This post is part of the ‘Start Blogging Now!‘ series for new bloggers!

By coincidence before you read this post, you can enter to win yourself a free domain and a YouTube niche video site by clicking here!

What is a Domain Name?
Well it’s that thing you type in to go to a website. Like www.Thatblogsite.com, that’s my domain name.

Why do I want a Domain Name?
Let’s think about how it looks www.yourblog.blogspot.com or www.yourblog.com. Which looks better? That’s what you’re visitors think about it. Having your own domain will make the website yours. The domain doesn’t belong to anyone else and the domain will create a professional feel around your presence on the web. Having your own domain name will help with your branding (the way people perceive you) and help with your search engine ranking as Google recognises that many free sub-domain blogs are neglected and never to be posted on again.

How can I Register a Domain?
I register all my domains with GoDaddy and way back in December I wrote a review about them that you can read to give a bit more of an insight to what I think. I’ve registered many domains since and the service is still 110%. There are many other registrars out there but I’m not going to give false impressions because I haven’t used their services. It’s up to you to decide which one you go for.

Price
The price of a domain is extremely cheap and the small investment is worth it in the long run. A .COM domain name from GoDaddy is only $9.99 and .INFO domains are only $2.99! Doing research with other companies is in order for this one. The prices don’t differ that much so going with a reputable company will be your best option.

Choosing Your TLD Extension
The TLD is the bit at the end of the domain, the .COM, .ORG for example. When registering your domain there is a choice between many. It’s entirely up to you which one you want to use and take into account the domain name you want might not actually be available. Here are a few descriptions and what their really meant to be used for:

.COM
.COM is the most popular TLD extension and one that most people go with. .COM is used for commercial purposes so it will definitely be relevant to your blog seeing as you wish to be raking it in!

.NET
.NET is meant for networks but it can still be used for your website and is a great alternative if .COM is not available.

.ORG
.ORG is normally associated with non-profit organisations and using one with your blog is probably not the best route although it is available to you.

.NET

Which .TLD you use don’t really affect your search engine ranking, the way you promote your blog and build your brand does.

Keywords in Your Domain
Have a look at my domain name, I chose it around keywords with the keyword being ‘blog’. Doing this I let the reader know before they visit exactly what type of website this is. I said that which TLD doesn’t affect your SEO ranking but choosing your domain around keywords definitely does. Having specific keywords can help your site be found by easier and hopefully your website is something that people are looking for. Imagine a day when I’m listed for the keyword ‘blog’.

Resell Domain Names
Once you’ve registered your domain you’ll begin to learn that registering very good domain names and reselling them can earn you a nice profit. Look out for domains will keywords in and buy them. If someone is looking for a specific domain they can sometimes pay thousands of dollars to get it off you! Easy money!

Remember a small investment in a domain will benefit you in the future.

Sorry this post hasn’t been sooner, I have had so much to do I couldn’t find time to finish it.

Now in this post of the ‘Start Blogging Now!‘ series we move onto the task of choosing your web host! It is important that you find a stable ground for your blog to grow on. Are you going to use the free services that are plentiful in the web and cost you absolutely zilch or are you going to go for a paid hosted blog that will bring you many benefits in the future.

Paid Hosting
These days getting paid hosting for your website is extremely cheap! If you take a look at HostGator their prices are extremely cheap. There are a lot of free blog hosts, but there are also a lot of paid hosts and the company that I went with was HostGator. If you wish to read why then take a look at this post. There are distinct advantages of using a paid web host and this is why if you can afford it, I encourage you to purchase paid hosting. Here are the advantages:

• Better uptime - A paid host can guarantee you uptime on your website which is essential for any serious blogger.
• Support - If you have a problem many companies provide phone, email, live chat, ticket, 24/7 support to solve the issue. This is a feature I love of HostGator, if I have an issue to address their live chat (always online when I need) has been there to help.
• No Adverts - Some free hosts that you go with will force adverts on your blog. You don’t want this especially when they are not your own and your not earning. Not only that you don’t have any control where they go, and what they look like.
• Features - They are plentiful, lots of bandwidth, space and tools that you can play around with all day!

There are not many advantages of paid hosting unless you’re not earning each month, the monthly costs can add up or the one lump sum you pay can be quite large.

Free Hosting
Free hosting can be setting up your own blog on a web host by installing it, creating the MySQL database etc or it can be using a website that sets up the blog for you. It is perfect for when you’re learning and experimenting but setting your blog up on free hosting is something that you’ll need to think about. Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of successful blogs that are hosted on free hosting but there are millions of unsuccessful ones. You will need to size up the advantages and disadvantages of each and the complications that some features would give you in the future. I can only think of one advantage really with free hosting and that is it’s actually free. The disadvantages definitely shine on this one:

• Reliability - You can’t always guarantee your blog will be online. You don’t pay for it so it could go down and can’t demand to ask why because they are giving you the service free.
• Support - They gave you free hosting, you can’t expect them to give you excellent support for free to.
• No control - Your hosting and blog is at the mercy of someone else, you haven’t paid for it so they can do whatever they like. If they don’t like you, bang and your work is gone! This also applies to their rules. If they are offering you something free now, who says they might start charging tomorrow? That’ll cause a problem for you.
• Features - Often on free hosts there are little to no features that you need. You need a high performance package to have the confidence that you won’t just collapse.
• Performance - This moves onto the performance, if you don’t have the features and your visitors start to grow, will your hosting be able to tackle the pressure and keep your site alive?
• The future - Free hosting often offers you a sub-domain this means if your reader count is up, visitors are growing and you decide to move to a paid host because you need the upgrade you won’t be able to take your sub-domain with you and this will make your traffic considerably drop and it’ll be like starting again.
• Sub-domain - It can be long, creates no branding for your website and visitors sometimes don’t like seeing sub-domains which hurts your presence on the web.
• Search Engine Optimization - Many free websites out there offer little information and search engines have learnt this. Hosting your website free can close your website out from the search engines because they think your site is just another site that will give nothing to anyone.

I think that’s enough disadvantages for this post, but I think you get the point.

I’ve used many free hosts and I wrote before about the problems I had of moving to a paid host because the free host was just not cutting it.

Free Hosting Examples

Blogger is a free blog hosting service and can be controlled completely in your web browser. The simplicity in using it makes it very popular for those who can not deal with the technical side of owning a blog. Posting is very easy and your blog can be set up within minutes.

Wordpress.com is a free blog hosting service that is a little bit more technical than Blogger. It offers expansion in your blogging allowing you to install very useful plugins, modify core files, use categories and generally have more control.

Your Choice
You’ll need to make the decision on your own, but I highly recommend getting paid web hosting as you’ll see the benefits in the future. Buying hosting creates a backbone behind your website that you know you can rely on and the company you go with will support you whereas having a free web host creates uncertainty in what can happen. Think of what your going to be using the hosting for, a free host will be ok for a personal blog that you don’t intend on making money from but if your going to blog seriously, then paid hosting is worth the investment.

Before you start blogging there are some questions you will want to ask yourself and you will want some questions answered for you.

What is a Blog?
A blog is your online sanctuary, it’s a place where you can kick back and write exactly what you want to. Many bloggers write about what they did in that day or what they are going to. They also talk about interesting things that they find on the internet.

There’s also a blogger which writes about a particular subject and will gather their audience by writing deeper into that subject. A common blog is writing about how to ‘Make Money Online’ and I know for sure this is one that will interest you.

Can I Make Money from it?
In a word, yes. There are so many different ways to earn money from blogging, and they all offer you something different. You can earn money from Pay-Per-Click advertising, affiliate commission, being paid to blog to name just a few. I’ll give you a more in-depth explanation of these in future posts. Making Money Online is very easy for anyone, new bloggers or bloggers that have not yet monetized their blog. Please be aware thought, you can’t go from making $0 to $1000 a month for example in a few days. This is explained below as building a successful blog takes time.

It’s all One Big Learning Process
Blogging is all about experimentation. When you first start out you will be faced with large amounts of choices that you have to make by trying things. All the different advertising networks will perform differently for you and you have to try them to see which performs best. You’ll learn that many successful bloggers did not get where they are today by just implementing Google Adsense on their blog. They have quite a few methods and have vast experience in making the most out of them.

How much Time does it take?
The time you take blogging depends on how serious you are. If you are a casual blogger and you are writing random thoughts then blogging can take no time at all. You jot down your thoughts, post and log off.

If you’re going to try to make something of your blog, your going to need to spend a lot of time marketing and working on your blog. You’ll learn that you only get out of blogging what you put in.

Do I need any Technical Knowledge?
The answer to this question is yes and no. No because there are many websites that will set your blog up for you in a few clicks and posting content is extremely simple. Yes because if you’re going to set up your own blog you may want to code parts of your website to the way you want it, setting up Wordpress and any other thing that requires manual install. Although this can be extremely simple and learning about it won’t take long.

Do you really Want to do it?
Blogging can have many different experiences entailed with it. If you’re really going to make a go of it, do you have the time? Do you think you have the work ethic? If you don’t think you will there is probably no point in you beginning to blog.

If you’re Ready, Let’s Begin
With those questions and answers completed. It’s time to start you blog, without further a due let’s learn, keep track of the posts in this series by subscribing.

I recently received an email asking me a few simple questions by someone trying to find out how to start blogging. Then it dawned on me, telling people how to set a blog up is an essential part of any blog. If your writing blogging advice and they can’t implement it because they don’t have a blog, you’re really defeating the object. I don’t claim to be some guru in any sense at all but I’ve learnt a lot since I first put my hands on a computer at the age of 10.

This is my first attempt at writing a series so I will try my best to provide you with what you need. I’ll share my experiences and show you how to do it my way and you’ll be up and running in no time at all. In this series I’ll be writing about the following things in separate posts:

• Learn To Blog: Initial Thoughts
• Learn To Blog: Choosing Your Web Hosting
• Learn To Blog: Choosing Your Domain Name
• Learn To Blog: Choosing Your Blogging Software
• Learn To Blog: Making Your Blog, Your Own!
• Learn To Blog: Writing Your First Post
• Learn To Blog: Driving Traffic To Your Blog
• Learn To Blog: Let’s Make Money!
• Learn To Blog: A Few Closing Words And Good Luck!

As you can see that’s quite an extensive list of posts I’m going to write. I’ll post first post then the next part two days after and then the next one two days after and so on… Once a post is done, I will hyperlink it to that post, so you can always return to this post to choose any article you like. I’ll be editing the posts if I wish to add some other information to the posts for the future.

Good Luck Blogging and Enjoy the Posts!