I will try to write a few lessons or tips on how to be a successful webmaster or blogger, that will be composed of: choosing a hosting company and plan, a domain name, building your website or blog, choosing a good theme/template or getting a custom one, optimizing your website for good results in search engines, ad choosing and optimization, by optimal placing, branding and different ways of advertising, along with copywriting.

Choosing a good hosting plan 

The hosting you use is important for your website, because you need it to have a very high uptime, close to 100% and to load quickly. There are lots of hosting providers, but some do overselling, which could create problems, other have high pricing and some, usually lower priced, lack quality.

Also, you should pick a hosting with many features and especially the ones you need and you think you may later need. The most important and mostly used are cPanel, Fantastico, PHP, MySQL, CGI, Perl and .htaccess editing permissions.

Personally, i use more web hosts for variety and because i want to see which one is better, but also, i don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. Until now, the best one that i have used is Hostgator, offering enough disk space and bandwidth, a lot of features and great uptime.

The domain name 

The domain name is a part of your website branding and you have to choose wisely and search a lot, as nowadays there are only a few good domains left to register. If you have an online shop that sells pink ladies sandals you shouldn’t get pinkladiessandalsshop.com, but something brandable and shorter, like pinkdals.com ( this is only an example that came into my mind on the moment ).

You should never get a TLD ( top level domain or extension ) other than .com or your country’s ccTLD, at least not from the beginning or if not buing it along with the .com or ccTLD, if you are sure you may be successful from the beginning.

The domain is very important, as many users may visit somedomain.net or somedomain.org and when trying to visit it again will go to somedomain.com, as this is the usual one and this way you may lose valuable visitors.

When buying the domain name you have to be careful where from do you buy and choose a reliable registrar, like Godaddy. I have had a lot of trouble with cheaper registrars, that lost acreditation. Registerfly is the best example.

Building your website or blog 

This part requires imagination and research. You have to think about building a website or blog that will work, will be visited and liked by people, so they subscribe and return to it. Or you can build it on some niche that you like and it is a pleasure for you to do it, this will help you a lot.

If you want to find a good niche, with less competitors, you have to do some keyword research, hire someone to do it or use some tools. After finding a niche to rely on and some keywords to start optimizing your website on, you need to start building it. You have to choose between a CMS, for a preinstalled website with a complete administration system, a blogging software ( i recommend WordPress ) or to create it yourself, depending on what you want to do.

Optimizing your website

I will go through two ways of optimization, the visual one, that the usual visitor will see and the search engine one, that will place you better in search engines results.

The first one contains in choosing a good-looking theme, building one or buying. The method doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is that it must attract the visitor and convince him to return ( but this depends on content, too ). If you choose to get a custom design, it’s better, because you will be unique at this part and different from the others.

Then, you have to wisely structure your website, for easy navigation and easy-to-reach-and-read content. The website must not contain many ads that will stop the user from reading the content or navigating and must have readable content, with usual fonts and big sized.

A logo would be great for your website, to make it more unique and create a brand, but we will get to that part later.

You definitely need unique content, written by you or a reliable content writer, both for search engines and the usual readers. You need to use CSS and have a code as clean as possible, for faster loading, browser compatibility and to be search engine friendly.

Use headers for the title of your articles, a relevant title for every page, not the same for all. Don’t put many external links on it and take care who you link too, because linking to spam or blackhat websites will lower your search engine rankings.

Try to get as many links from other websites to you, mostly from relevant ones.

More in a future lesson. I’m waiting for your comments on this.