If you plan on applying for Google Adsense so that you can make money through showing Google Ads on your blog, I would suggest that you first get your own domain name.

You can start a blog and host it for free on a service such as Blogger but you won’t be able to apply to Google’s Adsense program unless you have your own domain name.

If you’re just starting out, go to Blogger.com and open up an account for yourself. Familiarize yoruself with all the features that Blogger has to offer.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to do some research before you register your domain name. Personally I use GoDaddy.com which is very cost effective. Dot coms are only $8.95 per year.

Think about the topic that you would like to blog on. It’s easier if it’s something that you’re familiar with or have an interest in. If you’re not interested in the subject, it’ll get tedious since you should be posting to your blog everyday. That will make sure that the search engine robots will come by and index your site whenever you have fresh content. More on that later.

For now, do some research using the Overture keyword tool. There is also this site that shows you both the Overture bid amounts and search volume side by side.

You’ll want to find keywords that get a good amount of searches and reasonable bids. Here we’ll use Overture as a guideline for how much advertisers are bidding on Google. Try to scan the 3rd or 4th place bids. This will give you a rough idea of the value of the keyword. I like to with keywords that have at least a few thousand searches. It may not be a single keyword that gets that search volume but sometimes you have a family of related keywords, each with smaller search volumes but the total is quite large.

Okay, back to registering the domain name. If the domain name is available as a .com, go for it. Personally, I like .info as well.

With GoDaddy, you can either pay by any major credit card or using PayPal. Once you register your domain, you’ll want to get a webhost to host the domain on.

Okay… so the two things that you need to get your own website are:
1. Domain name
2. Webhost

If you’re looking for a good webhost, I recommend NewWebSite which is a great deal at $9.99 with unlimited bandwidth. They use Cpanel for site administration which is very easy to use.

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