Seminars are almost always great places to go – if only for the netwoking opportunities. The people you meet are always the high spot, but this time the speakers were top-notch as well. There were loads of them (including your’s truly) but for me, an American chap called Sterling Valentine really stood out. He had some great things to share and I recommend you look him up.

Thinking back to some of the personal stories that the successful speakers shared from the stage, there is one theme that keeps coming up. The people are different and the words describing their situations are different, but when you boil it all down, the people who are now enjoying success almost all went through a similar journey:

1. They were struggling in their lives. Some were flat broke and desperate, some were stressed to the max and at their wits’ end, some were on the verge of complete meltdown. Even allowing for a certain amount of poetic license in the stories told, the recurring theme is that their lives were way less than great and they were trapped.

2. They all tried everything. Or thought they did. They worked several jobs (if they had jobs) and flitted from one scheme to another.

3. Even when they discovered Internet marketing and saw the potential, they found it impossible to focus. Time and again we heard stories of people trying this, and failing, trying that, and failing, and then trying anything else that caught their attention. And failing.

4. Despite their phenomenal lack of success making money online, each and every one of them (and I’m including myself in the group too) absolutely knew – and I mean *knew* at a molecular level – that Internet marketing was real, making money online was possible and success was just a matter of putting the jigsaw pieces in their right places.

5. Success came *only* when, for whatever reason (everyone has their own reason) these people stopped chasing every rainbow and started focusing on creating a business. It came when they realized, at a deep level, that you fly higher and faster on a rocket that is blasting towards a target than on a balloon that is drifting in the breeze.

Everyone had their own solutions, strategies and skills, and each speaker was naturally ‘selling’ his or her own methods. But underneath it all, they were all saying the same thing: stop drifting, stop working hard at achieving nothing, stop being distracted. And learn to focus. You have no idea how much you can achieve if you only make a plan and follow it to the end.

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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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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!’

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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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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Q. 1: “How come the $24.95 Reseller plan gives 24gb of webspace and 250gb of bandwidth but the much cheaper $7.95 ‘Baby’ plan gives 600gb of webspace and a massive 6000gb of bandwidth? Is it is mistake on Hostgator’s web site?”

It did seem odd, but although I thought I knew the answer I asked Hostgator for myself. Their 24/7 live chat facility is very efficient and I had a detailed answer in seconds.

Here is what they said (paraphrased): “The Reseller plans are more expensive (and offer less in the way of storage and bandwidth) because they are intended for people who want to sell hosting solutions to their own clients. The Reseller plans include a lot of extra software and backend support for the reselling functions that are not included in the cheaper general hosting plans. In addition, the Reseller plans allow each domain hosted to have its own CPanel, whereas the general hosting plans administer all domains through one CPanel.”

The support operative then went on to confirm that yes, the low cost Baby plan is the best choice for a person who simply wants to host multiple domains and does not wish to resell hosting plans themselves.

So there you have it – save yourself money and opt for the cheaper – and far better value Baby plan. With 600gb at your disposal you’ll be able to host more websites that you’ll ever be likely to need.
Q. 2: “I just tried to buy the Hostgator Baby Plan but instead of being charged $7.95, I was charged $9.95. Is that right, and why the difference?”

I like Hostgator, and have most of my domains hosted with them, but I don’t like the way they (or a lot of other big companies) quote prices. There is a word missing on their price list: ‘from’.

If you buy the plan and pay for three years up front, then yes, it works out to the equivalent of paying $7.95 per month. But if you actually choose to pay monthly, then the price is $9.95 per month.

Clear? I don’t think so, and I wish they would express it differently. But the reality is that at $9.95 per month this is a great bargain.

Okay, I’m going to buy a Hostgator Baby Plan right now to use with the domain we bought in session three: www.imkickstart.com. I’ll video the process, so let’s hope it is as easy as I remember!

#~#~#

I’ve made a quick video showing the process – but rather than show it here (it is very straightforward) I’ll just put it on the blog for this course when it is set up.

The only thing that confused me, was that I thought the purchase process was finished, and went off to wait for a confirmation email, but nothing arrived. A quick chat with the livechat support person told me that I had needed to log into the Hostgator billing website to pay my invoice – something that for some reason hadn’t happened in the normal run of the sale.

Whether that was my mistake or their system, I really don’t know, but sorting it out took only a couple of minutes and all now seems to be fine.

HostGator: http://www.urlnex.us/hostgator/

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Those of us who take these things for granted often make the basic mistake of forgetting that that phrase might as well be written in ancient Egyptian for all the sense it makes to many people.

Hopefully the video (and text) in session 3 of this course explained about domain names and how to go about getting one, but what about hosting?

What is hosting?

Let’s start at the very beginning and explain what hosting is.

‘Hosting’ refers to a place where you can store all the files that make up your website, and where people who wish to view it can safely be allowed to enter.

In theory, you *could* store all the files that make up your website on your own home computer, but there a few difficulties with that solution:

1. In order for people to be able to access your site, your computer would have to be on, and connected to the Internet, 24/7.

2. If your site became popular your Internet Service Provider would not appreciate the traffic flowing through their service. Your use of bandwidth (see below) would be inevitably high and would soon exceed what they would allow.

3. There would be security issues: visitors would be wandering around inside your personal computer.

4. If everyone served websites from their own home computers the Internet would become even more chaotic than it already is!

5. The Internet would have to know where to find your computer if someone wanted to get to your website.

All told, while possible, it isn’t a good idea.

So early on in the days of the Internet, a system was devised that made Internet sites be stored on special computers called servers. A server is a very simple computer that is ‘on’ the Internet 24/7 by very fast connections. And the location of these servers is logged – so when you type a URL into a browser, it can find the server where the website is.

In the early days, servers were expensive – at least they were too expensive for the average person building a website to need to buy. So an industry grew up whereby someone who did own a server would rent space on it for other people to use.

In other words, they ‘hosted’ your site on their server, for a monthly fee.

What kinds of hosting are there?

Every hosting company offers a wide range of services, and reading their websites can be very confusing. For our purposes though, hosting options boil down to three main types:

- Shared hosting
- Reseller hosting
- Dedicated Server

In reverse order, with dedicated server hosting you will be given a server all to yourself. Nobody else’s websites will be hosted on it. It is effectively your own private server that the hosting company maintains for you. Naturally this is an expensive option with typical monthly fees in the $170-$200 range.

You would only need dedicated hosting if you have a really big and important website, so for most of our needs it is not something to consider – yet!

Reseller hosting came about because a lot of people wanted to be able to offer hosting services themselves, but didn’t want to go the the trouble or expense of setting up a hosting company.

The hosting company rents you space on their servers in the normal way, but you can then subdivide ‘your’ space up and offer portions of it to other people – and charge them a monthly fee.

While many people don’t really want to sell hosting plans, the other big benefit of reseller hosting is that by becoming your own client, you can can host many of your own domains in the one hosting account – all accessible through a main control panel.

Costs of reseller accounts vary wildly, but two I use are fairly typical: one costs $24.95 per month and the other $34.95.

Shared hosting is the cheapest option and for beginners, the best.

For a few dollars a month (currently $4.95 with www.urlnex.us/hostgator/) you can host one domain on a server that may be filled with hundreds or even thousands of other people’s websites.

More recently, hosting companies have realized that many people own multiple domains, but have no interest or need to sell hosting themselves. For these people, the reseller account plans are overkill.

To that end, companies like Hostgator now offer shared hosting plans that allow you to host multiple domains on a single account, and these can offer incredible value.

Hostgator’s ‘Baby’ plan (go to http://www.urlnex.us/hostgator/ then click on ‘Learn more…’ in the Shared Hosting panel) is exceptional value at just $7.95 per month. You can host unlimited domains up to the very generous hosting space and bandwidth limits (see below) and the added functions and facilities are top class.

What is all this web space and bandwidth jargon?

They are only shorthand for very simple concepts.

Web hosting space (sometimes called file space) is simply the amount of hard disk space that the hosting company is renting you. If the hosting space limit is 600gb (as with Hostgator’s Baby plan) that means you can store files up to that limit. ‘Files’ means everything that you put on the server – the files that make up your website, all the images, and video you store there and so on.

If you have a hosting plan that allows unlimited domains, that 600gb has to be divided between them. While you can host as many domains as you like, they can’t, combined, exceed the web space allowance.

Bandwidth is sometimes trickier to understand, but stick with me – it is quite simple once you get the idea.

If you have a web page that is made up of files that total 25kb and 1000 people come to view it, then 25kb x 1000 (25000kb) of data has been moved. Your bandwidth allowance denotes the total amount of data that you can move in a month. As you can imagine, video, audio, and some pictures can eat up your bandwidth allowance very quickly, so before you buy hosting it is a good idea to check how much you will be allocated.

That’s it for today’s session – I hope that hosting is no longer a great mystery for you and now, when someone says ‘All you need is a domain name and hosting’ the phrase will make sense!

As always, if you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you.

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Don’t believe everything that you hear.

Internet marketing should be a relatively easy pursuit, but it is, in reality, made much more complex by the secrecy that surrounds a lot of what goes on.

* People like me are secretive about the websites we have – because we fear that others may copy our ideas.

* A lot of the time people are secretive about their real earnings – either because they aren’t making nearly as much as they like others to think, or because they don’t like to brag.

* Successful people are often secretive about their exact methods – often because they don’t want to jeopardize their forthcoming ebook launch.

* But most of all, the search engines are ultra secretive about everything. They don’t want us to know how they rank sites. They don’t want us to work out what their algorithms are. They are not above issuing false information to muddy the waters.

The search engines know only too well that if they were to be open and transparent, everyone would game the system and then their search results would be useless.

All this has meant that an industry has grown up of people who would offer their opinions as if they were secret nuggets of truth.

The purveyors of half-truths, honest misunderstandings and outright lies do so for a variety of reasons.

* Some want to be admired by others.

* Some are desperate for attention.

* Some are malicious.

* Some believe they are helping others.

* Some want to make money.

All that matters is that as far as much of what you read or hear about Internet marketing and the search engines is concerned, take it with a pinch and a half of salt.

Be very careful whose advice you follow and wherever possible, check things out for yourself.

And remember – if it sounds too easy, it probably is.

So should you listen to me?

In this course I will do my very best to tell you about things that I know are true. If I’m not sure, I’ll say so. And wherever possible I will try to check things out for myself.

But I’m not infallible and I can just as easily pass on a half truth or a misunderstanding as anyone else. I will try to avoid as many of the outright lies as I can though.

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Our subject is ‘How to buy a domain’ and rather than write a whole lot of words that won’t mean anything to many people, I’ve made a short video that shows me buying a domain that will ultimately be used as the online home of this course.

Please watch the video at http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video1/ (that’s a temporary address until the course has its own home.)

Selecting and buying the perfect domain name is really important. It is a step that many people rush over, but that can be a big mistake. Take your time and follow the sensible guidelines that are detailed here and you’ll end up with a domain name that will work for you for years to come.

* It is almost always best to buy a .com domain. Sometimes you’ll find that the perfect domain is available only as a .info or a .tv or some other suffix type. Don’t be tempted. The search engines may well rank sites that are .org or .info, but do any Google search and you’ll find that the top ten – even the top 100 listings are massively dominated by .coms.

* Try to get a domain that is as short as possible. Under 25 characters is good – but under 15 is much better.

* Wherever possible incorporate your primary keyword or your brand name into your domain.

* If the domain you are interested in isn’t available, try separating the words in it with hyphens (dashes). So, if internetmarketing.com has gone, check out internet-marketing.com. However, be aware that you could end up violating someone’s trade name if they have already built a site with the non-hyphenated domain. In that case, it is better to find something you can make uniquely your own.

* Avoid using company names like the plague. You MAY be able to find a great-sounding domain that contains the word Google, or Ebay, but don’t be surprised if you hear from their lawyers soon after you buy it.

* When you find the perfect domain, register it for a minimum of two years. The search engines have hinted that they look out for domains that are only bought for one year at a time and downgrade them as a result. Whether that is true, or misinformation I don’t know, but the extra year is a small price to pay.

* Above all – don’t delay! Even if you just register your own name, grab yourself a domain today!

I’ve written a small php script that can help you brainstorm a few domain name ideas – head on over to http://www.keywordlsispy.com/domain/ and enter your keyword.

Hopefully the subject of buying domains is clear now, but if you have any questions at all, please let me know.

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That’s where so many people fail.

You see, doing stuff is all well and good, but what if it is the wrong stuff? What if you spend all your time and a fair chunk of your money doing things, taking action and being dynamic in all the wrong places and directions?

It happens all the time.

There is a time and a place for taking action – or even taking massive action as some folks like to preach – but right now isn’t it. It isn’t even a matter of having to learn to walk before you can run. Running is a logical progression from walking but the transition from blearily looking around to walking isn’t so clear cut. First you have to learn how to open your eyes.

If you’ve been reading newsletters like Kickstart for more than five minutes, or have visited any one of the hundreds of forums or websites devoted to Internet marketing, you’ll have come across the word ‘niche’.

It is a French word that literally means a recess in a wall – a pigeonhole.

Most Americans pronounce it ‘nitch’ and pretty much everyone else pronounces it ‘neesh’.

Aside: it is odd that folks from the US ‘Americanize’ niche, but often Frenchify the word herb to ‘erb’, unlike the rest of us English speakers who pronounce the ‘h’. But I digress.

Before you can buy a domain, build a website, set up a blog, do your keyword research, write articles or any of the other things you will ultimately need to take action on, you have to know what your particular pigeonhole is going to be.

By that, I mean that you can’t just pick any old topic – your niche has to be more tightly focused than that as you’ll see shortly.

So today we are going to talk about finding your niche.

When I started out online, the experts of the day all said the same thing: find your passion and create a website about it.

The idea was that if you are passionate about model railways, you will be able to create a website that will appeal to other model railway enthusiasts. If you live and breathe collecting seashells, that’s your niche – other seashell fanatics will flock to your website.

They said that passion for a subject would give you a head start in terms of knowing the things to write about, would give your writing credibility, and most importantly, would keep you interested when your Internet marketing project became difficult.

“Everyone,” they said, “has a passion for something.”

I didn’t. I wracked my brains but there were no areas of expertise that I felt passionate enough about to want to write webpages on. At least, none that would fall into the classification of a niche. My ‘passion’ if you could call it that, was business – according to the experts, far too broad a subject to qualify as niche.

It seemed to me then – and it seems to me even more now – that the only definition of niche that really matters is that you can make money from it.

So how do you go about finding a niche that you can profit from?

We’ll get to that in a lot more detail in later articles in this series, but for now let’s take an overview.

This is my 7-point checklist for things a potentially successful niche topic should have:

* People seeking answers to specific questions

* People already making money in it

* Not too much competition for you

* Easily available content for your website

* People willing to spend money

* A narrow market that you can dominate

* It requires several words to describe

You may not need to satisfy all seven, but the more you can tick off the better your chances of success.

Are you ready for some examples?

‘Health’ is a big topic, but it is not a niche. When people search for ‘health’ they are not looking for answers to a specific question.

‘How to improve my dog’s health’ is a niche. Anyone who searches for a website with a phrase like that wants to know the answer – and is likely to be happy to pay for it.

‘Acne’ is a topic.

‘How to cure back acne in adults’ is a niche. And a potentially very profitable one at that!

‘Gardening’ is a topic.

‘How to grow soft fruit’ is a niche.

‘Recipes’ is a topic.

‘Recipes for type 2 diabetics’ is a niche.

‘Time Management’ is a topic (yes, I made the mistake of targeting a broad topic when I wrote my book), but ‘time management for teachers’ is a niche. One of many possibilities!

In later installments of The Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online’ we’ll look at how you can determine if your niche satisfies my 7-point checklist, but for now, remember that it is focus we are looking for – a narrow target market that needs the answers you can provide and is prepared to pay good money for that.

Finding your niche is the beginning of everything you do online. Without a clearly defined niche you are lost without a map. Pretty soon, finding niches that you can profit from will become second nature to you and you’ll be able to spot them from a mile away.

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In pre-Internet days, if you had a spark of entrepreneurship you had to start your own business out there in the real world. It was tough and it was expensive.

Many people made money from direct response and direct mail advertising, but the entry price was high – thousands of dollars to even test a small campaign – and the failure rate was astronomical.

Even today the number of offline startups who survive and thrive past their first year is tiny. Starting a business offline is truly for the rich and the brave.

The Internet, though, has changed all that.

Now it is possible to start a business online – that has a great chance of success – without breaking your bank, and without the risk of losing your shirt.

You can literally start an online business for the price of a domain name – less than $10 per year – and some cheap hosting ($under $5 per month).

In fact, you can even start an online business for free if you use services like Blogger.com to created your first web presence.

So how does a non-Internet-savvy person get started on the road to effortless overnight Internet riches?

Before we go any further, let’s dispel three thoughts you may be harboring:

To start with, forget the overnight part. Even though starting a business online is easy and cheap, it is still a business that needs time to build up. If you need to make money to pay this month’s bills, don’t pin all your hopes on your fledgling online business. A regular income in three to six months is doable, but three weeks is unlikely.

And put that word ‘effortless’ out of your mind. Anything worth having is worth working for, and an online business is certainly worth having. Be prepared to put in the effort and the hours. This is a business we are talking about, not a miracle!

Finally, throw out the ‘Internet riches’ dream. Sure, there are some people who make six and seven figure incomes – and there is no reason why you can’t too – but they almost never do it right from scratch. Success takes time to build up to. You might strike lucky, just as you might win the lottery, but the reality for 99% of people who set out to make a living online is that those who succeed make a living, not a fortune.

The most likely scenario is that you’ll work 12 hours a day building your online business and not see a red cent in return for several months. When income does start to flow your way, it will be small, and you’ll wonder why you are bothering. But one day, in three, six or even twelve months, you’ll look at your income from your online activities and realize that it really can be a living.

You’ll be an Internet marketer.

Still interested? Good. You just might just have what it takes.

This ‘Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online’ series of articles will walk you through the process from the very beginning. Every detail will be covered so you won’t be left scratching your head.

By the end, you will have all the knowledge and tools at your fingertips.

And if you use the knowledge and wield the tools, you will be an Internet marketer.

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