How to Connect Your Domain Name to Your Hosting Account

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Welcome to Internet Marketing Lesson #2!

In this series I’ll be going over the essential elements needed to market your services or products business online – in order from zero to your first sale! I’ll document the steps I go through and tell you which tools I use to get started, to get ramped up, and to get selling.

In today’s lesson, we focus on getting your domain name (purchased at GoDaddy) connected up with your website hosting account (Bluehost) so you can launch your first self-hosted WordPress website and/or blog. To see Episode #1, click here (“Lesson 1: Getting the best Domain Name and Tools to help you do it“).

1) Access your Godaddy domain names

After the last lesson, you should have purchased your domain name (I use GoDaddy for the flexibility, support and opportunity to resell my domains through GoDaddy – see Lesson 1 for details on that). Access your domain manager by going to “All Products” (see below).

2) Go to the Domain Manager (it’s hidden)

With GoDaddy’s most recent redesign, they seemed to have hidden the domain manager even more. Just go to All Products, Domain and then under Management, you’ll find “Domain Management” (see the screen shot below).

3) Click the Domain you’ll be “pointing” to Bluehost

I house all of my domains in GoDaddy and “point” some of them to Bluehost so I can set up a WordPress blog or Website. Remember that in one Bluehost account, you can have multiple websites or blogs (without any additional fees), so once you get good at using WordPress, you can experiment a bit with new sites or blogs for only the additional cost of a domain name.

In this step, click on the domain that you want to set up in Bluehost (with a WordPress website or blog).

4) Click on Set Nameservers

After you click on the domain you’ll be working with, you have two options for changing the Nameservers (this is what “points” to Bluehost). Both places changes the same information, so either click the Nameservers icon (looks like a stack of gold coins) or the “Set Nameservers” link near the bottom.

5) The Default Nameservers point to GoDaddy’s web hosting

Since we’re using Bluehost as our host (I just prefer their hosting to GoDaddy’s), we need to replace these Nameservers below.

6) Add in Bluehost’s Nameservers

You simply replace the Nameservers with:

Nameserver 1: NS1.BLUEHOST.COM

Nameserver 2: NS2.BLUEHOST.COM

7) Confirmation of Changes

Once you click “OK”, you should get a confirmation of changes. Realize that it may take from a few minutes to hours for the Internet to recognize your new Nameservers. I usually find that it can take from 5 minutes to a couple of hours. You can literally go from a domain name to a new WordPress site within an hour or two if you follow these steps (including what I’m teaching in Lesson #3: Setting up your WordPress site).

8) Log into your Bluehost Control Panel

If you’re using Bluehost as your website host and have set up your account, you next need to log into your Control Panel (see screen shot below for where to find this).

9) Find Domain Manager in your cPanel

Once you log into your Bluehost account, you’ll be in your Control Panel (called “cPanel”). There are a lot of things in here (we’ll get into more about them later), but find the “Domains” section and then click on the “Domain Manager”.

10) Assign a domain to your cPanel account

To finalize the “pointing” of our domain from GoDaddy to Bluehost, we need to click “Assign a domain to your cPanel account”.

11) Input your domain name

Input your domain name and wait for the system to verify that it’s properly pointing to Bluehost. Make sure you don’t type www or http (see the example below). You should see a message below the domain that says “Ownership verified”. Then follow the example below

12) Confirmation of Domain Assignment

Once you click “Add Domain” above, you should see a confirmation message under “Summary”. Once these steps are completed, you should be ready to do the next step (set up your Lesson 3: Set up your WordPress site”)!

Resources mentioned in this post:

• Buy domain names: GoDaddy
• Hosting WordPress: Bluehost

Ready to get started?

So are you ready to get started with your new website? Let me know in the comments if you have any questions and please share this with your friends who are just getting started and need a little assistance!

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