Make Your Own Website or Blog

Start your website?

If you are serious about making money online, you should start a website or a blog. Launching your website has become so easy. You can start your website or blog absolutely free apart from the internet access charges. There are thousands of topics on which you start your website or blog. The best thing is to start your website or blog on a topic with which you are familiar and you are interested in. Once you have a website which is generating a decent number of visitors, you can earn money from that site. For a website which offers lots of content like stories and articles, a pay per click (PPC) program like Google Adsense is the best way to earn revenue. If you have a website that promotes particular products, you can earn revenue by affiliate programs, where you earn commissions by selling other people's stuff.

How to launch your blog?
A blog is the easiest type of website to start. It is a website run by person or group of persons where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. You can use your blog to post things about yourself and your interests. You can also use a blog to post news and your views about a particular topic. Visitors can leave comments about your posts. The easiest way to start a blog is to use Blogger, a free google tools using which you can create a blog a blogspot.com. There are many other places where you can host your blog free.

If you purchase a domain and web hosting, you can host your own blog using easy software like Wordpress. Many popular blogs receive huge traffic and there are people who thousands of dollars daily from their blogs. However, when launching your blog, it is better to start one on topics you like, because it may take some time for your blog to generate income. If you are just concentrating on money, you may lose interest and just stop blogging altogether.



How to start your website?

Websites can be of different types. A blog is also a website. A website needs to have a unique URL or domain name, e.g. www.yahoo.com, which identifies the website and directs the visitor to the website. It also needs web hosting, a place to store your web pages and scripts.

Domain Name

Many free hosting providers will provide you with a free subdomain or subdirectory under them, e.g. yourdomain.50webs.com at 50webs.com, geocities/yourname/ at yahoo geocities. However for a serious website, you need to register a domain name. Most popular domain extension is .com, other popular ones include .net, .org, .info and .co.uk. There are domain extensions specific for a country, for India, they are .in and .co.in. You have purchase domain names at a domain registrar. You can only register domain names which have not been registered by anyone else.

Domain prices vary depending on the registrar and extension. Most reliable and cheap registrars include Godaddy, Namecheap and Domainsite. There are hundreds of others. You can register a .com domain at Godaddy for $8.99 per year. At Domainsite, you can register a .com for $7.99. Domainsite is also a good registrar for .in names at just $13.99. One advantage of Domainsite is that they accept personal paypal accounts for payments, Godaddy needs a verified paypal account or credit card.

Web Hosting

Next step is to find a web hosting. There are hundreds for free hosts- most show their ads on your pages and are not very reliable. 50webs.com is one of the best free webhosts - they don't show ads on your site and their uptime is good. However, you can have only basic web pages and you cannot run scripts like php or asp. For a beginner, however, a free host like 50webs is a reasonable choice.

There are different varieties of paid hosting - shared hosting, virtual dedicated server or a dedicated server. For most websites a shared hosting is all that is required, unless your traffic becomes too large for a shared hosting server to manage. Godaddy offers a shared hosting plan where you can host a single domain for $3.99 per month.

However, a plan where you can host multiple domains is better if you are planning to start multiple websites. Bluehost allows you to host up to 6 domains on their plan for $6.99 per month. Hostgator allows you to host an unlimited number of domains on their shared hosting plans starting form $10 per month. This website is hosted with Hostgator. Other reliable webhosts with good shared hosting plans include Startlogic, Easy CGI and Bluefish.

Once you have a hosting plan, you will be provided with details about your name servers. You will have to direct your domains to these name servers in the domain control panel for your site to work.

Web Site Design

You need to design your site in a professional way. It should have a good and easy navigation so that the surfer can reach the page he is interested in easily. The site layout should be neat and the pages should not be having too many distracting images and banners. There are many sites where you can get nice free CSS templates. These include OSWD, which has a great collection of nice templates. You also need to decide whether you want to launch a site with static or a dynamic pages. There are many good php based content management systems like Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Mambo etc. which will help you to create a dynamic web site.



Getting Visitors to your website

Your website needs traffic in order to be successful. The best and free source of traffic is search engines. For your site to be well ranked with search engines, you need to optimize your site for search engines and get links from other sites to your site. This art is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Other ways of getting traffic include word of mouth by telling your friends, posting in discussion forums related to your topic and getting links from popular sites. But never go overboard and engage in spamming. You can also drive targeted traffic to your website using pay per click programs like Google Adwords. However, untargeted traffic from traffic exchange sites is not worth the trouble.

To learn more about starting and promoting your site, you can visit webmaster forums like Digitalpoint, V7N, webmastertalk, Sitepoint etc.