Domain Name: Why Do You Need One Anyway?

I come across sites all the time that are obviously hosted for free. Why obviously? Because they have no domain. Having no domain can cost you big time.

You have taken the time to put together a great website. You have collected pictures, designed or bought a nifty template, and filled it with great text. Your website is ready to go. Everything looks great - until you decide to host your site on a free hosting account provided by your ISP. Big mistake.

Having no domain name is no big deal if all that you will ever do with the website is post family pictures. A domain name is mandatory though, if you plan to do business online. If you don't take your business seriously, why should anyone else?

Domain names build trust in your website visitors

One of the biggest barriers to doing business online is the lack of face to face communication. When people can't look into your eyes and size you up in person, they are slower to trust you. In the absence of being able to talk face to face, your website and everything about it, communicates trust, or the lack thereof.

Registering a domain name is an important first step to building the trust your visitor has in you and your company. Always keep in mind that trust is much easier to lose than it is to build in the first place. It takes a long time to build trust but it takes no time at all to destroy it.

Domain names are portable

When you go with a generic website address from your ISP, the few dollars you save per year are far less costly than the lack of mobility to you get with a free website address. You may have hopes that your part time web project will one day lead to a full time income. When you have a free website address, you are stuck to that ISP. In contrast, when you own a domain name, you can take your domain name to any web hosting company you choose.

As the traffic to your website builds and your website climbs in the search listings, changing its name later is impossible without taking a big traffic hit. When you have a domain name however, changing hosts will have very little effect on your traffic. This is even more important if your website is suddenly hit with a major increase in traffic. You may need to change web hosts but if you don't have a domain name, that traffic may disappear. On top of that, if you start using too much bandwidth on your free hosting account, your provider will most likely pull the plug.

Domain names make it easier for your prospects to email you

When you have a domain name, it looks more professional. Having an email like jack@yourdomain.com looks far better and is easier to remember than jack.lastname@yourisp.com. Easier for your prospect translates into more money earned for you.

Domain name registration is a no brainer and something you should do right away.

Joe Duchesne is president of Yowling. Business web hosting and domain registration are two of the services they offer. Reprint freely as long as you keep both clickable links found in this resource box.

Do-It-Yourself Free Reverse Cell Phone Lookup Search Strategy Revealed

Although there are many services online that can provide you with access to detailed telephone databases to assist you with conducting reverse cell phone lookup searches, these services are rarely free. To get the information you're after, you will normally end up paying a fee per search or a one-time fee to access databases and tools.

There is, however, an insider trick to conducting your own free reverse cell phone lookup searches. Grab your pen and paper and follow along with me using the number you need to trace as we walk through this exercise.

If you're like most citizens of this great planet, you probably visit Google, Yahoo or some other search engine on a daily basis (if not daily, at least several times per week). These search engines roam the Internet constantly indexing new websites and web pages into their vast databases. You can harness the power of Google's search database to conduct your own free reverse cell phone number search.

Everyday, people all over the Internet unknowingly make their unlisted phone numbers and cell phone numbers publicly available over the Internet. How do they do this? Maybe they lost a dog or they're trying to sell a car and they take out a classified ad in their local newspaper. Most newspapers nowadays publish their entire paper, including the classified section, on their websites. If the person buying the ad put their cell phone or unlisted phone number in the ad, there is a high probability that phone number is now available to search.

In addition to newspaper classifieds, people also use their cell phone numbers when they register on websites, participate in message boards and many other online endeavors. Each time they put their number down, a search engine spider is going to find it!

How does this help you and your free reverse cell phone search? Take the phone number you're searching for and input it into the search box on your favorite search engine. Remember to try the different variations people use for phone numbers. For example, some people write their phone number in a format like 555-555-5555 while others will put it down as 555.555.5555. There are many, and I do mean many, ways people will format their phone numbers.

Try these different variations into the search engine. Try it with and without quotation marks as this will sometimes help you get better search results. In our tests, this strategy works about 40-50 percent of the time, although it often takes quite a bit of time to consider all of the variations a person may put their phone number down in.

Once you get a hit on the number, your next step is to investigate the website you found it on to see if it offers any clues to the cell phone number owner's identity. Sometimes all you will find is the actual number listed and you're back to where you started. Other times you'll get only a first name and no last name.

Sometimes you hit the jackpot and get the full name, address and more of the owner. Like I mentioned earlier, it can take hours to get to this point. If you don't have hours to invest in conducting your own free reverse cell phone lookup, I suggest considering one of the other services available to make your search faster.

Chad Kiser runs the popular Reverse Cell Phone Look up Guide. Would you like more information on the free reverse cell phone lookup technique mentioned in the article above? Visit ReverseCellPhoneLookup.biz today for quick tips and resources for conducting your own searches!

Dreamweaver: How to Publish Files Using FTP

Before you can publish in Dreamweaver, you must set up a "home base" folder where your website will live on the local hard drive of your computer. Once this is in place, you can use Dreamweaver's FTP feature to "get" and "put" the HTML files from your local folder to the remote server. Here's how to set it up for a BASIC website that does not include PHP, .asp or any "dynamic" elements.

Open Dreamweaver.

Go to the top menu and click SITE, then NEW SITE

The prompt will ask you for a name. Name it "Whatever Your Site's Name Is" (you can space this - it's like a title bar, not a domain.)

Next Prompt: Do you want to work with a server technology?

Your Answer: NO

Next Prompt, Question 1: How do you want to work with your files?

Your Answer: Option 1

Question 2: Where on your computer do you want to store your files?

Your Answer: (Here, you will set up a folder hierarchy. Your heirarchy might be, C:/Your Websites/Name of Website

Next Prompt: How do you connect to your remote server?

Your Answer: FTP

Now it will ask you the following questions:

What is the hostname or FT address of your Web server?

Your Answer: This will vary. Typically, it's ftp.whateveryourwebsitenameis.com (starts with ftp, a period, and then a domain name dot-com. The domain name could be your own domain name, or it may also be the domain name of your hosting provider. You may want to search for the term 'FTP' in your host's help instructions so you know exactly what address to enter here.)

What folder on your server do you want to store your files in?

Your Answer: typically the answer to this is htdocs, but you have to figure out where your main HTML files are stored on your server. (I know that in Earthlink the folder is called webdocs).

What is your FTP login:

Your Answer: whatever your website login is

What is your FTP password:

Your Answer: whatever your password is

Now check off "save" and then click TEST CONNECTION to make sure you're hooked up. If you can't connect, recheck the above information and repeat the process.

Next Prompt: Do you want to enable checkin and checkout?
Your Answer: NO

(This is up to you. If you have multiple designers on your team, then checkin and checkout could be a good way of preventing file versions accidentally overriding each other. If you work alone, just say NO.)

Note:

If you screw this up for some reason or want to change anything, go back up to the top menu, click SITES again and select EDIT. you'll see the name of your website (whatever you named it in Step 1) listed and you can repeat this same process.

To use the FTP in Dreamweaver, just go to the far right hand window where it says DESIGN, CODE, APPLICATION, FILES all stacked vertically. Hit the arrow where FILES is located to open up the little FILES window.

Note: if you don't see any far right window, you may have chosen the alternate view when you first launched the program. In this case, go to the TOP MENU BAR and click SITE and then SITE FILES. A floating window should open up that you can drag anywhere beside your main window.

In the FILES window, you'll see a little pulldown menu where you can opt to view your server files.

Next to that pulldown is another pulldown menu that says REMOTE VIEW. By default, you're looking at the server (as opposed to your local computer folders, which is another choice in this pulldown).

Just beneath the word FILE in that FTP window, you see a little icon that looks like a plug with a black dot next to it (far left). Click that and it'll "connect" you and the dot will turn green, for "GO Dreamweaver!"

To open a file from your desktop, mouse away from the FTP window and go to the *usual* place in any program where you'd open a file. (Top menu bar, far left, FILE.)

Open the file from the folder where it's located on your computer. Edit the file.

When you're done editing the file, go back to the FTP window on the right, that you just set up. Make sure you're connected (that dot next to the plug doohickey should be green. If it's black, click the plug icon again to connect).

To transfer the file from your local desktop to the remote server, do this:

Mouse away from the FTP window again, and back to your open file. Focus your gaze TOP CENTER. Next to the TITLE bar there are two arrows, a green "down arrow" and a blue "up arrow."
To PUT the file on the remote FTP server, click the BLUE UP ARROW.

(The blue UP arrow stands for PUT or PUBLISH from your computer to FTP server)

(The green DOWN arrow stands for GET or retrieve your file from the FTP server to your computer)

Later on, you may want to open the file directly from the FTP server and edit it.

So, go to the FTP window and click the icon to connect to your server again. The list of files should appear.

Find the name of the file you want to edit, and while still in that mini File window, click the name of the file once (to highlight). Then click 'FILE' and 'OPEN'. (this is all done in the little FTP window, not the main window).

Now your file will open up in the main (big) window. Edit it, and then click that BLUE ARROW by the center TITLE BAR to PUT or publish it again.

NOTE: if you click the blue arrow located in the little FTP window, it will PUT the ENTIRE SITE from your desktop to your server.

If you've already edited and put some files but not others, this will mess your stuff up royally. Why?

Because it'll take the files from your computer and replace the "most updated files on your remote server" with the old ones from your local folder, thereby deleting your work. I have done this by accident and it is no fun.

If you know that all the files on your server are the *correct* ones but the ones on your desktop are the *old* ones, you can *get* the files from the server by clicking the GREEN DOWN arrow in the little FTP window on the right.

This will replace every file on your hard drive with the same named files from your server.

If you royally mess up something, but as you remember it, the last file that you PUT (or published) is still live on the web, you can type in that file name in your internet browser and then do a VIEW SOURCE, copy the HTML code, and paste that back into the file on your hard drive, Save, and then PUT it again.

Generally, it's a good idea to work from your local folders and then PUT the entire site (in the FTP window) all at once. But I am a jerk and I don't do it that way.

Good luck, and happy FTPing, getting and putting!

Copyright 2006 Dina Giolitto, Wordfeeder.com Copywriting and Marketing Services for the Web

Liked this article? Have more of the same emailed to your inbox each month. Sign up for the Copywriting and Marketing Ezine from Dina at Wordfeeder.com and learn to write search engine friendly web copy and market your web based business for free.

Setting Up an E-store

E-stores are the newest craze to hit the internet. Suddenly everyone is starting their own and some major companies, like Amazon and Ebay, are making it even easier to get started in ecommerce by offering ready-made e-stores. This means that you need to make sure you set your store up correctly and in a way that it will stand out from the crowd. Here exactly how to do that:

First, you need an excellent product. Don't choose something that everyone else is already selling! You are looking for a niche market, something specific and popular, without the market being overrun. A good example would be pet accessories. Coats and jewelry for cats and dogs is a big thing these days, and while some competition will always exist, it is a fairly untapped market.

Once you have your product, you need a very good store. The best way to stand out from the competition is to not use a template. Instead of going with a standard setup like Ebay offers, you will be much better off designing your own e-store. Customizing colors and design just takes a little know-how that you can easily learn online or hire someone to do.

Keeping your store looking neat and clean, without excess graphics, and with a memorable logo, is a good way to keep visitors on your site. Fast loading pages will help, as well. Make all your information easily available and keep everything within two clicks of your home page, with a standard navigation bar available on all pages for easy access to everything. People like easy to navigate websites and will usually stay longer on such sites.

It doesn't have to be that complicated to set up a method of payment. There are plenty of payment services that offer merchant accounts and all you have to do is add the HTML buttons to your website so your customers can buy your products through an online shopping cart.

You will also want to invest in a good domain name. While the ideal domain name would be your e-store name that might not always be possible to find. Look for something that uses your main keywords if your title isn't available. Keep it to a maximum of 3 words long to make it an easy to remember URL and try for a .com ending as most people tend to remember that more than any other ending.

Now you have your store, your product and your domain name, all that remains is to promote. That is a whole other article!

Michael D. Copper Your Online Business Coach [http://www.course-internet-marketing.com]

I've been involved with online and offline business since 1990, my expertise is in marketing and sales, and now offering an online business coaching program associated with David Vallieres. The name of the online course is “Think and Succeed Training Program,” in other words; if you want to make money online, or desire to succeed in a full time online business, then we are here to help you think it through to a successful venture. If you want to succeed in your online business then consider our course, to receive more informatin go our web site. [http://www.course-internet-marketing.com]

Beating Junk E-Mail 101

If you've ever opened your email application to see that you have hundreds of new messages in just a day or two, you know what it is like to be hit by email spam. Spam isn't just a big waste of space in your email account. It is annoying to wade through all those emails. Even more importantly, the sheer volume of viagra, porn, I'm the King of Siam's uncle and need you to move money for me, etc. emails makes missing an important email from an actual customer or the boss a lot more likely. If you happen to work for someone who isn't technologically savvy, you could even get in trouble for getting spam mail. Your boss may be under the impression that you had to visit 50 porn sites and sign up for their email lists to get all of this junk mail in your inbox. Stop the bombardment of spam mail before the little "you've got mail" tune going off every three seconds drives you to resort to pen and paper for your business correspondance or ruins your boss's opinion of your work ethic. Get some anti spam software.

For the few people who never fill out online forms, don't let friends or family know their email address and rarely send or receive email, this may sound downright silly. However, anyone who has had to deal with spam knows that a grown man may be tempted to break down and cry after wading through 200 emails that sound like they might be important, only to find that he is being encouraged to buy shares of some odd stock or see some movie star's compromising photos. As you think about this rather depressing cycle of spam deletion, you are probably starting to wonder if there is any hope or if you should just try to cram your computer down the garbage disposal. Luckily, there is help for people who are overwhelmed by spam mail - anti spam software.

Of course, you won't be able to find anti spam software that is perfect. Despite your best efforts, there will be some mail trickling in that you don't want to see because spammers spend every waking minute trying to figure out new ways to ruin your productivity and sneak past the barriers. They hack into email accounts, send email from fake email addresses using reputable domain names, send emails that look like actual articles with the spammy word hyphenated, misspelled, or disguised in some other way in the body of the text, or come up with some other new solution to circumvent that sanity saving anti spam software.

However, without anti spam software, you are wide open to attack from spammers. It is well worth the money to buy a good anti spam software to free up a bit of time. After all, you have anti-virus, spyware and firewall software on your computer, right? (The correct answer is yes. Otherwise spammers are soon going to be the least of your problems as your computers are hacked and infected right and left.) Spam is here to stay and who wants to spend an hour or two a day fighting it? If you think an hour or two a day isn't that big a deal, think about how many years you plan to read email each day and multiply that by 365. How many hours of your life will you be throwing away on spam because you didn't invest in anti spam software? In 10 years, you could have recovered a mindboggling 3,650 hours. Imagine what amazing new skill you could have developed if you used that time to learn a hobby.

If you are still on the fence, think about this - what else gives you a time savings of at least 75% on a task for under $40? Don't forget the number of hours you are regaining. Multiply them by your hourly pay rate and you are also looking at an incredible financial return on the investment in anti spam software.

Sick of an inbox filled with ads for viagra, lottery winnings and junk you just don't want. Do you want to know how to stop spam mail? We can help! Click on over to www.cpusecurity.com

10 Ways to Stop Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, and EarthLink from Stealing Money from Your Business

How many of you are still using Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL or EarthLink to send email on behalf of your business? How many of you are actually paying both AOL and EarthLink every month to send email to your prospects and current customers? Did you know that every time you send an email using these services you are literally allowing them to take money away from your business? Please don't get me wrong, I too have used and still use some of these services but I never use them for my business. I use my business email address (jeffb@2thenextlevel.com) for communication, correspondence and marketing. The minute I hit "send," not only do I get to put my company name in someone's email box but I also give them a way to get back to my website for additional information on my company--and the possibility of a sale.

Your email address has become a major form of both marketing and branding. So much so that when you send it out to multiple people in the form of an offer you have for your goods or services your company name could be read by millions. So, why would you allow Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL or EarthLink to get all the credit. These email services already have millions upon millions of customers. Yet you have been letting them take precious marketing and branding dollars right out of your pocket. Every time you send that email you're giving them a free marketing opportunity to your prospects and customers. Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL and Earthlink all love it when you decide to start a business and use their email address. It does not matter if you choose a name like mybusinessname@aol.com, you are still giving AOL the ultimate way to market their service.

Ok so now you know what you should not do. Now here are the steps involved in what you should do.

Step 1: Go quickly to a website like proemailaddress.com and register a domain name for your business. If you can't get your exact business name try and get the domain name of what you specialize in: ex. Wesellrestaurants.com, or how your product delivers performance: ex. Thechaindrive.com

Step 2: In doing the search and then registration of a domain name, try your best to get a ".com" name. ".com" is still the most popular and the most recognized. If you cannot get ".com" go for ".net" and last but not least, ".biz".

Step 3: Get an email package that will supply you with at least 5 email addresses to start. Get more if you have more people in your company, but 5 email addresses are enough for most small businesses.

Step 4: The two most important email addresses are yourname@yourbusiness.com and info@yourbusiness.com. yourname@yourbusiness.com should go on every marketing piece you give out. This includes your business card, brochure, letterhead and fax coversheet. Try not to put yourname@yourbusiness.com on your website. Use info@yourbusiness.com for this purpose instead. This info email will be your catch-all email address. This will cut down on the amount of spam you would receive at yourname@yourbusiness.

Step 5: Send a change of email address letter informing all your customers that have been using your old Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, and EarthLink that you now have a new email address and the old one will no longer be in use. One of the best ways to do this is to use a service like Plaxo.com. Plaxo.com will help you send out the latest information on you and your business via email.

Step 6: Use the auto response or vacation response feature on your old Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, and EarthLink email to inform those that are still sending email to you that you have changed your email address to yourname@yourbusinessname.com Make sure you inform them that they should now use your new yourname@yourbusinessname.com email from now on and that your old email address will only be checked once a week for the next 30 days.

Step 7: Create a signature line at the end of your new yourname@yourbusinessname.com again informing those who had your Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, and EarthLink of your new email address and to update their spam filters with the change.

Step 8: If you are having problems in keeping up with your email list and want to send out broadcast emails more efficiently, consider using a third party email distribution service like Constant Contact or Broadcast Email Expert.

Step 9: Use the message on your voicemail to remind those that call you that you now have a new email address and/or website. Give them a choice to leave a message or send an email to your new email address.

Step 10: Finally for those of you who use AOL and EarthLink you may decide to cancel these accounts so you can save money. Since Yahoo, MSN, and Hotmail are free you may decided to keep these accounts--but again you should not use them for business purposes. Keep these email accounts for personal use only, and bring more money to your business by bringing more people to your website using
"yourname@yourbusinessname.com"

Jeffrey Alexander Brathwaite, aka "JB" is an Internet Technology Coach, Speaker, Trainer and Broadcast Email Expert. JB prides himself on helping small to medium size businesses that are frustrated with dealing with the Internet. If you are having problems trying to deal with Email marketing and distribution, Search Engine marketing or just getting your own website off the ground the right way. Please go to our website http://www.2thenextlevel.com

Using WordPress Theme Templates to Build Political Campaign Websites

It wasn't long ago that candidates running for local office had to pay a lot of money to professional website development companies if they wanted an impressive political campaign site to showcase their candidacy. Today, though, any candidate can create and manage their own campaign website with WordPress, a free content management program.

WordPress started out as a platform used mainly for blogging, but it has evolved into the program of choice for many businesses, non-profit organizations, online newspapers and magazines, too. And yes, plenty of political campaign candidates use WordPress for their election websites, as well, since it is so easy to learn and use.

WordPress allows you to choose from thousands of themes, or templates, to apply to your website and change its overall look and design. WordPress themes are easy to install with the click of a button, and they require no knowledge of advanced programming or HTML in order to use.

There are many options to choose from for political campaign WordPress theme templates, and more are being developed and designed every year. In order to use WordPress for your campaign site, you will need to sign up with a web hosting company (the cost is minimal, often no more than ten dollars a month). After you have purchased your domain name, you can then install WordPress on the domain server and will be supplied with a username and password for the administration panel.

Many WordPress themes allow you to change the website banner, fonts, color scheme and even font style on your new site. In order to find a template that is perfect for your political campaign, some quick search engine research will show you dozens of different sites that allow you to download free WordPress themes.

Remember: there's no reason to pay a website design company hundreds or thousands of dollars to create a political campaign site for you! With a little research, you can create your own candidate election site in your spare time using WordPress.

Download our FREE WordPress Political Campaign Theme to create a your own great campaign website!

Four Simple Ways You Can Create a Website Today

The popularity of websites and the need for almost everybody to have one today really necessitated lots of programmers to keep churning out awesome software that can do the job easily. It is uncommon that much new website creation software hit the market monthly and these are continually being updated. What this means is that if you find software that can help to at least create basic website, be sure that it will become better tomorrow because the developers will keep improving it.

The reality is that you can create a simple website in just two hours or less even if you haven't used computer before if you use some of the simple software that are readily and easily available.

A. There is some software that is editing in nature and has simple and easy versions that resemble word-processing programs. You can practically do anything you like such as installing a header banner, columns and side panels of any size and shape by simply clicking and dragging methods. These kinds of editing programs even make it very easy for anybody to integrate forms, PayPal, site checking, ordering, easy 'preview' and 'publishing' functions as well as SEO features. These are quite user-friendly and don't require any form of FTP or HTML knowledge. You can easily get any these programs online now and start creating a simple website the next minute or you may still 'off-the-shelf' website building stuff or package from some of the offline computer shops.

B. There are also the 'Quick Build' template manners of website creation. If you are really in hurry and desire to have your website created very fast, you can settle for the free website templates and simply fix your graphics and add your copies. These templates are limiting in some ways because some of them may not allow you to add the themes you like and change some of the areas you don't like and FTP or HMTL knowledge isn't required too. The good thing about the 'template sites' is that almost all of them have website templates that are ready to go. They are usually set up as 'workable sites' and would simply go live on the internet soon as you click publish. You can do a simple search on the internet now to discover lots of them.

C. You may opt to look for a 'step-by-step' website building video training. It isn't always easy to get the best of video trainings because lots of them doesn't give as much quality training as they claim but if you really search well online, you will get the very best. The best website creating creation video training will ordinarily explain every thing you need like the best programs and how to use them. They will go further by recommending domain name and reliable web hosting service you can use.

D. Host and domain name companies also offer some website building trainings. You may have seen their adverts in many places online. Some of hosting companies try to retain their customer and shelve them from competitors by offering them 'in-house' do it your self videos. Watching any of the easy-to-implement process will help anyone to create good and simple website in less than two hours.

Dhruv Patel is an affiliate marketer. He is a happy DreamHost customer and recommends DreamHost to any body who wants to host a web site. He has created a site to help DreamHost customers.

If you are not an existing customer of DreamHost and want to sign up with DreamHost, use DreamHost Coupons to get a discount.

If you are an existing customer and have any issue with DreamHost account, simply contact him using the "Contact Us" link on his site and he will help you in solving your issue.