for keeping track of my digital experiments

Today’s installment of howtos by Jason, I will discuss generating enough money from your websites, so that they finance themselves, and later on provide you some extra income. I will be covering the various means of getting people to come to your website, search engine optimization and placement, advertisers, and bandwidth requirements.

I suggest adding your website to the big four web indexes: Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask. Each one has a different way of site submission. With Yahoo, just go to their site submission page and enter in the neccessary details. Live works much the same way with their url submission. Google recently added a site submission page, but also offers many tools within their Google Accounts that are much more useful for webmasters. If you have a Google Account or would like much more details and control over how Google indexes your site, use the webmaster tools provided through a Google Account. Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) has one of the most ancient site submission methods. They require you to have a robots.txt file, and enter your sitemap(.xml file) via a GET Request. Wha ….. no UI?!?

A quick and painless single paragraph tutorial on how to optimize your pages for search engines, and get better search engine rankings.

1. Always fill in the header meta data for title, author, keywords, and description completely. Make sure that the meta data matches in to the content in the body element.
2. Make sure that the <h#></h#> tags match some keywords in the html meta data.
3. Don’t use extra keywords or lengthy meta data.
4. Get other websites to link to your site. Make sure that these back links are relevant to your content.

Now to money making schemes, muhaha. For those of you starting off with pay-per-click ads, I suggest Google Adsense. Google provides many help and optimization pointers for your site to earn more money. It is only natural for them to do this because, they get a chunk of your advertising yields.

For more information on site design and Google Adsense you can check out a series of tutorials on the subject from HyperVRE (Lessons: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

Once your site starts to move up in various search engine page rankings, earning you more hits per day, you can start contracting directly with advertisers and pay-per-click link exchangers.

If you are just starting out with a HTML site and a few images and sounds, you will definitely be under 1GB of traffic a month (probably closer to 500MB). As you add more media content to your site and have more visitors you should expect an increase in bandwidth a month. Bandwidth in this case, is the amount of data transferred (in one month). Most hosting providers measure it this way. Here is an easy to use website bandwidth calculator.

In this edition of howto’s by Jason, I will be covering how to buy, setup, and manage your domain. For this tutorial I will be using zoneedit.com which is a free DNS (Domain Name System) hosting provider. DNS is the internet’s way of matching a name to an IP Address. For example you wouldn’t want to remember Google’s plethora of server IP Addresses. You don’t necessarily have to use zoneedit.com, but I have found that they provide a few more key features that I enjoy the benefits of, and have lower latency than XName or FreeDNS.

Before buying a domain, I suggest that you have all your web content ready to go, your DNS hosting up, and your hosting situation ready, so that you don’t waste any of your money with empty domain pages. To “have” your own domain name, you will first have to find out if it is available to be “bought” from a domain registrar. So go to your domain registrar of choice. Much like going bargain hunting on EBay or at a flea market, I suggest shopping around for the registrar with the lowest prices for the type of TLD (top level domain, ex: .com, .net, .org, .biz, .ws) or ccTLD (country code top level domain, ex: .de – Germany, .cn – China, .hk – Hong Kong, .mx – Mexico, .us – U.S.A.) you want to purchase the rights to. I have found that name.com and dynadot have the best prices over longer term periods, they also allow you to pay by PayPal. GoDaddy sometimes has one year term contracts that are pretty sheik. Let me know if you find any great deals. ;-]

Once you have purchased your domain you need to set-up your DNS server addresses.

As you can see from the two screen shots, I use both Zoneedit.com and secondary name servers provided by the Roller Network. A secondary DNS server allows for traffic load-balancing, and also backup if the primary DNS servers were to fail. Secondary DNS servers query the primary DNS servers on set intervals for updated DNS data. Keep reading to find out how to get your DNS server addresses to put in and how to manage your DNS zone (your domain).

I will be showing you how to set-up your own free DNS server account on zoneedit.com, so if you aren’t already there head over to www.zoneedit.com in your browser. You will first need to sign up for an account, so hit the “secure sign up” link at the bottom of the page. Fill in all your contact information completely. Yes, they do make good on their word about no spam. So go through the typical confirmation shiznat that gets sent to your email address. Once your account is all set up, hit the “secure login” link that is right beside the “secure sign up” link you clicked earlier. Type in your account username and password. In case your are not presented with a page link the below, hit the Add Zone link on the left menu column.

Punch in the domain name you purchased earlier where it says “Enter Domain Name”, ignore all the crap below the button that says “Add Zone”. Press the “Add Zone” button once you have finished typing in your domain name.

You should then get something that looks like the following, stating that you can’t edit that domain yet.

If you recall we were talking about the DNS server address that should be entered into the domain registrar’s DNS management table. The two DNS server host names that Zoneedit just pumped out are what you plug in to the domain registrar’s DNS entries for your domain.

Once you add in the DNS server addresses to your domain registrar where you bought your domain from, it might take awhile for Zoneedit to recognize the update. In the meantime, it is time to add in the IP Address of your content server (the server you have already set up your domain on. So click on the edit zone link, and then after that there should be a link that says “IP addresses (A)” at the top of the page, click on it. Then enter in the ip address of your content server. Like I have done below.

Click the “Add New IP Address” button. Which should lead you to the following screen.

Click the upper “Yes” button to set this IP Address to handle requests from both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com. After the required processing takes place you will find that a new page comes up with both yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com filled in with the IP Address that you entered.

If all is set up properly you should start being able to access the content that resides on your web server. If you want to continue on and add in email capabilities for your domain click on the “Mail Servers (MX)” link to add in email servers. In some cases it is the same IP Address as your web server. Google offers free email and web hosting through Google Apps (below). It provides a completely web based administration, for those of you who don’t want to get down and dirty with Linux/Unix console administration.

There are many different ways to go about creating your own website or network of sites. Here are a few of the options I have gone through.

• For those of you who want the most control, you can run your own web server/email server from home. I recommend an “always on” connection such as Cable or DSL. The important part for this option is that you have enough upload bandwidth to serve your content to multiple users. This works just fine for a small site, but if you are expecting lots of visitors, have your website hosted by a hosting company. I’ve done this before and had good success with Debian Linux. For more instructions on setting up a variety of software on top of Debian –> check out the ISPConfig set-up tutorial for Debian 4.0 (Etch). The full ISPConfig setup takes about 1-2GB of hard drive space and at least 50-100 MB of RAM so don’t do the full set-up if you don’t need ISPConfig.
• The next best option is free hosting. Yes, there are such things, but many of these “freehosts” require you to display their ads. Most free hosting plans give you: 1-10GB per month of bandwidth, 100-500MB of space with a file size limit (so you can’t stash all your copy-infringing mp3′s on their server and link them to your MySpace account), PHP scripting enabled with sendmail turned off, and 1-5 MySQL databases. A conclusive list of free hosting providers can be found at free-webhosts.com.
• You then get into shared hosting. It’s called such because the hosting provider rents out space on the server and hosts many different accounts on a single server. Consequently you are restricted on how much control you have over the server and how much processing and memory you receive. Shared accounts can cost $3-20 a month, depending on what is all included. Shared hosting accounts include: email hosting (10-100 email accounts), web hosting (10-100GB of space with full PHP and sometimes Perl installations), and database hosting (10-20 mysql databases).
• A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. I managed to get my VPS for $10/month at cheapvps.net, but most VPS plans run from $30-70/month. You can also find cheap unmanaged VPS deals at vpslink.com.
• If you truly need all the power and a whole lot of bandwidth you can pay out $30-200/month for a dedicated server. Serverpronto.com has some of the lowest priced deals that I have found on entry level and medium range dedicated servers.

Now that you have your hosting set-up, it’s time to create and put up your content. For starters I suggest having a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS markup. What I have done with most of my sites is find a good XHTML/CSS template and add my content in on top of the tweaked template. If you are also looking into having a “dynamic site” I suggest reading up and having a running knowledge of PHP, MySQL or PostgreSQL, and Javascript. I also suggest using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for web development such as ActiveState Komodo, if you are going to be creating web content on a regular basis. It has saved me from quite a few scripting errors before I experience them server-side.

To get your content up on your host, you can use a web-based file manager that most hosts provide, or an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client. An FTP Client I suggest for Windows is FTPSurfer by WisperTech. If you are using Linux, Unix, or OSX here are a few suggestions I found.

After you got most of that down, then there is the issue of financing all of this, I’ll be getting into that with some information on advertising in an upcoming post.