Publish yourself in 10 steps

Having your own site is now a children’s play. Moreover, you can build your own brand online, by buying a domain name which represents you. There are a few steps to follow in order to create your presence on Internet:

1. Choose your domain name. You have two options: either you buy your own, or you use a free domain. Free services, such as blogger.com, offer you a domain like yourname.blogspot.com, with free hosting, so you can really start blogging in about 10 minutes. Yet, if later on you decide to get your own domain, moving your site will be a real pain and you’ll lose all your links, so it’s better to figure out from the beginning what you want to achieve with your site.
2. If you go with your own domain name, you need to choose a web hosting company. Inform yourself as well as you can, and remember that cheapest is not always the best. I did the mistake to go for the cheapest and I had to move in three months time, due to lots of annoying interruptions of service. I’m now with Dreamhost and I’m happy. It is not cheap, but I did not have any problem ever since. If you decide to go with Dreamhost, use the promo code ATT2007 and you’ll get 50$ discount for one year hosting plans. If for some reason you don’t like Dreamhost, another option could be Hostgator (aff). Whatever company you choose, make sure you ask your friends and check on forums and blogs, to find references about it.
3. Build your site. If you don’t know any programming language and you want to keep things simple, use a content management application. Among the most used are Wordpress, Moveable Type, Drupal.
4. Improve your site’s functionality: if you choose Wordpress as the platform for your site, take a look at the available plugins and install the ones which are most suitable for you.
5. Customize your site: if you are not so much of a photographer, you still can have gorgeous photos for your site. Daily Kos has published a great review of free photos available resources.
6. Measure your progress: install a good analytics program, which would allow you to see who your visitors are, how many visits your site gets, which are the best days of the weeks in terms of traffic, which are your best referrers, and much more. Two excellent free such programs are Google Analytics and 103bees. Statcounter is also good, but the free version tracks the details of only the last 100 visits. If you want to see where people are going when they leave your site, you can install Addfreestats. Besides the common statistics, it has an option to display the exit links. If you run AdSense on your site, this means that you can see which site they visited when clicking on an ad from a certain page, so you can filter it in case of very low cost per click coming from that link.
7. Promote your site: your work is in vain if nobody sees it. If you want to know what to do, or where to start your promotion activities, a good resource is problogger.net. Browse through the archives, and you’ll find many golden nuggets of information which can help you achieve great results.
8. Write interesting and useful content. Keep the dialog alive. Learn how to put your ideas in words, make your headlines eye-catchy, induce readers the desire to comment on your articles. Copyblogger is a great resource where you can learn how to write better. Digital Point forum is also a great place where you can learn a lot.
9. Look at other people’s progress and learn from them. Steve Pavlina has an excellent article about his blog’s evolution in terms of traffic and revenue, and he is not the only one. Steve Olson tells the story of his blog attracting 100000 visitors in the first 30 days.
Dan Raine takes us through the adventure of the 15k challenge: he made a bet with his friends that he can make $15000 from a completely new internet business, in one month time, with $150 starting capital. He was very close to winning the bet, and he tells the whole story, step by step. It is quite a lesson of creativity and hard work.
10. Connect with people. Make friends. Go social. Choose the social networks that fit you best. You can find a comprehensive list of such sites on Wikipedia. If you want an example of the power of social networking, you can read about my experience with StumbleUpon.