Welcome! This page should help you get started in the right direction. Each of the action steps outlined here are things that you definitely need to do.


I'm Bob Chambers and I'm the person with whom you'll have the most contact. My job is to make sure that you get the help you need and to answer any questions that you might have.

You can contact me by CLICKING HERE. It's my pleasure to help you.



Ready? Great. Let's rock-and-roll...

NOTE: If you ever get confused about techie terminology that you don’t understand, here’s a great site that can help: http://www.webopedia.com/ Webopedia.com is a free online dictionary for techie geek terms. It’s awesome. When you have a few spare moments, go there and do a search for "domain name" or "tld" or "IP address" or any other term that your heart desires.

QUICK-START ACTION PLAN:

1) Register a "crazy name" domain. You MUST have this in place before your site is transferred.

When you've completed this step, make sure that you tell Jim Davis at Tiger Investigations what your "crazy name" URL is. CLICK HERE to send Jim an email using spyguy@tigerinvestigations.com. If that email address isn't working, CLICK HERE to send Jim an email using jim1@jdssys.com.

What is a "crazy name"? It's anything you want it to be. It's a domain name that creates curiousity. It's your choice and you should have some fun with this. Joe's a big advocate of using a "crazy name" and I really like this idea too. It's fun. But not everyone shares our enthusiasm for crazy names, so you're free to pick whatever kind of domain name you'd like.

Here are some crazy name ideas (each of the "crazy names" after the first 3 examples below were available at the time this page was written):

fuzzy-chicken.com
wareareyou.com
squishy-shop.com
dogs-driving-scooters.com
last-change-prance.com
raising-goober.com
even-a-blind-squirrel.com
slippery-nanas.com
as-a-matter-of-fact.com
hug-your-elephant.com
put-it-on-my-tab.com
i-brake-for-software.com
two-belly-buttons.com
my-other-website-is-funny.com
so-little-time.com
clowns-taste-funny.com
he-who-hesitates.com
the-voices-in-my-head.com
back-from-oz.com
i-is-a-engineer.com
sneaky-little-furball.com
all-u-can-eat-software.com
consider-the-following.com
run-like-mad.com

For the full story on domain names, CLICK HERE.

Before we move on to step #2, let's talk briefly about website hosting. If all of this is somewhat new to you, you may be wondering "Do I need to pay for website hosting?" The answer is "No, you do not need to pay for website hosting."

Website hosting represents the space on a computer (server) where your webpages are stored and called up by a visitor's web browser. The browser only knows where the files are and what to display by the URL (domain name) or the IP address.

In our discussion regarding domain names further down this page, we talk about forwarding (or pointing) your "crazy name" URL to your IBSoftShop's IP address. When you get to that step, what you'll be setting up is simply a traffic switch that says (as an example) traffic going to www.crazy-name.com should be automatically redirected to http://www.ibsoftshops.com/ . The URL that uses the IP address represents the specific storage area on the computer that's acting as the web server and this is where your IBSoftShop web pages are kept.

Does that make sense?

The domain name registrar that you use may offer "Private Listings". You can sign up for a private list if you want to, but I personally don’t think that paying for a private listing is necessary for your IBSoftShop. Perhaps if you were setting up a network of sites using linking strategies that you did not want others to reverse-engineer, then it would be worthwhile, but it’s not relevant here.

The private listing simply means that the general public wouldn’t be able to do a “who is” look up and find your contact information.

2) When you register your domain name, you'll want to set up URL forwarding to your site's IP address (when we figure out what it is). For now, just go ahead and choose your domain name and get it registered. We can take care of the URL forwarding as soon as we get to that point.

For the full story on domain forwarding, CLICK HERE.

3) Create a custom contact page for your IBSoftShop. We provide a neat little software program that will pretty much do this for you.

CLICK HERE to go to the contact software download page.

4) If you're unfamiliar with using Google AdWords as a way to drive traffic, you'll want to start with the Google AdWords Video Tutorial that Joe and Bob Chambers created for you. CLICK HERE to go grab your own copy of the Google AdWords Video Tutorial.

DOMAIN NAMES... THE FULL STORY

In a nutshell, here's how this works...

Joe sets up your IBSoftShop and it's provided to you with a static IP address and a domain name that Joe has registered. They might look like this:

http://www.ibsoftshops.com/ (this is the URL using the static IP address)

http://www.free-software-downloads-business-ebooks-resell-1.com/ (this is the URL using the domain name that Joe has registered)

Now, neither of the above URLs look like anything really promotable, do they? Nah. Didn't think so.

So what you want to do is register a domain name (not hosting) that you like and want to use to promote your IBSoftShop.

If you're looking for some resources relating to domain name selection and registration, you can go have a look around here:
http://www.internetmarketingpowertools.com/website-design-tools.html
This is one of my sites. You'll see a couple of links on the left-hand side of the page on the topic of domain name selection and domain name registration.

Another site that has a great free tool for brainstorming domain names and checking domain name availability is here: http://www.imcdomains.com/

Do not register your domain name at imcdomains.com. It's way overpriced. Just use the "Check a name" tool that's provided. They'll give you alternative domain name ideas on the results page.

I've used a number of different domain name registrars for sites that I run. Two very reasonable and reliable services are:

GoDaddy - http://www.godaddy.com
Dotster - http://www.dotster.com

When you register a domain name, the domain name registrar acts as the administrator for that name. You own it and you decide what to do with it.

Here are some EXAMPLES of what you might do with your new domain name.

1. Park it. This just means that you own the domain name but haven’t decided what to do with it yet.

2. Associate it with web hosting. (WE'RE NOT DOING THIS) In this case, you’d set up the DNS information for your domain name to match what’s provided by your web hosting company.

3. Forward traffic through your domain name to some other domain.

For your IBSoftShop, we’ll pick #3 above.

O.K. Let's say that you chose squishy-shop.com as your domain name and you've now registered it.

We want to tell your domain registrar to forward all of the traffic that you send to squishy-shop.com to your IBSoftShop domain (i.e. http://208.76.213.95) .

DOMAIN FORWARDING... THE FULL STORY

Forwarding options generally include...

1) Simple Forwarding: this simply redirects traffic. There’s no masking or cloaking of domain names. A visitor types in http://www.squishy-shop.com , gets automatically redirected to http://208.76.213.95 and the IP address / URL is what they see in their browser’s address bar.

2) Cloaked Forwarding: this may also be referred to as "Stealth Forwarding" or "Masked Forwarding". When you use this service your visitor will continue to see http://www.squishy-shop.com in their web browser's address bar even though you’ve redirected them to http://208.76.213.95. This service may carry a small annual price tag but is well worth it. I'd strongly recommend signing up for cloaked forwarding (or whatever your registrar calls it).

Setting up URL forwarding is simple. Log in to the control panel of your domain name registrar's site and point your domain name at the IP address for your IBSoftShop (usually without using the http://). It should look something like "208.76.213.95" (your IP address will be slightly different). Not all registrars are the same, so make sure you read their instructions carefully.

Last thing. How to get your site name to show up in the "Favorites" list when someone bookmarks a page on your site... This is discussed HERE.

I hope the above information is helpful.