Basic Recommendations

There are a few basic, essential tools that you need for your internet victory. 

Your Domain

First you need a domain, your website name.  I highly recommend Godaddy.com, they have the best and most easily navigable interface and their customer service is top notch.  Be sure to find a domain that is keyword-rich.  So if you are selling basket weaving courses, it would be good to have the literal keyword “basket-weaving” in the domain; i.e. www.basketweaving.com .  If you can’t find a .com address, try for a .net. 

If your intended url is already taken you can add a word before and after such as best-basket-weaving or basket-weaving-course.com.  The search engines will be able to detect the correct keyword phrase in the url, whether hyphens are used or not.

Web Hosting

Next you need web hosting to upload your site to.  Take it from me, you want professionals to run your site, not some teenager-in-his-parent’s-basement type of web hosting company.  You want 27/7 customer tech support and people who know what they’re talking about.  I’ve used a couple hosts in the past, but by far the best experience I have ever had was with HostGator.com

Site Building

Then of course you need to actually build the site.  If you don’t know anything about html then you might want to consider an easy site builder. 

There are open sourced alternatives (free)building a website, they are building a Wordpress blog (which can be used as a regular website) and there is Joomla (a little more involved in the learning curve but can produce some powerful and beautiful sites).  There is also Weebly, which is free, which anyone who can make a word processing document can make a website through Weebly. 

My advice is not to set yourself up for a long learning curve building a website but use the free avenues so you can start making money right away.  Your goal should be to make money, not to make an impressive looking website.  You’re mainly interested in your return on time and energy invested. 

The Autoresponder

The other major component to your internet victory is your autoresponder, the thing which makes your list.  Remember, the money is in the list. 

The best resource for this is Aweber, which is only $19.95 a month, but it allows you to send messages to unlimited numbers of subscribers