Doing it the right way! 

The domain name should always be first!  The right way is to purchase your own domain name first.  Be careful and do several name searches.

A domain name that is short and simple is easier for you and any visitors to remember.  Most hosting sites have very good searches for the name(s) you might desire.  The domain name does not have to be on the same hosted site as the domain name is purchased.  Important:  when you own your domain name your site will be known as myname.com or whatever you chose from available names.  You may not want myname.atmyhostname.com.  The latter is a subdomain at some other hosted site.  Like this blog is blog.applicationallstars.com meaning it is on the same hosted account with our site.

The hosting is very important! If you are using a developer, listen to the suggestions he makes for a hosting site.  There are sometimes reasons other than price that will cause the developer to suggest a particular host for your website.  He is better equiped to deal with the nuances of that host, price could be a factor, type and style of your app, as well as other reasons.  I personally build most sites on Namecheap hosting for linux type applications and Smarterasp for the windows type applications.  They fulfill what I need for the different type applications.  There are hundreds of others that are very good to deal with out there as well. By choosing a top hosted account, you will have all the tools to install other applications onto your site like this blog or out forum.  There are many really good free ad-ons you can get on a good host plan.  Blogs, forums, Image Galleries, utilities, and many more.          If you are going to build your own site, there are free tools to do just that.  Komposer is a free tool and does a great job with websites for both the beginner and the advanced user, but there are many more.  Bottom line.  The cost is always a factor, but a domain name is about $10.00 per year and a Hosted account can vary from a smaller space at about $40.00 per year to untold amounts, but for about $50.00 a year you can have your own spot on the world wide web that belongs to you and you can do what you want to with it.

The build your own free site online like Wix, Yola, Weebly, and others and the Potential Problems:  Not to be knocking anybody's services, but you should know a few things.

There are some very real reasons to NOT do this and they may not apply to you.   I will attempt to document a few.

What is a blog

What if not a place for freedom of expression and a way to place information so others can gain some modicum of intelligence fron the printed word?!?!

Any website can benefit from having a blog of some type.  Yes, they cost money to have on your site at first, but with one like this, you can create you own posts with whatever information you wish and then creat more and more posts as well as delete a few and edit what you have written before.  You can optionally allow others to create and edit post on your blog if you wish.

This is one of the lesser expensive ones, taking only about 4 hours to completely install, set up and for training. There are others I do use that could cost you an arm and 2 legs plus a very steep learning curve.

Desktop Database Application

Suffice it to say, a database is defined as anthing that holds data.  A pad and pencil can get that done.   Most people associate a database as one to any number of tables on a computer that holds the necessary data for them or their business.  They are here and have been for many years.  Even the lowly spreadsheet is really a database.

Websites and Databases

Let's Take a php application on the web as an example.  It could be Java, PHP, c#, c++ and some other ones.  PHP is a backend for mostly data control.  Backend generally means it is not the part you see a lot of on your browser.

Phone and Tablets  There are 2 types of these to be considered.   The most common for business is where they are using a website database application and they use the phone/tablet to sign in and access the data.  This usually requires the webside application and then requires the database on the phone/tablet for offline information.

SEO-Search Engine Optimization

When asked about SEO, I have many questions of my own, so I am going to number what I can do and why.  I will also give the reasons for doing what I do and why I do it.  First of all, this site ranks as being 88 out of a possible 100 on seo and page ranking varies from page 1 to page 300 depending on which search words one uses.

Emails Help If you have a hosted server, you should have email capability.  For an example we will carry all through this post, lets say our domain name is "mydomain.com".   That means whatever whatever amil we create will be This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

How do we create that email account?  We go to our cpanel that will come with the hosted account and type in the name and save it.

Any emails sent will go to this email account.

Your Site is like Real Estate

Remember that a website is like Real Estate!  Your pages are your lots and the space is valuable.  You paid money to have the pages placed on the server and more money to have the pages built.  The space has value if the old rule of Location, Location, Location is followed.  If you have traffic of 2000 a day or more, advertisers will be easy to find and some will come to you.  You can charge for the space like a 125x125 pixel add for $xx.xx number of dollars per month.  Location is what type and what niche you fit into.    It seems, that sites with a store(ecommerce) is a big draw.  It seems like membership type sites are also a big draw.  A forum and/or blog helps out as well.  Attractiveness also helps as does good content and SEO. 

Google adsense

Assuming you  have 400 or more visitors a day, then adsense may be an option because adsense works on a monthly basis.  If you don't hit a certain number of clicks and earn a certain amount, then you lose it and start over.  It can be very good if you get enough clicks in a month.  Be careful when signing for adsense, since they make the most money off of adwords and will push you to do that.  Adwords does make sense if you have the budget to sustain it.  It is like having you site always at the top of the google search engine. 

Affiliations

The affiliates programs are everywhere, but care is needed to get the right ones for your site.  One way is to visit sites and look at the bottom to see if they have an affilliate program.  The other way is to join an affilliates company where they have many programs to offer you like Linksharewhere you join for free and ask the advertisers for the banners or text to add to your pages.  You get commissions off either sales, memberships or clicks.  If you noticed, this site is monetized and I am using Linkshare for that.  There are several others as well.  It is a good idea to just use one affiliate's company and not have several with banners from each.  If you are concerned about how much, it is not much for each, but it can add up and in most cases is enough to pay for the hosting and building of a site over time.  There are instances where one could make some serious money this way.  There are rules for each company and each advertiser as well.  Usually, that means keep it clean on the site and do NOT self promote the ads.  Just let people click if they want to.

Banner Swap

You can do banner swapping with several companies out there.  There are some pitfalls, but is a good source of extra visitors.  You would need to create at least one banner and dowload your choices of other peoples banners to place on your own site.  How it generally works is, every time your page is opened that has the banner on it, a message is sent and your banner gets placed in rotation to be shown on other sites.  This means that the more visitors you have, the more your banner(r) are shown on other sites and that will get even more traffic.   I have not placed these on this site as yet, but when this is completed, I intend to put one on each page somewhere.  With 140 people a day coming here and clicking multiple pages, I can get fairly good exposure on the internet.  You can create a banner that changes every 1-2-3 or 4 seconds by making an animated .gif file which most will accept.  Like these on another site I created for application allstars:   http://applicationallstars.com/blog/index.php/new-allstar-applications-and-application  Those banners are everywhere now because application allstars and allstar application has a traffic count over 500 per day on the wholle.

Traffic Count

You will need to know your monthly traffic count when signing up for your monetizing plan.  You can find that in several places.  If you have access to cpanel of your site, it may be the quickest to get the counts they generall have something like "stats" in there that you can open.  You can use my favorite Site Checkupfrom any browser where mysite.com would be your website address without the http://.  If you have signed up for google analytics, you can get the counts there.  There are more places and ways, but they should all give the same numbers.  Usually by the daily count, so you need to do the math and multiply by 30 for a monthly count.