Smart Web Hosting on Go Daddy

You will need somewhere to host your website. Beware of web designers who will set up your website and then demand that you host your website with them for a large monthly fee. If you are a small business person, the costs can prove to be prohibitive. You are better off learning some html code, controlling the host site and outsourcing the elements that you can’t do yourself.

My favorite place to host my websites is Go Daddy. I like them for two reasons. The hosting is cheap and the customer service is outstanding. For most businesses, the $6.99 per month plan is adequate. It gives you 150 gigabytes of space which is plenty for most businesses. Their unlimited hosting plan costs $14.99 but is more than most businesses need. You set up one website as your primary site and create folders underneath the primary site for your other web addresses. Their web technicians will walk you through the process over the phone. They are knowledgeable and will gladly take the time you need to set up the hosting.

Go Daddy has its own File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server which is adequate for most businesses. If you have lots of files to upload, Go Daddy will allow you to use your own FTP server. I moved two large websites over to Go Daddy recently and found that their FTP server worked just fine. If you don’t know what an FTP server is, let me explain that it is the way that you can take the files that make up your website, both html files and image files, and upload them from your computer onto the internet.

To use Go Daddy’s FTP server, you log into your account. Go to Hosting on the list on the left hand column. When your primary account comes up, click on manage account. The Hosting Control Center will come up. On the pull down menu under Content, click on FTP Client. The FTP server will come up. Find the folder from your computer on the left, click on the file you want to transfer. Make sure that the proper folder is highlighted on the right. Click on the double arrow in the middle to move the file into the Go Daddy hosting site on the right.

If you want to see that your website uploaded properly, go to Home in the Hosting Control Center and Click on View. You are able to see if you loaded all of the elements of your site propertly.

If you started a new website, it should go live right away. If you moved your website from another server, contact the technicians at Go Daddy to help you make your website live on the Go Daddy hosting site.

If you have a blog or your business is an affiliate site and you want to use your own domain name to get to the site, you can mask and forward your domain name to the site. Visitors to your domain name will go to the other site but will see your domain name as the address for the site. To mask and forward in Go Daddy, go to Domain Manager from the list on the left side. Find the domain name you want to mask and forward. Put a check by it. Click on it. On the top, click on Forward. It will prompt you to the IP address that you want to forward the domain name to. Type it in. Press Advanced Options. Click on Forward with Masking and click Okay.

Congratulations. If you have followed these instructions, you now have a website up on the internet.

Using HTML Code to Build Your Website

Knowing a little about html code can be helpful when building your website even if you hire an expert to design your site. If you know some html code, you can make minor changes in the site instead of having to go back to the designer every time you want to make a change.

HTML stands for hypertext markup language and it is the language used to build a basic website. Knowledgeable web designers will use a more elaborate script that entails java script and cascading style sheets (CSS). If you are just starting to learn about building a website, start by learning html code.

A basic feature of html code is that for every tag that you add to start a command, you need an equal tag to stop. The tag to stop always has a slash before the command.

Here are some examples. Every page starts with the word body surrounded by these brackets < > and ends with /body surrounded by the same brackets. Remember to put the brackets around all tags.  If I do it in this blog, the words will just disappear.
center before and /center afterward centers your text on the page.

font face="Times New Roman" size="4"Example/font is the code for font face and size. You can insert your preference for font face. Keep the font face generic like Times New Roman, Verdana, Courier, or Arial because not everyone who visits your site will have all of the exotic fonts and it will just show up as one of the generic fonts anyway.
b /b is bold.
u /u is underline.
i /i is italics.
Remember to add brackets <> around these tags.
You need to tell the code that you want to go to the next line by typing br.
To make a new paragraph, type p.
To add an image, use this code, img src="Your image" width="number of pixels" height="number of pixels" border="0" alt="" /.
To add a link to another website, use this code.
a href="http://www.yoursite.com"Write text here  /a

To have control of the size of your webpage, you need to tell it how many pixels or inches wide you want it. Otherwise, the text will fill the monitor of each visitor and it will be difficult to read. An easy way to do this is by using a table. Here is some code for a simple table with two columns and two rows. The table is 800 pixels wide. Each cell of the table is between td and /td. tr /tr indicates a row. You can add text, images or even forms in the cell.

table width="800" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2" border="2"
tr
td /td
td /td
/tr
tr
td /td
td /td
/tr
/table
(Remember to bracket each tag < >.)

If you would like to practice using html code, you may start with a free download of the Coffee Cup or First Page html editor. If you want to purchase a good html editor, Dreamweaver is popular. However, it costs $400. I have been able to produce perfectly fine web pages using Coffee Cup.

You don’t need to remember all of the tags because the html editors allow you to push buttons to insert tags. Keep in mind that you will need to highlight the item you want to tag using your mouse before adding the tag so that it will be included in the tag.

These simple tags will get you started. You can get more in depth tutorials from the html editors themselves.

Website Design for Profits

When building a website to make money as opposed to a personal one that showcases your talents or interests, it is important to make it easy for your visitors to give you their money. For that reason, you want to keep your site simple so that the visitor will understand how to purchase what you are selling.

First off, make the website easy to load. If you put a lot of Flash on the site that takes minutes to load, chances are you will lose visitors to another site that opens more quickly because people are impatient and want to see results.

Keep your visitor’s eyes focused on what you are selling. Do not distract them with flashing signs and animated gifs or links that will take them away from your webpage.

If you are selling just one item, you can use a service like Clickbank or 2Checkout to process your orders. If you have several items for sale such as an online store, you will need a shopping cart program and a merchant account.

Design your website so that a customer can purchase your items easily by clicking a button which takes them to a secure webpage where they can enter their credit card or bank information. It is helpful to have a phone number or live chat on your page so that customers can talk to someone to get help if they have questions or problems in processing their order. This idea alone will set you apart from most internet companies.

To increase profits, add an additional item or two on your order page to upsell your customer. You will find that a certain percentage of your customers will purchase the related item and that will increase your profits.

Another way you can make money with your website is to have your customers opt in to get free newsletter, ebook or other free information by having a form on your website requesting the name and email address of your visitors. You can use the free information opt in to grow your customer list and sell to them over and over again. You can use a third party service like AWeber or Get Response to make the form and store the information of your customers.

If you are just starting out, setting up a website yourself can be daunting and chances are you don’t have a lot of money to hire a web designer. Luckily, there are many web designers around the world who will be happy to design your site for you for a reasonable fee. Go to websites like freelancer.com or guru.com to find designers that will either work for a fixed bid or a small hourly rate.

Do not let your lack of internet knowledge keep you from having a profitable website. The money that you spend on a knowledgeable web designer will come back to you quickly as your customers discover how easily they can purchase from your website.

How to Pick a Great Domain Name

When choosing a domain name, there are two important factors to consider. The first factor is visibility. The second factor is branding. The key to success on the internet is being found. You may have the best website ever built, but if no one finds it, you will not make money online. How do you get visibility? First consider what keywords people are searching for when looking for your product or service? Think like your customer. If you are in the plumbing business, what keywords might they search? How about unclog drain or fix leaky pipe. Google moves websites to the front of the search page based on relevance. If your website is unclogdrain.com or fixleakypipe.com, you would expect to have more visibility than if your website was smithplumbing.com.

If you have been in business for a long time as Smith Plumbing and people will search for you under that name, it is okay to have smithplumbing.com, but you need to advertise to have visibility. I will talk a little more about that later.

Once you have determined the keywords that best describe your business, you need to see if the domain name is already taken. I prefer to use the domain company called Go Daddy because they have great deals on purchasing domain names and offer cheap web hosting as well. Click on the Go Daddy banner on the right to go to Go Daddy. Use the Go Daddy Domain Search Tool to see if someone already has a domain name with your keyword. I checked Go Daddy for unclogdrain.com. It was taken. Fixleakypipe.com was also taken. However, fixleakypipes.com was available. I checked Google to see how many people searched "fix leaky pipe" and found 1,180,000 searches. I tried "fix leaky pipes" and found 1,580,000 searches. If you specialize in fixing leaky pipes, you have a lot of customers searching for you and you can purchase this domain name for only $10.69 plus tax for one year.

If you have established yourself as Smith Plumbing and are known in your community, it makes sense to get smithplumbing.com. You must continue to advertise as you have always done so the local community can find you.

There is something else you can do. If you specialize in fixing leaky pipes, you may purchase fixleakypipes.com and forward and mask the domain name to your smithplumbing.com website. This way you can take advantage of the keywords that are being searched for your business and you can continue branding your business with the Smith Plumbing brand. (I will cover forwarding and masking in a separate post.)

This brings me to the second important factor in choosing a domain name, branding. Branding is more expensive and takes more effort on your part, but if you want people to associate Smith Plumbing with fixing leaky pipes, you can brand yourself with repeated advertising. Then when someone gets a leaky pipe, they will think of Smith Plumbing.

The example I gave is for a local brick and mortar business. The same principles apply for a strictly online business. I recommend the .com domain name. This is the first domain name that is taken with the keyword you select. Look for a domain name that you can promote all by yourself. If someone has the .com name and you buy the .net name, it can lead to confusion. If you are concerned with competition from someone else with the same keywords, purchase the .net and the .org domain names as well.

To prove to you how powerful this concept is, I started a website for Italian folk music ten years ago. The website is www.italianfolkmusic.com. I have hardly done anything to the site in the last 10 years. It still ranks as one of the top web searches for "Italian folk music".

I have lots to share on my new blog

This is my first posting on my new blog.  As an online business and marketing coach, I have a lot to share with anyone who would like to earn a living using the internet.  If you are just getting started, it can seem intimidating.  You may not know where to start.  You are probably getting conflicting messages about what kind of marketing to use, whether to pay for leads or try free advertising.  You may want to try pay per click but don't want to lose your shirt in the process.  Some of you may be so green that you don't even know adsense from incense or MySpace from outer space.  That is okay.  This blog will be a nuts and bolts guide for what you need to operate a business online.  In fact, I apologize to you internet gurus who may have landed on this site, because I will be speaking mainly to those business people who either need help getting started or who have gotten stuck somewhere along the way and need to get to the next step. I will talk about different tools that you will need to operate a successful online business.  I will also offer places to go that will inspire you to prosperity thinking.  You will need both tools and attitude to be successful.  I look forward to our journey together.