I've been extremely motivated and productive today!

I'm working through the training, and answering some questions for others.

I choose two niches, and registered domains for them! Perhaps I'm getting ahead of the training, but I know some niches are difficult to get a good name for, and I don't want to end up with something awkward with lots of hyphens.

I'm ready to create the sites on WA, although I can't map the domain until I become premium. I could always just host them on my hostgator server, but:

• I'm looking to move away from hostgator as it is quite slow (at least on the hosting plan I am on, I'm sure they have faster offerings)
• I don't know enough about Amazon AWS to host it there (YET!)
• I want the badge that comes with creating a site on WA
• I want to test out the hosting that comes with WA. I can always move it away later if I need to.

I registered the domains on Namecheap. It is definitely my favorite registrar. I was going to post a link to it with my affiliate id, but it appears to be against the rules! I really like that they include the first year of privacy protection for free, and after the first year, it is very reasonably priced, unlike <cough> Godaddy, <cough>. Namecheap is also offering PremiumDNS, which I was unsure of. I then asked the all-knowing Google if I needed it, and Google said, "if you need to ask what it is, you don't need it!" It can speed up searches on heavily trafficked sites. It seems that at some point in the future, if I am blessed with lots of traffic, I can upgrade to that later.

On one of my niches, I'm bit dubious about ways it can be monetized, but it will allow me to post a portfolio of my work, which should help in getting freelance jobs and short term contracts as an additional stream of income.

My other niche is very related to what I like to do in my free time. I have a LOT of content written up in MS-Word already that I was unsure of where to put it. Now it has a home!

On a down note, it appears that my Amazon Associates affiliate account was closed a couple years ago! Oops. Apparently, I did not respond to an email certifying that all of my (crappy, non-income generating) websites were targeted to people over the age of 13. It wasn't a violation thing, so it should be really easy to get it re-opened. I want to wait until I have one of my WA sites up, because my old sites were indeed "crappy."