If you’re a domain collector, webtrepreneur, blogger, or just about anyone these days, you need a cool domain name.  Today is your lucky day!  Godaddy.com has partnered with Buy.com to offer you a FREE domain name.  All you have to do is make a purchase at Buy.com and select a checkbox to add the free domain to your cart.

I recommend that you jump on this opportunity today.  Domain names are a competitive business and GoDaddy is the best in the bunch offering options for all TLD’s: .com, .net, .org, .us, and even the brand new .me domain.  Chances are that this deal is for a free .com, but still, GoDaddy is awesome.  Get to it and buy something from Buy.com to get your free domain!

Not sure what a domain name is?  Check this out this intro:

Domain Names

The main purpose of a domain name is to provide symbolic representations, i.e., recognizable names, to mostly numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource (e.g., website) to be moved to a different physical location in the address topology of the network, globally or locally in an intranet, in effect changing the IP address. This translation from domain names to IP addresses (and vice versa) is accomplished with the global facilities of Domain Name System (DNS).

By allowing the use of unique alphabetical addresses instead of numeric ones, domain names allow Internet users to more easily find and communicate with web sites and any other IP-based communications services. The flexibility of the domain name system allows multiple IP addresses to be assigned to a single domain name, or multiple domain names to be services from a single IP address. This means that one server may have multiple roles (such as hosting multiple independent websites), or that one role can be spread among many servers. One IP address can also be assigned to several servers, as used in anycast networking.

Convinced now?  Get your free domain name today with Buy.com and Godaddy.com!

I think that it is good practice to sometimes look back at your work and see where you can improve. Be reviewing and revising, you can often find various opportunities to significantly improve your work, which will in turn make you better at whatever it is that you do.

It is in the spirit of reviewing and revising that I came up with the idea for this post. I hope that you can find some insight to help you make your blog better. The better your blog is, the higher the likelyhood that you’ll be successful.  The focus of this post is on domain names.
Domain Names

Back in October of last year, I did a series on this blog called “Internet Marketing 101″. The second part of the series was all about domain names. Domain names are very important for your business and if you don’t yet have one, I recommend that you go to GoDaddy.com right now and purchase one. Domain mames, in short, are important for 3 reasons:

1. Professional. If you plan on making money from your website or blog, you should definitely plan on buying a domain name. When you buy a domain name, it lets your visitors know that you’re serious about blogging. It shows other bloggers that you mean business and it also adds credibility to your site. Often times when I surf the web for content and ideas, I’ll find something meaningful on other people’s blogs. However, I hardly ever pay too much attention to those blogs hosted on sites like Blogspot or other freebies. These sites are nice for communicating with your friends, but in all honestly, they’re not good for business.
2. Personal. When you buy a domain name, you have a lot of room to be creative. You can express your interests and even brand your blog by its domain. Take this blog, for example. This site is about learning to make money online, so my domain name is “LearnHow2Earn.com”. I think that this address is professional and personal. In addition to adding credibility and creativity to my site, it makes it easier for others to remember (which is my point #3).
3. Memorable. Probably one of the most important reasons to buy a domain name is so that others can remember where and how to find you. With a site name that resides on another domain, there are too many dots and slashes to remember, and most people won’t. When you have your own professional, personal domain name, people will remember you more easily.

So, sit down with some paper and a pencil for about 20 minutes and think about as many domain names as you can.  Write them all down, and go do something else for 10 minutes.  Come back to your list and start eliminating those you don’t think are very good anymore.  Take another quick breather and repeat until you have 10 domain names left.  At this point, rank your choices 1-10 and head on over to GoDaddy.com to see which ones are available.  Start with your #1 choice and work your way down the list.  If you’re unfortunate enough to have none of your top 10 choices still available, rinse and repeat.  Try some variations, like using dashes or periods in the domain name.  Good luck and get down to business!

This is the third in a series entitled Internet Marketing 101. This series focuses on the basics of Internet Marketing; it will cover the basic pre-requisites to creating an income online and will outline all of the basics steps required to get started. This is a 5 part series and the five parts are: finding your interests, selecting and buying a domain name, selecting and finding a web host, joining affiliate programs, and building your website.

Part 3: Selecting a Web Host

Up to this point in the series, I have talked to you about the importance of working with something about which you are passionate and also how to select a good domain name for your new idea. This post is dedicated to a very subjective and somewhat expensive topic of website building, and that is web hosting. Finding a solid, reliable, supportive and feature-rich web host is not an easy task. There are hundreds (or thousands?) of hosting companies available and their features and costs are all over the map.

What are some features that you should look for when shopping for a web host? In my opinion, you need an uptime guarantee. To me, nothing less than 99% is satisfactory. My previous web host went down very often and it was extremely frustrating, especially when writing a post or working on development projects. In addition to uptime, you can use the following criteria to evaluate web hosts:

Storage Space

Traffic Allowance

Number of Add-on Domains

Number of Databases Allowed

Control Panel Functionality

Before we get to my hosting comparison table, I want to stress once again the importance of spending a few extra bucks on a solid web host. Think of it in terms of money in your pocket versus money not in your pocket. If your web host goes down often, you will lose a lot of money. The extra few dollars that you spend on a quality host is worth every penny in the long run. In addition, Google’s crawlers may try to crawl your site at a time when your site is down and the result is negative in your search engine ranking.

Note that this table was compiled over a few days and the prices and features may have changed.

Now go get a web host. If you don’t like any of the options that I’ve provided, go to Google and search for another web host. No matter which one you end up buying, the basics are all the same and we’ll meet again in the next article to start selecting products to sell.

This is the second in a series entitled Internet Marketing 101. This series focuses on the basics of Internet Marketing; it will cover the basic pre-requisites to creating an income online and will outline all of the basics steps required to get started. This is a 5 part series and the five parts are: finding your interests, selecting and buying a domain name, selecting and finding a web host, joining affiliate programs, and building your website.

Part 2: Selecting and Buying a Domain Name

Have you been a good student? In part 1, I concluded with asking you to sit and think about specific things that you find interesting in the world. Hopefully you were able to write down your list and think about what you wrote down so that you could find one thing with which you would be passionate about working. So get your list and let’s get started.

I’m here to tell you something that you may find discouraging but if you’ve been online long enough, you will think it is expected. All the good domain names dealing with your topics have probably already been purchased. Unless you have a topic so specific and original, you will find at least a little frustration in this part of the lesson.

Now that you have been warned, head on over to your favorite domain registrar (I recommend Godaddy.com) and start searching for domain. Here are some strategies:

• Try to find good .com domain names. If .com domains are absolutely not available, look for .net or .org domains.
They are cheap but are not good for your profit potential.
• It’s OK to use dashes in your domain name. If www.widgetfactory.com is taken, try www.widget-factory.com.
• Get a domain name that is relevant to your product. Don’t get the domain www.oil.com if you are promoting water.

That’s all there is to buying domain names. You will probably find that you’ll need to spend more than 30 seconds finding and buying your domain, but I encourage you to sit back and relax. You will find something good. Get a thesaurus if you need to and look for alternate words that can help you.

Now you have a domain name but nowhere to host it. In the next article, I will help you figure out what is important in a web host and show you which features to seek out when shopping for a host.