Earning Online Cheap | Your Own Domain

By admin, on March 24th, 2010

In this article, we will discuss how to begin your internet business with your own domain name. This does require some investment on your part, so if you do not have money to invest, you may want to start your venture with our earning online for free article. I would also like to mention that if you have not read our article on keyword research, you should do so before reading this.

Earning online with your own Internet business can happen quite a bit quicker if you have a little bit of money to invest. The reason for that is that you have a lot better control over your site if you host it yourself. The SEO is a lot easier, you tend to get authority faster, and you have a ton of options that are just not available from a blogger blog.

Assuming that you’ve already done your keyword research, the next thing that you should do is find a good, profitable, green keyword that has a lot of cousin keywords that will be easier to rank for your main keyword. Let’s say for instance that you found that “auto racing” was a green keyword, with the potential of about $250 a month. There are also quite a few green keywords, such as “NASCAR auto racing”, “Jeff Gordon championships”, “Indianapolis 500 stats”, etc. but they all have the potential of between $20-$100. This will be a great keyword to use for your first blog.

Before you go any further, you are going to have to purchase domain name. I personally use GoDaddy.com for my domains and my hosting. Their setup is fairly simple and easy to install WordPress on their hosting accounts. Their domain name registration is pretty inexpensive, and you can have hosting accounts with unlimited domains for around seven or eight dollars a month. If you do not already have an account with GoDaddy.com, you can get one HERE. <– click

Choose your domain name

The domain name that you choose is going to be very important for SEO purposes. You want the exact keyword phrase to be in your domain name. Example: if your site is about auto racing, the perfect keyword for that would be autoracing.com. Obviously, you are probably not going to get autoracing.com, so you will need to be creative. Make sure that your creativity comes in before your keyword, or after your keyword. NEVER break up your keywords. “Autoracingguide.com” or “4auroracingnews.com” are both fine examples of a properly SEOed domain name. “Auto4racing” is not, that is unless your keyword phrase is auto 4 racing. If you find a domain name that you absolutely love, but cannot find it in a .com extension, you can try a .net. I would always, however, tried to get a .com if you can. For years, people have been saying that you cannot get good web placement without a .com. My personal opinion is that that may have been true years ago, but I’m not so sure nowadays. I have used net, inflow, org, etc., and have not noticed any difference. Still, I would try to get a .com if you can, just in case.

Set up your hosting account

Assuming you’re going to use GoDaddy.com for both your domain name registration and your website hosting, the next thing you’ll want to do is sign up for hosting account. When purchasing your hosting, take a look at the plans and make sure that you’re getting the plan that is going to work for you. Personally, I get the deluxe plan. It allows me to host an unlimited amount of domains for about seven dollars. Bandwidth has never been an issue with this plan for me, but if it does, upgrading to the unlimited plan is very easy.

Once you have a hosting account set up, go to the domain manager options, and check your DNS settings. On GoDaddy, it’s as simple as clicking on the manage DNS link and choosing “I have a web hosting account with this domain”. Once you apply those settings, it will automatically point the domain to your new hosting account.

Set up WordPress

Once your hosting account is set up and ready to go, simply go to your hosting control center, click “my applications”, and search the list of applications for WordPress. Click “install” and follow the directions to set WordPress up on your blog. It is usually best to set it up on the root of your domain. Your site name should be your exact keyword, if possible. If you need to add something to it, add after the keyword like “Auto Racing Reviews” or something similar.

Once WordPress is set up, you will want to login to the admin area and set it up properly. Go to the Settings tab and then General. Make sure your blog title is your main keyword, and your tagline is catchy and contains your keyword. Next, go to Writing. In the Update Services box, paste the following:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

Next click the Writing link. Go to the box that says “Blog pages show at most” and change the value to 3. The next step is optional, but I prefer it this way. Go to the Discussion page, go to “before comment appears”, and check the “An administrator must always approve the comment” box. I always moderate my comments to help keep the spam count down.

Next go to the privacy settings page. Make sure the option is checked to make your blog visible to everybody. This will make sure that the search engines will be able to find your site. Finally, go to the link titled permalinks. Under “common settings” go to “custom structure” and type “ /%postname%/” into the box (without the quotes). That will make sure that your URLs are search engine friendly.

Install your plug-ins

For right now, we are start off with the basic plug-ins that you must have for any WordPress installation. Take the time to install the these plug-ins before you go any further.

All in one SEO
Easy Privacy Policy
Google XML Sitemap
Akismet anti-spam

You may decide that you would like to add more plug-ins later as your internet business grows, but for now, these will do. Most of these plug-ins are pretty self-explanatory. The only one that might need some clarification as to how to set up is All in one SEO, but I believe that the default settings in the upgraded versions of the plug-in are fine.

Add content

Now that you’re basically set up and ready to go, it is time to add your first bit of content. This is your first post, and it’s basically just kind of an introductory, so keep it brief: 200 words or so should suffice. Make sure that you get your main keyword in there at least twice, but no more than three times. The ideal placement is once in the first or second sentence and again toward the end of the article.

The next thing that you want to do is create some tags. Go ahead and use your main keyword as one of the tags, and look around in your article for other words or phrases that look like terms that people might search for. On this first post, since it is kind of short, I would keep the tags to about three.

Finally, you’ll want to assign it to a category. For my first category, I usually make it something simple. General or Welcome should be okay. For the most part, you are going to want your categories to be relevant to your content, but since this is going to be the only article in this category, something very general will be fine.

Pick a theme

At some point, you’re going to want to pick a theme for your site. There are an almost endless variety of themes out there that you can choose from. It is best to start first with a simple theme that is both SEO and widgetized. You can find a few good themes here:

http://courtneytuttle.com/seo-wordpress-themes/

I have used a couple of themes from the site, as well as the Heat Map theme (which is what I’m using here) and the Freedom Green and widgetized:

http://courtneytuttle.com/seo-wordpress-themes/freedom-green-widgetized/

These are all very good themes, and any of them should work for you.

I did not cover site monetization in this little how to, so I will do that in a separate article. I will also cover what to do with your cousin keywords a little later. For now, set up your site like I described above, get your first post up, and spend some time learning the WordPress admin backend. Check out the widgets and see what they do, etc.

If you have any questions about this stage of setting up your internet business, the comments are open, and I will answer your questions as quickly as I can.