Design My Own Website

Archive for the ‘Make Your Own Website Free’ Category

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One of the appeals of making money online is that it does not take a lot of money upfront.  It still takes a lot of time, but money wise even if you pay for services and help, it is still much cheaper than running your traditional storefront busienss.  However, you can actually do fairly well with little to no money spent using Google Adsense and various free blog sites.

The first thing to do is get approved by Google Adsense.  This involves submitting your website for approval and most of the time you cannot use a free blog for this.  You will need a nicely constructed self-hosted website to get approval.

One exception:

Blogger.com Blogs

Not long after Google bought Blogger.com, they made AdSense available to Blogger blog owners.

The big bonus of this is not only is it free, and not only do Google and Yahoo crawl the blogs quickly, but Google is fine with approving Blogger.com blogs for Adsense!

So if you’re looking to get started with AdSense and not spend much money, Blogger is a great way to get started.

Before I talk about how to setup a Blogger blog for AdSense, though, let me tell you what an RSS feed is and how it works.  This is important for setting up your free blog.

An RSS feed is basically a list of all of the recent posts made to your blog.

People can use “RSS Aggregators” to keep up with new posts on your blog. Websites can also syndicate your posts by checking your feed for new articles and then reposting on their blog.  This is one method of “auto-blogging” (blogging on auto pilot) to give blogs fresh content.  It is a win win situation since the publisher can get “fresh” content on auto pilot while you get your posts syndicated.  With Blogger blogs, RSS fees are built in so you do not need to do anything to get it to work.

First,  figure out what topic the blog will focus on.

You can blog about products, create product reviews, or just blog about your hobbies.  The main thing is to blog about something you enjoy and are passionate about because money won’t necessarily come rolling in right away. It is important to be consistent with your blogging.  If money is coming in, that is a great motivator to keep blogging.  If money is nto coming in, then it is your passion that will keep you with it until the money comes in.  Brainstorm your skills and interests to determine what you would enjoy writing about. It’s important that you like to write about it, since you will have to do so to build up the blog!

Now you are ready to create your blog.

From the Blogger homepage click the “Create Your Blog Now” link and follow the step by step instructions.  This is very straightforward and you will have the framework of your blog up and running in no time.

When you choose your blog URL, you can come up with a clever name as your brand.  However, for marketing purposes, you can also choose “keywords” to be in yur URL.  For example, if you’re creating a blog about dog training tips, then you could check to see if  “dogtrainingtips.blogspot.com” is available, or some variant of it such as “myawesomedogtrainingtips.blogspot.com”.   Having your keywords in your blog title will give you a boost in search engines.

From here, you also want to choose a template which suits your blog theme.  Just think about readers that come to your blog and what they would be looking for and choose a theme that fits your blog, not one that distracts from it.  You can always pick a plain one also just to get your blog up and running and then change it later.  Changing your blog theme is as easy as clicking a few buttons.  Once the blog is created, then click on the “Templates” tab and select one.

To further setup your blog, there are some various settings you can now set.

On the “Basic” settings tab, set your blog title to the keywords you want to show up for in the search engines. That will help you get ranked.  So an example blog title would be “My Awesome Dog Training Tips”.

You can also give your description here as well.  Include your keywords, but make it a “human friendly” blog description (this will also help you get your blog Adsense approved).  An example would be: “Welcome to my blog!  I am a dog lover and come from a family of dog lovers.  In this blog I will give you my awesome dog training tips I have accumulated over the years”.

Not only will this help your blog more readable, but the RSS feed will show this description and help people choose your blog to syndicate or add to their RSS readers.

One very important setting is to set “Notify Weblogs” to “Yes”.

This is in the Publishing tab.  You want to set the “Notify Weblogs” to “Yes” so that each time you create a new post, notifications are sent out to the Weblogs site (which in turn is crawled by many other spiders).  This is an easy and automated way to let the internet at large now you have updated your blog.

Another setting is to accurately set your archiving to reflect how often you post

Set your archiving to daily if you post every day, or weekly if you only post every few days.  And by the way, you should aim to post almost daily if you can.  The more content, the more often search engines come, the better for traffic and Adsense clicks and thus revenue.

Here is a very important tip about the site feed:  Use the short feed.

By using the short feed, only a summary or description is shown in your RSS feed.  If people want to read more, they need to come to your site.  If they come to your site, they may click on an Adsense ad.  For this reason you want to make your blog titles compelling and your post description compelling as well.   Also the first 50 words or so will be seen so these need to be your hooks to get readers to your blog.

And now: Google Adsense

After you have a few posts set up, you can click on the “AdSense” link and apply for one straight from the blog instead of having to go to Google.com to apply. YES!  This is very convenient!

From there it’s just a matter of pasting the Adsense code into your blog and Voila!  You now have a monetized Google Adsense blog on a free blog out there that can make you money!

You can definitely do it yourself and pretty cheaply. Credit card transations is a bit more on the complicated side, PayPal is much easier, at least in the beginning.

1) Get a domain . I recommend godaddy.com

http://godaddy.com

2) Get a hosting account. I can recommend hostmonster:

http://designmyownwebsite.net/go/hostmonster.html

I’ve used a handful of webhosting companies and to be honest their support was the first that seemed to really be on top of things. Whichever hosting company you choose, I say go to the live chat at odd hours and ask presales questions and see what you think of the company. That is why I would pick hostmonster (even over the very popular hostgator)

Paypal makes it very easy to take credit card transactions online

3) Get a paypal account. You will see a “Merchant Services” tab and you can generate your own link and button and PayPal will give you the HTML to use

http://paypal.com

4) If you know HTML, you can design it on your own. Otherwise you can use WordPress to get yourself going quickly (and then use html and graphics skills to really spice up the site). WordPress is limiting if you want a lot of interaction with the user but it’s good for general layout ideas.

http://wordpress.com

There are actually some great HTML resources out there too. My personal favorite is Web Design Mastery because when I first bought it I was expecting to open up the book and learn HTML right away and instead the entire first book had NO HTML in it – all she talked about was what makes effective web design for marketing and usability – that was new to me and I really liked that approach

Good luck!

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Just finished your first website? So it is the time to have a look for some hosting and make a choise. Your first question doubtless will be whether to select free or paid hosting service.

Let’s take a look at some benefits and downsides of these solutions.

Free website hosting :
( + ) It’s absolutely free. You do not want to pay for web site name.
( – ) Your URL will be something similar to username.freehost.com or freehost.com / user name. Even though you save the cost of paying for a domain, if you move your site to another supplier in the future you can lose some or all of your organic search engine traffic. There are ways around that and to fix that, but it can be convoluted depending on how your site is built out
( – ) Your supplier will doubtless include advertisements to your pages – customarily one or two banners, infrequently popup windows. If you intend to use banner exchange on your website read conscientiously their T&Cs. Some free hosts doesn’t permit it.
( – ) a large amount of free hosts can change their Terms and Conditions with little to no warning
( – ) Sometimes the free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer paid hosting only. In this situation you have only two choises – pay them or loose your internet site.

Paid website hosting :
( + ) You can host your own domain. If you make a decision to change the website hosting supplier in the future, you simply transfer the domain to the new supplier and do not loose your traffic.
( + ) Most paid hosts offer twenty-four / seven support thru email or live discuss and many of them provide toll-free telephone support.
( + ) you should expect better uptime then on free host. Some paid hosts offer uptime guarantee. In other words, you get what you pay for.
( – ) Paid hosting cost cash ) Before you make the call if select free or paid host you must answer this question : how large ambitions have I got with my website? If you’re beginning small private page for your friends consist of some *.html files then a free host will be adequate. In case you intend to run significant business site, need PHP, database and do not need adverts on the site I like to recommend to have a look for quality paid host.

But really how much is paid hosting? If you prepay a year in advance it can be as little as $4 a month! That is basically giving up, say, one Starbucks latte a month!

I honestly do not know why people would go for free webhosting when there are so many advantages to paid webhosting and yet I see questions on this all the time at the various forums and answer sites – what is the best free web host, etc..etc. I can see using a free webhost for a blog (like blogger.com or wordpress.com) but other than that, I don’t really see the benefit of free webhosting.

Check out some great webhosting companies here:

http://www.designmyownwebsite.net/go/bluehost.html

http://www.designmyownwebsite.net/go/hostgator.html

http://www.designmyownwebsite.net/go/hostmonster.html

Coming soon: more on dedicated vs reseller vs “regular” web hosting.

Just a quick “Hello World” to you all.

Scotty here.. and Welcome to my web site.

My hope is here I can share my experience learning to design my own websitesand pass along some tips and tricks to you so you can create your own website – and much more!

Though I’ve been a longtime user of the internet, my web design really didn’t start standing out until a few years ago. I had tinkered around a lot but with the economy I started really focusing in on my website design. At first I was a bit fearful that it would stop being fun, but after I figured out how to actually do effective website design to make great web pages, it became quite fun (and fortunately made me a bit of money too!)

I’m looking forward to building out this site. I am hoping to share some great tips with you about web pages
and I am positive I’ll learn something myself in the process.

Thanks for coming!