• Iris Ministries Inc. Weblog » Blog Archive » Rolland Baker Health Update from Heidi - 9 October 2008 —
  latest news from Iris Ministries
• Mike’s Money Making Mission: How To Make Money With Satellite Blogs —
  This may be the ugliest blog on the web but it has good info. I am gonna give this a shot with a brand new niche.
• Niche Research | Site Flipping University —
• How To Build an Affiliate T-Shirt Site #1 | The Affiliate Preacher —
  How to build an affiliate t-shirt site tutorial 1

Here are the updates:

• Technorati Rank:  2,651,601 Authority 1 - Considering we just got on their list, we take this as a victory.
• Alexa: 858,815 - Again, just got a ranking
  
• Uniques:175 for the last week - up from 48 the week before
• Pageviews: 548
• Rss Subscribers: 23 - gotta get a contest of some sort going.

So the blog is about 2 weeks old.  Not great stats, not terrible.  Lets see what happens.

Before we design our affiliate t-shirt site we need to get a domain name.  there re two thoughts about this.

If you are building a site that will be a sand alone store, that you are looking for search engine rankings and have no other way to direct traffic, then you need to find the best .com name you can with the fewest words, preferably with no dashes.

If you plan to drive traffic to the store using your existing sites or though some other marketing campaign, the tld is not as important and you can get away with buying a .info domain.

The goal of this series of articles is to better monetize your current sites so we are going to go with the cheapest route possible.  This is a short term solution but if you don’t have that much money, you gotta do what you gotta do.  Since nobody is ever going to type in the name of the site, we are branding for customer confidence first, search engine juice second, brandability last.

I use namecheap for all my domains.   I do this for a couple reasons (you may find a few stupid).

1. Price is almost the same for the domain
2. Free first year of privacy protection at Namecheap
3. Godaddy makes you just through 13 hoops just to checkout (no, I really don’t want your hosting or website building software)
4. I heard several stories of people that were accused of spamming and godaddy said they would not seize their domain is they paid Godaddy $400 even when they did not spam.
5. Did you read #4?  Do you really need any other reasons?
6. Bob Parsons kind of creeps me out and I find his advertising offensive.
7. I am a Christian and I don’t see the connection between domain registration and women in bikinis unless you are pushing porn.

I found a domain that I had registered sitting in my account so I am going to use it.

http://www.christiantshirtstore.info/

Here is why I picked it.  I wanted christian and tshirts in the name.  Since christiantshirts was gone, I used the s as the start of a new word.  The search engines don’t know it is not shirts.  I have used this a bunch in the past with good results.

I did a quick search and found the following domains available.  You might want to pick one up.

• christian-tshirts.info
• christian-t-shirts.info
• coolchristiantshirts.net, org, info
• cheapchristiantshirts.net, org, info
• discountchristiantshirts.com, org, net, info

So go get a domain, point its name server to your server and let it propogate for the next day or two while I write the next tutorial.

If you score a decent domain, let us know in the comments.

“So he got up and ate and drank. Strengthened by that food, he traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God.” 1 Kings 19:8
Elijah and Moses were men of great zeal. They were passionate about their causes. Moses sought to free the Hebrews from the tyranny of slavery by killing an Egyptian with his own hand. Elijah, after calling down fire on the evil prophets of Baal, found himself spent physically and emotionally to the point he asked God to take his life.

Immediately after these two events, 500 years apart from one another, both men were led to the same Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. In Hebrew, Horeb means “desolation.” This barren environment mirrored the condition of Moses and Elijah. For Moses, it was 40 years of barrenness. For Elijah, it was 40 days without food. Elijah became tired of standing alone for God.

As workplace believers we often become so focused on the goal we forget to meet God at our own Mount Horeb. This was the place God met both Moses and Elijah. It was a place of renewal, a place of new beginnings, a place of personal encounter with the living God.

Perhaps Elijah’s greatest virtue was his zeal. Indeed, we shall see that twice in his communication with God, Elijah speaks of having been “very zealous” for the Lord. But zeal, unattended eventually becomes its own God; it compels us toward expectations, which are unrealistic, and outside the timing and anointing of God. To remain balanced, zeal must be reined in and harnessed by strategic encounters with the living God. We otherwise become frustrated with people and discouraged with delays. We step outside our place of strength and spiritual protection. Many of us become so consumed with our battles that we are no longer aware of the presence of Jesus. We have been traveling in our own strength. [Francis Frangipane, Place of Immunity (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Arrow Publications, 1994), 5.]

Pray that Jesus will teach us that intimacy with Him is the greatest measure of success. Lord, guide us to the mountain of Your presence.