LIST OF DOMAIN NAME REGISTRARS

 

There are numerous domain name registrars. Listed below are just a few, along with my comments, if I know anything about them. Note that the domain name industry is highly competitive, with prices wildly fluctuating throughout the year, every year, so it's impossible to really mention accurate prices below. Please check their sites for the latest rates. (Note: all prices are in US dollars.)

·         World's Largest Registrar - GoDaddy.com — This extremely popular registrar (possibly the biggest today) offers .com domain names for $9.99 (plus 20 cents) per year ($6.99 plus 20 cents if you transfer from another registrar). They have a web interface to manage your domains, free web redirection (where people who visit your domain will get transferred to another web address of your choice), free starter web page, free parked page or free "for sale" page, and an optional private domain registration where your domain is registered in the name of a proxy company. They offer .com, .us, .biz, .info, .net, .org, .ws, .name, .tv, .co.uk, .me.uk and .org.uk. Note that (as with all registrars) the exact price varies depending on which domain you are registering (for example some domain extensions are more expensive than others). Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted.

·         Dotster.com — This fairly popular registrar provides fairly cheap domain prices ($15.75 plus 20 cents per domain), a convenient web interface to manage your domains, an optional privacy facility where your domain name is registered in the name of a proxy company, etc. They offer .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us, .ca, .tv, .name, .cc, .de, .sr, .md, .co.uk, .us.com domains, etc. If you're transferring a domain here from other registrars, the price is even cheaper ($6.99 plus 20 cents). Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted here.

·         Register.com — This domain name registrar has been in business for a very long time: they were one of the biggest around when I started buying my first domains. They are currently running an offer (only via the above link) where they charge $9.99 for the first year for a domain name with a free business email account. Domains qualifying for this offer include .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us and .info. Country-specific domains have different prices. (Note: you'll need to use the above link to get the $9.99 special offer. If you access their site in some other way, you may end up with their regular price of around $37, depending on the number of years you register.)

TRAFFIC TACTIC #1: PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be both a long -term and a short-term strategy. This is because you can control your campaign at will. It all depends on your budget. If you are prfiting from your campaign, you can run the ads for as long as your budget will allow, then pause your campaign at any time (and, of course, you can turn it back on, too, when you are ready).
Pay-per-click advertising is often referred to as performance-based advertising. In other words, you pay for results and not for exposure. To put this in context, think of tradicional newspaper classifield ads where you are usually charged per word to run your ad. Similarly, you may have come across some web sites that will let you run a banner advertisement for a specified amout of time when you pay upfront. The problem with that form of advertising is that you have no guarentee of results. You could spend hundreds on pay-upfront advertisements and end up going broke if your ad performs poorly no one responds, no one clicks on your link, etc.
The PPC model of advertising, however, gives advertising like you the advantage by letting you control costs. Instead of being charged for publication or ad exposure, your ads are run for free. You do not actually pay anything until someone clicks on the link to your web site - hence the "pay-per-click".
PPC ads are delivered by pay-per-click search engines like the folling:

• Google - The google adwords program - Google Adwords is the current leader in the pay-per-click industry. It has the highest volume and traffic quality. However, it is also the most competitive and the most expensive.
• The Yahoo! Search Marketing Program - This program includes all of the engines formerly participating in the overture program. There is high volume and traffic quality, but careful research is still required to find the cheapest click.
• Miva - An Excellent program that is currently underutilized. Your competition will be lower.
• MSN - This program is microsoft's attempt to muscle away some market share from google and yahoo!. Still relatively new, so there are lots of opportunities for cheap traffic.

These are the four major players. However, there are also a handful of smaller PPC engines (with slightly lower volume) that offer high-quality traffic and super cheap clicks:

• Enhance (www.enhance.com)
• GoClick (www.goclick.com)
• 7search (www.7search.com)

You should use a mix of PPC engines in your traffic campaign, especially if you want to get the most traffic possible for your budget. Do not rely only on one PPC engine. Also, make sure you use both the large and small networks. The best thing to do if you are new to all this is choose just one of the major players, and one of the smaller players. See what kind of results you get, and then decide if you want to run your campaign on additional engines or drop one from your campaign to save money.

HOW WEB SEARCH ENGINES WORK

A web search engine like Google has three pieces. The first is an automated program that roams the Web, dowloading everything it finds. Thisprogram (often known by more picturesque names like spider, robot, bot, or crawler) eventually stumbles across your site and copis its contents.
The second piece is an indexer that chews through web pages and extracs a bunch of menaingful information, incluinding the page's title, description, and keywords. The indexer also records a great deal more esoteric data. For example, a search engine like Google keeps track of the words that crop up most often on a page, what other sites link to your page, and so on. The indexer inserts all this digested information into a giant catalog (technically, a database).
The search engine's final task is the part you are probably most familiar with - the front end, or search home page. You enter the keywords you are hunting for, and the search engine scans its catolog looking for suitable pages. Different engines have different ways of choosing pages, but the basic idea is to make sure the best and most relevant pages turn up early in the search results (the best pages are those that the search engine ranks as highly popular and well-linked. The most relevant pages are those that most closely match the search keywords.)
Due to the complex algorithms search engines use, a slightly different search (say, "green tea health" instead of just "green tea") can get you a completely different set of results.

YOUR WEBSITE PROMOTION PLAN

Before you plunge into the world of website promotion, you need a plan. Grab a pencil and plenty of paper, and get ready to jot down your ideas for global website domination.

1. BUILD A TRULY GREAT SITE - If you start promoting your site before there is anything to see, you are wasting your effort (and probaly a few bridges). Nothing says "never come back" like a website that consit of an "under construction" message.

2. SEE STEP 1 - If in doubt, keep polishing and perfecting your site. Fancy graphics are not the key concern here. There most important detail is wether you have some genuinely useful content. Ask yourself - if you were browsing the Web, would you stop to take a look at this site? Make sure you take the time to add the kinds of features that keep visitors coming back. One great option: INCLUDE A DISCUSSION FORUM.

3. MAKE YOUR SITE SEARCH-ENGINE FRIENDLY - There are a number of ways to tweak and optimize your site to help search engines understand the nature of your content. Small details like page titles, alternate text, and meta elements are easy to overlook when you start building a site, but become more important when you need to popularize it!

4. SUBMIT YOUR WEBSITE TO INTERNET DIRECTORIES - Like search engines, directories help visitors find websites. The difference between directories and search engines is that directories are generally smaller catalogs put together by humans, rather than hug sprawling text indexes amassed by computers. Search engines may give preferential treatment to websites that turn up in directory listings.

5. SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES - Now you are ready for the big time. Once you submit your site to search heavy weights like Google and Yahoo, it officially enters the public eye. However, it takes time to climb up the rankings and get spotted.

6. TWEAK YOUR WEBSITE'S PUBLIC PROFILE WITH THE GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS - These handy tools let you adjust how Google sees your site and reveals some valuable information about it. For example, it lets you specify the geographic region you want associated with your site, and it lests you discover whether Google's having trouble indexing some of your pages.

7. FIGURE OUT WHAT HAPPENED - To assess the successes and failures of your promotion strategies, you need to measure some vital statistics - how many people visit your site, how long they stay, and how many visitors come back for more. To take stock, you need to crack open tools like hit counters and server logs.

HOW DO I MAKE A SITEMAP?

To get your website properly indexed by Google and other search engines you will need a sitemap. A sitemap is a file on your website that shows the search engines exactly what files you have.
There are two types of sitemaps – a HTML page or a XML file. A HTML sitemap is a single page that shows visitors all the pages on a website and usually has links to those pages. The XML type of sitemap is used by search engine crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed. A XML sitemap isn’t meant to look pretty for the website visitor.
XML-Sitemaps is a free sitemap generator. XML-Sitemaps will index your website and create a XML file that you can upload to the root directory of your website. There is nothing to download or install. Just use the XML-Sitemaps website and they will do all of the work.

4 Easy Steps for Creating a XML Sitemap

1. Go to xml-sitemaps
2. Enter your full website URL. Choose your other options:
- Enter the frequency your website is usually updated from the drop-down list.
- Choose an option under ‘Last modification’. This is the time the URL was last modified.
- Leave the Priority at Automatic.
3. Click ‘Start’. Wait while your sitemap is being generated.
4. Click the link to download the .xml file.

EASY TRAFFIC

Traffic Generation is hard, problematic, and confusing. I WANT TO DEMYSTIFY THAT IDEA RIGHT NOW. THE ONLY REAL TRAFFIC GENERATING "SECRETS" ARE JUST METHODS YOU HAVEN'T LEARNED ABOUT YET. Once you understand the basic rules governing how people find Web Sites, you will never again be at a loss for traffic-generating ideas.

1) EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED - The internet consists of millions of Web servers. While not all of these servers are linked directly to one another, they are inevitably linked within their own "mini nets". What does this mean, exactly? Well, PEOPLE DISCOVER NEW WEB SITES IN THREE MAIN WAYS: by inputting keywords into a serch engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc; by clicking on links in articles or advertisements; by word of mouth - online (e.g., mentions in forums or chat rooms) or offline (e.g, via business cards, stickers, classifieds, radio, etc.).
Almost everyone knows about google, yahoo, msn, ebay, and so forth. Those are some of rhe most popular search engines right off the top of my head. Most people have the addresses memorized and know how to get to them without searching for them. Sites like google and Yahoo are the first places people go when they want to perform a specific search. Sites like MSN and AOL are often set as "start pages" or "home pages" - meaning they are the first sites a person's web browser goes to when the get online. So these types of sites represent major hubs of internet activity - like the airports or bus stations of internet. A majority of people start from there but can pursue an unlimited number of destinations because these sites are heavily linked sources of information. You can click on news article, a search result, an advertisement... and suddently you find yourself at a site you may not have seen before. This "new" site will also be linked to other sites, which link to other sites, witch link to... you get the idea. You can start in a familiar place and keep clicking link after link until you arrive at a Web site you have never seen before.

2) IT IS ALL ABOUT LINKS - In order for someone to get to your site, they need to hear it, to see it, or write it down and then type it into the adress bar of their browser; or they could click on an active hyperlink (this can be a text link or graphical link) from another Web sites or from within an e-mail. It followa, then, that what you need to do to generate traffic to your site is get your URL on many other sites as possible. You do this in the folling ways:

• Advertising (buying text or banner adson other sites);
• Creating content (e.g., articles, press releases, viral reports);
• Networking with other site and list owners;
• Linking to your site within forums, newsgroups, testimonials, classified ads, product reviews, blog comments, videos, etc.

The possibilities are limitless. The key point is that there are opportunities all around. THERE IS ALWAYS A WAY TO GET MORE LINKS BACK TO YOUR SITE. The more links you have out there, the more traffic you are going get.



What do you need to get started? To get started, you just need a few things.

Firstly, you need to buy a domain name. A domain name is something like www.something.com, www.anewwebsite.ca, etc. Try and pick a domain that reflects the title of your website. For the domain name we will use go daddy and their private registration service.

Second, you need a Hosting. What is hosting? Hosting is basically some space on a web server (a fancy computer) where your website files (like photos, videos, HTML, etc) reside. When somone types in your domain name, the web server then serves your site to the visitor.
For hosting, we tend to use HOSTGATOR. ONCE ON THEIR SITE (USING THE LINK BELOW), GO TO THE "WEB HOSTING" SECTION AND SIGN UP FOR THE HATCHING PLAN.

Third, LINKS BACK TO YOUR SITE.

Quick Ways to Make Money Online

1 -Flip domain names. Domain names are valuable internet real estate and some people actually make a nice living off of buying and selling them. One strategy is to use Google Adwords to find keywords that are trending and use that information to buy domain names that you think may soon be in demand. However, since short, snappy, or straightforward domain names have already been mostly snatched up, you can also get lucky buying domain names that are random acronyms, as you never know when a person or company with those exact initials will decide to set up a website. (CPC.com, for example, sold for over $200,000 when Contract Pharmaceutical Corporation decided to go online Not bad for three letters.)  For the domain name use go daddy and their private registration service.
 
2 - Become an affiliate marketer. This is a great way to make money for promoting someone else’s products or services without having to carry any inventory. Affiliate advertisements are usually incorporated into your website/blog/page via linked articles (great when your content is strong and compelling, but must be done carefully to avoid looking spammy), product-placement videos (great if you’re funny or have performance talent), or, less and less commonly, banner ads (pretty ineffective, as most people avoid these like the plague). If necessary, you can also become an affiliate marketer without a website (by posting videos on YouTube containing links to the product, for example).

3 - Become a freelance designer. Create a website showcasing your portfolio and build a client list by finding work in the online classifieds. Though it takes more time to get established doing business this way, you can set your own prices and won’t have to share your profits with the graphic design house.

What do you need to get started? To get started, you just need a few things.

Firstly, you need to buy a domain name. A domain name is something like www.something.com, www.anewwebsite.ca, etc. Try and pick a domain that reflects the title of your website. For the domain name we will use go daddy and their private registration service.

Second, you need a Hosting. What is hosting? Hosting is basically some space on a web server (a fancy computer) where your website files (like photos, videos, HTML, etc) reside. When somone types in your domain name, the web server then serves your site to the visitor.
For hosting, we tend to use HOSTGATOR. ONCE ON THEIR SITE (USING THE LINK BELOW), GO TO THE "WEB HOSTING" SECTION AND SIGN UP FOR THE HATCHING PLAN.