Account Deactivated

It’s been a little more than a month since my Adsense account was disabled, and I’m not “Feeling Lucky”. I’m just now starting to slowly recover lost revenue from my websites. The past six months my Adsense earnings were slowly growing to the point where I was getting checks regularly. It wasn’t a lot of money but it was steady and I depended on it for hosting costs and the costs of buying and renewing my domains.

A month before my account was disabled, an article from one of my sites went viral through a bookmarking site and the resulting traffic spike was so big it actually crashed my hosts servers and shut down the website for a day. The residual traffic for the next 30 days increased my Adsense earnings almost 500 percent for that month. I was excited to be finally be making enough money that I could re-invest back into the sites and have some extra to pay off bills, but when the end of the month came I received this email instead of a check.

Hello,

After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will
both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the effectiveness of Google’s advertising system, particularly the advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we’ve taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting

http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Ouch, not only is my account disabled but ALL unpaid earnings from the previous months is going to be revoked as well. The email included a link to the Google Adsense appeals form. I thought for sure that I was going to be able to explain what happened and since I was sure that I had not done anything wrong it shouldn’t be much trouble to get my account turned back on.

Appeal……Schmappeal

I filled out the appeal form and waited for the response. The form said it could take about a week to hear back, so while I was waiting I started doing some research on other accounts that have been disabled. The more I read the less confident I began to feel. The basic sentiments in the online community are that if your Adsense account gets disabled, you’re screwed. “You will never get it back because appeals at Google are handled by robots that are set to auto-decline.”

Through alot of forum reading and going through all of Googles helpdesk articles I realized that Google expects you to be proactive to prevent accounts from being disabled. If you receive large increases in legitimate traffic that would look out of the ordinary from a robots perspective then YOU must go to Google yourself and inform them to prevent the machines from shutting you down.

Seven days later the results of the appeal came in.

Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you’ve provided, as well as your continued interest in the AdSense program. However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your
feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we’re unable to reinstate your AdSense account.

This was a pretty crushing feeling at first. I realized how foolish it was to let such a draconian and non-transparent company like Google have such a large influence over my earnings. The reason why I had stuck with Google so long is that its simple, requires no real effort on my part, and pays out the highest in terms of PPC ads. They’re the biggest and best PPC ad service available today. However there is no transparency, the whole experience with them felt very inhuman and automated. Without Adsense I felt like I might as well shut down, pack up my things and go home.

I was unable to figure out what I did wrong, and with no warnings and no second chances I’m not able to try and fix it or work harder. If Google’s systems gave out warnings then I might have been able to be a better employee for them. Instead I got shut down and they left me completely in the dark.

Finding Alternative Revenue Sources

My first instinct was to find a replacement for the pay-per-click ad placements I had already optimized to work with Google Adsense. I went and signed up for Adbrite Exchange and Chitika Premium and inserted them into the spots where Adsense ads had been hoping to see some comparable earnings.

PPC Ads

The first thing I noticed with the Adbrite network was that many of the ads being served at first were way too loud and intrusive. They all looked like something if you clicked would give your computer a virus. This was very bothersome, but over time more advertisers on the network approved my website and more ads began showing on the sites. After a few weeks passed I checked to see how the new Adbrite ads were stacking up vs. Google. I wasn’t very pleased, even though I was still receiving several clicks on the ads the CPC (Cost Per Click) was dramatically lower. The Google ads being served on my sites were averaging $0.75-1.15 per click and now the Adbrite ads were only hitting for $0.05-0.15 per click. It was very disappointing and realized that without Google the PPC model wasn’t going to be a viable option for me anymore.

What I’ve learned about Chitika Ads is that some websites have alot of success while others fail horribly. The key thing to keep in mind is that Chitika serves mainly product related ads so websites with product reviews do very well, but other sites struggle getting a good conversion rate. Since most of my sites are not product related, Chitika wasn’t going to b a good replacement for Google Adsense. However Chitika does have a publisher referral program, so you can create revenue by sending other publishers to them.

Affiliate Marketing

I’ve had much more success using affiliate marketing in the place of PPC ads. Direct affiliate sales is much more labor intensive, finding the right products to promote and figuring out what your audience wants, but the payouts have been much higher than using simple PPC ads.

I chose Commision Junction to be the primary affiliate network I use. It took a while to find the which advertisers will convert well on my sites, but now I am actually making more with affiliate sales than I did before using only Google Adsense.

Current Top 3 affiliates on this site are:

#1 – Host Gator Hosting
#2 – Go Daddy
#3 – Groupon Deals

I’ve had an account with Amazon Associates as a secondary income to Adsense for several years to directly sell products to people that I think are useful or related a story I’m writing. Certain products convert better than others on Amazon but one thing I learned since I’ve been using Amazon is to learn to pick products that are higher in price. Amazon only pays out about 5-7% commission and for a few years I was only placing links to books in my articles. No matter how many products converted the commission was always just a few cents. However when I got away from books and started looking at bigger ticket items like computer hardware, and tools my earnings got much better.

Text-Link Ads

Income from affiliate sales is much more irregular than PPC ad revenue so I wanted to find something steady to supplement income on the site. I’ve always thought that text link were unsightly on websites when I was browsing, but I wanted to try it out for a while and see how it worked. There are several different text-link ad companies, however Kontera serves the highest quality of ads. Kontera also has an affiliate program where earn 10% for whatever your referrals make for up to one year.

If your Adsense account has been disabled for any reason then its probably too late to do anything. I recommend just signing up with the ad networks I mentioned and moving on from PPC.

If you are using Adsense currently and you haven’t been banned yet. Then you should take a moment and preemptively read Google Adsense Disabled FAQ as well as take a moment to re-read the Google TOS

Blogging is no more a mere hobby; it has become a full-time profession for many bloggers, including myself. Today I will share my journey as a blogger and how it helps me to earn a full-time income blissfully working from anywhere I like.

How it started

I had been working on diverse flavors of the Internet right from my college days. I used to earn a part-time income as a student by designing websites, and later I joined a multinational company as Information security engineer.
Corporate Work life is demanding and it never gave me any space to continue with my regular design and development hobby vocation. I was earning a decent income from my day job, but I failed to enjoy the work due to towering work pressure and deadlines.

I had a website that I registered early in the year of 2002 and used to receive web designing gigs from it. I don’t exactly remember when, but I transformed the website into a blog mainly to save the tutorials and code snippets as it could serve as a reference on the web for me to access from anywhere. This is how my blog was born.

The power of a web log

It began to become a routine that I stored all my new learning from the few web-based projects that I used to do on to the blog as a reference. Gradually I started observing that there were others who were interested in what I was writing as well.

Over time, I was overwhelmed by the response I was receiving from what I built for my personal use. This is when I thought, “Why not transform the blog into a webmaster community?”

I increased the frequency of updating quality unique tutorials and tips that I learned the hard way. Within a period of six months of an organized blogging approach, my traffic ranks were soaring. This was the power of the SEO-friendly advantage the WordPress system.

Taking it seriously

Within nine or ten months of blogging, I had already begun researching and learning a lot on the WordPress system, SEO, and internet marketing for improving my blog, and simultaneously shared that information on my blog as well.

The response I was receiving from my blog visitors, their comments, and traffic was the biggest source of enthusiasm and encouragement. I have developed many websites for myself and my clients, but never received this much consistent traffic ever! I had to take this seriously—and I did.

The flow of dollars

Now it was already a year and a half when I seriously started learning and implementing monetization of my blog traffic. I was under an impression that Google Adsense was the only method to monetize my blog content and traffic.

By that time, I was earning five or six dollars a day from the blog traffic, and that looked good for me. Approximately US$200 of additional income was great for me at that time. Gradually I started to explore and read more about monetization strategies, and I found affiliate marketing!

An earnings increase

Even though it is true that passion for blogging is the primary requirement for successful blogging, your earning from a blog will be a substantial fuel to your blogging journey.

Soon, along with my regular blogging efforts, I started to promote and review the best products on the Web. It is very critical that you only recommend what you have tried and tested: an honest review will certainly get your more fans and followers.

Gradually, I started to discover the power of affiliate marketing. And eventually, a single sale was fetching me more money I used to earn from half a month’s AdSense income. So gradually I started to write more quality articles and was doing in-post product recommendations.

Balancing job and blogging

It was already more than a year through my serious blogging effort. I used to return from my office each day and write one article for my blog. I’d also dedicate one hour to SEO and SMO tasks. On the weekends, I used to work four or five hours a day on content and keyword research.

By now, both my blog’s income and traffic were steadily growing, and when I started to earn around 70% of my regular job’s income, I started to think about blogging full-time.

The big decision

I was really enjoying the fact that my blog was becoming popular—the strongest proof of that was the fact that lots of people started involving themselves in discussions on my blog, and posting comments. I hate spam comments, so it was a pleasure to answer real people—and this was another form of encouragement.

After almost one and a half years of dedicated blogging, I was now earning more income than my day job and I started seriously thinking of making the leap to full-time blogging. At that point of time in India, US$1000 was my salary from my day job, and it used to be a pretty good income. But I was earning around US$1500 from blogging, and that played on my mind.

I didn’t want to make a foolish decision in hurry, so I thought I’d continue the same way and observe my income for three months. If it was consistent, I’d quit my job.

The next three months was a bit like a case study, and my blog came out victorious. I was consistently earning more than US$2000 for all the three months. So I took the decision and gave up my job to become a pro blogger.

Should you quit?

My story might inspire you, but I personally don’t want to encourage you to quit your hard-earned job unless you test yourself to earn at least double your day-job income. Becoming a pro blogger is a big decision and you might not want to be proved wrong.

The first month working full-time as a pro blogger was very exciting. I had all the freedom to do all that I wanted to, go anywhere, and—the best part—blog from any location.

I made sure that my work hours, earnings, plans, and strategies were accountable. I noted down every activity and progressed in a very systematic manner without losing sight of my goals.

The earnings steadily increased, and the first month after I quit my job, I analyzed my performance. Here are few findings:

• I almost worked the double amount of hours on my blog than I did before.
• My earnings from writing, blogging, and reviews touched US$3000 per month.
• I was enjoying traveling and spending time with my family.
• I had loads of plans for the next month.

If you don’t have a blog, or you have a low-traffic blog, don’t even think of quitting your job. It’s a huge risk. Be practical and put in lot of hard work on your blog to craft unique content that provides high value to your users.

Evaluate, measure your success, and prove yourself. When you are sure you’re ready to jump, make the big decision to become a full-time blogger … and you might just enjoy your work like never before!

Joshu Thomas is a full-time blogger writing on how to make money online blogging and runs a successful webmaster community.

Many “online jobs” promising quick riches and little effort are really scams. While the tasks below won’t make you rich, they can earn you a little pocket money on the side—and these days that can make a big difference.

Most of these online money making opportunities only require you have a computer, a decent internet connection, and some sort of marketable skill (or the ability to provide valuable consumer insight to marketers). You’ll be operating as a free agent and can choose when, where, and how much to participate.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not, because as mentioned earlier, you won’t likely be able to quit your day job with any of these programs, which typically pay way less than regular part-time gigs. But if you’re a student, insomniac, or just someone who wants an occasional cash boost without the commitment required by a typical job, these are some of the best tasks you can do online in your spare time.

Also beware: because specialized skills aren’t always required, you do have to be wary of scams. Before you sign up to become a virtual focus group participant, paid survey taker, mystery shopper or any online worker, keep in mind this important rule of thumb: you should never have to pay to work. Also, read the fine print.

That out of the way, here are a few sources of legitimate online single-task jobs:

Research Study/Survey Participant: Harvard Business School Computer Lab for Experimental Research (CLER): Participate in research studies at Harvard Business School and you can earn $15 to $40 or more per on-site study (in Cambridge, MA) or do one of their occasional online studies, which typically take less than 15 minutes to complete and usually compensate you with a $5 electronic gift certificate. The studies ask you about decisions you would make in various business-related disciplines, such as economics and psychology. Additional options: Lightspeed Consumer Panel, Pinecone Research, SurveySpot.

Focus Group Participant: 20|20 Panel: Since 1986, 20|20 Research has been providing companies with qualitative research from focus groups. Recent calls for focus group participants include: an online study of cell phones usage that pays $60 (adults 18-44) and an online study of household products purchases that pays $150 (adults 25-65). Additional options: Focus Forward, Hagen Sinclair, AlphaBuzz.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence: Amazon Mechanical Turk: Yeah, that’s a weird title. As a Mechanical Turk Worker (or MTurk), you complete odd jobs like looking up companies’ hours of operation, checking translations, coming up with ideas for marketing projects, and so on. The pay can be extremely low — a couple of cents even — but the tasks can usually be done quickly and some tasks pay more. Additional option: ShortTask.

User Tester: UserTesting.com: Get $10 for visiting a website and providing live, honest feedback about it. Your reactions as you traipse the site are recorded by UserTesting’s software. Additional option: uTest.

Tech Support Expert: FixYa.com: Put your knowledge to good use at FixYa and earn $2 to $6 for answering a posted question, $6 to $10 for helping someone in chat, $10-$15 if you do it by phone, or a variable amount for written tips and how-to’s. Additional options: Support Space, JustAnswer.

Blogger: Commission Junction: If you maintain a blog already, you can monetize it by inserting advertising links or affiliate links from Commission Junction, LinkShare, Chitika, Dev Hub,Smorty, and, of course, Google AdSense. There’s no set amount you can make (and no guarantee you’ll make anything at all), but if you write often and get a decent following, you can generate some nice supplemental income.

David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals and the creator of Ruby on Rails delivers a powerful lecture at Standford University’s Entrepreneurship Program.

He says that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. He argues that constraints–fiscal, temporal, or otherwise–drive innovation and effective problem-solving. The most important thing, Hansson believes, is to make a dent in the universe with your company.

He stresses the dangers of accepting venture capital money and why it’s more important to be profitable than be a big company.

Topics:
02:30 – Veer Away from Heavy Management Theory
02:52 – Planning Is Guessing
02:56 – Venture Capital Is a Time Bomb
01:53 – Don’t Play with Other People’s Money
03:09 – Playing It Small Doesn’t Mean Not Making Money
02:56 – Great Ideas Derive from Well-Rested Minds
01:57 – Constraints Are Your Friends
01:08 – Overnight Success Does Not Exist
01:56 – A Small Business Can Be a Highly Profitable Company
02:24 – Out-Teach Your Competition
01:19 – What I Did Learn at Business School

Visit Reason8.com now and test drive their Website ​Builder​ tool free

WordPress comes with many free themes already but new users might find it difficult to customize themes to their own needs. Reason8.com’s web app allows theme personalization with a drag and drop style interface which is very easy to use.

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Create your own design from ‘scratch’ or select one of ours to personalise

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Let’s face it : If you build a website that ends up sitting on page 10 of Google’s result,you’ll have wasted your money.

If you create a website with Reason8 we’ll help you get on page1 of Google, Bing and Yahoo with amazing technology developed over years of research.

We believe In good old fashion customer service.

Although our website creator is super easy, we understand that it is comforting to be able to pick up the phone and talk with a real person every now and then

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Note: The theme website inside this video has changed, but the principles for installing a theme remain the same.

How To Find And Install A WordPress Theme For Your Blog

What is a theme?

Your blog’s theme is a simple way of managing your sites layout, stylesheets, and typeface. Your theme will determine how you want your readers to view your blog posts and your website as a whole.

Thanks to the open source nature of wordpress there are thousands of free blog themes that are ready to go right out of the box. Each theme is also easy to modify to better fit your needs.

How To Find The Perfect Theme For Your Blog

1. Pay A professional / Hire A Web Designer - Visit a site like www.elance.com to find someone who will design your blog for you or you can find a local company to do it as well.

2. Use A Free WordPress Theme - Go to the official WordPress Themes Page or search the internet for “WordPress Themes” to find tons of themes websites on the web.

3. Design The Theme Yourself – After you spend some time looking at themes you will be able to learn the simple HTML, CSS, & PHP languages that will enable you to modify existing themes or even write one yourself from sctratch.

How To Download And Install A WordPress Theme

You can either install a theme directly from the wordpress themes tab in your admin area or you can install the theme through the back end by downloading the theme to you hard drive.

How to install a theme automatically?

1. Go to your wordpress admin area.

2. Click on the “Appearance” tab > “Themes”

3. At the top there should be a section for “Manage Themes” and “Install Themes”

4. Click “Install Themes”

5. You will be taken to an advanced search for themes. If you know the name of the theme you are looking for then you can simply search for it now.

If you do not know which theme you are looking for then you should browse through the available themes here until you find one you like.

6. Once you have chosen a theme, click on “Install“. If you choose to, you can make this your current theme back on the “Manage Themes” tab.

You may try out several themes before you find the perfect one for you.

How to manually install a wordpress theme?

1. Download the theme files from the website where the theme was showcased.

2. Unzip them to a folder on your hard drive.

3. Use an FTP program to upload the theme files into the following directory:

/public_html/wp-content/themes/”THEMENAME”/

You can upload as many theme’s as you like to this directory, but be sure to upload each theme to its own new folder.

4. Find a couple that you like then login to your wordpress admin area and click on the “Appearance Tab” > “Themes“. Now each of the uploaded themes should show up in the “Available Themes” area. Choose the one you like and after previewing it you can choose “activate” to make the theme your current theme.

Advanced WordPress Themes

To edit the theme click on the “Appearance Tab” > “Editor” or you can download the theme files to your hard drive and edit them in a text editor and then upload them using FTP.

Be warned that changing your websites theme can cause errors on the page. Always back up your theme files before modifying.

Download the free ftp program at http://filezilla-project.org/

How To Upload Files To Your Webhost Using an FTP Program?

1. What FTP is and why you need to use it?

“FTP” meaning File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a TCP/IP-based network, such as the Internet

In other words it’s a way to take files on your computer, and upload them to your host.

The process of uploading a file to your server using an FTP program is almost identical to moving a file on your computer from one folder to another folder.

2. What FTP software is the best?

A free FTP program called FileZilla is what we recommend using.

3. How to download and install the FTP software?

First visit www.filezilla-project.org

Download the latest version then install the program

4. How to set up a connection to your host using FTP?

First open up the FileZilla program. Then to enter the connection details you should take the following steps:

• Go to “file” > “site manager” > “new site”
• Enter the name of your website
• Next enter the details of your server, your login, and password details
• For host details, return to the email sent to you when you setup your hosting account, or login to the Cpanel, and find the section that says “Your Site’s IP Address“
• Copy the IP address and paste it into the “Host” field in the Site manager.
• Make sure the servertype is set to “FTP – File Transfer Protocol”
• Enter in your username and password

You are now ready to connect to your sever.

5. How to upload a file to your server using an FTP Program?

First find the file on your computer in the left window pane.

Then find the folder you want to upload the file to on the right side of the window.

Now right click on the file on your computer, then select “upload” or click and drag the file.

Congratulations you are now ready to upload files to your server using an FTP program.

How to install wordpress to your website using the 5 minute wordpress install process.

What tools you will need to install wordpress?

1. The latest downloaded version of the wordpress installation files at www.wordpress.org

2. An FTP program used to upload files from your computer onto your web hosting server.

3. A basic text editing program like wordpad or notepad

What are the exact steps needed for the 5 minutes wordpress install process?

1. Download and unzip the wordpress files onto your computer

Go to www.wordpress.org

Click “download wordpress”

Find file and “unzip” it to a new folder

2. Create a database on your server

Log in to the “cpanel” of your website

To access your cpanel either go to www.YourDomain.com/cpanel or go to www.cpanel.YourDomain.com

*You will need to enter your user name and password that is the same as your account with the web hosting company.

Now that you have successfully logged into the cpanel for the first time you are ready to create a database on your server that wordpress will use to store information.

Scroll down to the “Databases” tab

Click on the “MySQL Databases” button

Enter the name of your new database into the field and click “Create Database”. Ideally the name of your database should reflect the name of your website to avoid confusion later on if you choose to have several other websites.

3. Create a database user name on your server

After you have successfully created the database on your server you need to add a user to that database.

Return to the cpanel front page, and scroll back down to the “Databases” tab.

Instead this time click on the “MySQL Users” then click on the “Add New User” button.

Create a username and password then click on “Create User”

Click “go back”

Now that you have created a user, you still have to add this new user to your database.

Scroll down to the bottom of the “MySQL Users” page to where it says “Add User to Database”

Select your newly created user and database in the fields, then click “Add”. On the next page you will be asked which privileges to give this new user. For this user you want to choose “All Privileges” because you will be the one using this login.

4. Rename the “wp-config-sample.php” file to “wp-config.php”

Return to the folder where you unzipped the wordpress installation files in step 1.

Find the file named “wp-config-sample.php” and rename the file to “wp-config.php“.

5. Modify the details inside the wp-config.php file

Open the “wp-config.php” file using a text editor like wordpad.

Find the section that looks something like this

// ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere‘);

/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere‘);

/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere‘);

/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

/** The Database Collate type. Don’t change this if in doubt. */
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Replace the “putyourdbnamehere” with the name of your created database.

Replace “usernamehere” with the username you just created in the cpanel.

Replace “yourpasswordhere” with the password you created in the cpanel.

Save the changes to the document.

And get ready to upload the files onto your server.

(If you need help with this part you should stop here and continue after watching the next video)

6. Upload the wordpress files onto your server

Open up the FileZilla program and login to your server.

Open the folder called “public_html” on the right side window (server side).

On the left side (your computer) open up the folder where the wordpress installation files were unzipped.

Select the entire contents of the wordpress installation folder.

Right click, then select “upload”.

*The wordpress files are now being uploaded to your server

7. Run the wordpress installation script

Now that the wordpress installation files have been uploaded to your server all you have to do is return to your website using a web browser and run the script.

For newer versions of wordpress all you have to do is visit the homepage and wordpress will prompt you to install it.

Go to “www.YourDomain.com”

For older versions you may have to type “www.YourDomain.com/wp-admin/install.php”

To finish installing wordpress all you have to do is fill out the Blog Title and your email address and click “install wordpress”

Once the installation is complete you will receive a username and a randomly generated password.

(Don’t lose these because you will use them on the next screen.)

Click “login” and all you have to do is enter the username and password that was just given to you and then you have finished installing wordpress to your website.

Congratulation! You have now successfully purchased a domain name, set up web hosting, and installed your very first website.

Your website should now be up and running and visible to the world.

To access your WordPress admin area you need to type “www.YourDomain.com/wp-admin” and then login.

Get your web hosting at www.hostgator.com

What is a web host?

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called colocation. -wiki

You can think of a your web host like your own personal hard-drive that exists on the internet where you will store your website files.

Once you link your domain name to your web host, then people all over the world will be able to access your blog.

Why you need a web host?

1. Having a web host allows other people access to your website via the internet.

2. You could run everything from your own host right in your own home, but it is difficult to setup and even harder and more time consuming to making sure it is up and running 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.

3. It’s much more reliable to outsource the hosting of your website to a professional hosting company.

4. Over the long term it is more affordable to use a web hosting company and it will save you time, and many headaches.

How do you set up web hosting?

We use Host Gator to host all of our websites. They offer unlimited domains all on the same account. So for one price of ~$10 a month you may host several high end blogs and websites.

First go to go hostgator.com and choose “web hosting”.

Of the 3 packages offered you should choose the “baby” package (middle) just to get started. It’s very affordable and allows you to have unlimited domains, unlimited disk space, and unlimited bandwidth. A pretty great deal for only $7.95 / month

Once you are ready. You will choose the option “I will use my existing domain and update ‘My Nameservers’ only”

What is a Nameserver?

A name server is a program or computer server that implements the “name-service protocol”. The most prominent type of name servers in operation today are the name servers of the Domain Name System (DNS). The most important function of these DNS servers is the translation (resolution) of humanly memorable domain names and hostnames into the corresponding numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

Enter the domain name you have purchased earlier from step 2 and hit submit.

Continue to fill out the forms according to your preferences and hit calculate totals.

Next review your order.

When you’re ready hit continue, fill out your profile information and finish paying for the order.

Congratulations, you now have web hosting, but you still need to link your website domain to your web host.

How do you link your domain name to your web host?

1. Get the domain name server details from hostgator.com

The easiest way to get your new server details from hostgator.com will be to check your email right away. Host gator should send you an email with all the details you will need to setup your account right away.

Look for a section saying “Your name servers”

Typically it will look something like this:

ns967.hostgator.com
ns968.hostgator.com

Re-assign your nameservers to your web host.

Login to your godaddy.com account.

Click “My Account” at the top

Find the tab called “domain manager”

Once you are at the domain manager, you should select the domain you purchased before.

Find the section titled “Nameservers” and click “Set Namerservers”

This will bring up a pop-up window (make sure you allow pop-up’s from godaddy.com or else you may find yourself being unnecessarily confused.)

Select “I have specific nameservers for my domains.”

Delete the generic nameservers that have been set by godaddy.com and insert the ones we previously found given to us by hostgator.com

This re-directs your domain from the godaddy site where it has been sitting previously to your own web hosting providers

It’s important to remember that changing a domains nameservers, or any server side modifications to websites will update less than instantaneously. Sometime it may take up to a entire 5 minutes.(or 24-48 hours)

If you have trouble accessing the site right away then you may just have to wait a few minutes, get a drink, then come back and try again.

Now that you have successfully linked your domain name to your web hosting provider all that is left to to do is install wordpress, then you will be ready to start blogging.

Get Unlimited Web Hosting for only $7.95 / Mo at Host Gator

Next: How to install wordpress?

Estimated cost: $10 ~ $15

Register your domain name at – www.GoDaddy.com

What is a Domain Name?

A domain name is an address for your blog

It usually starts with “http://” which means ” hypertext transfer protocol“.

followed by www.YourDomainName.com

Why you need your own domain name?

1. A unique domain name gives people quick easy access to your website.

2. You own the rights to sell or transfer the domain name later if you choose to.

3. It’s shorter and much more professional looking than free options like those at

www.wordpress.YourDomainName.com

How to research possible domain names?

Use a keyword search tool

www.wordtracker.com – on this page you can enter a keyword and it will return a list of related keywords to help you choose in your domain name.

Research the competition.

Use Google to see what kind of competition you may be up against and to know what other people are doing. This will help you make a better informed decision before you decide which name is best.

Brainstorm all possible names in the niche and put them into a list.

How to choose the perfect domain name?

Now once you have a sizeable list of possible domains then you need to choose the best name.

1. Remember that the shorter a domain name is the more valuable it is.

2. Make sure its easy to remember.

3. Make sure its written as one phrase with no hyphens or random characters

4. Also if keywords for your niche are inside the domain name it will be easier to rank in the search engines later.

I.E. if your niche is “small dogs” a good domain name could be “SmallDogZone.com” instead of “SmaDoZone.com” or “theSDzone.com”

How to register your domain name?

The easiest and most popular domain registry website is www.GoDaddy.com

Signing up for an account is free, first create your account.

Next check the availability of the domain name.

Enter your chosen domain in the search field.

If its available then you are ready to purchase it. If not then it will list a series of possible alternatives.

Which is better .com vs .org. vs .net vs. info?

Its important to remember that if you are planning on making money on the website then a .com (commercial) should be used. .net is a good second choice. But others like .info or .me should only be used small or personal websites. For a club or organization you should use .org.

Also a .com will have a higher resale value than a website with the same name as a .info

Fill out the required details and continue the checkout process.

Hit confirm, and you now own your first domain name.

It should be noted that many domain registry will try to sell you various extras at the final checkout, most of the features are not necessary. You will learn how to do everything you need on your own in the next few parts of this series.

Next you will learn how to get hosting for your website.

20% off Hosting at GoDaddy.com – World’s largest Web host!