How To Start Your Own Website

Swordsmyth

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Apr 14, 2016
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This long pedantic post will not be for everybody. It is for people here who might one day want to create their own website, be it a news aggregator, a promotional page for something they are doing, or even an online store to sell stuff.

I believe it was Country star Cary Kembla who wanted to get up a page for his Music Career (I still owe him a plug in the brief and have not forgotten). Regardless, being able to publish online is an important skill in these days of information warfare. I want to do a short piece, not so much a how to, but simply a demystifier, so anyone who might be interested understands just how simple it is.

First, probably a word on strategy for this type of page, since some may want to run an aggregator. Given we are in an information war against Cabal – probably the most powerful and wealthy entity on the planet – you have to view our side as the guerillas. As in guerilla warfare, we have advantages and disadvantages. They are big and we are small, but we can adapt quickly, and exploit strengths better, and moreover, we have personality, while they are big lumbering, and exist as faceless automatons.

In ten years, RedState will be doing the exact same thing, and you won’t be able to name any of the writers, just like now. But Vox Day, Texas Arcane, and even I have a personality you know. And Vox Day has already branched out through everything from authoring, to book publishing, to comics, to book sales, to videogame production, to Infogalactic, to essentially a cable network.

Even here, I began promoting r/K. I was stupid, and my strategy was moronic by today’s standards. I thought I could let everyone know about r/K and if Gangnam Style could go viral, surely r/K could pick up in politics. I had never done this before, and obviously I knew nothing of Cabal, or how controlled the political media is. When that appeared to stall out, I segued into what I knew with psychology, and began doing periodic political blogs mixing politics, psychology, and r/K. Then I saw the surveillance, and dove into that. I realized to oppose that I needed to broaden my strategy, expand my reader base, and to do that, I needed to become more useful to people. So I pivoted again into news aggregation, and did so far more aggressively.

News aggregation is true guerilla information warfare, in that the enemy is wealthy and has resources to burn. But their strategy is saturation. They want numerous outlets, flooding the zone with places to go, to drown out the little upstarts. But that means they have to spread out their scoops, to keep all their myriad of controlled outlets equally relevant, so no one would dominate, and risk one day losing its viewership suddenly to an upstart. So even as they have resources to burn, they have to spread them out.

Once those resources were made public as stories, the fact there was a story here, and another there, became stories themselves, and they were like rifles left on the battlefield. Meaningless to something as big as Cabal’s massive army, but invaluable to a guerilla in an information war.

By forming an aggregator, it was possible to use Cabal’s very resource expenditures to create a superior product. No videos of me droning on to waste your time, no long drawn out articles which take fifteen minutes to say what could have been said in a sentence. No clickbait headlines that fail to deliver after you’ve gone to the page. No needing to visit ten websites a day to find which one Cabal put the scoop on that day. Just short headlines summarizing an article with the link so you could find it, and all on one page so you can skim through it quick for what you want.

I don’t do the news stories, Cabal does that, spending millions on comped assets all over, scouring the globe for them, and pumping Cabal’s network of sources and informants. The story I deliver is where the stories are, and I give you enough to decide if you are interested in going there to read them. That is a work product which has value, and is useful to people, and which you can’t find anywhere else. In that way, I feel like I am strengthening our movement by freeing up other people’s time to wage the wars they are waging.

Vox Day has a lot of stuff to do in the culture war – and he runs a blog on the side. If he is pressed for time, he can swing by and in 15 minutes see pretty much everything interesting on the web that day, and that frees him up to do more important stuff in publishing or Arkhaven. It is my hope lots of other people will do that. I put this shit here to be taken, so it is useful.

And best of all, I am uncomped, so I can talk about anything. You will see it all here. And I even know a little bit about science, so you can get an honest opinion in an area that is increasingly important today. All of that builds audience, which builds power, and that is how you fight in this information war. At some point the readership here will be big enough to move the needle. And then we can begin to be a real pain in the ass. But that was only possible because we were small enough to pivot in real time.

So if you ever jump in and do this, strive to be useful, and pivot until you find that usefulness. Make your time save other people time, and make their visit worthwhile. And then do it constantly, so people get in the habit of stopping by. It is a pain. You will be awful in the beginning. Everyone is because you need to learn this by doing it. But you will get better. You don’t get a vacation, because it is all you. But over time you can simulate what it costs Cabal millions of dollars to produce. I am sure it drives them nuts.

According to SimilarWeb, TheGatewayPundit generates about $10-15 million per year in revenue for 74 million pages per month, most of which I assume gets spent on the staff or overhead, if anything is believable (which is doubtful). But regardless, I think in probably a fifth the time, you are ten times as informed here, whatever it is he spends. Over time, I expect that will show in traffic, though I will be surprised if I end up with 32 million pageviews per month.

And strictly speaking I think I could do this for probably $500 per year on average, not counting computers and home hardware/internet/etc, although there would be more periodic crashes. I’ve had to buy extra features to support the traffic, but I could have done without them and just endured the down time. There are more costs in IRL security cameras, travel cameras, backup power systems, and other stuff, given the surveillance showing up in force. But still, you can do a site on a shoestring which can compete with the most impressive sites out there for a few thousand per year.

The downside is I do not think you could make a living at it. I will try at some point soon to see what revenue a site like this would get, and if we could afford employees. I don’t want to discourage people unnecessarily. But American Thinker has $15-25 million in revenue, supposedly, for 13 million pageviews.

I’ve got a 50th the page views of them by similarweb’s analysis (a fraction of what my site logs say, but whatever) (And I have probably a larger percentage of viewers because I post one page per day, so I get one visit per most viewers, whereas they post multiple articles multiple times per day, by multiple writers, and probably gets multiple hits on multiple pages from returning visitors looking for new content throughout the day).

But even as much as I personally click with the readers here, I seriously doubt I would bring in a 50th of their revenue, let alone more. A 50th of $15-25 million would be $300,000-$500,ooo, assuming I only have a 50th the readership, and I probably have a lot more.

I don’t know where their money comes from, but I do not think it would be available to you if you did this. And bear in mind, I have been at this a decade now, a lot of people heard about the site from r/K, we talk about the most interesting stuff here, and I think the brief is a high quality product. It is difficult to get enough viewers to make a living at this.

The point being, don’t quit a profitable job to do this, or think this is a better option than just about anything else for making a living. Do this to wage war with time you can spare. Don’t try to emulate these multimillionaire website operators, and think if you can break off a 100th, or a 1000th their salary you will be fine. It doesn’t work like that.

Now the nuts and bolts. I did this a little differently, and it was much more expensive, but if I were doing it today, this is how I would do it.

First decide if you need to be anonymous. Some may not, and anonymity costs a decent amount of time and money.

If you want to be truly anonymous, you can find a host which takes crypto, though that can be complex as I understand it since sometimes wallet transactions can be tracked, and you would need to know what you are doing. I don’t, so if you want to do that, you will need to do your own research.

More easily, if you require anonymity, find one of the lawyers online who sells premade corporations for a few hundred dollars.

You will need a mailing address for the corporation, so get a mailbox. It will not protect you from Cabal, but your goal here is to simply hide yourself enough that regular people can’t find you. Cabal will be hesitant to do anything if doing it will reveal somebody was spying on you illegally to find out who you were.

Then go to Bank of America (the easiest place to do this in my experience), and fill out their online forms to get a corporate bank account. You should get a debit card with that which you can use, or you can get a company credit card. Make sure your name is not on the card. Make up a company employee name if need be and put it on the card. Banks don’t care with corporate accounts.

If you really want to detach yourself from the site, get a VPN to hide where you are connecting to the site from, from the site’s logs in the event you get hacked. You will use it for a lot of different things, so keep it on. Every time you click a link, you tell the site you are heading to where you came from and your IP, so you will want to have it on all the time.

Get a cheap cell phone and plan for it, from a pay as you go cell service provider using the company card and company info. You are going to need the phone at some point to verify something. Try not to use it for anything else.

From there you will need to spend some time searching the internet and comparing hosting deals. Find a host which offers WordPress blogging software installed on their server, and make sure they throw in a domain for free. Most do.

Hosting plus domain can be as cheap as $20 dollars per year for the first year. Check what subsequent years will cost, because all hosts will jack that up for subsequent years, some more than others. $100 per year sounds about right for the shared hosting plan you are looking at. Ipage is a pretty big name, but you may find better deals elsewhere. I haven’t really been looking, and am not an expert.

Once you settle on a host, you will pay with the company card. Use the company’s data for everything they ask about you, do not use your name or your address or your phone for anything associated with the site. Get privacy features on the domain to boot, so they will hide the company in the domain records. Obviously if you don’t need all this privacy stuff, it is even simpler, but still get privacy on your domain.

Then choose your domain, which is the www.yourdomain.com address. After you choose your domain, your site will have a master page you will see when you log in with the password and username they give you for your account.

Procedures may vary from account to account, but here is what you would see at the host Ipage, and what you would do. Even if you have no idea what you are doing, follow their instructions. It will work out.

Once you click “manage your site,” you will end up on the Dashboard of WordPress which is the back end. It looks like this (click for full size) :

Wordpress.png


In that picture you can’t see the mouse because it is a screenshot, but I was mousing over “Appearance,” in the menu on the left which opens up the submenu. It will take you a week of playing with all those buttons, but you will figure it out. Your host will have set up pages explaining it all and they will offer email support as well if you have any questions, which everybody does.

As you experiment with each page, you will see how it changes your site. You will test different themes, which put different colors and text placements on your page. You can put different things in your sidebar, like I have on the right here, and you can even move the sidebar to the left, or eliminate it altogether. You can experiment with different banner images like I have above with our God Emperor and everyone else laughing at the idea of Biden-Harris. Nobody taught me this, I did it all by trial and error, and you will too. Everybody does.

Once the site looks roughly like you want it (you will change it again and again over time), you can click the “New” button at the top to post your first post. That will open the new post page, which is self explanatory:

Wordpress-new.png


You put your title, and you write your post. Where you want a link, you just copy the link to your clipboard, highlight the text you want to be the link, and past the address over it, and the page will automatically make it a link. Want something in blockquotes like below?

Highlight what you want in the blockquote like this text, and then click the quotation mark button above the box for the body, and it will look like this.

You will learn it quick as you do it.

If you want to sell stuff, you would then install the WooCommerce plugin by clicking the plugin button on the lefthand side, then clicking Add New, and searching for it in the search box. Click on it, click install, and it will install itself. It will then adapt WordPress to sell items. A tutorial is here when you are ready.

Taking payments is similarly simple. Open an account at GiveSendGo, and fill out the forms. Paypal is similarly simple, though less reliable if you are going to do something on the right. Use your company info, and bank account. They will give you a little paragraph of code to paste into a page on your site, and it will produce all the buttons and forms for accepting credit card donations on your site wherever you put it. They will deliver the funds to your corporate bank account, without you even doing anything.

If you want Crypto donations, that is more complicated, but in a nutshell, you need to download and install wallet software on your computer, like Electrum. Or if you want Monero, MoneroGui. Or you need to buy a hardware wallet, like Trezor or Ledger, and follow the instructions to set whatever you got up and that will get you an address, which you then post for people to send crypto to. Google the terms for more info.

A more complicated option, but much more anonymous is BTCPay software, but that will require another hosting account. Google BTCPay Lunanode for the easiest way to do that. Depending on how many different types of crypto you want to accept you want, it will range from about $10 per month to $25 or 30 for a basic setup.

Google the terms above, and you will find articles for beginners to walk you through it all of it. And you don’t really have to understand it to do it. I am just about there, and I still have only the vaguest idea how it all works. But you can, in essence, paint by the numbers by following the tutorials step by step and make what needs to happen happen, even if you don’t fully understand it.

Now there are probably free hosts out there, but you will be giving up control. Here, you will basically own your own little piece of the internet. Nobody can kick you off, save maybe the host, but that rarely happens, unless you are engaging in crimes.

Once you are set up you just have to get the word out to other people. It takes time, but if you stick with it and have a quality product over time readers will come.

The main message is anybody can do this, and it is an incredibly powerful skill. Whether you are promoting a business, or just shitposting memes, there is a reason these Cabal websites are being given millions of dollars to occupy space online. That space is valuable because it has power. Don’t be afraid to get a little for yourself.

As always you can post questions on this anywhere you want, and I will be happy to help.

More at links and in the comments at: https://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/how-to-start-your-own-website/
 
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