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.