Domain Names

You want to pick out a good domain name for your site. It's good to pick something with good keywords that are descriptive of what you're offering.
Right now Homestead is offering a free domain name with their $4.99 per month hosting special and as you know it also has the Site Builder software that I have been demonstrating on my site.
It's always good to get your domain name with the same company you're hosting with.
I'll show you an example of why in a second. But you might want to have more than one domain name for the same site or a certain page on the site. You may also want to test market different domain names. You really should test market the products or services you plan to sell or promote by running a short click ad campaign anyway. There is a chapter on how to do this in Four Hour Workweek.
In any of these cases you might want to buy a domain at Go Daddy, before you commit to a permanent domain with your hosting service. They are very cheap there.
Go Daddy is also a hosting service, but you can also just buy domains that just point to your website or a certain page like this: http://bestroses.info. Please click on that to see what I mean.
You will see when you get there that you are on a page of Easy Gifts and Flowers and that is what you see displayed. I use this when I am promoting my comparison page.
You go to "domain forwarding" in your Go Daddy account in order to do the above, by the way and you simply put in the page you want it to forward to. After that if you want you can click on "masking" and enable masking and that will make the new domain show up rather than the real name in the bar.(Go to the help section on their site, it's explained well) See these examples http://beautifuldiscountflowers.com (this is how I promote my site locally). Also see http://easysitespro.com.
You'll see this is now what you see in the browser window. Go to the different pages of the site and you'll see the above name the same for each page. Now go to http://EasyGiftsandFlowers.com, go to the various pages and you'll see the difference, each page displays correctly and distinctly in the browser window. That is why you want to have a domain name with your hosting service, whatever other names you use for various purposes or test runs.

Making Money with Adsense

This is another way you can make money by having a website. You have to be smart about it though. You can't just put some Adsense on your page and expect to get rich or even make a dime before you get any traffic.
A couple of secrets are:

• Use keywords on your site that will pay you a lot per click.
  

• Use cheap less often used keywords to advertise the site.

Use a cheaper PPC advertiser such as BidVertiser.
You can get away with paying something like 20 cents a click yourself on BidVertiser, and they have $20 in free advertising, when you first start(you don't have to place a deposit to get started with them either). You can also use Yahoo, they have $25 in free advertising.
If you use high paying keywords for example "student loan consolidation"(people pay as much as $30 per click with Adwords for that keyword) on your website, you will get high paying Adsense ads on your web page.
Then you just use a cheaper way to get traffic to your site as mentioned above.

Hope that helps,
Claire

Recommended Information for Those Creating Websites

So your are going to create a website. It will be easy if you have taken my recommendations so far, seen in demos, links on page, earlier posts.
But we're going to be talking a little bit about getting site traffic. In later posts I'll be giving you ideas on free traffic to your website. In the beginning though while you are creating your website, it would be great to have some tips on optimizing your website as much as possible toward coming up in a search engine. Now I had already created some of my websites when I read this book but it was very easy to tweak a few things with my Site Builder.
The book is Building Your Business with Google For Dummies by Brad Hill.
It really helped me know how the Google spider worked (the system that detects and gets information on what is on the internet). Some people wonder why if they put their website address in the search box, why they don't find it right away. The spider does it's very thorough crawl where it can find your website once per month and there are certain things that can keep the spider from finding it as well, such as using Flash. Mine were found just fine. This is not the only way you can and the only way you want to rely on at first to get traffic but he tells you some things to know so you do the best you can.
Also information all about using Adwords PPC advertising and getting paid for your site using Adsense.
Also I can tell you, it is a good idea to concentrate on a particular niche (a specialized market). My nightclub rose seller site and blog are found in natural search engine results because of this and this is free effortless traffic.
Anyway there is a lot of information you spend a lot of time reading but I found particular ones helpful in getting started. See an earlier post on a couple others I recommend as these two will help you a lot.
There is also a lot of data right on Homestead's site, once you start the free trial on how to get traffic and how to optimize your website for traffic as well.
Just so you know, you can get a free newsletter where you get a 7 part lesson on how you can "Start Your Own Easy, Profitable Online Business" at http://EasySitesPro.com so you can get more in depth information that I haven't gone over in my blog.

How to Make a Lead Capture Form in Two Minutes

I don't know about you but I don't really have the time to go through long set up processes and tutorials and such or learn a new skill when I'm really wanting to get the show on the road.
I can do those things but do I really want to take the time or do I want to have the time to do more for my business.
That is why I love, love these websites. You know I belong to a lot of affiliate programs but I never talk about or promote the ones I don't like or I don't really know about. In fact most of the time I find some I really like and then I wonder if they have an affiliate program because I really want to tell people about these guys.
Anyway you can create a lead capture form with Homestead in literally 2 minutes. I do it right here in this video in that short a time. It's just a matter of point and click and moving some little boxes around and filling in a blank of where you want it to go. You can then set up an autoresponder in your email or just respond yourself and send out the mailings. It's not until you get high volume web traffic that you need to pay a monthly fee for an autoresponder(which is something that sends out your newsletters automatically to subscribers. You definitely don't want to pay a monthly fee before You even start advertising at all or you just built the site and Google hasn't even found it. I'll be telling you all about that later and what you need to do to be successful with that.
You know what else, you should write to people personally once in awhile as well.
Well here you go, it's in the video bar also but this comes out a bit larger. I think I'll redo this video some time but at least you'll get the idea.

Back to Business

Well, Valentine's Day is finally over. It was sure a hectic one. I'm a rose seller, you know the ones that embarrass you on dates and ask you if you want a rose. Of course you're only embarrassed if you're a cheapskate or you're broke. That's why I made this website though, to help you not be broke.
Well this year, not only did I have my regular selling but I had my new rose wholesale site, my retail site and affiliate site, all with flowers and calls for wholesale roses as well. Of all of them the one that was obviously the easiest to manage was the affiliate one.
Anyway to make a long story shorter, I was busy. I don't mind selling roses but I'm glad to be back to business on my business building websites. If you want to hear about my rose selling, see my other blog.
We did a lot of experimentation with free advertising on the web though which helped a lot with the holiday as far as getting traffic to my flower websites. I'll be definitely letting you in on that as that is something you'll need to be successful online: traffic.


Best,
Claire

Affiliate Site Demo

I made another demo that shows you how you can create an even easier business online. You just use affiliate links from Linkshare or Commission Junction or others which are all free to join and the great templates and Site Builder they have at Homestead to quickly create some webpages. Watch the demo for now. You can see it on the front page of BuildYourOwnBusiness.homestead.com. You can also see it right on the left in my video bar.
I mainly show you how I made my florist site but I also go over a little how you might make a credit card comparison site and how you credit card companies often give you $50 to $200 commissions just for getting someone to apply for one of their credit cards and getting approved.
I'll be posting more information and have more demos on this as well.
Okay well I decided to put to put the video on my post here as well:





Later,
Claire