LONG ANSWER: In order to own a domain name, it must be registered to you personally or to your company, you choose. Once your domain name is registered, it’s yours for one year, then you have an option to renew. Once your domain is registered, each year you get to renew that registration. Domain name renewal costs anywhere from $5 to $15, depending on which domain name registrar you use.

Most domain name registrars give you the option of a multi-year renewal, which saves a few dollars and the headache of renewing every year. Multi-year renewals are a good idea if you have a domain name you are pretty certain you will want for the foreseeable future.

Even if you decide to let go of the website attached to the name, you can always use it for PPC and affiliate ads like the big guys do!

An expired domain name is one with an expired registration – no one can claim ownership. If you don’t renew your domain names at the end of each year, they become available for purchase on the open market.

Why would someone let go of a good domain name?

• Perhaps the domain name turned out to be not so good!
• Absentminded website owners who simply neglected to renew their domain names;
• Webmasters who got tied up in other ventures or interests;
• Webmasters who discontinued a site due to time constraints;
• Webmasters who ran out of money to continue to operate.

Domain name registrars know how valuable your domain names can be, so the good ones send out several renewal notices. If your email address on file with your domain name registrar is invalid, you will miss your renewal notice!

When a domain name expires nowadays, domain name registrars assume control for up to 6 months afterwards before putting it back on the market. Domain name registrars park that page with PPC ads on it so they can rake in the profits – no matter how small – from any continuing traffic you’ve built up. The domain name will now point to a parked page with PPC ads, with all monies going to the registrar. Smart!

Here’s the rub: if you decide you want the name back after it’s expired and the registrar has assumed control of it, the registrar will charge you anywhere from $50 to $150 (those are the prices I’ve seen) to pull that domain name out of limbo and reinstate it to you! (Even a domain name without much traffic might cough up a few pennies over time… even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then!)

The lesson here is, if there is any chance you can use that domain name, make sure your email address is good so you don’t miss your renewal!

WAIT!
Before you rush out register it there are a several things you need to consider.

• Is your idea marketable do people want it?
• What other words describe your site?
• How competitive is your market?
• Does the domain name describe your sites contents?
• how easy is the url to remember?

Existing Businesses

If you have an existing business you already have brand name recognition so its important to include your business name.

i.e. www.shopname.com

If that domain is taken then consider how people will search for your site. Most people will google something like (shop name) + (city) so  why not name it www.shopnamecity.com or www.shopname-city.com these domain names will almost certainly be available.

You may find that .net .us .org domain extensions are available beware of these extensions as people type .com automatically. You may wish to purchase these domains & forward to your main site.

Online Businesses

Very Important – Do people want what your selling?

Before you rush ahead & spend hours developing a site with no value think of 6 or more words that best describe your idea.

Go to Wordtracker (Its Free) & see how many people are searching those exact words. List your keywords by search volume.

Now you now know 2 things;

1. Is this an idea worth pursuing?
2. What words generated the most searches.

Obviously if  very few people are searching for your main keywords then this idea is not worth pursuing as an e-commerce business. Save your money & register for a free blog at www.blogger.com if you are really dedicated to the idea.

If your keywords have goog search volume you can move on.

Don’t worry about competition at this stage I will cover search engine optimization in competitive markets later, it is more important that there are allot of searches.

Armed with your keywords you are now ready to find the perfect domain name for your new business.

Write down some options using the most popular keyword or a mixture of your keywords. It is very important that the url is representative of the sites content.

A person searching the internet for  E-Commerce will click www.E-CommerceNewbie.com before  www.mywebsite.com

TIP – Hyphens as in E-Commerce are not generally a good idea however using Wordtracker you will find that more people search for E-Commerce than eCommerce.

More Webmaster Tips & Tools

There are a number of places to get keywords and do research on keywords.  There is the all famous Google Keyword External Tool.  This tool is pretty straight forward and easy to use.  It is the tool that a lot of people use when trying to set up an AdWords Campaign.  I like it a lot.  It is where I start first when I am researching keywords, but isn’t the only place to go.  The Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool is good too.  I would suggest going there after using google’s keyword tool.  Then there are numerous of other ways to find keywords.  There is my favorite as of now the tools.seobooks keyword tool.  This one is great for finding out information on all types of different sites.  It is also great for finding niches that you might not have thought of.  For example, start with a broad keyword such as “shoe” and then just keep honing down.  You will find niches that you never thought would have search volume but surpisingly have a lot of searches per day.

The best thing to is keep researching keywords to come up with different lists that can be broken down into different categories to make your website a lot more robust.  Examples might be 1. SEO then on that page have links to factors of SEO such as, contextual linking or H1 tags.  Instead of trying to get keywords for just the sake of having keywords, learn how they all relate to one another and try to find the heiarchy so that you can keep adding content as you go along.  A lot of times (especially using tools.seobooks) I will find great things to write articles about.  I also find great things to find stuff to write about on Answer sites.  This is a great resource for keywords as a lot of times the people asking the questions are actually in the niche and know some of the lingo.

The amount of places to find keywords are more than you can imagine.  So what you have to do is get creative.  If you lack a lot of creativity then hang around the forums on your topic or use Google sets to find other keywords or similar industries.  Also try The eBay Pulse.  You can find hot items there to do research on.

I will have more on keyword research but this should get you started and give you enough to get your feet wet.  The main thing with doing all this Internet marketing jive is to try to not get overwhelmed.  The amount of information and different tactics that you can use are vast and trying to take it all in at one time is daunting and will lead to failure.  Focus on this list of sites for now and when you master using these, come back and I should have some other areas where you can find keywords.

Using hyphens in your domain is ok, but limit it to around 2, 3 only if really needed.  Try not to use words that can be interchanged easily in one’s mind.  Examples might be “like or love”  or “want or have”.

Other than these simple tasks you should be ok choosing a domain name.  Just remember to keep it relative to whatever you are selling or to the information that you are providing.

To get started on getting your domain name you might want to check out godaddy.com .  You can get a discount if you use the promo code db1 or db2.  It gives you a dollar off.  Hey ever bit helps right?

Best would be to use the information product yourself or have some way that you have reviewed it.  But be honest when using clickbank products as people can also see if you are promoting something because it has a big payout.

That is basically why you need clickbank and what it can be used for.  I tend to wander off subject sometimes but I am trying to give you useful information.  Write me if you have any questions.

Believe me I have been there and am still dealing with a sort of Online ADD.  You are subscribed to so many email lists and they keep saying one thing or another about how this new product will change your life.  How is that they can all be right.  Granted the answer is that a lot of it is pure crap.  I have been on lists so long that I have grown tired of things that people send.  It seems as if they always found a magic pill and this will propel you to success.

So if you look at how you should make money online you first got figure out all the possible ways that are available and then decide which one best suits your talents and which you would feel comfortable doing.

If you have a talent that you can share then this might be the best way to start making money online.  Maybe start a video series about your talents.  Write an ebook about it.  Or hold teleconferences.  It all depends.  Then remember that the ways you go about getting people to listen to you involves tools.  Which are PPC, SEO, Social Media, etc.

You have to think of these last items as tools and you are trying to build your masterpiece.  Think of it as a new house.  You are the general contractor and you need all of the other trades to complete the job.  This is the same concept…kinda.  You need the arcitect (web designer) but you need to make sure that a lot of the trades have a hand in the conception.  The SEO will need to help build the foundation to build further on.  No need to have a site that can’t be optimized.  Think of PPC as doorways.   Social Media as a neighborhood gathering or a tupperware party.

I know the feeling of getting into this internet world and being overwealmed with all the terms and strategies, don’t worry I am here to help.  Write me a line if you have a question.

Well lets start at the beginning tags are what makes up a lot of your website.  There is the all important title tag, it’s next commander in line the H1 tag and don’t forget H1’s friends the H2 to H6.  Granted it is a far chance that you will ever use H6 tags or for that matter H3-H5.  H1 and H2 on the otherhand you will be using a lot of.

The title tag is the bit of text that you see above the place on your browser that says “File Edit View, etc”.  This is the most important tag because it is the thing that people will see when they are searching for your product or service.  It is what shows up when you look in Google and all of the sites come up.  The best way to use this tag is to put your main keyword first for each page and then put your secondary keywords after that.  You must make sure that what you put in the title tag is in your page as well.  Don’t want to confuse those webots, they aren’t that forgiving.  Especially for this tag, or for anything for that matter.

The new system, the Berkley Internet Name Domain (BIND), was developed by the University of California, Berkley. Originally a graduate student project, the application now controls virtually every domain name system in the world. The popularity of BIND can be partially attributed to the fact that it is free open source shareware, which allowed everyone to tinker with the system creating a whole that was much greater than the sum of its parts.

Choosing a domain name can seem like a daunting task. Millions of web sites are up and running around the world. Even so, good domain names are available with a bit of thought. Your goal in setting up an Internet based business is to provide something different, and as a result, your domain name will reflect that.Your web design firm can help you with domain questions

Your first goal is to create a list that describes the purpose of your website. Make a couple of lists to help expand your thoughts. For example if you are planning to start a web based knitting business you might include the types of supplies, yarns and materials you plan to have available. Describe your ideal customer or your aspirations and you will start to narrow down your choices.

Once you have a list in mind, use a name domain research tool to see whether or not your choice is available. Don’t forget to see if variations of your name also exist. Continuing in the knitting theme, YKnot.com and WhyKnot.com are similar enough that someone searching for you might hit one or the other, it is advisable to purchase both domain names to prevent customers getting lost at another site. Domain names are certainly cheap enough to pay for the extra name to avoid such problems and you can choose a long or short contract when the time comes to commit. The cost for paying for a domain name for two years makes sense.

Remember to keep an open mind when investigating your choice of names with a research tool. There are people who picked as many likely names as they could think of and bought them all in the hopes of selling you a name you like. These individuals are out to make a quick buck by convincing you that you can’t live without the first name that came to your mind. Ignore them and move on to your next choice. The only exception to this rule is if you have an established clientèle and forget to renew your domain name in time. At that point you might want to consider paying a reasonable amount to regain your old name, but be wary and always remember to ask people with experience like your web designer for tips.

Getting an online presence is so easy these days. Most large domain name sites will walk you through all the steps and you can have a site online in a matter of days. Your domain name is your anouncement to everyone, pick something fun.

Audio clips, images, hypertext mark-up language websites, and your electronic mail are all stored on your website storage space on the website workstation or hosting company. Based on what your website will be utilized for will determine precisely how much data storage you will want for your website. it is said that having a hundred web pages of only text is equivalent toequal to 1 MB of disk space; happily not that many sites on the web nevertheless solely show text. There are infinite websites that have photographs, and Sound tracks or movie clips. This will therefore make the requirement for more storage space necessary. The more you expand your site, such as particular member ad ons or even forums makes the demand for more storage space a must also. Whenever there will be features for the members to retrieve information, like audio tracks or video tracks you will want somewhat more storage space than a every day text based site.

A totally critical thing to look at is the amount of data transfer that you are going to get. This makes up the size of data that is being fed through your Internet line. Much of this file transfer is allotted to the purpose of your e-mail, and the clicks to your website. Basically for each hundred pages of text that a somebody browses on your website, a single MB of file transfer is utilized, if ten viewers read the same content ten MB is applied. This is how things can amount rather quickly. It is the extent of your web site that can influence just the amount of data transfer you will require. This however, isnt the lone crucial element as to how much transfer one will require. When you are sending data or video and audio files this will chew up transfer rates really fast. It is really easy to use up 1.5 GigaByte of website transfer, if you have a hundred users clicking on a clip that is 1.5 MegaBytes. If you aggregate this onto a monthly sum, you have just gone through a huge forty-five MB of website transfer. It is alleged that VR sites, and animated web sites are the sites that use up the most data transfer of most possible web sites so it may be prudent to bear this in mind when purchasing a plan from your business web host.

A URL can be called a domain name, which it is used for your web site plus the function of your electronic mail. One can purchase your domain name when it has not already been snaped up. It is likewise possible for a domain owner to transfer their domain that is already active to their web host provider via a domain service provider. Assigning your domain name to your webhost account from a domain name service provider is relatively easy. It is also conceivable for anyone to hold multiple domain name extensions for your chosen domain under a domain host account. It is really important these days to protect brand identity, consequently many site owners in this day and age are taking many domain names at a time. This ensures that there is no piracy in the web hosting realm, and keeps hits going to everyone’s web sites smooth without mix up. With the volume of site traffic in this day and age online its crucial to have your domain name registration safeguarded. Programs like domain name Protect guarantees that there is no unauthorized domain name transfers. This is a very important option to have to hand, when managing a secured domain name for the Internet. Make certain to do your preparation when researching a domain name service provider, or website hosting company, if not you may find many problems at some stage in the future that could leave one without any visits to your websites.

It is tough to choose a web site host, nonetheless, here is some very useful info for you. If you plan to build a new site, I’ve got a very good free website hosting service you will love. They offer website hosting totally free, there are no catches. They give you 1500 MB of web host space and 100 GB bandwidth. They also have cPanel control panel that’s absolutely impressive and simple to use. Moreover, there is no advertising whatsoever on your webpages. Find out more here: http://free-web-hosting.4less.info

Just think of your offline world.  Have you ever been at a party and there seems to be a guy walking around a party just promoting the crap out of some MLM or trying to get you to buy Life Insurance?  Most people will try to avoid this guy like the plague.  Nobody likes to be sold to, and a lot of people don’t like to tell people no.  The same rules apply online.  If you are in a social network for no other reason then to promote yourself you will be noticed and people will not want to talk to you.  It is so much easier online though.  All someone has to do is unfollow you or take you off as a friend.

Happens to me all the time of facebook.  These people get no love.  As soon as I get 3 emails in a row from the same guy and none of it has value except to promote his agenda, they are gone.  You will need to remember this when you in the social networks if you really want to build relationships with people.

If all else fails follow the John Reese approach.  Give value, value and some more value.  Then when you do have something you want to promote people will feel almost obligated at least to take a look.