Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet - Part 3 - Choose the theme of your website...

By Tasos Vasilopoulos
Posted Sunday, August 22, 2004

Introduction
This article makes part of a series of 20 articles. The subject of this series is the creation and promotion of a website as a cost-effective method to establish a profitable home based business on the Internet. In my previous article, “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet – Part 2 – Search Engines Explained”, I have analyzed several important issues regarding Search Engines and their impact in our business. In this article I will explain to you what to take in consideration when time comes to choose a theme and a domain name for your website.

Time for decisions – Choose the theme of your website

”How will I choose the theme of my web pages?” will be one of the questions in your mind.
The most popular a keyword is, the harder the competition. But, they are also keywords less popular, which still get many visitors, enough to help you build your group of co-workers. I have recruited many of my co-workers using the keyword “earn money online”. It is getting less than 5,000 visitors every month, but I was getting many visitors from all Search Engines by being listed among the first three positions. It is a less popular keyword. For this reason the competition is not so hard and I find it easier to keep my good position. This way I still get many well-targeted visitors. A good percentage of them become my co-workers. From this keyword I recruited two of my personal Group Leaders.
I would suggest that you choose a less popular keyword to start with. Something like “work at home business opportunity”. Or “Home based business opportunity”. This way, following my instructions, you will make it to appear in the first positions of the listings for these keywords in a few months of work. And you will start receiving a good number of visitors. Then, month-by-month, if you keep working hard, your web page will start appearing in the listings for the stronger themes, “work at home business”, “work at home” and “home based business”.
I suggest you use Overture’s term suggestion tool at (www.overture.com) to examine the popularity of each keyword. To reach this tool click on “Advertiser Center” at the right top part of the home page and then click on the “Search Term Suggestion Tool” option, found under the section “Tools”. A new window will open. Insert on the “Get suggestions for:” box the keyword “work at home opportunity”. You will see how many times this keyword was searched last month (its popularity), but not only this. You will also see the popularity of relative minor keywords. Minor keywords are those who contain a major keyword, like “work at home opportunity”. Then you can select some of these keywords and search for these keywords in Google, in order to measure the competition. This way you can pick a keyword that has not much popularity and for this reason also has less competition. You can make it to appear in the first positions of the listings of the Search Engines for this keyword soon. In our example a good keyword to start is “work at home business opportunity”. You can use this as the theme of your website. This way you can also head to the major keyword “work at home business” and if you become really good, you can go for a good position for the much more difficult “work at home”.
Also, you can use the freeware tool offered at (www.goodkeywords.com) to determine the best keywords, those with good popularity and lower competition. Have in mind that your major keyword must be one of “work at home”, ”home business” or “home based business”.

Time for decisions – Choose the domain name of your website

I will assume that you have decided to use “work at home business opportunity” as your keyword.
Now you need to find the proper domain name for your website and register it.
The ideal domain name would have been (www.work-at-home-business-opportunity.com). As you can see this domain name includes the keyword. It consists of the words in your keyword, separated by dashes. So, when human see your domain name, they can easily understand what it is about. Also some Search Engines will increase the relevance of your website for your keyword, since the keyword exists even in the domain name of your website!
To register this domain name you have to go to the website of a domain name registrar. This is how these companies are called, registrars. But not all companies are convenient to use. Some of them are expensive. Some others do not offer help in choosing your domain name. What do I mean by “offering help in choosing your domain name”? Well, probably someone else has already registered the domain name (www.work-at-home-business-opportunity.com). This is natural. Another entrepreneur decided to use it. Most of the good, small domain names are already registered. And for this reason a registrar that can help you choose the right available domain name effectively is important. I use Godaddy (www.godaddy.com) to register my domain names. It is cheap and offers to me options to find a good domain name, in case the domain name I want is already taken. To register a domain name for a year costs $6 to $15. The variation of the cost has to do with the extension of the domain name. A “.com” extension costs $9, while a “.ws” extension costs $10.
Go to Godaddy and type the domain you decided to register, without the word “www”, for example work-at-home-business-opportunity.com. Press the “go” button and you will get a message indicating that this domain name is registered. If you want to see who has registered this name and when the registration expires, press the button “whois” in the upper right corner of godaddy’s home page. “whois” is an Internet service that gives you detailed information about the owner and the administrator of a domain name, along with other useful information, with one exception. Some registrars offer the possibility to keep your data away from the public eyes, when you register it (with a small cost of course). Some registrars also give you the option to notify you in case a certain domain name has expired and its owner didn’t renew its registration (with a small cost of course). This way you can register it, if you move fast. But, take in consideration that there may also be others waiting also to register it and also paid to get notified as soon as it is expired.
Let’s go back to the registration procedure of your domain name. You see in Godaddy’s web page an answer stating that the domain name requested for registration is already taken. But, in the same page Godaddy offers you the solution. It presents to you alternative options. Domain names related to the words requested and have another extension, or another word or two maybe, like (www.work-at-home-business-opportunity.us) or (www.work-at-home-business-opportunity-online.com) or (www.work-at-home-business-opportunity-online.biz)
Do not register a domain name with the extensions .org or .net. These extensions are used from websites of organizations or with content about Internet. Prefer the extensions com, biz, ws, us, with that order. People trust the .com websites. But instead of registering a long domain name ending with .com, it would be better to register a shorter one with another extension.
Godaddy offers also another very useful option. The option to choose the format of the domain names you are looking for. The maximum number of the words that can contain, with or without dashes between the words, what words to begin with and other options. This way you can request for domain names, not longer than 6 words, 45 letters, with dashes and to start with “work-at-home-business-opportunity”. You will be presented with a series of combinations of names and extensions to choose. And, this way, you will find a good domain name.
Do not make the mistake to register a domain name like (www.home-business-on-the-internet-computer-based-opportunity.com), like I did. Make a small research with whois for this domain name and you will see one of my mistakes in my way to success. You will also understand how this series of articles can help you by keeping you away from mistakes I have made and by indicating to you methods and resources to do your work quickly and effectively.

Time to act – Register your domain name

So, now that you came up with a good domain name, register it, for one or two years. Also make the renewal to be done automatically; This way you won’t risk loosing the name, when it expires.

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Next article in the series “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet”:
Part 4 - Pagerank - What is it - How it can affect the success of your business

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About the author:
Tasos Vasilopoulos is a successful Network Marketer on the Internet as Group Leader of SFI Marketing Group. His main method to promote his home business on the Internet is websites properly optimized to obtain a good rank in the listings of the major Search Engines. Get his ebook with an in depth analysis of all the steps of his method and find more resources on proper domain registration, effective website design and search engines optimization in his website at (http://www.netincome.gr).