Making Money Online Lesson 1

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I'm glad to know that after reading and completing the steps in Making Money Online Lesson 0, you are excited to continue on your make money online journey.

Here is a key step that will help you start your online business smoothly...

If you still don't have a Google account, then Sign Up For GMail.

You'll find this useful when you apply later on for an AdSense account, or when you start experimenting with Blogspot blogs over at Blogger.com, or even when you register your own domain name.

Do you already have a GMail account? Great! It's now time to get your own domain name.

What domain name should you get?

Preferably, this will be a dot com name. For some reason, people tend to forget if a domain name ends in .com.ph or .net or even .org, so to avoid losing visitors, invest in a dot com name.

Choose a name that is not an identifiable consumer product or topic. For example, some weird word (that doesn't exist in the English dictionary) such as 24PH dot com.

This will give you flexibility in the future, because as a starting blogger you probably will be unable to write more than 10 posts about a particular topic. To sustain your writing efforts, you will most likely write about many different, or even unrelated, topics.

By choosing some non-dictionary word, the ad robots will not have a difficult time guessing what your web page is about.

For example, if you have a web page located in http://24ph.com/dogs what do you think the search engine robots will find there?

Later on, you can even write about cats, trout fishing, American Idol, or whatever topic you're interested in (which hopefully is appealing to many people, and also attracts a lot of advertisers).

If your domain name contained a dictionary word or phrase (i.e., home furniture), the search engine bots will get confused when they find a folder such as cats or dogs, right?

So, for a multi-topic blog, choose a non-dictionary domain name.

If you can't think of something exciting, or if you're worried about infringing on some trademark (do a search in Google), then consider using your surname.

Next: Register Your Domain Name

Some people have recommended NameCheap.com, but I recommend 000Domains.com

It costs a little under $15 per year, and when you register your domain name I suggest you register it for two years. Hence, budget around $30 for this.

Why two years? Typically, people who are not serious about their web site will register as cheaply as possible, and usually for just one year. The search engines will be skeptical about all these instant, one-year domain names.

If they detect, for example, that a domain name is good for 10 years, what does that say about the domain owner's commitment? Compare that with a domain name that's good for only one year.

Bottomline: When you register your domain name, register it for at least two years.

When you get a domain name via 000Domains, you will need to create an account. That's where you Gmail email address will come in handy.

I'll post a video tutorial on how to register at 000Domains if you're interested. Please let me know. Thanks!

And that's it for this make money online lesson.

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Manuel Viloria is your friendly multimedia internet publishing coach who helps you gain more traffic for your web sites. Whether it's through blogging, podcasting, article marketing, videoblogging, email listbuilding, or even through Web 2.0 or social network marketing, you can increase your website visitors today. For more information, please visit Make Money Online | ManuelViloria.com.

First Posted: February 25, 2008 | Filed in: Make Money Online