Lots! However what I’ll try to do is focus mainly on the types of hosting a blogger is most likely to encounter. This will greatly limit the scope, as well as keep it interesting. I can tell you for example that some companies I’ve personally worked with (more than one) have many computers acting as one, each with multiple processors and Gigs of Ram. However I doubt many, if any, blogger needs this kind of horsepower. So let’s looks at the realistic options for blogging from the smallest to probably the reasonably largest most bloggers will get to. And if you need hosting beyond the largest, you’re knowledge is probably beyond the scope of what I’m going to offer for this series. So without further ado…

Shared Hosting

This is typically the type of hosting most people start with. Why? Because it’s by far the cheapest! Hands down, you can’t beat the price. Of course with the lower price comes some issues, especially if your hosting company is not as ethical as it should be. Because this is going to be the most common type of hosting for beginner bloggers, I’ll take talk about this type of hosting more than the others (this entire post will just be about shared hosting). However do note that the last type of hosting I’ll mention in the next article in this series, dedicated hosting, is generally more involved than shared hosting. I’m just not going to cover it in as much detail because most starting bloggers never make it to that point. Unfortunately much like exercising, most bloggers start with great intentions but usually stop within a short amount of time..

Getting back to shared hosting, what is shared hosting? Shared hosting is where many people share the same computer to host many domains. This can be as little as just two domains, but often it ends up being many domains on the same computer. Each person’s domain is seperated by their accounts, although they are still hosted from the same computer. There are many pros and cons to this setup, of which the biggest pro is pricing. Let’s say you can get a dedicated service (you’re very own computer) for $200/month, which is relatively normal for an intermediate level dedicated server, then could you not divide that server up to host many smaller domains that have smaller resource needs and charge them individually? So let’s say we charge $10/month, then if we had 20 people we’d be breaking even (not counting time and effort), assuming those 20 people used less combined resources than the dedicated server has.

The reality is that most shared hosting accounts use very little resources, almost negliable. Some do use a lot, but the majority use very little. Which is why shared hosting can be done so cheaply. I’ve seen it go as low as $3/month per domain! That’s cheap! For less than the price of one Starbucks coffee per month, you can host your very own domain. That’s great!

However for $3/month, you can’t expect to get great service. Think about it a little. Firstly, that means they’re charge you $36/year for hosting. Now even though they can automate much of the sign up process, let’s look at the support costs. A qualified person will cost at least $30/hour for technical support. And remembering that most people who use shared hosting are new to hosting, they’ll probably have some questions. Yes you can template a lot of the questions, but to a point.

Therefore to compensate what many of the less ethical hosting companies do is overload their servers. If you remember as I mentioned a few minutes ago, the majority of the people who purchase shared hosting rarely even use a small portion of their resources, so why not use this into the equation. So what they’ll do is oversell, much like airlines oversell their tickets to compensate for people who miss their flights. However they’ll greatly oversell it. For example, they’ll have a dedicated server that can handle up to 100Gb a month, but what they’ll do is sell 1000Gb of bandwidth a month, knowing that most people will barely use 1% of their resources. That’s server overloading.
And unlike an airline, when a plane is full, it’s full. With unethical shared hosting, they’ll just keep stuffing people on until it literally bursts. With these types of companies you’ll find that if you contact technical support it will take a long time to get a response, if there is an issue with your hosting, it will take forever to get it fixed, as well, the service will be bumpy (the money just isn’t there).

What does it mean the service will get bumpy? Well, like the example above, when they get close to overloading a server, that is as it’s running close to its real full capacity (it’s actually using 100Gb of the 1000Gb sold), it will start to get slower responding to requests for the webpages on your website. Eventually it will get so slow that it will time-out, which means the web browser will just assume the web server is down rather than wait forever. At this point these hosts will generally try to re-balance themselves.

Now that I’ve talked about the cons, please don’t let me disuade you from shared hosting. If done right, it can be an amazing resource for you when you’re starting! I started this way myself. It’s just that you need to be careful like anything else. The cheapest is not always the best, especially for shared hosting. Reputation is worth a lot! Look for it. One of the best forums I’ve seen to read about other people’s experience on almost every hosting company I’ve ever been interested in is WebHostingTalk.com. Great site! It’s worth the time.
Shared hosting done right is marvellous if you find it. It can drastically bring down your hosting costs, especially if you’re starting. No one wants to pay $200/month for a dedicated box when they can pay $10/month for shared hosting that will be more than enough to fulfill their hosting needs!

Honestly, expect to pay at least $100/year for hosting. I’ve tried many services when I first started, and I know many people who’ve done tried others as well. We’ve all found that this is where the service gets reliable and they don’t overload their servers.

Also, as a disclaimer, let me say that I personally offer shared hosting for $100/year for the first domain and $50/year for each additional domain (once you’re in the system I can amortize your setup, support, etc. costs from the first year and just charge resource costs). This is also why I’m saying you should be able to get reliable shared hosting at this price range. I’ve managed to offer it, and it makes economical sense from a business perspective without overloading the servers. I refuse to overload my servers, I’d rather have to charge more and have less customers (all of which are happy) than charge less and have unhappy customers! If I offered the price any lower, I don’t know that I could do it without sacrificing something else… If you’re interested in getting hosting from me, you can contact me directly at steph@followsteph.com. So far the hosting I’ve offered has been solely through word of mouth. I’ve been happy with the results!

Getting back to the article, now one thing to remember is that shared hosting doesn’t offer unlimited resources (avoid those that do, it’s not economically possible). Eventually you will outgrow shared hosting if you become successful. For example, with the hosting I offer you get 200Mb of disk space and 10Gb of bandwidth. For most people, that should last them for quite a while. However if you get very successful, this will eventually become too small for you (I hope you achieve this, it’s great to have to pay more for hosting as it shows you’ve grown!). This is where you’ll need to start looking at other hosting solutions, which will be the discussion of the next article in this series.

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Some big news for those of you who are familiar with the very popular social networking site Reddit.com, it was acquired by Conde Nast (owners of Wired magazine and several websites). I don’t know what the implications are yet other than the staff of Reddit.com will be moving locations.

Either way, I suspect we’ll see some changes in the near future on Reddit.com.

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In the last article on about how to start blogging, I ended the post with “Ok, now we’ve got our domain, how do we get it to point to our IP address? How do we get an IP address? That’s the answer to the next article in this series…”. Well the answer to this question is that you need to use a hosting service that will lease you space on a computer (with an IP address) to host your website.

What does this mean? Well before we can answer that, let’s backtrack a little again. Every website, since it’s beginning of internet time, has to be hosted somewhere. And that answer is that it’s hosted on a computer. Yes it can be hosted on a home computer, but I’d strongly suggest against that. In the early days many people did that, even I did that when broadband first came out. Today it’s not advisable, and some ISP (Internet Service Providers) will disconnect your internet access if you do this. As well, it does require a decent amount of technical skill because you need to be running a webserver, incorporate substantial security measuers, etc. So for now, let’s assume we need to lease space on a computer somewhere on the internet to host our webpage from a company that specializes in this.

Ok, so if we don’t do it ourselves, where do we find such a service? Through a “hosting company”. There are litteraly thousands of hosting companies on the internet. I don’t think there it’s even possible to list all the hosting services on any one webpage as there’s so many, and they change all the time (just like there’s new gas stations opened everyday). There’s also many different types of hosting services, which we’ll discuss shortly. If you do a search on Google for “Hosting”, you’ll find millions of entries.

Anyways, for now, what a hosting company does for you is provide you with space on a computer that runs a webserver to transmit your webpages. Without being too technical, a webserver is a software application that’s always running in the background waiting for people to request webpages, and when it gets the requests, it sends the appropriate webpage. So for example, if I type in http://www.FollowSteph.com, it knows to send back that particular webpage. Now it’s a little more complex than that, sometimes the webpages don’t really exist and their created one the fly, that is they are dynamically created by the webserver, but for now let’s assume that it just sends a webpage.

So what a hosting company does for you is provide you with space on a computer that has internet access to let everyone access your webpages. Not too complicated so far. So let’s add another piece to the puzzle. Every computer on the internet can have one or more IP addresses. The IP address that we talked about in the last post is the address of that hosting computer. The webserver, using it’s internal magic, will convert the IP address, plus the remaining part of the webpage address to send you the specific webpage you wanted that’s stored on it. So for example, if I go to http://www.LearningCentre.com, the computers relaying information on the internet, convert this address into IP 207.58.160.157 and the webpage index.html (if you don’t specify a webpage, it assumes the webpage you want is “index.html”). Just to confuse the issue a little, it’s also possible to have more than one domain on an IP address, but we’ll ignore this for the scope of these articles. At the end of the day, the webpage address is telling our hosted computer what page to send back, which in the last case is “index.html”. Had we put http://www.LearningCentre.com/somepage.html, it would return the contents of the file “somepage.html” that we had on our webserver. in our case, since LearningCentre.com is dynamically created, instead of sending “index.html” it creates a new webpage on the spot and pretent it’s “index.html”.

If this isn’t all clear, don’t worry about it, it will become clearer with time. Right now I’m just trying to explain what’s going on, more to help you later make the links between what’s happening behind the scenes. But if its not clear, don’t worry, a large percentage of successful bloggers and website owners don’t know these details.

At this point, I’m sure you’re wondering where you can find a hosting company, and if all hosting companies are the same. If you think about it for a second, you can image that Ebay, Google, Microsoft, etc., have very different hosting needs than a single person’s blog does… So the answer is that no, there are many different types of hosting companies and services. And this will be the topic of my next article in this series.

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The 9 Personality Types of a Comment Spammer
Funny and real summaries of the types of blog comments spammers that exist

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The title says it all.

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Adsense and Amazon aren’t the only ways to monetize your blog, they just happen to be easiest.

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It’s always good to look at what not to do once in a while

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Ok, now that you’ve settled on which name you’d like to use for your blog, you need to register it. Why? What does this mean?

Let’s take a step back here, let’s look at what a domain is in the first place. A domain is a name that identifies one or more IP addresses. Ok, so what are IP addresses you ask? IP addresses are like phone numbers, except that rather than pointing to a specific phone, they point to a specific computer. So for example, LearningCentre.com’s IP address is 207.58.160.157. This IP number is the address at which you can find the computer hosting LearningCentre.com. If you’re interested in how an IP address works, what the numbers represent, you can visit this link for more details (each section of number represents something else much like the area code part of a phone number represents which geographical area you’re trying to call to).

Alright, now that we understand what an IP address is, how is that related to a domain? The reality is that IP addresses are hard to remember, much like phone numbers. So wouldn’t it be much easier if we could just remember a string, a piece of text, like LearningCentre.com? Which is exactly why domain names where invented. So now when we type in LearningCentre.com in our browser, it automatically converts it to 207.58.160.157 for us behind the scenes. Too bad they don’t really do this with phone numbers too…

The next question is, how do they do this? How do they know that LearningCentre.com goes to that address and not another. And what if 100 people want that same name? This is where registrars come in. The first person to register a domain name gets it. You usually get it for a specific time period, the most common being one year, after which point you can renew it (you always have first rights!) If you don’t renew it, it goes back up in the free market for anyone else to buy.

So if you have a name, you need to register it with a registrar. This of course costs the registrars something, and so on. I won’t get into the details of the registrar business, but needless to say expect to pay a little bit of money. From my experience, you should be able to pay less than $10 per domain. Initially when the internet started there was NetworkSolutions.com and two other major players. A while back, the registrar business was opened up and now there are litterally thousands of registrars. So which do you choose? Honestly, I’ve used several and I’m pretty happy with GoDaddy.com. Every registrar has it’s issues, and their price is good (at the time of this writing a domain costs $8.95/year).

Assuming the domain is still free, you just go through the process of registering your domain and paying for it. Some registrar will try to upsell you, of which GoDaddy is probably the most famous for (I’ve yet to see as much upselling on any other site as GoDaddy), but you can generally just be happy with the domain and no other add-ons. The only upsell I can think of is to make the domain registrant information private, much like paying for a private phone listing. Otherwise I’ve never really seen any benefit to most of the other upsells.

As well, make sure that your contact information is correct. It’s possible that they’ll need to contact you. Some registrars might only try once. You need to keep this updated.

When you’re registering your domain, I generally suggest to people I know to auto-renew the domain. This means that when your time period expires, the registrar will automatically purchase the domain for another time period for you (generally 1 year). This is a nice feature because it helps to prevent you from losing domains just because you forgot to renew it. However the onus is now on you to cancel the auto-renew if you decide you don’t want to renew it. For me personally, I’m much more apt to forget to renew a domain than anything else, so I use this feature a lot!

Ok, now we’ve got our domain, how do we get it to point to our IP address? How do we get an IP address? That’s the answer to the next article in this series…

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For the next little while, I’m going to start a series of posts on how to start a brand new blog from nothing, walking you through the steps. This will probably take a few weeks, but we’ll walk through every step using a real live blog as an example. I believe I’ve already got someone who’s willing to work with me on their very first blog, so we’ll have a real life case study!

Now before you even begin blogging, you need to first pick a topic. There’s a lot of debate online going on about how you should do this. Many people say focus on topics that generate you a lot of money. Others say focus on topics that interest you, that you’re passionate about. If you can get both, that’s the best of both worlds! Of course more often than not this is not the case.

So what do you do? I generally suggest writing what your passionate because that will be more interesting for people to read, it will show in your writing. Plus you’re much more likely to continue writing than just go for a quick sprint like most people. The rule of thumb is that it takes time for a blog to be successful, so pick a topic that you can stay with.

What you can do though is look for ways to “optimize” your topic. That is, if you’re going to talk about dog grooming, why not search online if there are other similar terms that pays better (assuming you’re using Google Adsense as your main revenue stream). We’ll talk much more about monetizing your blog later, I just wanted to let you know for now that it can be a part of your decision making process. Anyways, if there are better paying keywords (we’ll define this better later), it might be worth mixing in those terms in your blog because Adsense is contextual, which is to say Adsense determines which ads to display on your blog based on the context of your blog (for example if you’re blog is about dog grooming, odds are that your Adsense ads will be about dog grooming). One quick note, it’s important to realize when looking for optimized versions of your topic to look at the total revenue, not just the highest paying ad. To put in other words, I’d rather have a topic that lots of people are interested in that’s paying $1/click than a topic that virtually no one is interested in that’s paying $5/click. At the end of the day, it’s the total revenue, not the price per unit that matters. One great tool to use to search for this is Symbiotic.com

If this last paragraph confused you a lot, don’t worry about it for now. We’ll be talking about it in detail later. I just wanted to give you a quick idea of just how complex this can be (if you want to absolutely maximize your earnings). In the seminars we offer we dedicate between 25-50% of the total time on how to optimize your blog for the right monetization techniques. And yes, I’m suggesting that you ignore this at first, and this is mostly because I want to avoid information overload, and of having you spend all your time analyzing versus acting on your goals. This can always be fixed later (or not, I don’t optimize FollowSteph.com for example), so don’t be too stressed if you miss out now, think of it as a growth opportunity for later!

In anyway case, uou might have also noticed that I’m glossing over a lot of other details of how to pick your blog, and you’re right. I’m only alluding to Google Adsense as a monetization technique. I’m doing this because at this point in the series I’m going to assume you’re more interested in just starting a blog and learning from your experience than getting overloaded with details. Trial by fire if you will. And you can always monetize it better later. Like I said before, think of it as a growth opportunity for the future. As well, this is a very large topic that would take me another full series to publish which I’ll leave to another day.

Some of the other points you might be noticing that I’m glossing over when making a decision is planning how you’re going to monetize it. If you’re new to blogging, let’s assume the simplest techniques and work our way up. We could also very easily get bogged down here as there’s a plethora of choices. So for now we’ll assume two main revenue sources, Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate links which most bloggers use.

After having chosen a topic, the first thing you need to do is get a web address. Now many people will say that you can just use a service like WordPress.com or Blogger.com, but I strongly suggest that you buy and host your own domain. Assuming you become successful, this will greatly help, more than I can say! As well, the cost of buying your own domain is less than $10, and hosting can be had for as little as $100/year. If you’re not willing to invest $110 in yourself, then in my personal opinion, you probably shouldn’t be blogging. Why would I want to read your blog if you don’t even think you’re worth $110? Value your time and yourself!

So your first task is to pick a domain name. This is probably harder than you think because there are millions of names registered. Pretty much every dictionary word is taken, every 2, 3, and 4 letter combination is taken. If memory serves me right, 80% of all 5 letter combinations are also taken. So don’t be stressed if it takes you time to pick a domain name. The key is to find a domain name that isn’t too long, that’s easy to remember, and is not likely to be mispelled. Don’t obsess over the perfect domain name, they don’t really exist, but get something your comfortable with. Yes you could always buy a domain name from someone else, but that’s beyond the scope of this series. Think creatively, you’ll come up with something I’m sure! Just don’t spend an innordinate amount of time, many people get stuck at this stage, or spend weeks trying to find the perfect name. I’d say that you should limit it to 1-3 hours at the upmost! Anything beyond that is a waste of time.

You can search for domain names at registrars such as GoDaddy.com or use a service like Whois.sc which gives you alternative options to your domain if it’s taken.

Once you’ve chosen your name, we’re ready to move on to step 2, which is to register the domain, and is the topic of the next article in this series…

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I was about to start a series today on how to start blogging, but I’m postponing it to tomorow because of a great article Darren Rowse of Problogger.net just wrote. Although it’s not entirely accurate, as he himself says more than once, it’s a good indicator of what it takes to be a successful blogger, at least to get to the top 100 of Technoratti.

He went and manually analyzed the top 100 blogs on Technoratti to see “what lessons I could learn from ‘top blogs’”. What he found was that the top 100 blogger had been blogging for an average of 33.8 months, almost 3 years! The median was 28 months, more than 2 months.

So as we mentioned in our seminars, blogging can be a great way to make money, but you have to keep at it to really be successful. Don’t expect to get rich overnight, it probably won’t happen. I’m sure we can all find exceptions, but looking at these stats, it clearly shows that it does takes some time.

My favorite analogy is going to the gym. Don’t expect to be get massive muscles in a month or two. No matter how hard you hit the gym at first, it takes time. And this is the downfall of most people, they get a membership to the gym, go crazy for 2-3 months, if that, and then stop. They feel all the pain, but barely get any reward. The reality is that it takes time, you need to prepare for it. FollowSteph.com, my personal blog, has been growing for about 1.5 years. I can tell you that my montly growth now is higher than all my COMBINED traffic for the first 3 months! Yes, that’s right, more new people are coming to visit FollowSteph.com each month than the total number of people who visited it for the first 3 months. And I virtually stopped promoting it on top of that!

So don’t be discouraged if at first your blog is getting little traffic, it takes time. The rewards can be great!

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Personally I don’t believe it’s worth much right now. There seems to be a lot innactivity and corruption going on. Just read the comments in that post alone!

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Very good explanation through his experience of how to snap up expiring domains. Very similar to what I’ve personally experienced!

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Today we had our first forum poster who hit the 100 post mark! Thanks Scotty! The second biggest poster is pretty much halfway there, and it isn’t me. Come check out the forum, there’s lots going on.

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