Posted by Fione Tan, Head Internet Marketing Coach

Ready to register your own domain name? Unsure what needs to be done before you choose your domain name? Here are some popular questions asked by entrepreneurs that are starting an Internet Business. Part 1 discusses the issues related to registering a domain name while Part 2 will be covering other topics such as how to transfer a domain name.

1. Do i need a website before i register for a domain name?

No, you don’t need a website before registering a domain name. When you find a great domain name, wait no more and directly buy this .com name first and then decide on how you want to create your website

- normally your domain registrar (the website where you purchased the domain name from), will give you a temporary under construction webpage

2. Do i need to buy hosting before i register for a website domain name?

- you don’t need a hosting account initially as well. Therefore, unless you already know how you will design your website and what software you will choose, then you can add on the web hosting packages at a later date

- some domain name company also offers online site builder like the do-it-yourself website builder we have at http://www.eonenet.com/eoneweb/affordable_web_design.htm where you can just use the given online templates, fill up the forms and your website can be ready in minutes

- if using Dreamweaver or Frontpage to design your website, you will need to buy a hosting account to host your website files

3. Can my website have more than 1 domain name?

Yes, your website can have more than one domain name. This doesn’t mean you display all the registered domain names in your website home page as your website name. You can setup the domain forwarding or url forwarding for each domain name to all go to the same website or to individual different webpages.

Some domain name reigstration companies such as FreeDomainsRegistration.com provides free email forwarding, free starter webpage, free domain masking and other services with their domain name registration fees, while other companies might charge you separately for each of the service.

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Review of free website image tool by Fione Tan, head internet marketing coach

Free image hosting are one of the most popular topics for web design as well as for blog owners. If you have your own web hosting space, then you can host your images and photos in the same web hosting space as well.

If using free blog softwares or blogging platforms like blogger or wordpress, you can also host your images in their free blog account as well. However, the free image hosting space given is rather limited.

Here we take a look at some of the popular image hosting services available on the Internet.

1. Flickr - owned by Yahoo!

- free version allows you to host unlimited images (in lower quality) and display up to 200 recent photos in this account. There is a limit in the number of images you can upload each month.

- you can upgrade to the Pro Account for US$24.95 per year to store unlimited high resolution images online

- you can see a sample of the paid image hosting upgraded version at http://www.flickr.com/photos/internetmarketing where i can create unlimited sets such as 1 set of images for my travel to korea, another set for internet marketing images and then another set for my shopping best buy items.

2. Photobucket

- allows you to host images / photos as well as videos in one account itself

- sample is like http://s250.photobucket.com/albums/gg248/eonenet/

How do you proceed to host your images for free? First, go to the websites above and create your free account. In your free account, you can upload the images from your PC/Laptop and then these images can be viewed online.

On the webpage that displays your images, right click the image file and you will find the url of that image. Copy that file name / url and then paste this into your own blog when you are creating the new post.

An alternative method is to directly insert this HTML code into your webpage source code.

<img src=http://fionetan.com/images/award_zdnet2.gif>

Then amend the url above with your correct file name and this image will automatic appear on your website or blog.

Posted by Fione Tan, head internet marketing coach

After the post about accepting paypal money for Malaysians, i’ve received enquiries about what are the countries that can directly transfer funds in their Paypal account into their local bank account. Here are a list of countries that which are allowed for withdrawal from their Paypal account using the adding bank account function.

- Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, French Guiana, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hong Kong, Hungary, India *, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg *, Martinique, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Reunion, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan and Thailand

The countries above can not only withdraw money into their local bank account, they can also send the money to the money into a US bank account. For India & Luxembourg which is marked with asterisk above, they have an extra option to withdraw their paypal money into their debit, credit or prepaid card.

When you withdraw funds from your Paypal account into the local bank account, there is No Additional Fees charged if you withdraw the standard withdrawal limit (depending on your country). E.g. for Australians, you can withdraw AU$150 and above into your bank account for free, and if for for amount AUD149.99 or less, then you pay a withdrawal fee of AUD1.00. 

Certain countries have their own localised version of Paypal so you need to sign up at the local paypal website. Sample of those countries are like Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and United Kingdom.  

Posted by Fione Tan, head internet marketing coach

Here are some common questions posed by entrepreneurs when they want to join the free affiliate programs

1. I found an affiliate site but in order to use their banners, I need to have a website first. As my website is still not up yet, how am i supposed to get contents for my website?
- do I copy from the existing site or must I build up my own contents and banners?
- what is the procedure for me to get the contents onto my site so that I can sign up with the affiliate program merchant for approval?

Here is the answer from internet marketing coach:-

Here are the steps to get started when joining the affiliate program:-
- list out the affiliate programs that you intend to join (eg about 10 free affiliate programs and their payout rates)

- do not copy articles, contents from other people’s websites unless they have given you permission to do so (and even if they let you use their articles, you should also check what is the benefit to them eg do you need to link to them, mention in source?)

- to plan your own website structure for inserting contents in, eg if you are doing a website about atkins diet so you will be having pages like what is atkins diet, free atkins diet menu plan, popular atkins diet stories, and more

- you should have about 5 webpages of contents and make sure there are no pages that shows under construction, or coming soon

- then you use your website name or blog url to apply for the free affiliate programs

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One of the popular ways to accept payment online (to accept credit card payments from your website) are to use third party ecommerce accounts. The most well known one is of course to use Paypal.

1. First, you need to join paypal. Have you done so? Get a minimum of premier account if you are using individual name and business account is you will be using a company name (but must have the same name bank account).
- and not using the personal paypal account as this will have some trading amount restrictions

2. After completing your application on Paypal, you need to enter your credit card inside for paypal to verify your identity. Then wait for your ct card statement for the 4 digit code that paypal will show in your credit card bill. Initially your paypal status will be called unverified and also be limited in terms of amounts you can accept or send out.

Use that code to upgrade your paypal account as a verified account.

3. How to sell online using Paypal?

In the paypal members area, go to the Merchant Tools section and there are both the Shopping cart and Buy now function.

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Have you ever wondered how popular your website is ? Well, you can keep count of the number of visitor to your website easily by using web tracker. What is WEB TRACKER ? The idea of web tracker is very simple. You place a small piece of code on your website, and that small piece of code will execute every time someone visits your website. The visitor’s public details such as ip address, browser, operating system, url and etc are analyzed and stored for reporting to you later.

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Posted by Amy

One of the problems that people are facing is how to build and maintain their websites. I am glad to be given a chance to coach interested participants to build their own website using eOneNet SEO Site Builder.

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In the 3rd quarter of 2006, over 112 million domains names have been registered worldwide, according to the recent Verisign industry brief. Apart from the TLDs (top level domains), the ccTLDs (country code top level domain names) also experienced great growth. On average, 2 million .com and .net domain name registrations were registered each month. This shows that more and more websites will be sprouting online, and have you started your Internet Business too?

If asked whether you should take a .com or a local .com such as .com.my (Malaysia), .com.sg (Singapore), or .com.hk (Hong Kong), which one would you prefer? If you already have a business / company presence in that country, it’ll be advisable to also take the local domain name too, in order to protect your identity locally.

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What are the basic computer hardware requirements for running an internet business?

For me, i have several laptops in place, that each day i’ll just opt for 1 laptop to bring along. Sony Vaio is my favourite one as it’s light and have long battery life. Dell is also compact and is normally placed back in my HK office, while the new Fujitsu is placed back in my HK apartment.

Back home in Malaysia office, i still have 1 more Apple iBook that i can use.

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Have you seen websites that take ages to load? If you are able to improve your website loading time, for sure your visitors will appreciate this and are more likely to come back.

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