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Building Your Ebook Website
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So you have spent countless hours typing and doing research, and have finally got your ebook completed. Now what? Well, if you plan on selling that ebook, it would be a good idea to also create a webpage for it. This guide will help you with the basics and get you started and own your way to success.
Finding a Host
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Important Host Factors
Reliability
Money Back Guarantee
Free Tech Support
99.0%+ Server Uptime
Email Accounts
PHP/MYSQL/PERL Support
and Price!
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Before you can begin, you will need to pick a host for your website (If you do not have a domain name, now would be a good time to register one, although it is not required). You can either choose free or paid hosting. I recommend paid, as it is much more reliable, faster, and you will not have to put up with any annoying ads. You will need a domain to get paid hosting. You can get them for $8.88 a year at
NameCheap.
What you want to look for in a host is reliability. Every minute of downtime is a minute you could be selling your ebook. If you get a paid host, do not buy more than you need. In other words, if you dont plan on having hundreds of people a day downloading your ebook, do not pay for extra bandwidth your are not going to use. For a simple and smaller ebook site, two to three gigs of bandwidth a month is plenty. If you ever need more bandwith, you can always upgrade later. Same goes for disk storage. If you only have a couple ebooks, twenty megs of disk space is fine. Remember, there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth or space. Stay away from these types of deals. If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is and you will end up losing money. Also, you may get a better deal if you pay up front for a full year, but that is very risky. Monthly is a much better choice. It will only cost a a few dollars more, and if your host ever does vanish off the face of the earth, you don't lose as much, if any money. Don't forget to
keep regular backups!
Take a look at the two tables below to compare some of the top paid and free hosting available.
Making Your Site
Now that you have your host, you can begin the process of making your website. If you do not know anything about web design, there is a place that can help.
HTMLGoodies.com - They have everything and anything you need to know about web design.
HTML, PHP, CGI, database management, and everything in between. I suggest you read this site through before you begin your coding. It will take time and patience, but you will learn something and it will look a lot better than any WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program. If you want to go ahead and use one of these programs feel free to do so, but you will not learn anything new.
Promoting Your Site
Finally, after hours upon hours of hard work, you have finished your site. But theirs one problem. Nobody knows. So now it's time to start promoting. There are many ways to do this. The most effective is search engines. Before you submit to the search engines you will need to optimize a little. Make sure you have unique meta tags on all of your pages with a title, description, and keywords. Content is key. The more information you have the better. Another effective method is link exchanges. Find sites that relate to your own and ask if they would like to exchange links. The more sites you have linking to yours, the better chance you have of being listed in the
Google search engine. Once you get listed in Google, just sit back and watch the traffic role in. Their are many other promotion techniques with varying results. Other techniques include word of mouth, adding you website to all your signatures, and posting in forums.
Now that you know the basics, your own your way to creating your own profitable ebook.
Good Luck!