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Copyright (c) 2009 Khadijah Ibrahim

When I bought my first domain, the only thing I knew about building an online business was the need to buy domain and hosting to park my domain name. I realised that this knowledge was not enough. Even after I attended a seminar that claimed to enable me to build an online business after attending it did not help much.

Due to that I did research on my own, asked questions, attended more trainings and enrolled in a coaching program so that I could build my own online business.

From there on, I learned a lot about how to build an online business. I also learned that there is four basic but important information that you need to know to start building your website.

Today, I am going to share the information with you.

Find a niche

The first thing you need to do before you build your website is to find the right niche. Your niche could be your hobby, expertise, work or something you or someone close to you know about.

This is very important as your website and your online business will be built based on your niche.

For example your niche is selling cookies therefore your website will be about cookies. You can’t have a website talking about building a house and yet you are selling cookies. People will get confused and maybe there are people who think you are crazy.

Therefore when you have decided on the niche for example selling cookies, you will start to plan building your website around your niche i.e. how to make mouth-watering cookies, how to make healthy cookies that children love etc.

Everything you talk about in your website will be about cookies.

Buy a domain

After you have decided on your niche, you need to find a name for your website. The domain that you are going to buy will use this name. Your domain will look something like this www.yourdomainname.com. The best is to have a catchy and easy-to- remember name so people could remember your product. They may not buy your product the first time they go into you website. However they will be able to remember the name and once they need the product that you sell, they will type in your domain name.

For example if you are selling cookies, you could name your website www.crispycookie.com. Another thing about giving a right name to your domain is that people will generally know what your business is just by looking at your domain name.

Hosting to park your domain

When you already have a domain, you will need a host to park your domain. Think of your host this way, your domain is the signboard for your shop while hosting is your shop where you keep your product for sale. The only difference is that instead of keeping physical products there, you are keeping your product review, how your product could help people etc. In other words, you are keeping information of your product in your host.

FTP

FTP is short for file transfer protocol. As the name suggests, you can use it to transfer files from your computer to the network such as the internet, transferring files from the internet to your computer or transferring your files to another computer vice versa.

The process of transferring the file is called uploading and downloading. If you transfer a file from your computer over to the internet for example FTP site then the process is called uploading. If you transfer a file over from the internet to your computer then the process is called downloading.

For those who ask what a FTP site is; FTP site is something like a large filing cabinet only this filing cabinet will be in a central server computer.

To transfer file back and forth from your computer to the FTP site, you would need software called FTP Client. There are a lot of free FTP Client products on the internet that you could choose from. This software needs to be installed into your computer and you can only use it with a live connection to the internet.

Believe me, your life is much easier using FTP Client as the process is only dragging-and-dropping files from your computer’s directory to the central server computer i.e. your hosting directory and vice versa.

With these basic information in your pocket, you could now start to build your own website. These are the backbone for any online business and anybody who wants to build an online business must know these. With these in your pocket plus other internet marketing strategies, you will be on your way to build a successful online business.