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You will need to chose a place to host your blog or website. Although there are free options out there, having your own hosting account gives you the most control over your website.
There are many many options for hosting providers these days. Consistent among the top of them is Site 5. I have used them for quite a few years. Customer service is excellent and their plans are among the best avaiable. I was lucky to get in early on with an exceptional plan with unlimited domains, storage and bandwidth. And recently they have brought it back again! Even if you have only one site now, you will probably want more later, so don’t limit yourself with a one domain account.
Questions to consider about your hosting account
You should of course weigh the merits of varioius hosing companies.
- What types of plans do they have?
- How much does the plan that fits my needs cost?
- How do their plans compare to that of other companies?
- Do they provide the software you need? PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc.
- How is their customer service? Do they have phone, chat, email, support desk, and/or forums?
- How do they rank among other hosting providers?
I highly recommend Site 5.
Linux or Windows Hosting
Unless you really need to host something on Windows, chose Linux hosting. The reasons for that are primarily security and speed. In addition, most software for your website, such as WordPress or Drupal runs on Linux. Save yourself a lot of headaches and use Linux.
I’ll soon post how to set up your blog.
For the purposes of social networking and blogging, your first domain name should be your own name if possible. People are interested in you. And you probably don’t know what niche topic you might end up blogging aobut . So to start out, pick a domain that contains your name.
Choosing your Domain Name
Ideally that will be your first and last name. As you can see, mine is RosinaBignall.com. However, some names may not be available. So, have in mind a few other options. Such as adding your middle initial, or using your first initial. If you really can’t find something and you have a certain topic you’d like to blog about, add keywords from that topic to the domain name.
A few other suggestions:
- Keep it short – some say under 20 characters if possible which for most names should be plenty.
- Use a .com extension – when people think of websites they assume .com with only a few exceptions (such as non-profits which should be .org). Do not choose a .me, .mobi, .org, etc. extension. As a last resort you can use .net, but try to find something that is .com first. Other extensions have their place and are useful, but in general you want a .com.
Registering your Domain
Now that you have a domain name in mind, it’s time to go register it. Chose a good, reputable domain name registrar. There are plenty of them, but I use GoDaddy for my domains. They are always among the top rated registrars. I have been using them for years and have transferred all my domains there that were scattered to other registrars. So here’s a link to GoDaddy, I highly recommend them. There used to be really low priced domain registrars but rarely anymore, sometimes you can find great deals at GoDaddy, so watch for them.
A few suggestions:
- Don’t search for a domain name until you are ready to buy. You can lose it if you do, there are people who watch the searches and buy up the ones being searched for and try to sell it at a much higher cost. It’s probably less likely with your name and less common now than it was a few years ago, but I lost bignall.com that way and it still happens.
- When you register your domain, register for as many years as you can. Never less than 2 years, but 5 or more is better. The longer it is registered, the higher value it will have in search engines and the less likely it will be seen as fly-by night website.
So go visit GoDaddy and register your domain. Soon I’ll do another article on setting up web hosting.
Quickly Tweet to Twitter, add to your Facebook wall, Digg, WordPress blog, Yahoo Buzz and any other social bookmarking site with the buttons below each post on my blog. I added a the Add to Any plugin. Give it a try!
I added the Tweet this plugin to my blog today. Now my posts will go to twitter automagically.
Take a look at this new course. It looks really great. Check it out.
My new blog is up and running! I’ve decided to move my various blogs to my own domain to make it easier to keep them updated and interesting. So, in a day or two, you should see my old blogs showing a post saying they’ve been moved, and the posts from those blogs moved here. And, I’ll start adding new content. Enjoy and keep your comments coming!
The money is in the list…
You’ve heard it before. And, indeed, it’s true. If you’re going to build a business you have to have a list of opt-in subscribers to whom you can send announcements and opportunities about your business.
List Explode is designed to virally build your own Double Opt-in List. And, even better, it is 100% Free.
Once you are a member, not only can you eMail your own downline, but you can email a random group of people equivalent to the number of people in your downline.
So, if you have 3,000 people in your downline you can choose to eMail those 3,000 people OR eMail 3,000 100% RANDOM members!
Think about that, you will be able to eMail people you would have never had a chance to eMail before.
Click Here Now to start building your own list!
After the training, here’s where I stand:
1. I grew up in a family pinching pennies every step of the way. My mom still saves everything even though she doesn’t have to just in case it might be useful someday. So, for me, money is a big worry – there’s never enough of it. For some time now I’ve been looking at my view of money, so I will continue that process.
2. Well, I have to admit that I had a lot of hits this week, even more than Rick. I had nearly 4,000, well above Rick’s own 2,200. However, with about 25 new members, my conversion rate was only .6%, whereas his was 3%. So, my hits are no where near as effective as Rick’s. Looking back at what I did this week, I think that most of the hits were from the autosurf traffic exchanges. I use a number of them – when I leave the computer, I leave a bunch of the autosurf’s running. I’m sure most people who use them do something similar… so, lot’s of hits, but no one actually looking at the page. So, I think I will drop the autosurf usage and focus more on other, more effective strategies. I use a number of manual traffic exchanges and spend about 1-3 hours per day surfing them, so I will continue that (it’s a great time to listen to training calls and personal development tapes). I have another ezine ad scheduled to go out this week, so hopefully that will bring me some good hits.
3. But, my primary focus will be on the last set. Trying to get ready to create more visibility. I’ll look at creating my own version of the lead capture pages and setting up my domain better. I own RosinaBignall.com, but I don’t think it should go there, so I will look at some other domains, though I may just start with some subdomains of RosinaBignall.com for now.
Another great training today. Here’s some notes from it:
Rick planned to talk about 3 topics today:
- The millionaire mindset – secret psychology of wealth
- Traffic snapshot
- Kicking it up a notch
1. We all have ingrained things that we learned about money, so this is an absolute stretch for us. Some grew up with pinching every penny. There was never enough. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.†Etc. Others grew up without really knowing where the money came from, but it was there. Either way, the lessons we leaned in childhood do not serve us well as adults.
No one teaches the real game of money as we are growing up. You won’t learn it in school; there’s no class in college.
We all have a blue print: What you heard and (more importantly) what you saw became what you think and especially how you feel about money.
Book to read: Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (you can find a link on Rick’s training blog)
Have to get past the psychological block to get to wealth. It’s a process and won’t happen overnight.
If you come into it with a sense of desperation, you won’t succeed. You need persistence, focus, and most of all certainty – knowing you can do it.
He again mentioned Simpleology.
2. Traffic snapshot – Important to track your traffic. How many hits did you get this week? How many conversions? What’s the percentage.
Someone asked what he was doing to get traffic. His answer: Check out his team training blog. It contains a blue print for what he is doing. And you can see how it has changed over time. Also he’ll put out advanced strategies on his blog.
3. Kick it up a notch
- Have to own your own domain name
- Create your own pages (lead capture pages)
- On pages have lots of keyword rich copy
All this creates visibility. Ezines are a great short term strategy, but a terrible long term one. You need to have visibility so that your web page is on the top of the search engine pages.
Step 1: Build keyword rich lead capture pages on your website. There is a workshop through GDI with Janet that will teach how to create these.
Use subdomain pages. Use blog. Constantly get in front of the search engine spiders so that you are at the top of the rankings and get the top spots on the search pages. People are more likely to click on the free listings than the paid ones. We’ll be talking more about how to get in front of the search engines in later trainings. Need to gain visibility
When creating the pages, personalize the pages written by Paul and Joel. These pages are great and some of the best copy Rick has ever seen, so use them, just add your personal touch.
Conclusion:
- Have the right mindset
You have a blueprint ingrained in us – the key to winning is to understand it
- Look and see where you are at – take a traffic snapshot
- Have your own lead capture page
I found a great article on Rick’s blog about getting the most out of Traffic Swarm. I have been using the techniques discussed, including tracking it in the spreadsheet and have found it to be most helpful. I don’t want to rehash it here, but I highly recommend reading the article.
I would add a couple of things, though. If your browser opens new tabs all the time from the links on Traffic Swarm, hit the back button instead of using the Next button on the Traffic Swarm page. It will be faster since it doesn’t fetch the page from the server again. Even if speed and extra tabs opening are not an issue, you may want to do that anyway to keep the links from being rearranged.
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