It is actually free for 1 year from the date of registration (you will need to buy your own hosting plan separate from the domain if you wish to use it), the catch is that they want your credit card information on the account so that when the free year is up they can charge you for a second year and so on. They charge $35.00 for 1 year domain registration!! What a rip off!

I actually do not recommend register.com’s hosting plans to anyone who wishes to have control over their site/ SEO. I used them back in the day and was grossly disappointed. I don’t even recommend them for domain registration because it is way over priced but with a free domain why not use them?

The key is to transfer the domain to another registrar at the end of the year and THEN pay for the next years registration. This is what I plan to do!

I got my free domain registration for customgiftsbytalina.com, I will redirect it to my business site (www.craftedcustomgifts.com) thus reserving my business name as a domain so nobody else can use it and misrepresent the business.

A free domain name could be benificial to you as a blogger. Getting a domain registered and buying a hosting plan means you own your blog. It wont be hosted at a free blogging site (like blogger.com, wordpress.com or MSN spaces) which increases your chance for making money off that blog, plus you have more control!

Free blogs often cannot use all the nifty little plugins (like comment luv) that exist because they are unable to edit template files and so on. Free blogs are free so the capabilities and benefits are often limited. If you are a serious blogger this free domain name offer can launch you into the world of professional blogging/ owning your own site!

If you want ot claim your free domain head over to their promotion page (http://www.register.com/promo/acquisitions_lp_1.rcmx?trkID=EMAoFkNb1W) and get started.. The offer is only good for the week so don’t wait if you want one.

Then mark your calendar and remember to transfer the domain registration to another registrar of your choice before it expires next year!

The post A free domain name? appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

Also, if you are new to site building or if this is your first website you would also benefit from the informative articles the have posted on the site. These informative articles can help to make sense of buying hosting service and a domain.

The post Choosing a webhost is now easier! appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

If you are looking for ways to grow your blogs readership real world marketing through blogger business cards is a great idea that you may want to look in to!

The post Blog marketing idea- blogger business cards appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

Payperpost is a great way for bloggers to get paid for writing but questions have been raised about whether or not they are asking you to break google’s “passing page rank” rules. Some payperpost writers claim that using “rel=nofollow” in the html for sponsored links is against the payperpost terms of service. Not using it will surely impact your page rank and may even get your sites removed from google so what decision will you make? Which one is more ethical? Are you looking to make money or to provide helpful content to web users, do you have to choose one or the other?
I thought the goal of payperpost was to create internet “buzz” for advertisers and to refer readers to opportunities that were relevant and useful to the target audience. I didn’t think payperpost was a round-about way for advertisers to buy page rank and optimal search engine placement.

Yes, I know that many people are saying that google page rank means nothing anymore and that they are “a soft monopoly” that is loosing respect and creditability over all this. I am just not sure if I believe it just yet. Google is my preferred search engine and they do have many users who believe their results are the best, besides I do get over half of my traffic from their search results!

I guess it all goes back to what we believe is the best type of search results. Do you like your results to be free of paid results and do you think paid results are often irrelevant, do you care? Do you think that advertisers who pay for publicity should also benefit from preferred search engine placement?

Shouldn’t their be a way for the small businesses and the “great content” producers to get into the search engines without having to pay and arm and a leg for publicity? What are your thoughts about all this and where do you think the coin will fall?

Their are some great debates going on about the google/ payperpost saga that you can read about on the payperpost forums. This is a very controversial topic and each blogger has to decide which way they will go.

Additionally, any site owner that chooses to place advertisements on their site for personal gain should consider the pros and cons very carefully! For more reading on the paid links/ page rank issue check out these sites:

• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings
• Matt Cutts on text links and pagerank
• Why paid links in the search results can be bad
• Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank
• Paid Links To Manipulate PageRank

The post Payperpost, Google, page rank, paid links and the debate. appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

You have your blog and your content but it’s not quite performing the way you had hoped, do you want to make your blog more profitable or valuable? In order to do this you need people to read what you publish and you need to improve your page rank and get into the search engines. The higher your page rank is and the more readers you have the more money you will make. Things like technorati page rank, followed incoming links, blog description, tags and keywords have an impact on the success of your blog.

I have found many fellow writers and have visited their blogs, many of them have great content but nobody will ever find it because they have not taken the steps to expand their readership. Nobody comments of their stuff and the page rank is very low. Having a blog is hard work but you can’t simply write something, publish it and expect the readers to come flocking to you.

The idea that you can simply “build it and they will come” is insufficient and will take you years to get the readers and the ranking you desire. As of July 2006 there were over 50 million blogs tracked on technorati. Everyone is blogging these days and chances are hundreds of people are blogging about the very same thing you are. How do you intend to get people to your blog?

Irrelevant link exchanges, spam commenting and other linking schemes are also basically useless and unless your blog is found quite often via the search engines your chance of readers “just finding you” is slim.

The best way to build your readership and get your content read is to network! Reading and commenting on other blogs, forums, networking sites and returning the favor when people visit you is the most successful way!

Get out there today and find some blogs that you would enjoy reading and commenting on. You can check out: http://www.technorati.com to search for blogs and add your own, also: http://blogsearch.google.com is a great way to find blogs.

If you can spend 30 min to an hour visiting other relevant and interesting blogs, reading the content and posting on topic comments it will pay off. They key is to be consistent with your own blog posts and to consistently visit and participate in other blogs. Before you know it you will have several cyber friends visiting your blog just as you visited theirs and if your content is really good they may even talk about your posts in their own posts thus bringing you more readers!

Find 3-5 blogs that you like (the more the better), visit them everyday, write on topic comments for as many posts as you can, fill in your own blog address and your information when you comment. Do this for a week just to see what happens! I know you will be surprised at the results!

The post So you have a blog and a dream, how do you get there? appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.