The first thing you need to do when you start your home based internet business is decide on your domain name. You should choose a name that is easy to remember and type. It is best to avoid any weird characters or dashes in the domain address. For example you would not want "your-bu$iness.com" but you would want "yourbusiness.com". From the very beginning you need to think about making it easy for prospective customers or affiliates to type and remember your site. There are tons of free searches out there to see if your chosen domain name is already taken. One is http://instantdomainsearch.com but you can find literally thousands out there. Play around with your ideal domain name and search until you find a combination that is available. That is all there is to it.

Once you have decided on a domain name, you need to research what keywords will bring the most potential customers to your site. Key words are extremely important. Keywords are one component that drives search engine results for Google, Yahoo, MSN and all of the other top engines out there. If you wanted to start a pet business online, you might research the following key words and phrases: pet business, online pet business, pets, online business, dogs online, cats online, etc. We'll discuss ways to choose your keywords in later articles but I would suggest downloading Good Keywords from http://softnik.com. The program is free and easy to use. Good Keywords will show you how many times a given word or phrase was searched on the internet in the past 30 days. The trick is to find keywords that are in the middle of the search pack. You don't want to compete with keywords that generate 10 million hits a month when you can compete with keywords that fit your business and generate 10 thousand hits a month. More on this in later articles.

OK, you've got a domain name and a good list of keywords. Now you need a solid "Host" for your website. I do not recommend free hosting. You truly get what you pay for when it comes to hosts and this is one area you do not want to scrimp on. Paid hosting sites provide quick response support. If you were like I was, knowing very little about how all of this works, support is one of the key ingredients to building a successful home based internet business.

Next I would highly recommend setting up a free email account with Gmail, Yahoo, MSN or whomever you are comfortable with or maybe already using. This email account would be used exclusively for your online business. Experience tells me it is much easier and more effective managing your business email separately from your personal email. Your online business will generate and receive a large volume of email and it is essential to be able to access and manage that email easily.

So far, so good. We've chosen our domain name, researched and chosen our keywords, decided on a host for our site and set up a dedicated business email address. It's time to take a look at email auto-responders. Very simply, email auto-responders send out an "opt in" email to individuals (leads) who have expressed an interest in owning a home based internet businesses. This is not spam! In fact, all of the auto-responders I use are 100% spam free and, believe me, they monitor it exhaustively. If the person(lead) expressing interest in internet business receives the opt in email and clicks on the confirmation link in the email, it triggers a group of follow up emails that you can write yourself or you can join a program that provides that service. The person can also "opt out" of receiving any more emails by clicking the appropriate link in the email. You can find programs that will write and install your entire email follow up campaign for free. I like that word "free".

Once you get your auto-responder working for you, you can allow your campaign to build a list of "opted in" subscribers that might eventually become customers or affiliates. Keep in mind that we're talking about sending thousands of emails to prospective home based internet business owners each week. Take a look at the number of emails you receive each week. Multiply that by several hundred thousand. It takes time to build a list of prospective customers. The key is in the follow up.

The most interesting aspect of running an online business for me is the hosts, auto-responders, lead companies, etc. that I use will also allow me to make money by advertising their services on my site. This is called "affiliate marketing" and it is huge. So, you are not only a customer of these services that are essential to online business, you now also "sell" their services on your site, even if your site has nothing to do with home based internet business resources. The cool thing is that you can be confident in promoting the performance of the services you are using because you have personal experience with them. Nothing speaks as boldly as personal experience.

This is the basic formula for virtually every online business I have researched and I have digging for legitimate opportunities for 5 years. Don't forget to look for my follow up articles which will explore in depth each of the areas we've covered in this article.

Remember, "Nothing Happens Until You Swing".