What would come out your mind when you think a store that sell books at discount prices? Amazon, right.

What would you name a site that would become the world’s largest garage sale – Ebay, sure.

What would you call a site that would become a premier portal to the web? – Yahoo!

Then if you were going to build the mother of all search engines, what would be the right name – Google!

If you noticed, you will find the web is full of new brand names that are totally unrelated to the real content of the site, seriously.

And there are some that you may not have heard of yet but you ought to know about them!

The site you really need to know about now is one that can help you with affiliate marketing, list building, ability branding, and promoting your business.

It’s called *Squidoo*

Yes, you heard me right – Squidoo.

Here’s the thing – Squidoo is free and collaborative. You can use it to promote whatever business, expertise, service, or hobby as you wish.

As test, I build my own web hosting recommendation site at the Squidoo that called a “lens”. You can take a look now.

People who made their own lens is call Lensmaster.

I like the design and the nice looking.

You can open a free Squidoo lensmaster account and start your own easy-to-build page (lens) to share insight on a topic you care a lot about, build your online credibility, send more traffic to your Web site or blog, and even earn some cash.

Make your own lens really simple, just click on “Create A Lens” or “Build My Own Lens” anywhere in the Squidoo site. This will take you to the LensBuilder. It takes about 5 minutes to set up a lens. Once you’ve created it, you can go back and work on it bit by bit to make it really great.

Here are the 5 steps to set up your lens:

1. Creat a name for your lens, what’s your topic? what’s your lens about?

2. You will see there are 4 choice list down in this step, you can choose one depend on your prefer of what you want to do with your lens.

3. Give your lens a name, actually is to name your Squidoo’s url where your lens will live, you also need to select a group in this step.

4. Insert your keyword tag to let people find your lens and then click done

5. Start to work on your lens from the back office, like create your profile and post etc.

The best of all, if you like, you can build a hundred lens. It’s fast, fun, and free!

Let’s use this powerful Squidoo and get your site showing up in top Google results more often, and then you can say “I Squidoo!”

Oh by the way, You can make MONEY with Squidoo as well, so don’t miss the opportunity!

In the previous lesson, I have guide you how to do your market analysis and domain registration. With your domain name registered, the next step you need is to set up a web hosting account, to ‘rent’ space on a computer (known as a ‘server’) from where your website can be presented to the world via the internet.

Set Up Your Web Hosting

There are literally hundreds of companies in the web hosting market, each of them vying for your business. However, you have to be extremely cautious when selecting a hosting service because the firm May Not immediately appears to be the best one in regarding to the level of service they provides.

For instance, the web hosting market is an extremely competitive place, many web hosts use rock bottom prices as their main point of attraction, but the problem with this is that the majority of web hosts who charge honest prices will have to cut the price or skimping on the services that they provide to their customers in order to keep business moving forward.

This is a critically important point to grasp because you have to reliant on your web host to keep your website live, you want your site to be visible 24/7/365, and anything that potentially threatens that visibility is a threat to your business. Unfortunately, no matter which web hosting company you choose to use the service, there is always a possibility that your site will occasionally have problems, or down, or crash, thus a web host who offers a 24 hour service support is very important, together with provide high quality level of customer service.

On the other hand, if you go for a web host who is charging rock bottom prices, generally they will not provide 24 hour service, and they are working only normal working hours instead. If there any down or crush happened to your site, it could be offline for a period of 12 hours, during which time you could lose an awful lot of sales and money.

In short, choosing a web host because they are the cheapest is normally a completely false economy, from the surface, it will save you a couple of dollars every month but it might ultimately cost you several hundreds of dollars over the course of the year. Thus, use a reputable web host firm to host your site with a certain percentage ‘up-time’ guarantee is crucial. Your sites need to up all the time.

Beside that, you also need to know the amount of disk space that a web host offer you, and you need to check on the bandwidth that would be associated with your account as well. In a lot of time, the majority of webmasters never come anywhere near using their full allocation of disk space (which basically equates to the number of megabytes of information that make up your site), bandwidth represents the amount of traffic or number of people who can see your site every month. Hence, you need to make sure that the web host you’re considering to use offers sufficient bandwidth.

Another important factor to consider is that some web hosts are far more internet business friendly than others, which means if your host understands the demands and requirements of online business, they are far more likely to be flexible than the one who are not particularly familiar with the world of online commerce.

Among those web hosting companies, one of them I would recommend you to get started is called Hostgator – a hosting service provider that is used and recommended by many thousands of experienced online marketers.

The organization is well versed in the demands and requirements of the online marketing community, they offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and they use the excellent cPanel through which you control your site:

As you can see from the screenshot above, Hostgator even offers a free site building program resource.

Although this particular site builder is not primarily focused on building the kind of website that you need for online marketing purpose, but it is a reasonable fallback option that you can use to construct a site in an extremely quick way.

You can see the bandwidth and disk space is unlimited as is the number of domains that you can host under the same account.

Changing the Domain Name Server (DNS)

With your domain name registered and hosting account set up, the final job is to tie the two things together so that when people type your domain name or URL into their web browser, The internet company immediately ‘point’ that query at your site on your Hostgator account.

You probably noticed that when you do your domain registration, the Internet Company that you use also offer web hosting, but I will not recommend you do that because put all of your business into one single firm is a risk. If for whatever the reason, the company got problems, your business could be wiped out by their difficulties. That’s why you should register your domain and set up a hosting account with different organizations, which is in turn the reason why you need to change the DNS.

In order to do so, open up your domain name registry account, find the specific domain that you want to make alterations to and click on it, then you will see a ‘Nameservers’ button at the top of the page that looks something like this:

On the next page, take the information that Hostgator have sent you by e-mail toward their own nameserver, you can just copy/paste those nameserver details into the appropriate boxes on the detail change form as indicated here (you always need to change two nameserver addresses):

Click on the orange ‘OK’ button and you should see a message that tells you the changes will be made in the next few hours.

Generally speaking, it is never likely to take more than 24 to 48 hours before these changes are propagated. In my own experience, the propagate generally happen far more quickly than this. Once these changes are made, you are now in a situation where anyone types your domain name into their browser will be immediately redirected to your Hostgator web hosting account to see your site.

However, there is obviously nothing on that site at the moment, so creating your site is the next step.

If you still confusing or not clear the step, I also have two videos for you to watch in regarding to how to set up your web hosting account videoPart 1 and Part 2.

In the part 2 video you will learn how to set up password protected directory, how to set up sub-domain, how to set up add domain, and how to put content in your sub-domain’s sub-domain, how to point your add domain to your sub-domain, how to use Fantastico to set up a script on your site, your database, wordpress blog etc.

Before you make a decision on which web host should you be use, here are the things you need to look for in selecting a web host:

1) Unlimited Disk Space

You don’t want to see when people are trying to access your site, your site run out of the disk space

2) Unlimited Bandwidth

It’s important that your host is able to deliver your content especially during the event period, like product launching or new seminar start up, because it is the time that a lot of people are visiting your site.

3) Unlimited Websites

Depend on your own situation, you may start with one site first, but you may find you want to launch other sites later as well. So this option is important.

4) Free Setup

There’s no reason you should be paying setup fees.

5) 99.9% Uptime Guarantee

No one can guarantee 100% uptime, but some hosts can get awfully close.

6) Installed Software for Systems, Database, Scripting, Email and more

This will appear as CGI, Perl, MySQL, SSH, POP and other acronyms (honestly, I don’t understand them all). It’s ok, you don’t need to understand them either.

7) CPanel Hosting

This is the defacto control panel which making things easy for you to administer your site

24/7/365 Support

I have been with hosts before who didn’t answer their support ticket, emails and phones. It’s scary, it is critical – good customer support.

9) No Contracts or Hidden Fees

Everything should be made clear and there should no any hidden fees.

10) A Fair Price

Most hosts start at $10 or so per month, which is not bad, but there are some better ones.

I’ve used a number of web hosts in the past few years. I’ve had some nightmarish experiences and I’ve had some great experiences. Often time, people asked who I recommend for web hosting.

The host I’ve found that meets all of the above requirements and beats the price on all others are Kiosk and HostGator. I have several sites are hosted with them.

So don’t sweat it as you look for the perfect web host. If you dont’ feel like to use either of above this two hosting services, here are the list of Web Host provider that I find is offering the high quality service, you can check them out.

I’m happy with Kiosk and HostGator‘s services and I think you will be as well.

Happy hosting