Getting Registered

Purpose:

The purpose of this lesson is to provide you with a general overview of services required in building your Auto-blog empire.  It will cover:

• What services are necessary
• When you should register for the services
• Why you should register for these services

As you go along, action items will be presented and opportunity will be given to complete those action items.

Register Now and Stay Organized

When building your auto-blog empire, you will discover that there are a number of services you will want to take advantage of and you will need to create accounts at these services you choose to use.  That means a lot of URLs, usernames, passwords and other required pieces of information will need to be managed.
You will also discover that these various services can have different target audiences in mind.  Some will be focused on both “New & Experienced” users while other services only want “Experienced” ones.
With this in mind, the following will cover the services you need to know about and take advantage of, when to take advantage of them and why registering with them is of value to you in your auto-blog empire-building.

Account Management Tools

A critical aspect of running your auto-blog empire is the ability to manage the many services you will register with and here are a couple of tools that can help with that management.
Account Management Spreadsheet: This spreadsheet is designed to help you keep organized and provide a means for quick access to your important registered account information.  An Excel version of this spreadsheet can be downloaded at:

Download the spreadsheet and store it in the Blog Blueprint folder you created in the previous lesson.
When you open the spreadsheet, you can see it contains five different worksheets:

• Email Accounts
• Affiliate Networks
• Hosting
• Domains
• Mailing Lists

Each worksheet is designed to help you record and organize account information specific to the service the worksheet is named after.  We’ll get into a little more detail on this later on in this lesson.

Roboform Browser Add-on: This recommended tool is a browser add-on that will securely keep all your account access information on your computer and makes it extremely easy to access that information.  When you return to a site, Roboform recognizes the site and will bring up the corresponding access information (e.g. username and password).  It is all secured behind a password that, once entered, enables Roboform to automatically fill in the access information for you.
Roboform can be accessed from http://www.ramthoughts.com/roboform.  It is a paid product but a free trial version is available for you to experiment with.

• Download the Account Management spreadsheet to your Blog Blueprint folder
  (http://www.ramthoughts.com/accounttracking)
• Optionally, download and install the free trial version of Roboform
  (http://www.ramthoughts.com/roboform)

Services

There are five initial categories of services that are important to building your auto-blog empire.  In this section we will give an individual overview of each service.  This is intended to give you a basic understanding of each service in order to get you up and running with building your auto-blog empire.  You will gain greater understanding of all of these services as you continue in the auto-blog training.
Email Accounts
Many of the services desired to help with building your auto-blog network have been victims of spammers who create junk blogs then use throw-away email addresses from free email providers like Hotmail and Gmail to spam those services.  How the services protect themselves is to use a filtering system that filters out email addresses from such email providers.
As a result, each auto-blog you create will have its own personalized email address such as accounts@yourdomain.com.  This will help distinguish you from spammers, enabling you to successfully register and use those desired services rather than being filtered out.
While using this technique gets you around the spamming problem, another problem is created.  Following our auto-blogging steps, after a year of using individual domains for email addresses, you will end up with 120 email accounts and as you can well imagine, this will be a major pain to manage.
Our recommendation is to create a central email management account that all other email accounts will forward to.  This is an account that is not seen by anyone but you. For example, you can use one of the free providers and our recommendation is to use Gmail (which is what we use).  The advantages of using Gmail are:

• It can be accessed from anywhere you can access the internet
• It has a built-in, powerful spam filter
• You can easily auto-filter and sort
• It is FREE!

Now remember, this central email management account will NOT be seen by anyone else but you, so when you sign up for a service, you are not using that email account (which will probably result in rejection) instead you would use a domain specific email (such as accounts@domain.com) that is forwarded to your central email management account.
How you employ the use of email accounts in building your auto-blogging network is that each time you create a new blog, you will create two email addresses.  One will be used for “account creation” (registering with the service) and the other will be used as a “contact forms” email.  The “account creation” email will not forward to Gmail but the “contact forms” email will.
As you continue on in the Auto-blogging course, the meaning and use of these things will become clearer.

• Create a new email account (recommend Gmail) that will be used as your central email account for managing your auto-blogging empire emails.
• Record your new email account information in the Account Management spreadsheet by going to the ‘Email Accounts’ worksheet and entering the corresponding information in the “Primary Email Address” fields.

Affiliate Networks
Affiliate programs are going to play a major role in your revenue generating and as a result you are going to need to register with a few affiliate networks to get started.  By doing so, you will discover how easy it is to find lots of different products and services you can offer on your blog. 
This differs from finding products and then determining whether or not they have an affiliate program through which you can promote that product.  Affiliate networks have thousands and thousands of products to choose from and every niche is covered.
Though affiliate networks offer such ease in finding products and services to promote, it is important to understand that not all affiliate networks are the same.  In general terms, these networks can fall under one of two categories:

• Newbie Friendly
• Not Newbie Friendly

By “newbie” we simply mean an individual who is new to affiliate marketing.
The issue of “newbie friendliness” is important to be aware of.  Many networks only want experienced marketers and as a result will require …

• A personal reference
• An application process
• Proof you are experienced

As you can see, this makes breaking into the affiliate marketing world a very challenging one.
Another issue facing individuals new to affiliate marketing is the misunderstanding that you must register with all these networks now.  Until you have established yourself and have a reason to expand into other networks, you do not need to register with all of them.  With our auto-blogging system, this will not be required.
In fact, the focus of this training is to get you started ASAP and that means our training will only focus on those affiliate networks that are “Newbie Friendly”.  If you are not a “newbie”, feel free to use other networks but for the purpose of this course we will be focusing only on the following affiliate networks:

• Amazon
• Clickbank
• Commission Junction

• Register for accounts at the recommended affiliate networks. You can use your central management email address when registering for these services but it is best to use an email with the domain of an already well established site if you own one.
• IMPORTANT - Amazon and Commission Junction will need you to enter a website when registering with them. Do not worry if you do not currently have a website, the approval process is generally very fast (24 to 48 hours) and you can come back to this step after you have your first blog created.
• It is also important to note that these services do allow the use of free email services because they are not victims of spam like social websites are:
• http://www.ramthoughts.com/amazon (Amazon)
• http://www.ramthoughts.com/clickbank (ClickBank)
• http://www.ramthoughts.com/cj (Commission Junction)
• Record your affiliate networks information in the Account Management spreadsheet by going to the ‘Affiliate Networks’ worksheet and entering the corresponding information in each of the fields.

UPDATE: We no longer recommend that you register with eBay as they are very critical of new affiliates and will not approve you until you have an established presense online. With this in mind, we do not recommend that you apply to eBay until you have a few established blogs that you can show them in your application. If you already have established websites online and would still like to try and apply at eBay, you can register at http://www.ramthoughts.com/ebay.
Note: It is highly recommended that you do not use Google AdSense on any of your auto-blogs until at least 4 weeks after they are created. As a result, we do not recommend you apply for Googe AdSense until later and this will be covered in a different lesson.

Hosting:
With auto-blogging, you will need to invest in hosting accounts to “host” the many blogs you are going to create.  In this section will talk about the hosting options that you will specifically need to successfully build your auto-blogging empire.  As you build your empire, the reasons for the requirements will be very clear to you.
Now remember, our goal is to get you up and running ASAP.  Therefore, as long as you follow our steps, those details that at first may seem quite confusing will become clearer to you.
For starting your auto-blogging empire, you will want a host that …

• Is Linux-based with cPanel management software installed
• Allows for WordPress installations
• Allows for XMLRPC communications with your blogs
• Has lots of hosting space and bandwidth
• Allows for multiple domains
• Allows for multiple email addresses
• Provides good, fast customer support

There are several other considerations as well.  For example, the different kind of hosting plans you can get are …

• Shared
• Reseller
• VPS (Cloud)
• Dedicated

Each option has its own pros and cons, so explore these to see which best fits your specific requirements.  For example:

• Shared hosting  is great for those just starting out in Auto-blog Networks … and even for those that have been around for awhile
• Shared hosting uses a main, dedicated server shared with others, thus reducing the price
• Shared hosting can cause a problem.  For example, if someone on that server gets into trouble with Google, you could be at risk because the IP address used comes from the same server as the problem user.  This does not happen very often and is not likely to be an issue but you do want to be aware of it.  Of course, this is why you want to select a hosting service with excellent, quick customer support.  That way if a problem does occur, you can resolve it quickly.

You will host 10 to 20 auto-blogs per shared account so you want to make certain your hosting service allows for this. 
The reasons for having only 10 to 20 auto-blogs per shared account are …

• To protect your network and your work:  It is possible for both search engines and people to reverse engineer every part of your network by using your website’s IP address.  By hosting on different hosts and IPs (e.g. using a single host that enables multiple IP addresses), you are able to separate and protect your network.
• Shared servers are limited:  Since our auto-blogging system can be resource intensive, it’s possible to exceed your account limits by amount of storage space, bandwidth usage, etc.  Restricting your hosting approach to 10 to 20 blogs over multiple hosts and IPs, you prevent this from happening.

As you can see, the preferred method of hosting for a “newbie” is shared hosting.  Why not use the others when starting out? 

• Reason #1 – Money.  VPS, Reseller and Dedicated hosting can be very expensive.  For example, a dedicated server can cost from $300 to $500 a month.
• Reason #2 – Complicated.  These types of accounts require much more management and are considered overkill for someone that is just starting out.

The bottom line in all of this is to Upgrade As You Go! 
Shared accounts cost only about $7 to $10 a month and are the easiest option for getting started.  Returns on your auto-blogging will easily pay for that.  After a couple of months of growth you can than consider investing in other options, such as multi-IP shared hosting, VPS (sometimes called ‘Cloud’) hosting and dedicated hosting.
What you need to remember is …

• Do not try to penny pinch on hosting
• Do not get more than what you need when starting out … you want to spend as little as necessary but do not skip quality
• It is good to know how each specific hosting option works but that is not what this course is all about.  The fact is that the best experience is hands-on … so follow our advice, start small with a basic shared account, do NOT over-analyze this and then work your way up as needed.

• Register for a shared hosting account at one of the recommended hosting networks.
  • http://www.ramthoughts.com/bluehost (Bluehost)
  • http://www.ramthoughts.com/hostmonster (Host Monster)
  • http://www.ramthoughts.com/lunarpages (Lunar Pages)
  • http://www.ramthoughts.com/hostgator (Host Gator)
  • http://www.ramthoughts.com/liquidweb (Liquid Web)
• Record your hosting information in the Account Management spreadsheet by going to the ‘Hosting’ worksheet and entering the corresponding information in each of the fields.

Domains:
Domains play a major role in how well your auto-blogs rank in the search engines.  In this course we will focus on purchasing new domains for your auto-blogs that focus very tight on specific keyword phrases.
In the coming lessons you will be researching to get keywords for domains and content.  At that time we will dive deeper into specific domain strategies such as …

• How to pick the best domains
• Why we are focusing on new domains
• What are aged domains
• Other important factors to be mentioned later (e.g. why do we only use specific domain extensions)

For this lesson, all that is needed is for you to understand that you will be purchasing lots of domains to create your network and as a result will need an account at a solid domain registrar.

• Register with at least one of the recommended domain registrar networks.
• http://www.ramthoughts.com/godaddy (GoDaddy)
• http://www.ramthoughts.com/namecheap (Name Cheap)
• Record your domain information in the Account Management spreadsheet by going to the ‘Domains’ worksheet and entering the corresponding information in each of the fields.

Mailing Lists:
Note: It is recommended that if you are unsure of whether or not you will use a mailing list, that you hold off until you go through "Lesson 23 - Email Marketing"
Part of the overall strategy of the Blog Blueprint will be to teach you how to make as much money as possible.  Part of how that is accomplished is by implementing some sort of email list building strategy into your network.
In order to properly manage your email list, you are going to need to invest in a third party email list management system.
There are two options for email management software: free and paid.  Right away we will tell you … DO NOT BOTHER WITH FREE!
If you are going to take email marketing seriously, you are not going to want to waste your time having to manage your own system.  If you use a free system, that is exactly what is going to happen.  Things like email delivery rates, etc. are going to take up a lot of your time being managed.
So, best option – LEAVE IT TO THE PROS!!
They will make sure your emails get through.  As well, they will protect you from any possible legal issues that may arise.
When deciding on a paid service, some of the things you look for are …

• An established service
• Multiple pricing options based on list size.  When starting out new, you will have a very small list and so you don’t want to be paying more than a few dollars.  This can range from about $12 to $20 a month when starting out.  As the list grows, it will go up a little bit, e.g. some accounts with up to 3000 leads will cost about $25 a month. NOTE: If you have 3000 leads, you’ll be making much more than $25 a month … JUST FROM THE EMAIL LIST … so it proves to be very profitable.
• Multiple lists per account, e.g. when you create your account, you can have an unlimited amount of mailing lists within that one account.
• Inclusion of auto-responders so you can send automated responses to everyone on your list.
• Fast customer support.  This is very important because if your mailing list should malfunction for whatever reason, you want to be able to quickly get the problem resolved.

• If you will be using a mailing list, you will want to register at one of the recommended mailing list management networks.
• Reminder: It is recommended that if you are unsure of whether or not you will use a mailing list, that you hold off until you go through "Lesson 23 - Email Marketing"
• http://www.ramthoughts.com/aweber (Aweber)
• http://www.ramthoughts.com/icontact (iContact)
• http://www.ramthoughts.com/constantcontact (Constant Contact)
• Record your mailing list information in the Account Management spreadsheet by going to the ‘Mailing Lists’ worksheet and entering the corresponding information in each of the fields

Summary

In this lesson we reviewed the services you should register for and had you register for each of them so you can be ready to go once you start building your auto-blog empire.
The information in this lesson about the services was just an overview – all that has been presented here will become clearer and clearer as you continue further into the auto-blogging course.