Find a Host

Before you can begin, you will need to decide on a host for your website (If you do not have a domain name, now would be a good time to register one, although it is not required). You can either choose free or paid hosting but I'd definately recommend using a paid server, as it is much more reliable, faster, and you will not have to put up with any annoying ads. You will need a domain to get paid hosting.

What you want to look for in a host is reliability. Every minute of downtime is a minute you could be selling your ebook. If you get a paid host, do not buy more than you need. In other words, if you dont plan on having hundreds of people a day downloading your ebook, do not pay for extra bandwidth your are not going to use.

For a simple and smaller ebook site, two to three gigs of bandwidth a month is plenty. If you ever need more bandwith, you can always upgrade later. Same goes for disk storage. If you only have a couple ebooks, twenty megs of disk space is fine. Remember, there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth or space. Stay away from these types of deals.

If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is and you will end up losing money. Also, you may get a better deal if you pay up front for a full year, but that is very risky. Monthly is a much better choice. It will only cost a a few pounds more, and if your host ever does vanish off the face of the earth, you don't lose as much, if any money. Don't forget to keep regular backups!

Making Your Site.

Now that you have your host, you can begin the process of making your website. If you do not know anything about web design, there are plenty of places that can help. Alternately you could use programs that develope web-pages for you MS frontpage is usually installed on most computers and is reasonably easy to use and is free.

Personally I recommend using Dreamweaver it's a superb package with a whole host of add-ons and usually includes Fireworks which is a graphics editing program but again you will have to pay for this.

Promoting Your Site.

Finally, after hours upon hours of hard work, you have finished your site. But theirs one problem. Nobody knows. So now it's time to start promoting. There are many ways to do this. The most effective is search engines. Before you submit to the search engines you will need to optimize a little.

I can help you with is need assistance just use the seo link at the bootom of the page

Make sure you have unique meta tags ( I'll touch upon this in a later hub) on all of your pages with a title, description, and keywords. Content is key. The more information you have the better. Once you get listed in Google, just sit back and watch the traffic role in although it will be slow at first. Their are many other promotion techniques with varying results. Other techniques include word of mouth, adding you website to all your signatures, and posting in forums and a method I use to great effect is using social bookmarking

Now that you know the basics, your own your way to creating your own profitable ebook.