Battle of the giants

For anybody doing business online there is an interesting battle going on right now, and it’s a battle between two of the industry’s giants!  Google and eBay are at war!

How did all this get started?  Let’s have a look.

The whole war has to do with competition between Paypal and Google Checkout.  Paypal is an online money sending website, which is owned by eBay.  They used to be independent, but eBay bought them a few years ago.  Paypal is very profitable, and of course eBay wants to keep it that way.  Over the years, the primary use of Paypal has been for eBay buyers to pay for the items they bought from eBay sellers (even before eBay bought Paypal).  In the last two years, Google has opened their own web payment service called Google Checkout.  Google wants for eBay customers to be able to use Google Checkout to make their payments to eBay sellers.  Currently, eBay doesn’t allow this, though.  Google Checkout is left out in the cold when it comes to eBay sales.

Last week, eBay was holding it’s annual event, eBay Live, which is a conference primarily for eBay Power Sellers.  I used to be an eBay Power Seller, but I never attended eBay Live.  The conference was being held in Boston.   Google decided to see if they could get eBay to loosen up on Google Checkout by holding an “anti-eBay” party in Boston during the eBay Live event.  The whole thing was to be kind of a protest against eBay for not allowing the use of Google Checkout.

There is only one problem that Google did not consider.  eBay is a tens of millions of dollars with Google every year for keyword advertising through Google’s AdWords program!  Well, when Google announced their Boston party against eBay, eBay decided to cut off it’s Google advertising.  In an instant, Google was out tens of millions of dollars!  Well, Google canceled the party, but eBay elected to stand firm on it’s plans to cut off Google advertising.

How does this affect you?

Well, believe it or not, this could have a profound effect on you.  If you are a blogger and you depend on Google Adsense to monetize your blog, you may end up earning less!  You see, now that eBay has abandoned Google advertising (for now, anyway), other big advertisers are re-evaluating their ad spending with Google.  Hey, if eBay can stop advertising with Google, maybe the others can continue their success without Google as well.  You can bet that if enough advertisers abandon Google, the amount of money you earn will decrease.  The price of the ad units will go down in an attempt to attract new advertisers or to lure back the old ones.

I think it’s too early to see how this will pan out.  Maybe after a month eBay will come back to Google after teaching them a little lesson.  We’ll have to see how this pans out.  It’s not good news for online entrepreneurs like you and I, though.

Setting up your blog

OK, so now that you’ve completed the things I recommended on my last post, you should have your domain name, a hosting account with some company that will host your domain, and hopefully you got an account with CPanel and Fantastico for administration of your account.  I am going to write this post based on that setup.

OK, so first step, you want to set up a blog!  I strongly recommend that you use Wordpress for that.  I use Wordpress as my blogging platform on all of my blogs (note, I am not talking about Wordpress.com hosted blogging, but rather Wordpress software on my own hosting account).  Wordpress is, these days, the de facto blogging platform, it is probably used by at least 70% of all bloggers on the Internet, I’d say.

If you have C-Panel and Fantastico, setting up Wordpress is a snap!  First step is to log into your Hosting account CPanel.  After logging in, the right side of the screen is filled with icons for various things you can do through the CPanel.  At the very bottom you should find an icon for “Fantastico” - click on that icon.  The resulting page will be the Fantastico panel.  On the left side of this panel you will see lots of different types of software that you can install on your server account.  Toward the top of the list you will see Blogging software, with maybe a half dozen different choices.  Click on “Wordpress”.  After selecting Wordpress, the right side of the screen will have a link that says “New Installation” - just click on that, and follow the instructions.  In about 2 or 3 steps you will see that your installation is complete, and you can now start using Wordpress!

Next post, we will look at how to install a different theme (giving your blog a different look) and customizing your blog.

I want to blog, but how do I get started?

If you are a beginner, of course it’s scary to get started on a new online business.  Everything is new, and it will seem that you have so many things to do.  where do you start?  Well, first, let me tell you - sit back, calm down, and don’t be worried.  It’s easy and painless, I promise!  For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that you want to start blogging, and to earn some money through advertising, OK?

First steps first, you need to have a place to put up a blog.  There are lots of free blogging platforms out there like Blogger, Blogspot, Blogster, Wordpress.com and many others.  However, I do not recommend having a hosted blog!  What I recommend is having your own blog and hosting it yourself on your own server.  I would bet that 70% of people who start up blogs do so on some hosted free blog service like those I mentioned, so why shouldn’t you do so?  Well, I have a number of reasons, let’s look at a few:

1. If you are putting up your blog posts on somebody else’s service, without a doubt you are giving up some of the ownership of your post.  You are freely storing the info and publishing the info on somebody else’s platform, and thus they get some ownership of the information you post.  If you get your own hosting account on a shared server, you rent the space, and this have some ownership of the space.  The service provider does not own the content- you do.
2. Think about this - let’s say that you build up a blog that becomes popular and influential.  A lot of people know about your blog and follow it regularly.  I have a number of blogs that fit this category.  Then, let’s say that the blog hosting service you are using goes out of business.  Or, what if you post something on your blog that is against the terms of service of the host, and they kick you out of the service?  Your blog is gone.  Sure, you can move to your own server at that time, but how many of your loyal readers will find you?  It’s like starting over, and you may never build up your blog to the point where it was.
3. I always prefer having control over my activities, not letting others have control.

So, because of these, I simply believe that it is best to go on your own.  So, what steps are involved in getting started with your own blog on your own server?  Let’s look:

1. Choose a domain name.  This is simple, choose a domain name that fits in with the topic you want to blog about, or just with you.  For example, I have a blog about Mindanao, and my domain is “Mindanao.com.”  I have a blog about Living in the Philippines, and the domain is “LiveInThePhilippines.com.”  Choose a name that fits in with what you want to talk about, or a very generic name that can be used for everything.  Another way you might go is to register your name.  For example, although it’s already taken by somebody else with my same name, I could have registered “BobMartin.com” and then I could have even had multiple blogs on that domain.  Let’s say I wanted to blog about fishing, I could have then started a subdomain for that blog:  fishing.BobMartin.com, etc.
2. After choosing what domain you want (and making sure that nobody else has it yet), you will need to register that domain.  There are many places where you can register a domain, I use a company called GoDaddy.com.  For under $9 per year, they will register the name for you.  It’s cheap, and their service is very reliable in my experience.
3. Next, you will need a host where you can put up your blog.  I use a company called ServInt.net, but they are mostly for people with needs for a bigger server than you will probably need.  You will want a Linux server, in my estimation, because if you want to run Wordpress (the blogging software that I prefer) it runs on Linux, not Windows.  You can get a web host for anywhere from $3 to $10 per month.  Look for somebody who has a one button installer for Wordpress, a program like Fantastico would be very good for that.  With Fantastico, you can install Wordpress (and other web software) at the click of a button.
4. Once you have your domain name and hosting in place, you are ready to go!

OK, that’s going to be it for this post.  You have enough to do with getting everything set up!  On the next post, let’s look at the next steps in starting up with blogging.