The Essential Guide to Making Money Online

Lesson 1

The World Wide Web is the most incredible innovation of the last millenia, and probably the biggest and most important invention any of us will see in our lifetimes.

What is also just as amazing is the huge amount of money that can be made by people like you and me, working from home.

You will no doubt ask yourself "If they can do it, why can't I?"

Well the answer is "Yes you can, if you do it right!"

The first thing you need to do is to create a website.

Now, there are lost of free websites available, already set up for you. However, you don't own your own website, and they are specifically set up to promote somebody else's product, and to make them money, not you.

In order to maximise your online business, you need a website of your own, preferably with your name, or your business name as part of the domain name. A name like xyz.geocities dot blah de blah doesn't do anything to promote you and your business. So do it properly and get your own domain name.

The Hardest part of making money online is the Marketing of your online business, and that involves building a list of potential customers. We'll get to listbuilding in another lesson. The first lesson is How to Create a Website.

Creating a Website

Choose a Domain name

First of all you need a domain name, that's the name of your website. Mine is geoffcooper.co.uk. The www bit is optional, although most ISP's (Internet Service Providers), or hosting companies, add it on automatically.

To get a domain name, you need to go to a Domain Registrar, such as GoDaddy.com and do a search for an available domain name.

Chances are, the first name you enter into their search box will come up as taken, and you will have to be a bit imaginative in choosing something that is available. If I was searching for a domain like my own today, I might choose geoff-cooper.co.uk, or geoffcoopermarketing.co.uk or geoff-cooper-marketing.co.uk. Dot coms, dot co.uk, dot info or dot biz can all be used, though dot com is the most popular as it's what most browsers will default to if you miss off the domain extension.

Choose a Hosting Company

A Hosting Company is one which hosts the files that make up your website and presents them to the internet. The Domain Registrar you use to register your domain will usually offer you hosting, and that's fine if you're capable of writing your own pages and uploading them yourself. However, you don't have to use the domain registrar for hosting, you might get a better deal somewhere else.

If you're not happy coding html files and would rather have someone else do that bit for you then consider using phphosted.com who will handle it all for you.

Once you have a hosting package in place, the hosting company will email you with details of your web hosting package including login details and the location to send your web files to.

Designing your first Webpage

To design your first page you will need a web editor. A Web Editor is a piece of software that converts the basic text that you write into html that will be recognised by your hosting provider as a web page to present to the internet.

There are lost of web editors available, some of them costing hundreds of dollars, however, there are also lots of free ones.

Kompozer is quite a good one, and is very easy to use.

So, download Kompozer from their website http://kompozer.net/ and double click on the downloaded file to extract it.

If you're using Windows XP or Vista, then Zip file extraction is built into the operating system.

The Kompozer program files will be extracted to a folder on your computer (You need to make a note of it's location) where you can double-click on the kompozer.exe program icon to start Kompozer. Do that now.

The program will open and a small window will also open on top called Kompozer Tips. Close that by clicking the close button; the X button at the top right, but you probably know that. If not then you will need one of my earlier lessons.

Now you will see a window with two panes and some menu bars. The cursor will be flashing in the right hand pane indicating where you can start typing text.

Type the following text into the right hand pane:

When I finish typing this text into this box, I will be one step closer to being an internet millionaire!

Now, before you save this first page, you need to give it a title.

The title of a web page is what is displayed in the blue title bar of every web page on the internet, and is very VERY important to the search engines.

It is the text that will appear first in any search results and can mean the success or failure of your website from the word GO!

So, to create a title for this first page, click the Format menu, then select Page Title & Properties.

Type Important Website, then click the OK button. The tab title above where you entered the text, and also the main program title bar, will change from Untitled, to Important Website.

Now you need to save this first webpage. Click the File Menu, then click Save As.

Now, the program will automatically fill in the name of the web page with whatever you typed as the title for the page, in this case: Important Website.

However, we need to change the name of this first website file, and in fact most if not all future files that you create.

All files that you create for publication on the internet need to be referenced by a hyperlink on another webpage, with the exception of the first page on any website. The first page on a website always has a default name of index.html ( there are exceptions; index.htm, index.php and a few others, but for basic websites index.html will always work.)

So, you need to change the file name of this first file to index.html and click the Save button.

Now the title bar of the Kompozer program will change to read Important Website[file/.../index.html] - KompoZer

Uploading your first webpage

Ok, it's only a basic test page, but you have to start somewhere. You can expand on it later.

To upload your first page, click the Publish button. This will open the Publish Page dialog box, with the Page Title and Filename already filled in with the data you've already supplied.

Click the Settings tab, and you then need to enter the details you were supplied by your hosting company. First you need to enter a name for the site in the Site Name: field, this can be anything you want to remember it by, its for your use only.

Next it asks for your Web Site Information, ie. the HTTP address: eg http://www.geoffcooper.co.uk - change to your website details

Next it asks for the Publishing Server, In most cases this is called the FTP server, ie. the Publishing address, or FTP address: eg ftp://geoffcooper.co.uk - change to your ftp details.

Next you need to enter your username and password, and click the Save Password box to remember your password for future uploads.

Now click the Publish button, and your first webpage will be uploaded within a few seconds and BANG! you're online!

Now go to your web browser of choice, type in your website name, and you should see your first ever webpage on the world wide web.

Amazing or what?

Next, we need to create something more meaningful, and add some flair to what we write and also intersperse some interesting graphic images into our page. Also, just as importantly, we need to add some more pages. We'll get to that later.

Lesson 2

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