There are many reasons to start up a website. Most of them are not serious. Plenty of people have started up their own blogs, but few of them last longer than 6 months. Almost none last more than a year. As it happens, very, very few people have the discipline and the time to produce consistent content. But what if you didn’t have to do a whole lot to create a unique presence, a brand of your own, to manage and monetise? In today’s age of commoditised data and Big Tech-controlled platform-based advertising, you need to set yourself apart. And that is not hard. All you have to do is create your own personal site. In this article, I will show you how to build your own brand online.

The First and Most Important Step

Before you even think about building your own site, though, you need to understand something very, very clearly.

Look up top at that Tom Peters quote. It is absolutely true. No Master Bulls**t Artist can spin it, and no lawyer can twist it. YOU ARE A BRAND, and like any brand, you need to manage your own value.

As any good marketer can tell you, real brands need, at minimum, three things to grow:

1. A unique image that persuades others to buy into it;
2. Regular investment into its most important attributes to maintain its competitive edge;
3. A compelling set of benefits that it can offer to its customers and consumers;

These three things mutually reinforce and build upon each other. Once you stop thinking of yourself as a mere collection of experiences, skills, and degrees, and start thinking of yourself as a BRAND, then you can figure out exactly what your image is, where you want to invest in yourself, and how you can help others.

Don’t expect anyone else to sell you. That won’t happen. And don’t expect any platform to do it for you. Such platforms commoditise you, by controlling your image and presentation. After a while, even the most impressive profiles all kind of blend together.

And that is before we get to the ever-increasing threat of deplatforming at the hands of an out-of-control Big Tech oligopoly, that now deems itself to be more powerful than entire national governments. Say or write one thing that they don’t approve of on their platforms, and you’re gone.

Your Very Own Brand Marketing Space

So let’s start with the first item on that list. If you want to build your own brand, you MUST build your own presence, voice, image, and attributes. It’s just that simple. And the fastest, most efficient, and most cost-effective way to do that is by creating your own website.

There are many significant benefits to creating your own personal site. Here are but a few:

1. YOU Control Your Own Image

Imagine creating a site that reflects YOU. Your favourite colours, images, themes, and ideas. Your own words and thoughts, expressed in as many languages as you want. A web presence that presents what YOU want the world to see. Something that brings together all of your social media feeds in one place.

Let’s say that you are a bilingual psychologist and teacher based in Russia who wants to reach new clients. You could do this through social media, certainly. But if you choose to promote a brand through Instagram, you tend to find yourself against competitors who don’t really seem to be actual psychologists, to put it very mildly. Yet they get vastly higher view and like numbers than their more… staid and businesslike counterparts.

Do you really want to mix up and confuse your personal brand simply to get more attention? Probably not. Instead, you could setup your own website designed specifically to reflect you, and market that through your social media presence.

2. You Can Monetise Your Brand

This is by far the best reason to build your own brand online. The possibilities are too numerous to count. You are limited only by your own imagination. You can market your own products through your site. Or you could enter into affiliate contracts and market other people’s products, getting a cut of the proceeds. Or you could establish your own dropshipping business.

There are many different approaches to monetising a web presence, but they all have one thing in common:

Your upside is unlimited.

I am a mathematician by training and I have spent a decade working with financial derivatives. As a result, I think in terms of payoffs. The payoff associated with a personal or niche site is essentially identical to that of a European call option (at maturity). Once you pay a certain fixed cost to obtain future cash flows, your upside is unlimited. You only stand to lose as much as you invested, and no more.

To establish your personal brand, you need to invest a certain fixed cost – I’ll go over that below. Once you recover that, you keep the rest. And, most importantly, this is passive income – the very best kind.

3. You Are Free to Create and Express Yourself

Once you establish your own site and start to build your online brand, you can do so in the way that suits you. Furthermore, you can add value to people’s lives simply by producing content on a semi-regular basis. It’s not that hard to do.

The challenge that most people have is in finding something unique or useful to say. But, once you put in the work, you might be surprised to find out how quickly it pays off.

4. You Will Create Your Own Networks

The reward that you get from creating your own brand and establishing your own unique voice is not always monetary. I have found that it typically comes from building networks with people.

Let’s say that you establish your own personal niche website, catering to people interested in particular supplements. Perhaps you’ve established a mailing list of 50 or so customers. You email them regularly and offer them discounts on products, and – here’s the key – offer up your personal opinions about those same products. At some point, someone will write back to you with feedback.

Congratulations. You now have a personal relationship with your customer. This will help your brand considerably. And you’ll never know what doors you will open in the process.

Not Your Granddad’s Internet

For most people, perhaps the biggest mental block to building their own site comes from the outmoded belief that doing so is hard. It isn’t.

Oh, I’m not saying it’s so easy that a labradoodle could do it. But it’s not that far off, either.

I’m so ancient and creaky that I remember the early days of website-building. About 20 years ago, my dad got a bee in his bonnet about building his own site. He bought himself a book called, I think, Web Sites for Dummies, or something like that. And for about 2 weeks, he was happy as a clam building a site of his own for our family. But, as I recall, it took a lot of time and effort to build, and the results were… well, let’s just say that it was one of his less successful projects.

Those days of painfully coding in HTML are long done. You don’t need to do that anymore. If you actually want to build your own website, you basically need five things:

Step 1: Get a Domain Name

Now that you have decided to build your own online brand, you need a name for your website. And to do that, you must register the name of your proposed website with ICANN, the global body that registers all domain names. This is a bit like getting your own customised license plate, except considerably cheaper and far more dignified.

First, decide on a name for your new site containing your name and possibly a hint as to your profession. Here are a couple of tips:

• Keep your site name short – 15 characters or less before the suffix, nobody is going to visit or even bother searching for “www.drbernadettemaryannrostenkowskiwolowitz.com“.
• Unless you want to setup a very specific kind of site for a particular kind of venture, get yourself a “.com” suffix. Otherwise, your site will not rank very well on various search engines, especially Google. Avoid country-specific suffixes as well.

I recommend NameCheap as your registration portal of choice. They will allow you to search for your chosen name. If it isn’t already taken, you can register your new .com domain name for as little as $8 a year (depending on your tax jurisdiction). They will also throw in identity protection (known as WhoisGuard) for FREE.

Step 2: Get a Hosting Service

Now that you have a domain name, the next step is to get yourself a proper hosting service. There are plenty available on the market. You’ll want to get a shared WordPress hosting solution. That three-word phrase has a lot involved in it. To understand why you want shared WordPress hosting, see this article.

The tl;dr version is that shared hosting is simple, cost-effective, and stable, and WordPress is by far the most common site-building engine out there. Its wide presence, open-source nature, easy-to-use interface, and huge plugin library makes WordPress a superb choice for beginners. Furthermore, because it is so widely used, it is very well supported and understood by the developer community.

As for which hosting service you should choose – I recommend A2Hosting. Again, there are plenty of competitors like HostGator, GoDaddy, Bluehost, and Siteground. I checked them all out before I established my site, and chose A2Hosting because of its extremely competitive pricing and all of the included features. With A2Hosting, you can build as many websites as you want, get free backup and storage, and establish as many email accounts as you need.

It is quite simply the one-stop shop that you want for your hosting needs.

Now, in fairness, there IS a learning curve involved with using A2Hosting’s cPanel interface. Alternatives like Bluehost might be easier to use “out of the box”. But overall, A2Hosting is not hard to use. Here is a tutorial to help you get started:

Step 3: Get a Theme Builder

WordPress, the site-building software, has a huge number of themes that you can use to create beautiful sites. But, if you really want to build your online brand, you simply cannot get away from a proper theme builder.

A theme builder will have lots of pre-packaged layouts and themes to help you create a spectacular, slick-looking site in hours or even minutes. There are quite a few good alternatives available, such as Thrive Theme Builder, Elementor, Brizy, and my personal favourite, the Divi Builder from Elegant Themes.

Divi is basically a theme that you install for WordPress that has very powerful front-end AND back-end layouts. It sits on top of the existing WordPress engine and complements it perfectly. You can build pages, widgets, and posts directly in Divi. You can also build them directly in WordPress and then complete them in Divi.

Again, there IS a learning curve involved – though that is true for all theme builders. But you can setup a really beautiful site in minutes if you take the time to learn the basics:

Step 4: Get Yourself a VPN Client

VPNs used to be for political dissidents, hackers, and… shall we say, people who like to sail the high seas looking for content. As I have pointed out, this is no longer the case. These days, thanks to Big Tech and Big Govt, doing much of anything on the Web without a VPN to protect your privacy is a bit like taking a shower while wearing a plugged-in toaster.

Your online brand is your reputation. You are inextricably linked with it. Therefore, you must protect its value – and you must protect yourself.

That is where a VPN comes in. I STRONGLY recommend Surfshark – you simply cannot get better value for money. NordVPN and ProtonVPN are better in terms of protections, but both have device limits, and ProtonVPN is quite expensive.

Step 5: Learn the Basics of SEO

Once you have your site established, you have to figure out what you want to do with it.

Remember, the entire point of building up a beautiful site is to build your own online brand. To do that, you need visitors. Otherwise, you might as well have spent all of that money on a site designed to host cat memes. That is good for your tabby – but for you, maybe not so much.

I am a firm believer in the idea that “if you build it, they will come“. But they will come to you a LOT faster if you make it EASY for them to find you. And these days, that means using Search Engine Optimisation techniques to make your content rank quickly and easily.

SEO is not difficult to figure out. All you are doing is giving search engine algorithms a reason to select your site for specific keywords in the first page of results. Ideally, you want to rank in the top 10 of all results for a given search query. This is perfectly legal. You simply give the algorithm exactly what it looks for anyway.

So if you plan to spend your time on your site writing about your travels, and you want to build your online brand as a travel guru, then you need to rank high for travel suggestions.

Figuring out SEO is worth a separate post in and of itself, so for now, watch this to figure out the basics – and that’s really all you need:

Conclusion – Adding It All Up

So, once all is said and done, how much does all of this cost?

Well, let’s assume that you want to build just ONE site and you’re looking at your first year’s costs. Let’s do some totting up to get your breakeven point for the first year – I’m assuming zero sales taxes or VAT, so be sure to factor that in:

• Domain name: $7.98;
• Hosting: $83.88;
• Theme builder: $89;
• VPN client: $29.88 (Surfshark actually offers a 2-year package for $59.76, so that’s your one-year cost);

Add all that up, and your total initial investment is…: $210.74.

That sounds like a lot – until you realise that it actually comes to $0.58 per day.

Basically, get yourself a slightly cheaper cup of coffee every day – or just ignore Starbuck’s altogether – and within a few months you’ll have all the money you need to build your own website.

And remember, your upside potential is UNLIMITED. Any money that you make over and above this threshold is yours to keep as profit.

So it’s really not that hard to build your own brand online. All you need is an idea and the will to turn it into something tangible. After that, what you do with it is up to you. That is the beauty of creating your own site. YOU own your brand image, YOU choose how to invest in it, YOU choose how to build upon it, and YOU choose how to monetise it.

That, my friend, is power. And no one can take it from you without your explicit consent.

So what are you waiting for? Write down some ideas and start building your brand already!