don’t stress. Many web hosting services contain “WordPress install” in their cPanel.
Now that your website is in-the-making, it is time to make it feel like your own masterpiece by picking an attractive design, adding branding components, and customizing it.
Start with the theme. WordPress themes are exquisite design packages that can change the aesthetics of your website. You can get free or paid themes. Paid ones would make you save a lot of time. In addition to this, the themes are interchangeable, allowing you to switch themes conveniently.
To install a theme, visit the WordPress admin interface. Please follow this link to see our selection of the best premium themes.
Go to YOURSITE.com/wp-admin – use the password and username you used during the WordPress installation. And, go to “theme” from the sidebar and add new.
You can check this video to install your WP Theme:
The next consideration is the logo: To do so:
Lastly, you can change your website’s colour scheme, add free widgets, sidebars, and the font of your content with everything that WordPress has to offer.
Pages add versatility to your website. It is hard to use a website without content, right? Web pages are quick to create in WordPress. You can check the WordPress knowledge base to learn how to create a page. Most successful websites contain the following pages:
To add a new page, navigate to My Sites → Pages and then Add New Page:
You’ll land on the Editor, where you can add text, media, embeds, contact forms, or any other content for your page. Customize, review, save, or publish your new page using the editor settings.
All of the essentials of creating a website with WordPress are covered. Congratulations! You are ready to showcase your website to the world.
Indeed, the best way to grow your side business without a lot of money is by creating an online presence. As we’ve explained the necessary steps to building a website above, let’s move on to the plugins.
What are plugins?
WordPress plugins are bits of software that can be uploaded to extend and expand the functionality of your WordPress site. For example, you can add an online booking plugin, an online shopping plugin or a booking system plugin. All these functionalities are not directly part of your site, but you can “plug them” unto your site.
Your WordPress blog site requires two kinds of plugins that add blog-related functions and others that enhance your website’s security, searchability, and performance. There are around 50,000 WordPress plugins developed by third-party designers and WordPress users from around the world.
It is easy to get confused by the sheer number of choices available in almost every category. Please note, you should not download and install any plugin, some, unfortunately, are more harmful than anything. That is why we have saved you the trouble by creating a list of all the best plugins required to improve your website’s usability and interface.
Here we are!
Optimizing your WordPress website to rank in Google is a must for growing your business in Ghana and establishing your authority online. YOAST SEO covers all the SEO portions in a single plugin.
Yoast optimizes every inch of your site based on the keywords you provide. This full-service asset automatically “qualifies” your content for tags and searchability. Download Yoast for free or go premium to utilize a series of options.
You can check out other trustworthy SEO plugins here.
To increase your SEO, you might also install a Rich Snippets plugin, not mandatory but will definitely help.
Gravity Forms can create any type of form you are after. From basic forms, polls, surveys and quizzes – Gravity Forms has you covered!
Gravity Forms creates both simple and complex forms. It is a useful, practical and robust plugin. There are so many benefits to using Gravity Forms that it is difficult to explain it all here.
You can check out the video below about how to install Gravity Forms:
There are also many other forms you can use, read our blog about the best WordPress forms in town to make your final decision.
Blogs look more appealing with images, but large image files take time to load and slow your website down. WP Smush is a free WordPress plugin that compresses images in various formats for better loading without ruining its quality.
We created a list of all the image optimization plugin. Once again, you need to choose the one that suits your needs.
Every website demands protection from hacking. For that purpose, WordFence is a reliable security plugin, best suited for self-hosted websites.
With WordFence, you get a firewall with several security features and protection from malware and viruses. Besides that, WordFence also deals with real-time traffic management and email alerts.
This one is a premier gadget for tracking statistics on your site. It puts all the Google Analytics functions on the table for your WordPress dashboard. As a result, you can evaluate your website’s clicks and traffic without leaving the site.
Google considers any website without an SSL certified as “Not Secure.” To avoid getting in this line, install Really Simple SSL; it transforms your unsafe “HTTP” to safe “https” with a single click.
Also, the plugin automatically manages redirects, supports security, and automatically grades URLs.
If there’s any plugin to protect spam comments, it is Akismet. WordPress itself creates it, and it filters all comments and allows users to approve or block commenters.
Akismet is a free-to-use plugin for personal websites. It has some premium packages available for professional and business bloggers.
WordPress offers a standard content editor with both HTML and visual options. You can personalize your website’s appearance with different themes. BUT, Elementor is unique. It is a drag-and-drop page creator that allows you to manage the appearance of every post or page. If you want to take your website design to the next level, you need to install Elementor.
Comments are essential for developing a community for your blog. But, they are not always appropriate. With Disable Comments, you can discontinue the option for visitors to comment. It is a free plugin that allows you to eliminate the comment feature from selected posts and pages.
Based on helpful research, email campaigns provide an average open rate of 20% with a click-through rate of 2.5%. So, social media marketing is nowhere near email. Social media’s click CTRs are lower than 1%.
Plus your email marketing list is your base of potential customers. If they didn’t like what you do, they wouldn’t give your their email in the first place.
As proof of the above discussion, 60% of marketers prefer email to produce an incredible ROI for their website.
If you want to know how to grow your side hustle, make email marketing your advertising tool.
To make it work, you have to take email marketing side by side with other digital marketing platforms. Mixing the right ingredients will help you achieve the required results, and below we’ve explained how you can do that.
If you are not collecting email addresses, you are missing out on a valuable marketing opportunity. You don’t have to struggle with algorithms with email marketing. It allows you to create a better relationship with your visitors because email is the best communication method.
In general, email marketing integration provides a staggering ROI than other methods of advertisement.
Keep Twitter and Facebook a part of your advertisement and devote all of your resources and efforts to email marketing because it dramatically enhances your ROI, engagement, and impact for all platforms.
Email marketing integration offers a quick way to interpret and view your analytics from all-around platforms. You can spectate who is opening your emails and provided links.
In addition to this, you can even cross-reference the same information with people who visit your website, including their browsing activities on your pages and how they link with your social accounts.
You need to create a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a free item or service that you give to your website visitors for the purpose of collecting their contact details. It can be trial subscriptions, white papers, e-newsletters, or free consultations. Once you got the email of your prospect you can nurture the prospect by sending useful information and promos directly in their mailbox.
The best way to bring your lead magnet to life is to create a popup. You can do that using Gravity Forms. You also need to have a creative call-to-action.
Now that you built your email list, you need an email marketing software to reach out to your prospects.
We have a full blog post about email marketing providers and pros and cons, but here we will stick to the top four email marketing providers that will take your game to the next level. I put a small video of each of them so you can choose which one fits your needs better.
Mailerlite is another standard marketing hosting service that sticks to the essential features, including tools for automation, pop-ups, surveys, and landing pages. It allows you to segment your consumers to enhance personalization and optimize your website with A/B testing.
Moosend is a useful email marketing platform with state-of-the-art features and automation with an award-winning interface. It allows businesses to manage several mailing lists and campaigns and send striking newsletters made on the built-in campaign maker.
ActiveCampaign offers an automated email marketing guide for any business. It offers a free plan that provides you with unlimited contacts and includes 300+ emails every day. That’s a great deal, especially if you are handling a solo operation or bootstrap startup.
Getresponse is something more than a traditional marketing service. It is an all-in-one solution that offers professional automation. The platform contains an excellent feature called Autofunnel for creating funnels for leads, webinars, sales, and more.
That’s it, now you have your website up and ready. You can start showcasing your company.
If you want to integrate e-commerce functionalities then the below is for you!
This heading is targeted at those who want to know how to start an e-commerce business in Ghana.
Woocommerce is specially designed for WordPress. It is a free WordPress plugin that facilitates your website with e-commerce functionality so you can create and run an online store. With a few clicks, you can transform your WordPress website into a successful functional e-commerce platform.
If you are wondering, “What is WooCommerce?”, chances are you are already running a WordPress website, and you are ready to sell products. In this section of this article, we will cover how WooCommerce can do for you.
It’ll only take a few clicks to integrate WooCommerce with your existing WordPress website with the benefit of turning your business platform into a functional e-commerce shop and start making money online.
It was launched in 2011, and ever since that, it has become the primary e-commerce solution for many WordPress users. With more than 27,000,000 active installations, WooCommerce is the driving force behind several e-commerce websites.
WooCommerce delivers basic management functionality right from the box, with a costless plugin from the Plugin Repository or directly from the WordPress dashboard.
WooCommerce can make the initial stages of business as easy as possible for many thriving Ghanaian entrepreneurs.
With WooCommerce, you never have to worry about losing data ever again.
When you stop working with a third-party for your e-commerce platform, all of your data is lost. Luckily, WooCommerce puts you in charge of all data. Be it customer purchases, store performance or customer history you have access to all data at a fingertip to make the right decisions and run your e-commerce store successfully.
Are you tired of watching your e-commerce business crash? Are you looking for some ninja techniques on how to grow my business without a lot of money? We suggest you keep reading because we’ve got some tips for you.
If you want to attract more customers, you must add an easy way for your visitors to contact you.
The most appropriate way to do that is by adding a contact form to your website. Although WordPress does provide a contact form, you can get one from the various WordPress plugins.
We highly recommend using Gravity Forms.
Social proof is regarded as a psychological concept where individuals conform to others’ practices under the considerations that those practices reflect the correct behaviour.
Marketers make use of this phenomenon by displaying that other people have trusted their products. This can be done by sharing statistics, customer testimonials, subscriber counts, and more.
As a website owner, you have minimum time to tell users what you have to offer and make them realize why you are better than everyone else.
Therefore, you must optimize your website to ensure that it performs well and is fast, even under traffic.
For the majority of websites, search engines like Google are the primary source of traffic. You can do plenty of things to improve the optimization of your website for search engines by learning the basic rules of SEO.
Search engine optimization is a set of rules and techniques that enable your website’s search engine friendly appearance. It is not technical at all. In addition to this, you will need to upload content on your website to make it SEO-friendly.
You can make money from creating a blog on WordPress. Even if you have a low budget, starting an online business in Ghana shouldn’t be that difficult.
The key is to be vigilant, persistent, and ahead of everything at work. Moreover, our step by step guide will assist you in every part of the way.
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