Relayblogger

by Cliff Posey

Finding an affordable web site hosting plan is a must for new businesses or established businesses that are on a budget. Of course, as with most things, this is much easier said than done. There are tons of hosting companies out there that claim to offer free or cheap web site hosting, but many of them have hidden fees or low quality services. A supposedly affordable web site hosting plan can quickly turn into a costly nightmare if you aren’t careful.

This is why it is essential that you do your homework and research a number of hosting companies before making any final decisions.

Comparing Costs:

If you are looking for cheap web site hosting, then you will obviously need to compare the costs that are charged by different hosting companies. Specific costs to look at when searching for an affordable web site hosting plan include site set up fees, monthly or annual maintenance fees, and any other fees that may be associated with the plan. It should be noted that some hosting companies offer free set-up. If you can find a web host who is offering this in addition to low monthly hosting fees, you will of course be much better with this host versus another who makes you pay for the same service. Features Things to compare in addition to the cost when looking for cheap web site hosting services include the amount of storage space received with the plan, the programming languages supported by the web host, and the amount of customer support offered. Some hosting companies will offer all of these features in their basic or most affordable web site hosting plan, and others will not. You will also want to take a look at the other services offered by the web hosting companies that you are considering. Some cheap web site hosting companies provide additional services such as domain name registration and web building tools. If you haven’t purchased a domain name yet or if you need help building your website, you may want to check to see if these services can be combined with the company’s most affordable web hosting plan. This could save you an enormous amount of money.

Other Considerations:

If you have found a cheap web site hosting plan that has all of the features you need to build your web site, there are still a few other things that will need to be taken into consideration before you sign on the dotted line–the most important being reliability. Some hosting companies who offer an affordable web hosting plan have one major downfall: they aren’t always reliable. Because you need the web site to work when people try to access it, reliability is going to be a must. This is why you should always ask hosting companies about downtime before signing up for cheap web site hosting. Last, but not least, you need to make sure that you will have all of the support you need if you choose the most affordable web hosting plan that is being offered to you. Specific things to ask about include technical support response time and customer service representative availability

About the author: Cliff Posey, owner of CRP Marketing, owns and operates http://webbusinesstoolsonline.com. Cliff Posey has also operated several other successful web businesses including Love Song Cards and Radio Career Consultants. The content in this article was developed from his experience in these businesses and his continual research into further business improvements.

by: Daniel Moro

Choosing a good domain name is one of most important steps in setting up your online business, but it’s getting harder and harder to find good names that are still available. You could use a domain name with hyphens, but is that really a good idea?

Let’s quickly review what makes a good domain name. A domain name needs to be relevant, easy to remember, keyword optimized, and free from trademark conflicts. It should also be shorter. Although seven characters or less is ideal, you may have to settle for a domain name that’s a little longer.

So you’ve just set up your new barbecue grills business and now you discover that barbecuegrills.com is already taken. Should you consider hyphenating the domain name to barbecue-grills.com or should you go back to the drawing board?

The first choice should always be to take the name without a hyphen. Having established that, there are some exceptions. Let’s look at hyphenated domain names and when they are might be good to use.

Domains with hyphens can sometimes be a good idea if you really want certain words in your domain name but all the domains without hyphens are already taken.

Another reason to use a hyphen is when the words you plan to use are harder to read without the hyphen. The domain hotellamps.com is harder to read than hotel-lamps.com. That is not necessarily a great domain name but it does serve to illustrate the point that some domains are easier to read with a hyphen.

You might also consider using hyphens for search engine optimization. Some people suggest that using hyphens helps the search engines to distinguish your keywords better. This may be a good option for webmasters whose primary goal is to optimize their sites for traffic from natural search engine rankings. The only catch here is that this could change over time since search engines are constantly adjusting their search algorithms.

Incidentally, if you decide not to use hyphens in your domain name, watch out for any unintended double meanings that might be embarrassing. To illustrate this point a couple of fairly suspicious domain names are therapistfinder.com and molestationnursery.com. In case you are wondering the latter was reportedly the domain for the Mole Station Native Nursery based in New South Wales, Australia, although it seems, fortunately, to have moved.

Whatever reason you have for using a hyphen in your domain name, it would be good to remember one thing. Some people will forget the hyphen when they type your domain name. So whenever you invest in promoting your site, some lucky webmaster who owns the un-hyphenated version of your domain is going to get some free traffic, courtesy of your hard work.

As you can see, there are some situations when using a hyphen in your domain name may be a good decision.

About The Author

Daniel Moro has been successfully building online businesses for ten years. Download your free report on ‘10 Remarkably Effective Traffic Building Techniques’ at http://www.DanielMoro.com/domains.htm

Get a domain name.

I’ve previously written about getting a domain name. The main two recommended patterns for domain names seems to be; get a name that describes your site, or a pronounceable word that means nothing at all.

Here is a Google search for domain name registrars.

Get a web host.

Choosing the right web host is almost like a lottery these days. There are tons of hosts to choose from and it is hard to find out the terms for most of the ones I’ve looked at. If you decide to let your web host manage your domain name registration make sure it is you who actually own the domain.

Here is a Google search for web hosts.

Update DNS servers.

Now that you have a domain name and a web host it is time to tell the world where your site is. DNS servers are a bit like the yellow pages for the web. When a user enters an address in the browser it uses DNS to look up a numeric address that the computer can understand. It can take up to 48 hours for the DNS change to propagate all over the Internet so when you have recently updated your DNS entries you might end up at different sites depending on where you are when you look for a domain. You manage DNS settings from your domain name registrar account.

Write for 48 hours.

The two days it takes for DNS to propagate are perfect to write your initial content. If you are going to blog about a specific subject I would recommend that you write ten posts that you can publish right a way. That way your index page will be fully populated since most blogs show ten posts up front. It is also a good practice to write a couple of extra posts that can be published when you don’t have the time or inspiration write.

Time to get the blog up and running

By using the Google tools for webmasters you can submit your site to the Google indexer so it will find it a little bit faster. You can also tell Google that content on http://yourdomain.com is the same as content on http://www.yourdomain.com, otherwise Google will classify all your content as duplicates and that is a bad thing according to all SEO experts online.

I use Wordpress as my blog tool so further on all my recommendations will be based on that. It is included in Fantastico, a web site configuration tool that exists on most LAMP based web hosts.

Go to your Fantastico control panel and install Wordpress. If you do this before the DNS information has propagated the site will look weird and some things will not work at all.

Get a good looking theme. There are lots of free themes at Wordpress. There is some debate of how important the look and fell of a site is for a steady user base. I think the most important thing is that you should feel comfortable with it. Time spent on content is usually better than time spent on your theme.

Since the spamming business seems to grow faster than anything else; activate the Aksimet plugin. You have to get a free API key from Wordpress.

Feed readers can check your site quite often so to save some bandwidth and get some nice statistics go to Feedburner and create an account. Feedburner has an excellent article on how to get the Feedburner plugin to work.

If you intend to make it on the social networks then theShare-this plugin will enable your readers, or your self, to easily submit your posts to a variety of them. I’m not sure if it is a good idea in the long run, but you will get some readers by self submitting articles to Digg.

If your content makes sense even after a couple of months it can be a good idea to configure your permalink structure. I use ‘/index.php/%category%/%postname%/’ on all my blogs. The default configuration just adds the post id number to the URL and if you use a predefined one with dates in it your posts might look old in a while.

Lets earn some money

, but there are other alternatives that looks and works almost the same. BidVertiser is one of them. The Adsense Delux plug-in makes it simpler to incorporate ads, not only adsense, into your posts.

You should set up a merchant account at PayPal since many offers to make money online offers payment to PayPal. That way you don’t have to pay for checks or wire transfer of money to your domestic bank.

There are several ways other than plain advertising to make money from your blog. Both Bloggerwave and PayPerPost offer payment for reviews. You can also sign up as a publisher for an affiliate network. Affiliate networks gathers advertisers and lets web site owners publish links and/or banner ads to the advertisers. The site owner can get paid depending on the readers actions, such as clicking a link, signing up for a newsletter or buying something from the advertisers store.

Bring on the readers

If you are curious about how many readers you have, what they read and where they are from, you can fulfill your curiosity with Google Analytics It is a free web site statistics package that keep track of more stuff than I could imagine before I saw it. Don’t fall in the trap and check your Google Adsense and Analytics statistics every 30 minutes. Make it a habit to check them once a day and leave it at that. You should put all your effort in producing high quality content.

Good luck!

This post has been submitted to the following blog carnivals:

• Your Potential. Our Passion. Blogging.
• Bootstrapper
• successpart2.com
• Blog Carnival Make Money Blogging 101

What is a domain name?
Before you get one you have to know what it is. A domain name is a readable address to a web site. This sites domain name is relayblogger.com, without the domain name you would have to remember a lot of numbers instead.

When you buy a domain name you get the right to use it as long as you pay for it. Usually the payments are done yearly, but if your internet presence is stable it might be useful to pay for longer periods.

How to pick a good domain name?
A good domain name is one that is the same or close to your company, or site, name. Since a lot of names has been registered already it might be hard to find one that matches your intent. One idea in those cases is to make up a word, just like Goggle and Zune.

The small suffix after the last dot is called top level domain. Most, if not all, counties have their own TLD’s. Sweden has .se and Japan has .jp. If your site is primarily in English you should try to get a .com address. It is the commercial TLD that is not connected to a single country.

How to register a domain?
To register a domain name you should contact a registrar. Lots of web hosting companies will help you with the registration, but make sure you own the name. there are lots of web hosting companies that will charge you a lot to get the name if you want to change host. (I will explain what a web host is in a later post.)

Here is a saved Google query for domain name registrars.