The only thing missing now is an actual web site. In the old days, that would have meant hiring a designer and spending lots of money and time developing a nice-looking site. Those days, luckily, are gone. You can have a site up and running very quickly. You’re going to do this by installing a free WordPress blog.

Just in case you didn’t get the significance of that, it means you became a blogger when you installed WordPress. And just in case that doesn’t mean anything to you, it means that you don’t think in terms of competition. Bloggers do things just a little differently than old-school webmasters. As a webmaster, I was always thinking of my competitors as adversaries. As a blogger, I think of others sharing the same niche space as I do as “fellow bloggers”. There’s a huge distinction to be made there, as the mindset governs actions in completely different ways.

• As a webmaster, researching competitors puts your focus on an adversarial level, in which you concentrate on how to outmaneuver and beat the opponent.
• As a blogger, researching others in your space put your focus on collaboration, in which you concentrate on ways that you and your fellow bloggers can work together to collectively create wins for each other.

While either of those methods can work for any site, the very nature and history of blogging makes collaboration with fellow bloggers a piece of cake. All you have to do is participate.

We’ll be discussing the many methods of participation in several future posts, but we’ll take one thing at a time. First things first…find out who else is in your space. Back in Part Two of the series, you focused on “The What”, in which you decided upon “what it is you know best, or what it is you do best, or what it is that you have the most interest in.” Now that you know what your niche space is, start reading the blogs of others who also have that same interest. What? You thought you were the only one? Well, maybe. If your niche is the mating habits of the Tibetan microscopic beetle, then perhaps you are alone. But if your interest lies in almost anything else, then it’s a safe bet that there are others blogging about it. That’s ok. In fact, that’s great! That means that you have an instant team of people with which you can collaborate. Again, we’ll talk more about that later.

For now:

• Find your new niche teammates.
• Read their blogs.
• Make a list of the 20-30 most popular.
• Then determine of those, which are your personal favorites? Which make the most sense to you? Which bloggers’ personalities mesh best with your own?
• Rearrange the list in the order of your favorites. Sometimes that will bring some of the more obscure blogs up to the top of the list.

How do you find the bloggers in your space? Do an advanced search on Technorati, scroll down to the bottom of the advanced search page, and type in your subject matter into the Find Blogs About field. (see screenshot below)

Read the blogs that you discover for the next few weeks. Subscribe to a few of them in your feedreader. Don’t have a feedreader? I prefer GreatNews, but Google Reader or Bloglines are two other very popular choices. If you aren’t sure what to do with feedreaders, we can discuss that in the future as well. For now, if all you can do is manually visit the blogs on a daily basis, do so. Once you learn how to consume feeds via feed readers, the task of reading blog posts will become easier. But any method of reading the blogs in your space is fine at this stage of research.

To sum up, find bloggers in your niche space, read their posts for a few weeks, and list them in order of your favorites. Over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss ways that you can begin to participate and become a part of a collaborative team effort of blogging.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: actual web site, collaboration, designer, Google, nice-looking site, research, search page, webmaster, working together
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

HostGator, like most hosting companies, has several plans to choose from. The cheapest is $6.95/month (called the Hatchling plan), but you have to pay for a year in advance for that plan. If you’d prefer to pay monthly, or in 3 or 6 month chunks instead, the next best plan is $9.95/month for the Baby plan. With the Baby plan, you also get to host as many sites as you want for the same price, so in the future that may come in very handy for you. If it were me, I’d choose the Baby plan, but the Hatchling plan will work as well. (Don’t worry about what all those numbers mean right now. Basically, that’s just letting you know how much space is available for your site under each plan. Any of the plans have plenty of everything for you right now, so that’s not a big consideration at this point).

Just click on the Order Now link in the column of whichever plan you choose.

You can see that the Order Wizard will ask you to choose a domain option. Since you already have your domain name, you’ll want to select I will use My Existing Domain and update My Nameservers only. Then, you need to type in the domain name you purchased (such as flykites.com) into the space that says Existing Domain:. Click Next and proceed to fill out the information requested to finish the purchase.

Once you’ve completed the transaction, you’ll receive an email from HostGator with information about your account. You definitely want to save this in a safe place. I usually save the email AND print it out. In any case, within this email will be the nameservers that have been assigned to your site. You’ll need to tell GoDaddy about these nameservers so you’ll want to look for them in the email that HostGator sends you. *

Ok, now let’s go tell GoDaddy about your new nameservers. Log in to your GoDaddy account and choose Domains / My Domain Names from the menu near the top of the page.

Select the domain name and click on the Nameservers button.

Copy and paste (or manually type in) the two nameservers that you received in the HostGator email. Save.

That’s it. You now not only own a domain name, but you’ve given it a place to live. It can take up to 24-48 hours for the rest of the world to be told about about your new domain name, so typing www.whatever-your-domain-is.com may not do anything yet. Eventually it will. (This is called “propogating” throughout the net).

The only thing missing now is an actual web site. In the old days, that would have meant hiring a designer and spending lots of money and time developing a nice-looking site. Those days, luckily, are gone. You can have a site up and running very quickly. You’re going to do this by installing a free WordPress blog. We’ll discuss this in the next part of the series, but rest assured that this is very, very easy to do. Once you’ve done this and a few more little things, you’ll be ready to roll.

Just a reminder. I’ve tried to make this process easy enough for anyone to understand, but if I still wasn’t clear enough, you might want to purchase a set of instructional videos that really step you through it as though you were watching it happen live.

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part One (The Introduction)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Two (The WHAT)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Three (The DISCLAIMER)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Four (The Domain Name)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Five (The Hosting Plan)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Six (Installing WordPress)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Seven (Your WordPress Theme)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Eight (Your Blogging Voice)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Nine (Making Money)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Ten (The Summary)

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© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: actual web site, designer, hostgator, hosting, hosting plans, make a living in your pajamas, nameservers, nice-looking site, web hosting, web servers, www.whatever-your-domain-is.com
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.