Don't subscribe to get rich quick schemes.

There are thousands of sites out there trying to get you to part with your money, and inferring that you will immediately start reaping the rewards. Don't be fooled by compelling one page sales letters, often with copies of bank statements, and invariably concluding with free gifts worth hundreds of dollars. Often the letters are sprinkled with testimonials and attempt to close the sale by offering only a limited number left remaining for sale, or you are warned of an imminent price increase. Check some of them out. Make a note of the price and the suggested uplift date. Does it really happen. Check out some of the reference sites. Are they really sites of substance, in which you would place the utmost faith in their recommendations. Yes, you can make money, but is usually after the passage of time, and not without a good deal of effort.

Don't pay for information on How-to.

There are thousands of publications offering, at a cost, to teach you how to bring about search engine optimization, rank highly with search engines or become an affiliate guru.

Keep your money in your pocket and seek similar advice for free. Let me start you off by pointing you at some free publications which will get you on your way, and all of which are available to download from our web site. Brad Callen's "Search Engine Optimization Made Easy" is a useful read. To emphasise my point about rogue web traders, I did a Google Advanced Search for exact matches to the title. At the top of the first page, ranking No1 out of 26,400 was a site offering to sell you this free book for $29.95.

Ken Evoy's Affiliate Masters Course is an excellent free read. Whilst one of its aims is to educate the reader about affiliate schemes, much of the content relates to pretty much any web site.

You might also want to download another good free read, "The Netwriting Masters Course."

Don't pay over the odds for domain registration.

There are thousands of sites offering to register domain names. Do find a site that not only provides search facilities to see if your chosen domain name is already registered, but also provides alternative suggestions if it is. Don't pay more than $10.00 as an annual registration fee. Let me stress that we are not affiliates of the company we use. We last paid $8.95 for a dot com at Godaddy.com. We liked the access to nameservers so that we could activate the transfer of the domain name to a host of our choice. Do not subscribe to hosting at this site.

Do get yourself a suitable domain host.

There are some very important points here. To ensure minimum of downtime from your host do not join any of the free hosting sites. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Choose a site that offers to host an unlimited number of web sites for you. The fist host we selected still has a maximum of two sites before they start to increase the annual fee. You should possibly consider one that offers an unlimited number of autoresponders, if you feel that you may need this facility in the future. Although not the site we have recommended on our web site, you might find that Hostgator.com compares favourably with anything else. Make sure that you are comparing like with like when it comes to number of domains, web space, band width etc.

Don't buy links or email addresses.

Don't buy links and more importantly do not purchase from web sites offering you tens of thousands of email addresses. Whilst it can be a pain, you must build up your own links, and your own opt-in list of email addresses. To assist with link building, particularly with keeping track of where you are in a link relationship we use a truly excellent piece of software, outlined on our web site. Not only does it generate the link pages but it handles the sending of emails from templates.

Do carry out search engine optimization.

Your site will go nowhere unless you have carried out the basics. By this I mean searching for and using keywords, developing a link strategy, writing and submitting articles, and promoting your site in other ways. For keywords use the "Tour" at wordtracker .com and then try it for free. For SEO read Brad Cullen's free e-book available on our web site. For tuition on how to write articles, go to Joe Robson's site at adcopywriting.com. Joe has had many years of copywriting experience, and his advice is free.

Do get good article submission software.

For our experiences do a Google Advanced Search for the exact phrase "Articles to Directories in the Newbie World" and select a site to read about our experiences. We found disappointing submission companies, mediocre software and again came across the heavy sell, one pagers with free gifts. This prompted us to design our own. We have now made the decision to share it with others, and we are currently preparing it for commercial use.

Get easy-to-use web design software.

Nearly all web design software writes the HTML code for you. Some packages are very cheap with, reflecting functionality. Others are very expensive, but with considerably longer learning curves. Nearly all require the purchase of some extra software for search engine optimization. We have recently carried out an in-depth review of a web design package which led us gently by the hand through SEO, and optimized each page for us. Feel free to visit the review at the web site shown below.

About the author:

You can see the authors first web site, with an in-depth review of the product that created it, at http://www.re viewxsitepro.com

Paul is also CEO of Demovision, a company specializing in talking heads. You can see examples if you go to the "Contact Us" page at http://www.re viewxsitepro.com

You will need Internet Explorer to view.