Chapter 1: Setting up your Website
Section 1: Get Your Domain Name (URL or Website name)
Actually getting your domain name will be very simple to do, but choosing your name (and finding one that hasn’t already been taken!) may be a little frustrating. Here are the top general rules of thumb that you need to know:
1. Use your main keyword in the title, if possible. I will talk more about that below.
2. Do NOT use the name of an opportunity that you might be promoting now in the name. Not only is that almost certainly not legal, it would be a poor choice for a number of reasons, also discussed below.
3. Keep it as short as you can. Do NOT go over 35 characters in length, including the 4 characters that go with the ".com" portion. (If you go over that limit, you will not be able to use your website in paid ads in Google’s search results, known as Google Adwords, which we definitely will want to be able to do. Adwords will be discussed at length in Chapter 2.
4. Although .net and .org URLs are starting to become more popular, I would recommend getting a ".com" instead. This is still by far the most popular website suffix, and some search engines actually rank ".com" sites higher than other versions, so you may even end up with more website visitors in the long run.
I will discuss keyword research in much more detail in chapter 2. In fact, that is the absolute most important element to study in order to begin generating traffic to your site. For right now, you just need to understand that ultimately, we will be helping to direct people who are searching for certain keywords to our website. By carefully tracking results, we will begin to uncover some tremendously profitable information, like which keyword phrase searches result in visitors that buy from us, and which keyword searches result simply in tire-kickers.
As a starting point though, you likely already have a few general phrases in your mind of likely searches related to "MLM" or "Network Marketing" or "Work from Home" that you will want to be high up in search results for. Enter some of those phrases into the site at www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com. That is a great free tool that returns the estimated number of times that searchers across the globe search for that particular phrase per day. More importantly, it shows the number of times that related searches are done as well. You can click on those results and keep drilling down for more specific search phrases.
If some phrases pop out to you, you’ll want to find various combinations of those as potential names of your site. To do that, go to www.godaddy.com, and enter your potential name in the search box in the top (or middle) of the page. Keep going until you find one that is still available. NOTE: The video on this page shows me doing each of those two steps. Easy to do, but finding the right name may take a little bit of time.
If have an "angle" in mind for your website, try to include some element of that in your name too. With me as an example, I knew I wanted to focus on providing precise step-by-step instructions and tutorials. In addition, helping people to add a strong online component to their business was also paramount in my mind. That lead to the idea of incorporating the words "online" and "blueprint" into the name. "Network Marketing" is searched just about as often as "MLM", but it is much longer. Since onlinemlmblueprint.com was already taken, www.TheOnlineMLMBlueprint.com became the name of my site. Perhaps a little longer than I would have preferred, but it fit in well with my overall concept.
Once you are happy with your name, you are ready to make the purchase and start setting up your account. If you use godaddy, which is the service I recommend, you’ll only pay a couple dollars for the name and about $4/month for the hosting. You have to pre-pay that for a year at least, so for just $52 or $53 you’ll have your website name and hosting established for your first year. (Hosting just means that they will store your web pages and files, and display those to your visitors when they click onto your site.)
On the next page, I’ll walk you through a quick video that shows me buying a webpage and setting up the hosting. This will just take 10 minutes or so, and I’ve generally found that usually within just one hour you can actually have a webpage loaded up that displays when you go to your website name through a browser, though they state that it can sometimes take as long as 1 to 2 days for that.
Set up your hosting now….
