Speaking of which, there are two threads right now that are interesting. One is from someone moaning that Blogger.com has deleted all his blogs and the other from someone who is saying that WordPress.com have done the same.

Both services allow you to set up blogs for free, and they host them for you.

In effect, they own your blog. And as a result, if they decide they don’t like you, or what you’ve posted, they can instantly delete all your hard work.

And they often do because many people ignore the terms and conditions they agree to when they sign up and create blogs that break the rules.

Doh! Of course they delete stuff they don’t like.

The only surprise to me is why anyone would allow someone else that much power of their business?

Buying a domain is cheap. Buying hosting is cheap. And once you have those two things, setting up a real WordPress site on your own domain, under your own hosting costs nothing.

So why, oh why, would anyone not do that?

I know that the $20-$30 dollars needed to buy the domain and hosting is still money that some people don’t currently have, but unless you are prepared to invest that small amount you can never, ever, say you have a business. You will always be at a third party’s mercy. And ‘Woe is me, the blogs I’ve worked so hard to produce’ threads on the Warrior Forum will continue to be commonplace.

Blogging is an excellent strategy. It can get you very high Google rankings very quickly. And in the process, it can make you a lot of money.

But for goodness sake, stay in control of your own destiny and use your own domains and hosting from the very start.

Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank 2010 ebook tells you how to get started in blogging the right way. Incidentally, I’ve been saying that this is the third edition of the book, but I’m mistaken – it is in fact the 4th.

http://urlnex.us/bttb2010

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Part 14:  Beware the Newbie Trap.

In the old TV cop series, Hill Street Blues, the briefing sargent started each shift by telling everyone: “Let’s be careful out there.” I sometimes think that newbies to Internet marketing should have the same message flash up on their screens every day because it is so easy to fall for the hype and part with huge chunks of cash.

The most-often heard plea for help I hear is from people who have spent out big money for some kind of instant site building scheme, or ready-made niche site package. Sometimes it may be for one of the many ’store front’ type of sites that look so appealing.

They say to me – I spent [insert however many thousands of dollars you are uncomfortable with here] on xyz site builder – or on so-and-so’s site templates, or the latest instant niche store product – but I don’t know what to do with it. Have I been conned?

The answer is usually no – these types of Internet marketing products aren’t really a con or a scam. They are legitimate products that usually have great potential in the right hands. But newbies are rarely the right hands. They simply don’t know the questions to ask themselves before they rush to flash their credit cards.  The products are hyped, for sure, and make wild promises that reality usually falls short of, but they are not completely dishonest. What they ARE is sold to the wrong people.

Unfortunately for newbies, they are usually the easiest people to sell stuff to because they’re keen, filled with enthusiasm and are desperate to break free of whatever it is that they see Internet marketing as the answer to.

Newbies are ripe pickings. And they fall into the newbie trap every single day.

What, then, is the problem? If the products are only guilty of a bit of hype and are not, strictly speaking, telling lies about their profit potential, why do almost all newbies who buy them fail?

The answer is simple – and yet, one of the most complex things that you’ll have to learn as your Internet marketing business grows – if it will grow.

It is that however good your niche website is, however packed with saleable products your storefront is, however many other people are claiming thousands of dollars in sales, nothing will happen for YOU unless you can master the art of bringing traffic to your site.

That’s the problem. I can sell you the best looking storefront right now and fill it with dozens of hot, in-demand products. All you’d have to do is sign up and upload it to your computer. Easy. A child of five could do it. But unless you can get a steady stream of people to visit your site – and more, a steady stream of people who are pre-motivated to buy whatever it is you’re selling – then you’re wasting your time. You’ve been sold a pup.

Think of it like this… Look at any High Street. Some shops there will succeed and some will fail. But if someone were to open a store in a narrow side street, a couple of blocks away from the main shopping area, how long do you think they’d survive? Not long – unless they can find some way to make people know they are there and want what they are selling enough to make the detour.

That is the newbie trap: the promise of potential returns from a usually large initial investment (and often an ongoing monthly fee) that can only be realized by people with enough experience to understand how to generate hot, hungry traffic. And that’s something 99% of newbies just don’t know yet.

There is, of course, a degree of caveat emptor (buyer beware) in all these things. But the excitement of the promise and the hype of the sales letter often manage to turn the most conservative of spenders into rabid, mouth-frothing hopefuls. ‘This one MUST work for me!’

Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you read and understand what I’m saying here, you’ll save a lot of money. More importantly, I hope you’ll stay in the game long enough to learn the skills you need to make such investments worthwhile.

I see too many people crash and burn – disillusioned because their thousand dollar investment doesn’t work for them.  Getting traffic can be complicated when you are starting out and getting buyers to visit your sites is doubly so. But once you’ve learned the principles you’ll have a skill that will ensure you’ll never starve.

We’ll look at some basic traffic-generation principles next time.

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Part 6: DNS Settings – making your domain and your hosting account work together.

Having bought both a domain name and a hosting account, the next step of the process is to connect the two together.

That entails changing the domain’s DNS setting.

Whoa! Is that techie jargon creeping in?

A bit – but let me explain.

When you type a website URL into a browser, you use an address like http://www.kickstartdaily.com

That’s a nice, easy to use URL that we humans can understand, but computers work a bit differently. They prefer to look stuff up in databases.

So when you type that URL and click on enter, your browser sends a message to a special computer called a nameserver that looks up kickstartdaily.com and tells where on the Internet it can be found.

When you first buy a domain, from GoDaddy or anyone else, it’s nameserver is set to point to a holding page on the domain registrar’s server, but that’s not much good to us. We want to point our domain name to our own hosting account.

When you buy a hosting account, the company (Hostgator, in the case of today’s example) sends you an email giving you their nameserver address.

It will look something like ns322.somename.com

Make a note of it because you now have to go back to your domain registrar (GoDaddy or Namecheap or whoever you registered your domain with) and plug that new nameserver address in.

This is one of those things that is dead easy to show you, but complicated to describe in text. So here is a fast 3 minute video: http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video3/

This video shows the process at GoDaddy – but all domain registrars are similar.

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