MBA1097 How Much To Spend on Building Your Website + Free Ride Friday!

Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter? Right.

And the best part, they accept Discover.

Except Discover in a little place like this?

I don't think so, Jennifer. Oh, yeah. Huh? Discover's accepted where I like to shop. Come on, baby, get with the times.

Right. So we shouldn't get the parachute pants.

These are making a comeback, I think.

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. Ready to save on new tech. It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event, celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium support, and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster. And with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey everybody. Today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's free ride. Every Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It's $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but somebody's gonna win it for free. You can win it for free as well. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and and listen in on Friday to see if you won the draw. And when you leave us a review, you enter the draw for every week automatically. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that's for people that don't have time for fluff. We deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how much money should you spend building your website for an online business. Your website is your storefront. It's where you do business. It's where you make your money. So you want to make sure that it's high quality and high performing. You, you also want to make sure it's reliable and that you can make changes easily. So that might sound like, hey, you should really be spending a lot of money on your website. Well, not necessarily. Having a website has become more and more affordable these days and there's some great options, especially if you're just getting started. So in today's episode, I'll be sharing my advice on how much you should be spending on your website, depending on what kind of business you have. If you're selling physical goods, software, a course, whatever it is. So, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The first thing I want to say when it comes to how much you should spend on your website is that your website is dynamic. It's going to be changing over the course of time. You're going to edit things, you're going to improve things, you're going to tweak things. It's not a once and done type of thing. So if you spend X amount of dollars right now, it doesn't mean that you're not going to spend again later on. So we need to establish how much do we need to spend just to get started. Right, right now you need to just get something out there so you can test what works and what doesn't. The next thing I want to say is that the success of your website, how well it performs, has a lot to do with its content. Most of the reason why people stay on websites or buy from websites, it's because they like what they read or see. Whether it's images or video, it's really the content that matters. A great post on this topic is Justin Jackson's post on words. It's at justinjackson CA words HTML. And the reason why this post is such gold is because it emphasizes the fact that words are where everything starts, is how we communicate with people. It's how you're going to communicate with your website visitors, whether those words are text or with video or with some infographic. But the point here is all that stuff, how you communicate, that's free. A lot of us, we focus too much on design and think we need the most fancy design, most modern design or, or people are not going to like our product or service or our site. There are countless websites out there that are highly successful that I would consider ugly. And with today's technology and services, there are so many options out there to have a very good looking website that's based on a template that you can edit. So you have nothing to worry about when it comes to design. What you really need to invest in is reliability and the ability to edit your own website. Now there are two elements of your website. You need to understand how this all works because you may want to change your website in the future. The way it looks, the way it functions, even, you know, maybe the Operating system or the framework it uses so you can be able to edit it. And you need to be able to do this easily. And the way to do this, understand these two elements. So you separate them. The first element is the domain name. It's the actual URL, like your business. Com, right. That has nothing to do with the actual website itself, like the actual design and where it's actually hosted and how it's managed. That's just like the address. I would highly recommend separating your URL from your host. So when you go to build your website, just get the domain first. And I really like Google Domains. I've transferred a lot of our domains from different providers all the way to Google Domains. So that way it's centralized, it's very easy to use. So just register your domain name with Google Domains. So you have one place where all your domains are now, where you actually host, where you actually allow yourself to build this website in the cloud so people can access it anytime. That is up to you. You can go with a website builder like Squarespace or Weebly. You can use WordPress and use hosting with like Hostgator. The choices are pretty much endless. The point here is that where you build your website can change anytime. I can change it every day of the week if I wanted to. And all I have to do is tell my domain where to link my domain to, where to point my domain to. So separate the two. Don't get them both at the same place. Don't get your domain and your hosting, because then you're locked in. It's really hard to kind of tear yourself apart from the host if they also control your domain. So when it comes to costs, a normal, not really fancy domain is going to cost you something between 10 and $20 a year. Domains are not something you own, it's something that you actually lease out. You rent year after year. So that's pretty cheap. Everything else is where the cost is going to be. Your hosting, your management. You're going to get somebody to actually build the website, the web developer, a designer, if someone's going to design this website from scratch. So we're going to focus on that part for the rest of the lesson. So you have three options when it comes to this. One, you can use a website builder like Squarespace, like Weebly, super simple to use, and you're gonna start off with some templates. You can't build anything from scratch. If you have like a very, very specific design in your head, you can't really build it from scratch, but you can Pretty much build something that's similar to that using their templates. Now this is the easiest, fastest way to build a website. It's also gonna be the least expensive because all the design, all the development is already done for you. And you're just gonna pay a monthly fee, which is gonna be something between 10 to $30 a month. If you have an E commerce store, which you'll have to upload product to, it may cost a little bit more, maybe up to $50 a month. Still super cheap to run a business. $50 a month. And this is probably the one I really recommend, just to get started, get the ball rolling. Okay, so everything's included and they have customer support. Nice and easy. You can link your domain to the hosting, to this website builder, and you're set to go. Option number two, you use a platform that is easy to manage, like WordPress for example, and you buy a template for WordPress or have somebody create a template for you from scratch. Now if you have somebody creating a template for you from scratch, they're also going to have to be able to code it. So you're going to need somebody who could design and code at the same time, or you have to hire two separate people. I recommend checking out upwork. Upwork is a great place to find great freelancers that can do this for you. I've used Upwork for this type of work before and it's really great. Now, the design and the development, it depends on how elaborate your website is, how many pages, what kind of custom features you want. But it's gonna cost you something between, you know, $1,500 and, you know, $5,000 to have a pretty, you know, basic and uniformed website. That's just to design it and to code it into WordPress. WordPress is like the backend, how you manage and edit your pages. Now, if that's too rich for your blood, if you don't want to spend that kind of money to. Totally understandable. I never did this at the start. You could buy a theme you really like and there's a great site called ThemeForest that has like literally hundreds of thousands of templates for you to choose from. Now this gives you a lot more variety. Choosing from hundreds of thousands of WordPress templates versus, you know, choosing a template from one of those website builders like Weebly or Squarespace. They might have like, you know, 50 templates. Now by doing that, you need a host. This is like where you store your website. So you can use WordPress. We recommend WP Engine. You can check out our website at the resource pages 1 00, MBA NET resources. WP Engine is a great place for you to host your WordPress websites. It's the most reliable in the industry. You can even google it. It's super reliable. It's what we use. And they have amazing customer support, which is great. So when you buy that theme from ThemeForest, they, they can help you install it and then show you how you can edit things. So that's option number two. If you buy a theme, a theme can cost somewhere between, you know, 40 to $100. And the hosting is gonna cost you something between $20 to maybe even up to a hundred or $150 depending on how much traffic you get your website. But if you're getting started it's gonna be like $20, $30 or so a month. So again, still in the affordable range. If you're gonna customize it again, it's gonna cost you something between 1,000 to $5,000. So there is kind of where we're living now. The last option is to have a completely custom built website from the ground up. This is going to be the most expensive option and this is going to look like something between 10 to 20 to $30,000 to build it from scratch. And that's not including the hosting. You know where you're actually going to host this website which can be somewhere between 5 to 10 to $20 a month. You can use DigitalOcean, you can use AWS services for your hosting because again, you don't need to use something like WP engine because this is not WordPress. You're using another service or any kind of hosting service because you're not using WordPress as your backend. It's built from scratch here. Now the disadvantage to this is that you're going to be reliant on a developer to make any edits or changes you need because you don't have the framework unless you are a developer to be able to go in and edit things. And this is the most expensive option. Personally, if I was going to advise somebody who's getting started, I would go with option number one. I would get my business rolling, get my copy down, sell some product, make some money and then reinvest and then choose option two. A year down the line, two years down the line, totally okay to refresh my website later on. Again, I separate my domain from the hosting. So this is easy. Option number three is like when you made it and, and you just want to spend some money on something that is in your head that you want to see happen. And to be completely honest with you, it has very little with how much you're going to convert your customers to convert your visitors into customers. Unless you're selling a very unique product and you need a very unique kind of design and special effects and all this kind of stuff, then it's really, really not necessary. Thy ticket, lady Jennifer of Coolidge.

Well, many thanks, good sir. Here is my Discover card. They accept Discover at Renaissance fairs? Yeah, they do here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Geth with the times. With the times. You're playing the loot.

Yeah.

And it sounds pretty good, right?

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report.

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To wrap up today's lesson, understand you don't need to spend a fortune on your website. Get started and then reinvest later. Invest in your product at the start. Make sure you have the best product possible. So there's lots of word of mouth and people go to your website and purchase. Make sure your site is reliable. That's why I was giving you recommendations to some really good website builders or you know, WordPress hosting like WP Engineering. That's really important. You need to make sure your site is up at all times. People can reach it at any time. When you're sleeping, when you're awake, when it's a holiday season, when there's a lot of traffic, it doesn't matter. You have to make sure your website is reliable. And then lastly, you know the website again is a work in progress. You're always tweaking, you're always changing, you're always adding, you're always removing. See as that. And you'll understand that, hey, I don't want to dump in a whole lot of money in the beginning because I really don't know what this business is going to be like, what's important, why I need to really double down on what, what are some things that my customers like and don't like. How do I change the journey? All that stuff needs to be considered once you get the ball rolling. All right, thank you so much for listening to the hundred Dollar MBA show. Today's lesson's over. But our episode's not because it's free ride Friday. I gotta announce who won this week's free ride to ezcourse. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is Beito hall from Italy. Beitohall says great show. 5 stars. I really love this podcast. It's really opened my mind to new ways to thinking about my business. Great job guys. Well, thank you Beetle Hall. You are a free ifriday winner. So make sure you email me at omar@100mba net so I can hook you up with the free ride to EZ course. We do this every Friday. Just leave us an itunes rating and review so you can enter our weekly random draw to win a free ride to one of our programs. Hey, easy course is $500 over at easycourse co but we're giving it away for free every Friday to show our appreciation for you showing us love on itunes. Thank you so much in advance for that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Your website is your home. Your website is your business. Your website's where you make things happen. So spend the time in creating great content for it. Great sales copy, great headlines, great images, great videos. Refine the experience for your visitors. That's how you invest in it. Alright, I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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