If you have ever installed a pluggin, then this will be pretty easy.

1. Extract the files. podpress directory into
   wp-content/plugins/
2. If your using WordPress 1.5, then you will need to use the replacement wp-rss2.php file that is provided. Look in the podpress/WP1.5_users/ directory
3. Login to the Site Admin and go to Plugins and active podPress
4. Then it can be configured from the Options menu. The config should be pretty straight forward, and it even has a preview of what your podcast would look like on iTunes.

Note: If using PHP5 you may need to increase the memory_limit setting in your php.ini to be at least 12M if you run into the problem of getting a blank screen after enabling the podPress Plugin

Go to the video tutorial at http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/podpress-tutorial

Enjoy

Quentin

The search engine giant Google has developed a pay per click advertising system of their own which allows you to place their advertisements on your web pages. If a visitor to your web page clicks on one of these advertisements, you get paid a percentage of the pay per click value.

This system known as Google Adsense is a quick and easy way for webmasters to monetize their website's content pages and earn money from visitors to their website. What makes this system so powerful is that Google uses a special algorithm to determine the theme of each page and then only displays advertisements matching that theme.

The other side of the Google pay per click system is known as Google Adsense. Products owners who wish to promote their wares, open memberships in Google Adsense and create advertising campaigns based on keywords which are regularly searched for by people using the search engines. These advertisements appear in two different locations:

1) They appear on the Google search results page as "Sponsored Links" when the keywords searched for by the web surfer match those that the Adsense member included with their advertisement.

2) On any web page which has incorporated the Google Adsense code they appear as "Ads by Goooogle" when the theme of the web page matches the keywords the Adsense member used for their advertisement.

When one of these advertisements is clicked by a web surfer, the advertiser (Adwords member) is charged the amount they bid on the keyword and the webmaster (Adsense member) is credited with a percentage of the bid amount.

Due to the size of the internet and the shear number of people advertising with Google Adsense, there is a wide range of topics available for webmasters to capitalize on by creating websites based on those topics, but structured specifically to earn money through Google Adsense.

The golden rule for an "Adsense Site" is to limit the options any visitor has when they arrive at a web page to the following:

1) Click a Google Adsense Advertisement for more information.

2) Leave the website by clicking the back button or closing the browser.

3) Clicking to another page on the website which displays more Google Adsense ads. This last option must be made as difficult as possible by not displaying the website menu in any normal or anticipated position.

The key to getting people to click on an Adsense advertisement for more information and not clicking the back button is a bit of a tightrope act… Basically you have to provide just enough information to wet the visitor's appetite so they are eager to carry on searching, but not too little that they get annoyed because of a lack of information and the resulting feeling they've wasted their time.

From your point of view you don't want to spend all that time and effort building a website and getting a reasonable flow of visitors through it, and only earning a couple of cents when people click on your Google Advertisements.

Clearly you need to do a little research before hand and discover which topics and related keywords or phrases cost the most for an Adwords member to bid on. For example, anybody who wants to promote an internet marketing related product using Google Adwords had better be prepared to pay dearly for the more popular keywords.

The downside of building an "Adsense Site" on an expensive theme is there is so much competition for the popular keywords, that you will have to be a search engine optimization wizard to get the search engine rankings required to generate enough traffic to your website.  

The key is to find keywords or phrases that people regularly search for but which do not have much competition from other websites on similar themes. You will not get much website traffic from these little known keywords, so you will need to uncover a lot more of them to make up the difference.

Once you have built your website and got the right balance between keyword value, popularity and competition, your website will earn a nice steady passive income from Google Adsense with very little additional effort on your part.

Your shipping and handling charges are a determining factor in how competitive you will be in a niche market. Many established companies are well known for their efficiency in dispatching the product – customers trust them for their safe prompt delivery. Before you can emulate them, you need to come up with a fair pricing structure for shipping and handling as this is an additional cost paid by your customers. The costs of shipping in bulk are often cheaper than for a single item and you should consider giving your customers discounts for volume.

How do you calculate shipping and handling charges for your product? It's relatively easy, if you know the basics. There are two components in the price:

1) The handling cost which includes packing material, labor, storage and other related costs. While this cost is pretty easy to calculate and depends only on you, the most common mistake is to use the lowest price possible for packaging materials in the shipping calculation. The better way is to find an average cost for packaging materials and then source the cheapest. At least this way you still have some room to "sharpen your pencil" if your shipping quote is too high.

2) The shipping cost which is the charge for postage, freight or courier charges. These costs are not so straight forward and you need to research courier and freight charges to many destinations around the world. Bear in mind that not all shipping charges are fixed, and with a little effort you can easily negotiate an agreement with your shipping company.

Shipping and freight companies usually charge based on the weight and volume of items, the distance they are going to travel, and how quickly you want them to get there. Large volume or weight deliveries carry a premium price tag, while smaller and lighter ones cost less. If the destination is within your country, the shipping charges will be rather small compared to sending packages abroad. If you need urgent goods to be delivered quickly then you will need to pay higher 'priority' charges, whereas slow, 'non-priority' delivery costs much less.  

When calculating shipping costs, don't calculate the cost of shipping to each country in the world, break it down into regions or by continent. If you are shipping small items like CD's use one shipping cost for local deliveries and cost for international deliveries. Find the most expensive shipping cost you are likely to incur and use that for all countries.

When your customer purchases a product, they will be charges the cost price for the product and the shipping and handling costs applicable for the delivery destination will be added at the checkout. A total is calculated and then charged to your customer at the end of the transaction.

You may want to consider offering customers a delivery priority for their shipment. For example:

Option 1. Standard shipping within 3 to 5 days (cheapest).

Option 2. Express 2-day shipping (average cost).

Option 3. Guaranteed Next Day 1-day shipping (most expensive).

Consider giving discounts on bulk orders. Customers will often insist on insurance for bulk orders and costly items and you should consider their request; not only does it makes them more comfortable, it saves you a big PR headache if the order goes missing. On all shipments include a clearly explained shipping, handling and return policy.

Always take care to prepare the proper documentation to suit the insurance, tax and customs regulations in force in your own country and in the destination country. If you are shipping to another country, make sure your product is not prohibited. If you sign up with a trustworthy shipping agent or courier most of the documentation will be handled by them, giving you peace of mind that your items will be delivered safely and quickly.  

The only way to create niche products or services that become best sellers is to discover what your potential customers want. What problems are they facing that you can solve. What pain are they experiencing that you can soothe.

There's only one way to get this information… You have to conduct some research. You have to uncover your potential customers needs, their pain, even their dreams and aspirations. Here are a few idea to get you going:

~Use Forums

Use the search engines to find a number of forums related to the niche your're interested in. Visit these forums regularly and find out what questions people are asking and how often they are asked. The same question asked by many different people on many different forums is a possible topic for your product or service.

~Use Surveys

If you own an opt-in email list, send a brief survey to your subscribers to discover the problems they are facing. If a common problem emerges from your survey, providing the solutions to this problem is a possible topic for your product or service.

If you don't own an opt-in email list, you could send a solo advertisement to a few ezines with a large subscriber base and invite people to take part in your survey by offering a useful reward for their participation.

If you own a website which receives a lot of traffic, you could use a popup to invite people to your survey.

~ Use Wordtracker

Wordtracker.com is one of the most useful research tools on the internet. You can use it to uncover what people are searching for on the internet.

Not only that, you can use it to find out how often people search for different topics. It is a great tool for discovering niche markets.

On its own, Wordtracker is unlikely to point you to your next best seller, but when used in conjunction with surveys you have a very powerful research tool.

Once you have discovered what problems your potential customers are facing it is time to set about creating a product to solve them using any of the following three methods:

1) Use products which come with Private Label Rights.

If you purchase a product with Private Label Rights you can do virtually anything you want with the existing product, you could:

- Insert your name as the author/creator

- Re-arrange the contents

- Add to or remove contents

Private Label Rights is by far the quickest method of creating your own product. The only real disadvantage is other people will be using the same content as their own, so if you use the contents "as is" you won't have a unique product.

2) Use products found in the public domain

If a product is in the public domain, it means the copyright on it has expired and you are free to use the contents. While not as quick as Private Label Rights products, using a product from the public domain means you can get yourself a unique product.

Do a search for public domain products and once you have found one purchase a copy and have it digitized (made into an e-book). You could do this yourself with a scanner and good character recognition software, but you will be busy for many hours proof reading and correcting. A quicker route is to have the work professionally digitized as they do all the proofing and correcting as part of the service.

You can copyright your new digitized product, meaning nobody can sell copies in that particular format.

3) Create your own product

Even going this route doesn't mean you have to do all the work. There are many people willing to write articles, write e-books and even code scripts for a price.

By going to websites such as Elance.com you can negotiate a fair price with people willing to do the work for you. Part of the contract being you keep the copyrights, they simply provide the finished content (known as ghostwriting).

The biggest disadvantage is you have no idea whether they have used other people's content. If they have you will be charged with copyright violation, not them. Before using a ghostwriter, try and do a background check and check their references thoroughly.

There are many different ways of increasing the amount of traffic to your website, but every single one of them fail because they only get your sales message in front of them once. You spend all that time and effort getting them to your sales page, they have a quick look round and they are gone… Perhaps you caught them at a bad time, they might have been in a rush, or they might not have had any spare cash, or they were simply in a bad mood. It doesn't matter because they never bought your niche product or service, you missed the sale.

What if there was a way to get your sales message in front of your website visitors not once, but many times, a system which will regularly call attention your product. Fortunately for you there is such a system and it's easy to install and operate.

The internet marketing fraternity has come up with a utility called an autoresponder. Not the system you can setup with your email account that tells anybody who sends you a message that you've gone on holiday or whatever. This is a system which can send unlimited individual and unique messages to your website visitors at any interval you desire.

When your prospective customer visits your website, you present them with an irresistible free offer in exchange for their name and email address. This could be a free information series based on your product, or it could be another valuable product on a similar theme to yours.

Once they have signed up for your free gift, you send them a series of messages spaced a few days apart and offer them useful free information with links back to your sales page. If they find your messages interesting and useful there's a very good chance they will decide to buy your product to get more information.

Don't think it all stops there… They are still subscribers to your list; they still expect to receive interesting and useful information from you, so give it to them. Continue sending emails to your list of subscribers at regular intervals.

The key is not to inundate them with advertisements; send them useful and relevant information in every email and place a link to other products of yours or join a few affiliate programs and offer those products.

To get your hand on an autoresponder, you have three basic options:

1) Join a free autoresponder. A search on any search engine will get you a list of many free autoresponders, but there is a price to pay… Many free autoresponders will display their own advertising messages at the top of each email sent out by them. This message detracts from your message and considerably reduces your emails effectiveness.

2) Join a paid autoresponder. Again a search on any search engine will get you a list of autoreponders to join, but there is one factor which can greatly affect the delivery rate of emails sent out… Many paid autoresponders are used by spammers and most email service providers will block emails sent from these autoresponders. Unfortunately this is not widely known and obviously the people supplying the autoresponders don't make this information public.

Before you join any paid autoresponder service find out how they guarantee email deliverability. If they don't do anything, or won’t answer you don't use their service.

3) Purchase and install your own autoresponder script. This is the option many internet marketers opt for as it gives them complete control over their email marketing efforts, but they also have to deal with spam complaints themselves. If you join a reputable paid service, the autoresponder provider will ensure all your lists are double opt-in which means every subscriber has to confirm their subscription, any spam complaints from subscribers to your autoresponders are handled by them.

When it comes to incorporating any of these autoresponder options, the service or script providers offer extensive documentation explaining how to get your autoresponder set up and working properly.

If you do not have your own product or service to sell you will need to find suppliers who allow you to sell on their behalf as an affiliate. The process is fairly simple; you join their affiliate program and use the special links they create for linking to their product or service from your website. For each sale you make from one of these links you will earn a commission. At the end of each accounting period your commissions are totaled and you are paid out.

There are thousands of merchants who allow affiliates to sell on their behalf, making the task of searching for reliable ones quite daunting. Fortunately for you this task has been simplified by those who created directories of affiliate programs, here are two of the better ones:

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com

This is a searchable directory of affiliate programs. No "adult", multi-tier (MLM) programs or known scams make it onto this directory and each affiliate program is rated by the people that use them. While useful, this system of ranking is only a guide as there are many programs that have not been rated yet.

http://www.lifetimecommissions.com

This is a directory of affiliate programs that pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions for life. What is the difference between the two?

- An affiliate program paying lifetime commissions pays you every time the customer buys something from the merchant, not just for the first purchase.

- An affiliate program paying residual commissions for life pays you commissions on all recurring fees your customer pays, such as monthly membership fees, web hosting fees or auto responder fees.

Both of these affiliate directories have search facilities. You simply type in a keyword related to the theme of your niche website and a list of related affiliate programs will be displayed.

There are also Affiliate Networks to consider. These are big networks which administer affiliate programs for hundreds if not thousands of merchants. The major advantage of joining an affiliate program through one of these networks is you are less likely to run into the problem of not being paid your commissions.

Three of the biggest Affiliate Networks are:

1) Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com )

Commission Junction is part of ValueClick, Inc. and allows you to make use of one very useful feature… You are able to get your commission payments paid directly into your bank account.

- LinkShare (http://www.linkshare.com )

Linkshare is one of the largest Affiliate Networks with an impressive number of merchants using their services. It is worth noting that they do not manage the commission payments for all merchants using their services.

- ClickBank (http://www.clickbank.com )

ClickBank differs in that they only deal with merchants who sell electronically delivered products like e-books. They control all aspects of the purchase and automatically pay commissions twice a month.

Not all merchants have submitted details of their affiliate program to any directory nor do they use the services of an affiliate network, so if you are still unable to find a merchant with an affiliate program who sells products related to the theme of your niche website, it's time to hit the search engines for your research.

The process is very simple, go to the search engine of your choice and type in a keyword related to your niche and then the phrase +affiliate+program. For example, if the theme of your niche website was related to cheese, you would type cheese+affiliate+program into the search engine's search bar.

It would then be a simple task of going through each result listed until you found the perfect affiliate based niche product you could sell from your website. Before joining any affiliate program take note of these important points:

1) Most affiliate programs have a minimum payment threshold typically between $10 and $50. You will only be paid when your commission exceeds this threshold.

2) Small affiliate programs can be troublesome when it comes to being paid your commissions. Try contacting the affiliate program manager who in all likelihood is the product creator and webmaster all in one. If you don't get a swift response it's unlikely you'll be paid your commissions on time (if at all).

Your first major hurdle to cross is that of improving your reputation and credibility. One way of improving your credibility is to become well known amongst those members of the internet community that frequent your market niche. There are other relatively simple things related to your website which also have a huge impact on your credibility.

The following points all contribute in some way to the first impression your website creates in the minds of your customers and they all go a long way to establishing or destroying your credibility…  

1) Nothing destroys your credibility quicker than if you use unprofessional graphics on your website. That first impression created by your website is incredibly important and it does not take much to turn a seemingly terrible graphic into something that looks neat, clean and professional, but if you don't have the ability to modify the graphics yourself, either find suitable free graphics on the internet or hire a graphic artist to do the work for you.

2) Use full contact details on your website. People feel a lot more comfortable when they are dealing with a real person, and not a "front" for a money making scam. Use your full business address on your website, not a P.O. Box. People like to know that you will respond to their requests for help, so put their minds at rest by also including your business, and mobile phone numbers. Make sure you use an answering service for those periods when you are unable to answer your phone.

3) Don't leave your email address on your website; it will be harvested by spam bots. Use a "Help Desk" system… Your customers have to register first and then create a support ticket. They immediately get an automated response explaining that their customer service issue is logged, gives them a tracking ticket number and explains that a customer service representative will respond shortly. This appears very professional to a customer and greatly increases your credibility.

4) Nobody likes to wait for an answer regardless of the circumstances, so include a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) on your web site. Many customer service issues happen more than once and by supplying the solution to a problem on a FAQ mean your customer gets the answer to their problems immediately. Every time you get a new customer service issue, add it to your FAQ, that's one less issue you'll have to deal with in the future. One spin off from having a comprehensive FAQ is your credibility increases because you've dealt with all those issues (or at least thought about them) in the past.

There are also a number of "off site" issues which greatly affect your credibility…

1) Not responding to customer service issues is a pretty quick way to destroy your credibility. Many people won't buy directly from the sales page and will have questions about your product or service that they want answers to before they consent to the purchase. Delay your reply to them and you loose the sale. Many customers may have a problem with the sale itself and if you don't reply quickly, they will ask for a refund, and what's worse is they will never buy from you again.

2) A very good credibility building task is writing articles related to your website's theme or topic. Submit these articles to as many article directories and ezine editors as you can, the more the better. Your articles will be included in many different ezines and newsletters and will also be included as website content. Hundreds, if not thousands of people will read your articles and over time your reputation and credibility will grow.

3) Participate in web forums or discussion boards as they are also known. Post your own comments, answer other people's questions, and even ask your own questions, always being honest and truthful. Never advertise blatantly, rather include a text link under each message you post. People will get to know you the more you post especially if they like what you write. Quite apart from the additional traffic you will get from people clicking on your text link to see what else you have to offer them, your credibility will increase dramatically.

- A sales page

- A payment processing page

- A thank you / download / order fulfillment page

Let’s take a look at each of these pages:

1) The sales page.

This is a carefully constructed web page which gives your visitor two options: either buy your product or leave. Obviously you must do everything in your power to stop your visitor from leaving without buying, and this is where a few sales page basics come into play… Use each of these features in the order they are presented:

~The headline.

You need to state a compelling and powerful benefit your customer will receive from owning your product.

~The introduction.

Your introduction should explain the problems facing your customers that your product will solve. You do not mention your product at this point, all you are doing is making your customer feel comfortable because you know and understand their problem and their pain.

~The lead-in to your product.

At this point you need to introduce your product. This takes two forms, the first being a visual representation of your product and the second a description of your product and how it solves the problems you outlined earlier.

The visual representation is particularly important if you are selling an e-product (an intangible product that your customer will download onto their computer). The visual representation could be a picture created to look like a physical book or the box that a physical software product would be packaged in.

~Customer testimonials.

Customer testimonials are a very potent motivator to somebody who is unsure about your product or service. After you have introduced your product or service you need to display any testimonials you might have from your satisfied customers.

To start with you won't have any testimonials leaving you with two options:

- The obvious… Don't include a customer testimonial section.

- Advertise free copies of your product in exchange for testimonials.

~Benefits.

An important part of your sales page is a list of benefits explaining how your customer will benefit from owning your product. These benefits will create the desire for your product.  

~The call to action.

In this section you will ask your customer to buy your product. You may wish to include a few free bonuses to make your customer feel they are getting a good deal. You might also wish to include some kind of deadline which could motivate an undecided customer to purchase; the thought of loosing out could just tip the balance in your favor.

~Your Guarantee.

People are very nervous about buying on the internet, so offering a guarantee will put them at rest.

~The Summary.

This is last part of your sales page and where you summarize your offer. You need to state your major benefit once more and ask the customer to buy.

2) The payment processing page

In nearly all cases you have little control over the design of the payment processing page you use. It largely depends on how you process payments for your product or service.

Most payment processors (and all third party payment processors like PayPal, ClickBank etc.) have their own processing pages. You would be given a code to use on your sales page and when a customer clicks the payment button they will be automatically taken to the third party payment processor's page.

3) The thank you / download / order fulfillment page

As soon as your customer's purchase has been verified they will be forwarded to your order fulfillment page. If your customer has never purchased anything online before, it is quite possible this was a traumatic experience. To put their mind at rest and to complete the transaction, your order fulfillment page should:

~Put your customers at ease

It is vital that you inform your customer that their payment has been verified before giving them any other information. Tell them what to expect on their credit/debit card statement.

~Describe how your customer's order will be fulfilled

Explain to your customer, in detail, exactly how their order is going to be fulfilled.

For offline fulfillment, explain when their purchase is going to be shipped, how it is going to be shipped, and when they can expect delivery.

For online fulfillment, you need to explain how they can download their product. If you have used a compression tool, explain how they can uncompress (unzip) their product. If you have used a special medium for viewing your product, explain what your customer needs to do in order to view you product, for example most e-books are created as a PDF file and so Adobe Acrobat is needed in order to view them.

The secret is to use what is known as an autoresponder which is an email utility you can use to save the contact details of your visitors and then to send them emails at set intervals.

To make use of an autoresponder you can either use the services of a third party supplier or you can purchase and install a script onto your website. To begin with it's a lot easier to use a third party autoresponder.

Irrespective of whether you use a third party service or your own script, you will have to use a form to capture your visitors contact details. This form can be built into any HTML web page be it your sales page, or a page designed specifically for use as a popup.

The underlying concept behind the use of autoresponders is that people rarely buy on their first visit to a website. Research has shown that most people need repeated contact with an advertising message before they respond to it and purchase the product or service.

Autoresponders were designed for just this. You can load a series of advertising messages into your autoresponder and adjust it to send the messages at set intervals. That said, people react badly to advertising; in fact most people just plain ignore advertisements.

To get round this, you have to design your email series so that it is not perceived to be advertising. A good way to do this is to design your email series to include plenty of useful information; give your subscribers some good quality free information in each email and weave your advertisement into it.

For example, let's assume you are selling an e-book titled "101 Dieting Tips". You could create a series of 7 emails, each containing a single dieting tip. At the end of each email you could inform the reader of your e-book containing 101 tips and include a link to your sales page.

The bottom line is the content you include in your email series must be of very high quality; after all you are going to ask for somebody's contact details in exchange for it.

Bear in mind nobody is going to sign up for your email series just you write it, or you include good content. In truth visitors to your website aren't interested in you, they are interested in themselves. They have a problem they are trying to solve, and that's why they ended up on your website; they thought they could find a solution there.

Another point worth considering is you are a relative unknown to the person visiting your website; they don't know you or trust you. It's because of this distrust that many people won't buy your product or service on their first visit. If you can get them to subscribe, your email series should build up their trust to the point where they will buy your product or service.

First you have to get them to subscribe, and you do this by advertising you are giving away "free" tips which will help solve their problem. Your opt-in form must be prominently displayed on your sales page, build it into the content. You should also design a popup form that displays your opt-in form either when people first get to your site, or when they leave.

Finally, a properly designed opt-in form which causes many of your website visitors to subscribe to your information series will incorporate these three design tips:

1) Use a heading, in a larger font and of a different color to the rest of the form, which includes a major benefit. In other words, in as few words as possible, explain the biggest benefit your visitor will receive from subscribing to your information series.

2) In as few words as possible explain two or three additional benefits your reader will receive from subscribing to your opt-in list. A list of bullet points is the best way to do this.

3) Your primary objective is to get your visitor to join your opt-in list, so ask them to subscribe. Get into the conversation going on inside their mind, use words like "Yes! Send Me the Tips Now!" on the submit button of your form.

A good domain name that describes your product or service gives it credibility, for example www.goldjewlery.com looks professional, is descriptive and easy to remember. Compare that to www.geocities.com/jewelry/gold.html…

If you have created a product, don't name it and then try to find a domain name… The trick is to find your domain name first and name your product after it using these brainstorming tips:

1) Conduct keyword research related to your product or service by using these services to see what people are searching for:

- http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

- https://adwords.google.com/select/tools.html

- http://wordtracker.com

2) List the key benefits your product or service will give to your customer, and because the shorter a domain name is the easier it is to remember, you might want to use single words that imply a benefit. For example the word "cheap" implies you will save money which is a major benefit.

Using a thesaurus will help you find all the synonyms for your words and phrases.

3) Mix and match the words you have researched to come up with a domain that is:

- Short.

- Easy to spell.

- Easy to pronounce (if it has a rhythm to it and rolls of the tongue, it will be more memorable. If it is difficult to quickly say your domain name out loud, your potential customers will mentally trip over it and not remember it).

 - Descriptive.

When choosing your sales pulling domain name, pay attention to the following ten tips and you could make (or save) a pile of money:

1) Avoid using trade marked names, it's unethical and could land you in an expensive legal battle.

2) Try and avoid words which have different spellings in other countries such as color and colour, humor and humour.

3) Avoid unnecessary words and keep it simple. You would never search for "low cost high quality garden utensils", you're more likely to search for "cheap garden tools" and it's easier to remember.

4) Avoid using numbers as these tend to be forgotten.

5) Avoid starting a domain name with the word 'the' or the letter 'a' as they tend to be forgotten.

6) Avoid using domain names where the end of one word and the beginning of the next are vowels. For example, free ezines reads OK as two separate words, but as one in a domain name freeezines.com looks ridiculous and chances are people will omit the third letter 'e' when typing the domain into a browser.

The same applies where one word ends and the next starts with the same letter e.g. next topic – nexttopic

If you are using a hyphen (dash) to separate words then this is not a problem.

7) In the US a .com domain name will be noticed far quicker than any other domain name. Perhaps because .com is the oldest extension and therefore the most associated with reputable websites.

On the other hand local domain names will get the attention of local surfers. For example, if you live in the United Kingdom, mydomain.co.uk will get your attention far quicker than mydomain.com because you know it is a UK specific domain name and probably more relevant.

People will tend to type a domain name into their browser without dashes. For example, they will type mywebsite.com instead of my-website.com. A long domain name with dashes is easier to read, but it's more annoying to type into a browser.

If you optimize your website for the search engines, having a domain name with dashes has the advantage of making it a little easier for the search engines to understand.

9) Domain names can only contain letters, numbers, and dashes. Spaces and symbols are not allowed. Don't worry about upper and lower case characters as domain names are not case sensitive.

10) It is not true that most of the short domain names have been taken, thousands of domains expire every day and many of them are not taken up again. Type the phrase "deleted domains" into any search engine and you will find loads of websites dealing in deleted domains. Try it out and you might find the short sweet sales pulling domain name you were looking for.