How to make a name for yourself on the 21st century Internet

By Ace Bravo
Posted Friday, December 3, 2004

Clearly, the Internet technology is going at a tremendous pace and you need to make a presence for yourself in this vast and lucrative market.

So, lets dive in the subject right away and say that you need to have a web site. An e-business site to create a presence for you on the web. I'll show you how to decide what your site is going to be about in a moment. In the meantime, lets take a look at the reality here.

All the indications and expert analysts' reports point to the direction where the world is headed. Everyday, e-commerce generates $32,000,000 in sales. The whole world is connected. Domain names are going at a scary rate everyday. Think of any domain name and do a whois on it. I bet you'll find that it has been taken. This should be enough for you to start thinking; you owe it to yourself.

When I decided to make a web site I had an idea on what it's going to be about. I didn't have the money to start an e-business site right away. Instead, I started a site, which cost me $120.00 CDN for a 1-year hosting and $70.00 US for domain registration for 2 years.
Remember when I said domain names are going fast, it took me 3 days to find this name.

(http://www.sitefiles.com/)

How to start?

First, think of an idea just an idea on what your site should be about. Ask yourself what am I good at? You must be good at something find it. To help you, you can always start with a site that can provide a service to people, visit my site (http://www.sitefiles.com/) and try to get an idea. If you look around you'll see tons of sites about FREE STUFF it's a good idea.

The point is to put your foot on the first step, once you're confident go up one more step and keep going you'll never stop until you've made a good fortune for yourself.

By now you should have a name in mind and if not taken, do not hesitate to register it right away. On (http://www.sitefiles.com/), you'll see Network Solutions search box. Use it if you like to search for free names and to register your OWN domain name.

I've put carefully selected links on my site to help you find all that you need to create your own web site. You will find links for free domain hosting, Internet access and much more.

One little note about free domain hosting, I do not recommend it if you are going for a professional and trusted web site. Also, sponsors who will be paying you don't like that.

Next, you get busy designing your site. Go to different sites on the web to get yourself an idea on what your site should look like. Think how to make a better layout, better colouring etc.

Let's say you have registered your domain name, got an ISP to host it for you and now you site is up and running then what? Well, before anything else you need to make your site known to the world and to do that you need to add it to all the major search engines and directories. This is free so start with Yahoo and follow exactly their submission instructions. Other search engines will just ask you to type in your URL and their crawler will take care of the rest, but for this to work properly your META TAGS should be correct. I'm assuming you've done your homework and used the links on my site to the various locations where you can learn all about HTML in no time.

So now you have a web site with good content that is searchable on almost all the major search engines. You are almost there if you've made this far, you've proven you have strong determination.

Next, start contacting sponsors, usually you need to submit an application and in no time they will reply and guide you through the process of becoming an Affiliate.
You will get to know all the sponsors and know which to choose.

Again, you can always go to (http://www.sitefiles.com/) as a reference. Say you want to contact a sponsor but you need a name or URL, looking around on my site you'll get all the information you need.

About the Author
Ace Bravo is a Canadian entrepreneur writing articles in various news lists and how-to magazines. By profession, Ace is an Internetwork Design Engineer. He is the creator/owner of the successful SiteFiles.com.