Web Empire

In our previous series, you learned how to set up a free WordPress blog on their site, and got your first taste of blogging. Your frequent updates to that site ensure that the spiders visit often, so now when you create your second website, a link in the blogroll of the first site will ensure it gets crawled within the first few days.

The goal for this second website will be to create a profitable site, and lay the foundation for your web empire. This site can be another blog, or it may be a static site, or even a combination of the two. Whichever you choose, you can use WordPress software. Yes, WordPress is blogging software, but it will work fine for a static site as well! Most people don’t realize that, so one post in this current series will be all about making a static website using WordPress software. But first things first.

You need a server (web host) to put your site on. There are hundreds of thousands hosting services available. Many of them are resellers, offering no services directly, but selling hosting services they buy, and reselling them at a profit. Most of these hosts, both original and reseller services, provide good service — but some really stink. You need to do your homework before choosing one.

First, avoid hosts offering ‘unlimited’ hosting — meaning you can have as many websites as you want under one account. Such systems may work fine at first, but in short order someone will come in on the same shared server you are using and put hundreds of websites. The service will slow to a crawl, there will be service outages, and before you know it your site is being penalized because it was not available when the search-engine spiders tried to crawl it.

Do look for a host that will allow you have more than one website, but there should be a limit of 5 to 20 such ‘Addon Domains’ as they are called. Don’t buy the cheapest service, they will be over-sold. Expect to pay $15 to $25 per month for your account. Be sure the host offers ‘VPS’ packages (Virtual Private Servers) — even though you will not be using those more expensive accounts yet, you may want to upgrade in the future. Also, it is an indication of a serious hosting business that they offer those. Make sure the service comes with cPanel — that is the most widespread control package, and there is no sense your wasting your time learning how to use more than one system.

If you do not already have one, open a PayPal business account. You will want to accept payments through them for your business, and they provide the easiest means of paying for your hosting. Most hosting services will let you pay through PayPal’s subscription service, which automatically subtracts the hosting fee from your account (or bank account or credit card if you don’t have funds in your PayPal account) each month. That way you don’t need to give the hosting service your credit card information, and you can cancel the payments at any time directly through PayPal.

Search the web for mention of your hosting service by other users. Be suspicious if there is no mention of them outside their own site. Look for negative comments. A few complaints can be taken with a grain of salt, some people whine about everything, but a lot of complaints indicates there may be a problem. Very large hosting services may get a lot of comments both good and bad, look for the bad comments to be refuted by satisfied customers if it is a large company.

Once you have your hosting account set up they will send you the details of how to log-in to your cPanel, and they will provide information on the address of the ‘DNS’ or Domain Name Server, which you will need when you register your domain. The domain is the alpha-numeric version of a website’s name, such as www.yahoo.com. The DNS program converts that to the numbers the Internet really uses to identify sites, called the IP Address, such as 74.6.8.104 — originally it was always four numbers between 0 and 255, separated by periods. Now there is a new type of IP that allows for more address, since the mere 4,294,967,296 addresses originally available were found to be too few!

Your next step will be to register your own domain name … but before you can do that you will need to do some keyword research, to make sure your subject matter is sufficiently popular and profitable. That keyword research will also identify good candidates for keywords to include in your domain name. That will be subject of our next post in this series.

OK, you are now a published author, a blogger and an Internet entrepreneur. Well, not quite an entrepreneur yet — you need to make some money to qualify for that title. With your very first effort, you should not expect to make any money in the first month or so. So long as you are using free hosting, you should not have any great expectations of making money at all.

Your next site will be the one designed to make a profit. So why bother working on this ‘practice’ blog? In part it is to ‘learn the ropes’ so you know what to do next time, and don’t have to waste a lot of time on learning the mechanics. But a more important reason is that you need to have a site indexed by the search engines in order to ensure your next site gets indexed quickly.

What do I mean ‘indexed’? — simply that the content on your site is included in the search engine’s database. There is a simple technique to see if a site is indexed:

Copy a line from the middle of the text on a post that has been on the site a week or more. If there is a period in the middle of the line, so much the better. Thus you have the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. Just highlight it with your mouse and press Control-C to copy. Then, go to the search engine (like Google or Yahoo) and type a quotation mark; then press Control-V to paste your copied line in, then another quotation mark. To the search engine, this means you want the exact phrase within the quote marks. It is unlikely anyone else has used that exact phrase, so if your page is in the index, it should come up as the only results for the search. If it is not in the index, some search engines will show a small message saying the exact quote was not found, then show results as if there were no quotes — which means the same words were used but not all in one phrase.

This technique is important, and has several uses:

1. It will tell you if your page has been indexed in that search engine
2. It will show you if someone has copied your work without your permission
3. You can use it on expired-copyright text to see if anyone has published that material on-line yet

Beginners may not realize the benefit of that last option yet, but it is important if your goal is to build a web empire, rather than have a single site you focus on. To build multiple sites you need lots of content, much more than you can write yourself. A great source of such content is the public domain, where you can find expired copyright works. Many of these, however, have been copied so often that the search engines won’t show your pages if you are the umpteenth person to use the same text. Finding un-indexed public domain text allows you to get traffic from search engine search results.

Once your first site is indexed you will have a resource you can use to get your next site indexed within days of putting it up — just add a link to it from your blog. A good place for such a link is the ‘blogroll’ which you probably noticed while looking around at the various pages — both on your site and mentioned in the control panel.

That section has default values you probably don’t want to leave, so go to Manage and Links and delete all or most of those. Then put in links to blogs that cover the same topic as you do.

Hey! But isn’t that driving traffic to my competitors?

Well theoretically yes, but at this stage you have no traffic, so don’t worry about it. In the world of blogging, it helps to show your readers other blogs that you like, even when they cover the same ground you do. Your readers appreciate it, and the other blog is more likely to link to your site. If they don’t it is still better to have the link than not, for your readers and for search engine optimization (SEO) which is something you will no doubt read a lot about, but not in these introductory posts.

For the first few weeks, you should add at least four or five posts to your blog each week. If you can manage more, even better. You will not have readers until you provide them with something to read!

Once you have a dozen or so posts it is time to go out in the world and begin promoting your blog. There are dozens of techniques for doing this, but for a beginner three or four are best. Get used to using these, then go on to learn some of the other, more advanced, ways of getting links and traffic.

One technique to promote your blog is to leave comments on other blogs who discuss the same, or related topics. Even participating on blogs that are not related at all in subject matter can have some benefit, so if you already post comments, go ahead and use your website on those. Most blogs ask for your website when you post a comment, and if the comment is published your name is linked back to your site. If people find your comment interesting, they may click on that link to see your site. So don’t just post ‘Great site’ or some other inane comment, be responsive to the content of the post you are commenting on, and try to contribute something worthwhile to the discussion.

There is a similar technique available on many discussion forums. A few of the more popular ones no longer allow footers on your posts, but most let you put a line or two at the bottom of each post that can include a link back to your website. So you write interesting posts, or reply to other people’s posts, and your link appears under your message.

Free article marketing is also a good method for promoting your site. You write an article similar to the content posts you put on your blog, but not an exact copy of one of those. Go to a free article distribution site (you can find several using any search engine) and submit the article, along with an ‘about the author’ box that goes at the bottom of the article. That box should include a link back to your site (don’t put the link in the article itself). Publishers are then allowed to use your article on their websites or in their newsletters free of charge — so long as they leave that ‘about the author’ box and its link back to your site. The link-back is your payment for allowing them to publish your article.

There is one final method of site promotion suitable for the beginning blogger: write articles reacting to something you read on someone else’s blog. Generally this works best if you liked the article, and can recommend it to your readers. This is like commenting, but since it is on your site it can be more beneficial to the other blog since it brings in potential readers that may not have known about their site. The Wordpress system will generate what’s called a track-back, so part of your post appears like a comment to the original post you referred to (if they have track-back enabled — sometimes they need to approve the track-back so it may not appear right away). Also, the other blogger may add your blog to their blogroll.

So that’s all there is to starting and promoting your first website, a free blog on WordPress. In a future post in the ‘Beginners Corner’ we will discuss your second site, this time using WordPress software on server space you rent, under a domain you purchase. The purpose of that site will be to make money! And it might not even be a blog…

OK, so you entered the required info into the WordPress site for a free blog, and got an email from them with an activation link. Click on that link. WordPress reminds you (for the last time–take note) of the username and password for your blog. Click on the link to log-in to your blog, and enter those in the appropriate boxes and press enter. If you have a good browser (like FireFox) , it will ask if you want it to remember that log-in data for you — if you are on your own computer, select yes.

The next page is your WordPress control panel, and it is fairly similar to the one you will use when you install your own version of WordPress on your own server space. The default installation has a few samples — a sample post, sample page, sample comment. A post is one of the periodic messages, such as you are reading now. A page is other content — such as the ‘about’ in the upper right corner of my banner, above. A comment is input from outside users.

Before we enter the post you wrote last night (remember your homework?) we want to change a few of the basic settings. The top of your control panel has the title of your blog in large letters, and next to that a ‘visit site’ button that will take you to your blog. Click on that and look at your new blog, then hit the back button to return to the control panel.

Beneath the title is a row listing different functional areas of the system, and depending on which one is active, there may be a another row below that with sub-pages listed. The upper row has the most common functions on the left, and in smaller text to the right the settings and user functions. Begin by clicking on the settings link to the right there.

Notice that the second line — showing the sub-pages, has nine options for the settings section, beginning with ‘General’ which is the page you are viewing. The first thing we want to change is the second item on this page, the tagline — because yours is not ‘Just another WordPress.com weblog’. Think of this as the sub-title of your blog, and write something appropriate. You can always change it later.

Hint: if you are using the FireFox browser, and you should be, it does not automatically spell-check single line text boxes like this, only the multi-line boxes. So click on the right mouse button, and select ‘Spell check this field’ if you are not 100% sure of the spelling for the words you entered.

A little further down the same page is a check-box that says users must be registered and logged in to comment. I’d leave that blank for now, but remember it is there if you begin to get any objectionable comments, you can always check that later. Notice the bottom of the page has a ’save changes’ button, be sure to press that to save your new sub-title.

Look at all the other pages under settings, to see what you can change. If you understand the options, change them if you wish. If you don’t understand what is going to be different if you change a setting, look it up in the ‘Help’ section, using the link near the top of the page. For now, you can just leave all the settings at their defaults, if you want.

Your next choice is what you want your blog to look like. Click on the ‘Design’ option. You will see samples of available ’skins’ or layouts you can use. Choose one that appeals to you. Click on that ‘View site’ button again, and you will see how it changes when you select the other skin. This too can be changed whenever you want, so don’t agonize over making a choice, just pick one.

Click on the ‘Comments’ option in your control panel, check the empty box next to the one existing comment, then click on the delete button to remove it. Click on the ‘Manage’ option and do the same with the one post. Notice the ‘Manage’ option has lots of sub-pages, explore those to learn more about what you can do. Notice that there is an ‘About’ page under the ‘Pages’ sub-list under ‘Manage.’ Rather than delete that I suggest you edit it.

So go to ‘Manage’ and ‘Pages’ and find the ‘About’ page listed.Click on the name of the page — ‘About’ in this case — and you will be taken to the edit page. Leave the name as is, but delete the paragraph in the big text box by selecting it all then pressing your delete button on your keyboard. Type in your own description of what your blog will be about.

When that is done, click on the ‘Save’ button to put your edited page on your site. Then click on the main category labeled ‘Write’. By default you are taken to the place to write a Post — but notice the sub-pages line has an option for writing pages instead, if that were what you wanted to do. Right now though, you have your first post all written, and want to put it on the site. So just copy the title from WordPad or whatever program you wrote the thing in, then click inside the title box and paste your title in there. Copy the rest of the article and paste it into the big text box. If you are using FireFox, go through the text looking for red-underlined words and correct those that are misspellings.

Go down lower on the page and find the categories section, only ‘uncategorized’ is available, so click on the ‘Add Category’ link and type in the name of the category your post relates to. If your site is about Fishing, and you wrote a post on selecting a fishing rod, you can create a category ‘Equipment’ or even ‘Rods’ if you plan to write a lot of posts on just that subject. Click the ‘Add’ button and you see your new category added to the list, and it is automatically selected. Now just go back up the page, and next to the big text box is the ‘Publish’ button — click that and your first post is on-line! There is also a ‘Save’ button, that would save your post so you can edit it later, but it would not be visible on your site yet. You need to use the ‘Publish’ button to make a post visible to the world.

In the next post on this topic I will give you some tips for making your new blog a success. For now, just explore all the options the software gives you, so you know what is available. You won’t be using all those features, but the more you know the better your choices will be when it comes time to select features for your first blog, or any subsequent blogs you make, using the free WordPress software.

A visitor to this site has accused me of ignoring the complete novice, and I stand guilty as charged. Creating an empire is not how one starts out in creating an Internet business — it is a very advanced stage of development.

So for those of you just starting out, I thought I would write a series of posts that will take you through, step by step, the process required to create your first few websites — the beginning of your empire. Follow these steps and in three or four months you should be making enough to pay your food bill (if you don’t eat out at fancy restaurants too often!) More importantly, you will have a foundation that will serve you well as you build on your successes, and the process of building these will teach you the basics you need to know before going on to more profitable methods.

So in this post I’ll talk about starting your first website. I’ll assume you are like most people and don’t want to spend a lot of money, until you ‘learn the ropes’ and have some idea of how it all works.

So our first site will be hosted on a free service, and will be a blog. There are two major free-blog sites, WordPress and Blogger (a Google site). I recommend WordPress because you need to learn to use the software anyhow. WordPress is the best and most-used blogging software made, and it is free. When we get to our second site we will talk about downloading Wordpress and installing it on rented server space, but for now just use the free one. Go to http://wordpress.com/signup/ and enter a username, password and email address.

A note about email addresses. You do not want to use your personal email address for business. Since you do not have a web host where you can create your own email accounts, start out with a free account at http://mail.yahoo.com/ or  http://mail.google.com/ or both. I’d suggest trying to get the same username on both if you can. That way you can try them both and choose which one you like better.

For your username, pick something that is unusual enough that it will not be taken, but relevant to your business. Since you may not yet know what your business will be, for now just choose a word relevant to anything you have an interest in, that you would be willing to write about. Then add the year, a related word, or whatever you need to get a name unique enough that it is not already taken. So if you like fishing, for example, you might choose fishing2008 or even fishing2009, or if that is taken use fishingbigbass, bigbassfishing, fishing4me, etc., etc., until you find something that is accepted. I like to include numbers in place of their sound-alike words: 2 - to, too; 4 - for; 9 - nein (German for NO).

Once you have signed up at WordPress, it will show you the address for your blog, using your username as the domain. Try using the same username you chose for your free email account as your WordPress username — if it is available, they will show you something like this as your URL: http://bigbassfishing.wordpress.com/ (not exactly that — it exists already, I checked). A password will be sent to the email address you provided, and when you click on the link in that email you can log in to your new blog using the username you chose and the password they sent you.

In tomorrow’s post we will talk you through how to enter your first post. For tonight — write it! Just write out your first message about the topic you chose, using WordPad or any other simple text editor (don’t get fancy, you can add italics, bold, pictures, etc., later). Save that for tomorrow, and we will put it on your blog.