How to make a terminal alias for Mac OS X

After looking around for how to make an alias for Mac OS X's terminal/shell I ended up cobbling together my solution from a variety of different (mostly unixy-linuxy) places. So in the name of good documentation, here is the magic formula for the next time I need to set up an alias for happier command line hacking:

1. First we edit/create a profile. For a normal user do:
   pico /etc/profle
   ...or for root/superuser do:
   
   pico ~/.profile
2. Add your alias like so to the file:
   alias aliasname='mycommand /path/path'
   (notice no space between equal sign and ')
3. Save your changes and close the file
4. Load/reload your profile with:
   . /etc/profile
   ...or for root/superuser do:
   . ~/.profile
5. If you are using root/sudo you will need to use sudo -i in order to load the profile upon login (more info about this here).
6. Done.