Domain And Hosting An Introduction

Domain and Hosting 101
I’m not gonna waste ur time with rhetoric, I’m just gonna tell you what you need to know about how to make money online, and how to go about doing it. This articles is for absolute beginners. If your not one of them, I suggest that you skim through it and move on.

I will cover the following two topics : Hosting and Domain Names.

A domain name is simply put the main website address. For example, complete address of the page your viewing is: http://makemoneyonlineprofessor.blogpsot.com/Domain-and-hosting-an-introduction.html.

Breaking it up:

Http:// - HyperText Transfer Protocol. – Meaning, mumbo jumbo about communication protocols and stuff that can make our head spin. Simply put : who cares.

www. – Stands for the World Wide Web

Blogger – This is the domain name, registered at a price of $8.85 per year. All .com domain names are registered for about that price. Domain names are Internet Real Estate. The domain name porn.com for example sold for about $9 500 000 US. Read my article about Internet Real Estate – The Domain Game. For now, all you need to know is that to registering a domain is not the same as buying a domain. If you find a domain name that is available, you can register it at hosting websites or at WebNowServices.com

As I said, most places register the domain name for about $8.95 a year, and most will throw it in for free when you buy a yearly hosting plan. Buying a domain name, is the transfer the domain name from someone who already owns it. For example, if you want the domain name registered to me, we can negotiate a price, and I can transfer ownership. Obviously, shorter, popular, easy to remember names are EXPENSIVE.

MakeMoneyOnlineProfessor - is what is called a sub-domain. If you own a top level domain, most hosting plans will let you have an unlimited number of subdomains for free.

.com – This extension is describes what kind of website you have. The most popular being the .com, of course. You can register you domain under numerous extensions. Here is a list of the popular ones.
.com – commercial business
.mil – U.S. military or affiliated agency
.edu – Educational institution
.net – large network (or small)
.gov – Governmental agency
.org – nonprofit agency
.biz – business (Don’t suggest you ever use this)
.coop – nonprofit organizations
.info - any website ;Cheap domains, you can get them at a price of .99 cents a year. Usually a .info domain is used to point at other website. Read my article Internet Real Estate – The Domain Game, for neat tricks to utilize this extension.
.museum – self explanatory
.pro – professional (e.g. doctors, lawyers, etc)
.name – personal website (Don’t suggest you use this unless you are really really famous)
.aero – For airlines

There are also upper lever domains specific to each country, for example:

.ca – Canadian
.us – United States
.au – Australian
.fr – France

You get the idea!

Out of all the ones listed I only suggest using .com (the best), country oriented (i.e. .us, .ca etc), .net and .info! I would think twice about using any other extension.

Hosting

On top of a domain, you need what is called a hosting plan. Simply put, you need to store the webpage files on a computer somewhere so people can access them. You can’t use your computer at home (technicalities I wont go into). You need those files on what is called a “server”. Hosting can be free or it can run up to thousands of dollars a year. Most people will end up paying about $10 to $15 a month.

Free Hosting : Be very careful when you use free hosting services Only use free hosting for blogs. And don’t host a blog unless you’re planning to post daily. Free hosting accounts limit what you can do with your website. You will have little database activity, and almost no commerce tools.

Pros: Free; easy to learn (you can learn to setup up a blog in about 10 minutes)

Cons: very limited on what you can do with a blog by means of interacting with visitors and ecommerce solutions.

Recommended sites for free blog hosting: Blogspot (Owned by Google), and WordPress.

Note : if you are really cheap and do not want to spend 10 bucks a month on a domain name, you can get a top lever domain name for free. So for example if you had the domain name etcetcetc.com you can get a free etcetcetc.blogspot.com domain name, but you can kiss marketing the name goodbye. Don’t be cheap, pay the 8.95 a year. Unless ofcourse you are blogging, in that point, use a blogger service. This is for SEO reasons that are beyond the scope of this article.

Cheap Hosting:

You need to asses what functionality your website will have before you decide on a hosting plan. Almost all hosting plans will allow you to set up commerce on your website. I guess the only thing you really need to asses is if you need the host service to be able to handle special extensions such as Cold Fusion. Another point you need to keep in mind before choosing a hosting plan is how many websites you plan on hosting. Regardless of what your needs are, it is probably a good idea to visit Godaddy.com. They are cheap, and you can set up as many websites as you want.

Writing Ebooks - selling ebooks

How to make money online writing E-books and selling ebooks : productions and promotions

E(lectronic)-books are digital books that can be downloaded for free or instantly upon receiving payments . You can use e-books for two folds. 1. They can be used as both a revenue stream by writing and selling the ebooks online and 2. They can be used as a promotional tool.

Producing and promoting e-books is simple, just follow the outline presented to you in this section.

Remember, you can write an e-book about almost anything and everything, but a lot of times you will not be able to sell those e-books. Let me demonstrate what I mean. Let’s say, you have a website selling shoes. You can produce an e-book about shoe fashion, and the different designers, but you will most likely not be able to sell it. You will have to offer the e-book for free. You might ask why would you want spend time and effort producing a product that you won’t sell(Just read on). I find that you can easily sell e-books in the topics such as security (i.e. how to safe guard your home, bank accounts, credit cards etc), Health and Fitness including sex advice, online production and marketing(Yes, people are selling information that is presented to you here for free for a hefty $60 to $100….your welcome), wedding planning( or avoiding wedding disasters is a nice sell), parenting, etc The answer is simple and multi-dimensional. Offering and e-book or a newsletter on your website will:

1. Allow you to obtain your visitors’ email addresses
2. Allow you to promote your product and/or services
3. If its free, people love free things.
4. Distinguishes and aids in your branding efforts.

PRODUCTION

If you run a content based website or blog than most of the work is done already. Just gather up a sum of your best work, organize it, add a table of contents, do some editing to make sure it conforms to an e-book not a website, and convert the file to PDF. PDF is a standard when it comes to e-books. Majority if not almost all e-books are found in this format. You can convert your file to PDF formatting for free here.

If you do not have content ready for your topic. Do the following

1. Create a table of content(at least 10 headings long)

2. Write at least 300 words for each topic (Read my article about producing cheap content)

3. Add at least 1 affiliate link in each chapter (read my article about Affiliates), and add at least one link back to your website(s) in each chapter

4. Design an e-book cover(Text based or image, read my article about producing professional cheap images and graphics)

5. If the e-book is "sellable" add it to ClickBank (read my article about Click Bank)

6. Add it to any eBay Store (read my article about Selling on eBay) or any other online store you may have

7. Promote your e-book (Read my article about Online Marketing)

Using Clickbank Affliliate Program made easy

You can go back and read the first part of this article Here

There we discussed how you can go to ClickBank's Market Place , find digital products(ie : E-books) and promote them on your website to make money online. It will introuduce you to how to make money online using Clickbank affiliate program In this article we will discuss how you can use ClickBank to promote your own product.(Read my article about producing and promoting your e-book).

You can promote your product on ClickBank to make money online. By going to ClickBank Sell Products section, you can fill up an application to allow ClickBank and their affiliates to sell your product.

TIP ON HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE USING CLICKBANK AFFILIATE PROGRRAM : To maximize the amount of money you can make online, you should keep the price of your product moderately low and offer a slightly higher commission than similar products available on Clickbank. After your product gains popularity you can marginally higher your price and/or lower the commission payout.

It might be worth it for you to create a section on your website for your affiliates. Basically make it easier for them by showing them how to use your product to make money using clickbank. You should link this section at the bottom of each of page with the text link "Affiliates". In this section you should tell your affiliates (or potential affiliates) the benefits of your products and the benefits they will enjoy by promoting your website. You should also provide them with tools that will make it easier for them to promote your clickbank affiliate product. This can be in the form of banners, catchy text links or even online video commercials. You can create this tools on your own, or you can get someone to create them for you. I tend to use Web Now Services for creating banners and online commercials. You can get a professional looking banner created for about 40 or 50 bucks. You can also provide your Clickbank affiliate with a list of keywords that they can use to market your product. Look at you affiliate team as your sales force, and treat them professionally: Do this, and you will gain success using the Clickbank Affilate Program to make money (and that's How!).

Happy selling....

Using Clickbank

This is a two-part series on How to Make Money Online Using Clickbank

What is ClickBank and how can I use it to make money online?

ClickBank is an online company that hooks up publishers with advertisers. You can use ClickBank to buy sell and promote digital products. Are digital products usually come in the form of e-books(read my article about Producing and Promoting E-books.)

This section will discuss how you can use ClickBank to make money online by promoting e-books and selling your own.

First let us discuss how to promote other people's digital products to make money online.


By going to ClickBank's Marketplace you can browse through the topics which range from Business to Business to Health & Fitness to Marketing and Ads plus many more. Select the one closest to your website, newsletter, email campaign, blog, e-book(or whichever one interests you). You will then get a list of products which you can promote. To help you the publisher, ClickBank releases some information about the selling trends of the product. They are :

1. $Earned/Sale: This is the average net amount earned per affiliate per referred sale. By the way...this is the net earned per actual sale, and so its effected by such things as refunds, and taxes.

2. Future $: Average total rebill revenue earned by the affiliate due to sales from a site. This is because a lot of products are subscription based. For example, you can be earning 10/month as long as the person you directed to the site is still paying.

3. Total $: This is the total amount per sale, This means, you take the original sale, add up all the re-bills and then devide that number by the number of sales.

4. %Earned/Sale: This number should be different if the publisher (product provider) changes his/her commission amount, so watch for that.

5. %Referred: Fraction of publisher's total sales that are referred by affiliates.

6. Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher's products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.

One you find a product that you are satisfied with, click on link that says "create hoplink. A hoplink is is a normal HTML code that tells ClickBank that if the visitor you send to the website buys the product you get credited and hence you receive your commission. It is that simpler

TIP : Search the website of the product for a section dedicated to you the affiliate. A lot of times they will provide banners and tools to help you promote the product.

After selecting a product you are familiar with, write up a short review. You should aim to write 5 reviews a week. It shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes for each review, and do not make it longer than 200 to 250 words. You do not have to buy the product to review it, simply find out what others are saying about the product by searching the internet and writing your own unique description. If you are not interested in writing reviews or want to have them ready at bulk so you can concentrate on marketing your website, you should consider using a service like Web Now Services. They can write you reviews in a short time at a cost of a measly penny a word.

How to use duplicated content on your website

The Thousand Page Tip - How to make money online using it.

You have a website and it contains about 10, maybe 20 or so pages of your own unique content.(By the way, read my article How to Make Money Online without HTML or Programming Skills) Doesn’t sound like a lot but if you’re the one doing the writing (or the paying) you know that it’s hard work to research, write, edit, proof read, affiliate, post and back link your article. However, to an outside observer, to a new user, your website may not seem as content rich as you might want them to believe. Here is a nifty way where you can change all that with a little trick that I like to call my own. (Not sure if it was employed before or not, but whatever, I’ll still take credit).

Step 1: How to make money online by building content

By now I hope you have learned how to grab free and cheap content. To recap here is a bunch of easy ways to do it: (Do not worry, this will not hurt your SERP efforts…read on). If need be, here is my article about Cheap Content

So, now you have a bunch of articles (20 – 30). If you have a lot of free time you might even have a lot more than that. If I taught you right, you must be saying : Wait a second, if I use these articles on my website I will kiss my SERP ranking good-bye. Google and other Search Engines will detect that I am using copied content and screw me (The not on How to Make Money Online). Good boy (or girl)…you’re absolutely right. You will have to:

Sub-Domain It :

Put all these articles in a sub-domain (Call it whatever you like for example archive).

Then Simply create a robot.txt file and place this

User-agent: *
Disallow: /mysecretdirectory

My secreitdirectory being the directly where all the pages that have legal but copied articles on.

Why??

Here are a few reasons

1) They make your website look a lot bigger and content rich
2) They can ultimately lead a user to stay longer on your website and such raising the chance that he/she will click on an ad, buy your product, or click through to an affiliate.
3) You website will have more resources and content that is valuable to your reader. (pick your articles carefully).

You can read my Introduction on How to make money online regardless of how much HTML or web programming experience here

How to make moeny without programming skills Part 3

This is a 3 part series that gives step by step instructions on how to make money online without any type of HTML or web programming experience. This series is titles "Programming Illiterate Web Gurus"

We are continuing our discussion on how anyone without any programming or HTML experience can go a bouts on establishing a successful series of online websites. If you like, you can go back and read Part 1 Part 2.

Any website has the following:

1. A Domain Name and Hosting
2. Content
3. The actual website, the back bone or the back end program

We will discuss number 3 here.

Once you have decided what you need its really simple. We will start off with simple websites, for example, those that require little user interaction, no shopping carts, no databases to maintain, and no subscriptions. You can build such a site for free by doing one of the following.

1. Use a blog site (Simple Site - No shopping cart and minimal user interaction

You can do this by using such free services as Blogger. Blogger will even give you a free sub-domain. (ie: www.YOURSITE.Blogspot.com). I do not suggest you use Blogger except for blogs (read my article about blogs), just because its not a common practice and will take away from the professionalism of your website. Also never use a sub-domain for anything other than a blog. A domain name goes for less than $9 a year. Read my article about Domain names and Hosting.


2.Use a website builder

Thanks to press technology, there are numerous online website builders out there. Even though I a website programmer I tend to use one of these services simply because they are fast and easy to use. I can even integrate shopping carts and accept payments online with just a few clicks. Feel free to search and try different website builders out there(do NOT try any that do not come with at least a 30 day money back guarantee) My favorites are citymax and SiteSell.com. All you have to do is choose a template, cut and paste your content, and your done. Upgrading your website is just as simple. If you have the content written, you can have a professional looking website up and running in less than a few minutes.

3.Using Templates

A template is a ready made website design. All you have to do is cut and paste your content and your all set. I suggest using templates if you want your site to be written in Flash. Flash is dynamic, instead of defining it for you look at my example :

Flash Template Example

The pros of having a flash site are obvious : The website looks neat, and professional. As with everything, there is a downside; A flash website might take longer to load if the visitor is not using a high speed connection to the internet, which could entice them to leave before the site is fully loaded. If you like the idea of flash, and think that your visitors might appreciate it, you might want to consider a flash intro. A flash intro is convenient because if your visitor is using a slow connection he opt to skip the intro and enter the conventional site.

I recommend you use DreamTemplate - Click here
. You can also do a search for a free website templates if you like.

It is very important for any website to have a banner or a company logo. If your cash strapped you can use a free service such as MyBannerMaker. However, I strongly suggest that you upgrade to a unique customized banner. If you know Photoshop(or have the patience to learn, its not hard) you can make one yourself. You can also get some to make one for you for about $40 to $50. A company I use regularly is Web Now Services.

4. Hire Someone to make the website for you.

I have not seen many websites that cost more than a few hundred dollars. Again, you can find your own programmer, or you can hire Web Now Services, they are cheap and professional.

How to make Money Online without HTML or Web Programming Skills Part 2

This is the second part of a series discussing how anyone can go about starting a website without any prior HTML or programming experience and make money online. The series is titled "Programming Illiterate Web Gurus". Part 1 of this series can be found Here

Generally there are few types of affiliate websites that can make you money online. The best part is you do not need HTML or Web programming experience. For simplicity reasons, we can define an affiliate website as any website/email/newsletter that requires visitor to do more than just click on an advertisement to earn money. For example, I can start a website/blog about lets say how awesome Paris France is, and about all the different wonderful experiences one could have while on vacation there. On that page I will put a link(I will show you how later) :


If I want the link to look more more natural and less like an advertisement, I would do do it like this :

I started off my vacation by booking online at Travelocity.

Now since my website or blog is about traveling to Paris, you can assume that the visitor is likely looking to travel to Paris. If s/he clicks on my link and books an air ticket, hotel, or any other service/product they offer, Travelocity will pay me a nice commission. This method is called Pay Per Action(Sale).

Not all pay per action is completed by a sale. Another famous per per action is a lead, which is generally predominant in the insurance and money lending industry. Currently, if you as an affiliate refer your visitor to one of these companies(Lending Tree, Capital One, Gieco etc) you can average more than $50 dollars per no obligation application they fill out. This is a great field...imagine you concentrate your efforts to get one person a day to fill out an application, you will average $1500 a months. Not Bad!

To this point, if your new to this line of business, you probably have a few questions most importantly 1) How do I find these companies willing to be pay me 2) How do I guarantee they pay me fairly.

The answer to both of these questions is simple. There are companies that specialize for this kind of service. They are a marketplace for publishers(You) and Advertisers (Them) to get together and form partnerships. They also guarantee fair play by being the middleman. They track the visitors and store cookies that enable you to get credit even if the customer returns to the website at a later time. The most popular service is Commission Junction and Link Share. I strongly suggest CJ.Com if you are a beginner because they are free service for publishers. Also if you are looking to promote electronic products, use Click Bank. They are also a free service. You can read my articles about promoting, writing and affiliating e-books here.

Now that you know the basics of running an affiliate website you can read further for a step by step instructions on how to build one without any programming experience.