If you have just decided you want to build something online and have no idea where to begin, you are in the right place. Beginner Launchpad is written for total beginners, people who may not yet know what a niche is, how a website gets built, or why anyone would visit it. Nobody here assumes you already know any of that.
This page is the front door. It explains what the site covers, the order that makes the most sense to read things in, and where to find the first page for each of the five areas we write about.
What Beginner Launchpad is
This site is about building an online business through affiliate marketing, using Wealthy Affiliate as the place to learn and build. Affiliate marketing means you recommend something useful, and when someone you recommended it to becomes a customer, you earn a commission.
The site also promotes Wealthy Affiliate itself, and you should know how that works. Wealthy Affiliate pays referral commissions that recur for as long as each person you refer stays subscribed. If you join through a link on this site, the person who runs it may earn a commission. That is the model you would be learning to use too, so it makes sense to be open about it from the first page.
Everything here is organised for someone at the very start. Each article takes one small question, explains it in plain language, and gives you one thing to do next. You will not find a page that asks you to understand ten ideas before you can act on one.
The order to read things in
There are five pillars, and they follow the order in which most beginners need them:
- Start Here
- Choosing Your Niche
- Building Your Website
- Getting Visitors
- Your First Commission
You can read them straight through, and for a first visit that is the order I would suggest. Each one leans a little on the one before. A niche decision shapes what your website says, your website gives visitors somewhere to land, and visitors are who a first commission comes from.
If you already have a niche picked or a site started, skip ahead to the pillar that matches where you are. Nothing is lost by doing that, and you can always come back.
The stages you will move through
Building an audience goes through a sequence of stages, and it helps to name them by what you are doing at each one. There are no dates attached, because people move through them at very different speeds depending on how much time they have each week.
- Get your bearings. You learn what the work involves and decide what you are going to build.
- Open the doors. You put a website online so there is a place for people to find you.
- Meet your first readers. The first real visitors arrive and read what you wrote.
- Earn a little trust. Readers come back, or read a second page, because the first one was useful.
- Help them take a step. You show a reader a next step that fits their situation, and sometimes that step involves a recommendation.
The five pillars map onto these loosely. Start Here and Choosing Your Niche are about getting your bearings. Building Your Website is opening the doors. Getting Visitors covers meeting your first readers and earning a little trust. Your First Commission is about helping a reader take a step.
It is worth knowing the stages come in this order for a reason. Most beginners want to jump to the last one, because that is where the money is. The earlier stages are what make the last one possible.
Start Here
This pillar is about getting your bearings. It answers the questions that sit underneath everything else: what online business actually involves, what it asks of you in time and attention, and what a sensible first week looks like.
A good place to begin is New to Making Money Online? Start Here, One Small Step at a Time. It is written for the person who has not yet done anything and wants to know what the very first move is.
If you are the kind of reader who likes to understand the whole picture before you start, the pages in this pillar cover that. If you would rather just begin, read that one article and do what it suggests. Both approaches work.
Choosing Your Niche
A niche is the specific group of people and the specific subject your website is about. A site about “health” is hard to write and hard to find. A site about one particular kind of reader and one particular problem is much easier to write for, and much easier for the right person to recognise as theirs.
Many beginners stall here because they believe a perfect niche exists and they have not found it yet. It does not exist. What exists is a niche that is good enough to start with, and you can adjust it once you have written a few pages and seen what interests you and your readers.
Start with There Is No Perfect Niche, So Here Is How to Pick a Good Enough One This Week. It gives you a way to make the decision in days rather than months.
This pillar also covers the two worries that come up most often: a niche that feels too small, and a niche that feels too crowded. Both have practical answers, and neither is a reason to wait.
Building Your Website
Your website is the place where everything you write lives, and it is the thing you own. Building one is more approachable than most beginners expect, but it is also where the first technical frustrations tend to show up.
Those frustrations are usually less mysterious than they look. A page that will not load, a setting that seems to have no effect, a layout that looks different from what you intended: most of these fall into a small number of kinds, and each kind has a sensible first thing to try. Most Beginner Tech Headaches Are One of Three Kinds, and Each One Has a Calm First Move is the page to keep handy for the day something goes wrong.
This pillar also covers what your site needs to have on it before you invite anyone to visit, and what can wait until later. Most of the list can wait.
Getting Visitors
A website with nobody visiting it does not earn anything, so this pillar is about how people find you. For most beginners the answer is the same: you write useful pages that answer questions your readers are actually asking, and over time search engines and readers begin to find them.
That takes time, and the early weeks can be quiet. It helps to have a plan for what you write that is small enough to finish. Plan Only Your Next Five Posts, and Keep Everything Else in a Parking Lot shows how to decide on your next few pieces without trying to map out a whole year.
This pillar also looks at how to organise your articles around a few themes, how to keep going while traffic is still small, and how to tell that things are moving before the numbers show it.
Your First Commission
A commission happens when a reader trusts what you wrote enough to act on a recommendation. It is rarely the result of a single clever page. It comes from a reader finding you, reading something useful, and later finding that your recommendation fits what they need.
Because of that, your first visitors are usually not ready to buy anything yet. They are still working out whether you are worth reading. Your First Visitors Aren’t Ready to Buy Yet, So Help Them Take One Small Step explains what to offer them instead, and why it leads to a commission more reliably than pushing for the sale.
This pillar also explains how recurring referral commissions work in practice. Because a Wealthy Affiliate commission continues for as long as the person you referred stays subscribed, looking after the people you refer matters as much as finding them.
How to use this page
Come back to it whenever you want to find your place. Reading five pillars in order is a good plan, but real life does not always allow it, and a gap of a week or two between articles is normal.
Here is a simple way to use the site:
- Read one article, not five. Pick the one that matches the question you have today.
- Do the single small thing it suggests before you read the next article.
- Return to this page when you want to see where you are in the stages above.
The point of an orientation page is that you never have to wonder what to read next. If you have not started yet, go to the first pillar, open the Start Here article linked above, and begin with that one. The rest of the site will still be here when you are ready for it.