Let’s take a realistic look at affiliate programs, what they can and can’t do for your business and how to maximize your chances of creating a successful, long-term business with them.

WHAT IS AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM?

An affiliate program (also known as a reseller, associate, referral or partnership program) is essentially a revenue-sharing arrangement whereby you, the affiliate, receive payment from the owner of a product or service that you promote on their behalf.

Affiliate programs are an excellent way for the new internet entrepreneur to start an online business.

TYPES OF AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

There are various types of affiliate programs.

The most simple involves you, the affiliate, placing a banner ad, graphic or text link at your site which is linked to the site of the business you are promoting. This link is coded with your unique affiliate ID so that the site visitor is recorded at the target site as having originated from your site, thereby allowing you to be credited with the sale.

Payment is generally a fixed percentage of the sale value (commission) or “pay per click”, where the affiliate is paid a certain amount for every time a site visitor clicks on the link at the affiliate’s site, whether or not a sale is made.

The more sophisticated affiliate programs are multi-tier and allow the affiliate to earn commissions not only on the traffic they directly refer to the target site but also a proportion of sales generated by their sub-affiliates.

BENEFITS OF AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

The greatest benefit of affiliate programs is that when you are just starting out in your own online business you don’t have to worry about creating your own product or service. You just promote someone else’s and get a share of the revenue pie for your efforts.

You also don’t have to concern yourself with warehousing, transport or logistics headaches. All of this is handled by the business whose products/services you are promoting. All you need concentrate on is driving traffic to that business’s website. This means that a high proportion of your revenue is profit.

The owner of the product/service is also responsible for collecting payment, customer service and the myriad other details that come up on a day to day basis in running the business.

DISADVANTAGES OF AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

The main and obvious disadvantage of affiliate programs is that it is the owner of the product/service who earns the lion’s share of the profit on the sale.

You’re working on commission. You will NEVER earn by way of affiliate program commissions as much as you can earn by way of profits from producing and selling your own product/service.

As a result, affiliate programs represent a high opportunity cost when you consider what you could earn if you instead channeled the time and energy you spend on promoting affiliate programs into creating and promoting your own product/service.

For this reason, it does not make sound business sense to rely solely on affiliate program income for the longer term growth of your business.

Instead, think of them as a way of dipping your toe in the water when you’re first getting started, and a nice little sideline once you’ve created your own product/service. Do NOT build your business around affiliate programs with the intention this will always be the backbone of your business. You’ll be stunting your own growth if you do.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT AFFILIATE PROGRAMS FOR YOUR BUSINESS

So, keeping in mind what affiliate programs can and can’t do for your business, let’s turn to what you should look for when choosing an affiliate program or programs to promote in your business.

Synergistic Products/Services

First off, and this is a cardinal rule, only promote those programs which will allow you to create synergies with your site. This means selecting programs that naturally complement the subject matter of your site and that will therefore be of interest and relevance to your site visitors. This will ensure your prospects (ie your site visitors) are pre-qualified which will result in a relatively higher conversion ratio (the ratio of visitors to purchases) than would be the case if your traffic is untargeted (which will be the case if you promote unrelated products and services from your site.)

Quality In All Things

Keeping the need for synergy uppermost in mind, look for quality programs first and foremost. The last thing you want to waste your time, money and reputation on is a shoddy product or service. There are just too many quality programs out there to settle for anything less.

Stability of Company

Look for a company that’s been around for a while and that’s reputable and stable (both financially and in its management). Any reputable company will have full contact details readily available so do your research.

References

Look for testimonials and references from other affiliates. If the company you’re interested is not forthcoming when it comes to putting you in touch with other affiliates, move on.

Affiliate Agreement

Look for a professional, considered and detailed affiliate agreement (contract). This shows that the company is serious about its business.

Watch out for exclusivity clauses and other restraints. Some affiliate agreements will require that you not promote competing businesses’ products and services. This is not to say you should avoid such agreements. As a general rule, it is your interests not to promote competing programs anyway. Just be aware of what the agreement says on the subject to avoid getting yourself into hot water.

Look also for an agreement that treats spammers harshly. This protects not only the company but other affiliates as well. The last thing you or any other reputable affiliate needs is to have your reputation and the reputation of the product/service you are promoting besmirched by these sorts of tactics.

High Commissions

Promoting someone else’s affiliate program necessarily requires that you divert traffic away from your site and towards someone else’s. Make sure you’re properly compensated with a high commission structure. And be sure to set up your link so that when the visitor clicks on it, a new browser window is opened for the target site. This at least keeps your site in front of the visitor so they can go back to your site once they’ve finished at the site your link has taken them to.

Lifetime Commissions

Look for affiliate programs that will credit you with not only THIS sale but all other sales the customer may make in the future. Many programs are set up so that the customer is identified as “yours” so that when the customer returns to the target site in three months time, the sale is recorded as having been generated by you.

Residual Commissions

Include programs that offer residual commissions in your portfolio. Good examples are webhosting services, autoresponder services and the like where customers sign up for a continuous service that requires periodic, regular payments. You receive periodic, regular commissions as a result.

Tracking of Commissions

Look for programs that allow you real-time access to your stats so you can keep easy track of your commissions.

Reliability of Payment

When checking with affiliate references, find out what the business’s record is on paying out commissions. If they’re slow or there appears to be a pattern of problems, keep looking.

Frequency of Payment

Make a note of payment schedules too. Some programs pay weekly, some monthly, some quarterly. Some only pay once you accumulate commissions of a certain amount. None of these arrangements are necessarily good or bad in and of themselves. Just be sure you know what to expect.

Programs that Require Payment Up Front

Two words: MOVE ON!

Affiliate Support

Finally, take a look at what support the business offers its affiliates to make sales. Do they provide resources such as sample ads, banners, logos and the like? Do they provide useful advice about maximizing your sales? A good affiliate program provides affiliates with a LOT of support in these areas.

MAKING MONEY FROM AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

OK, now you know what to look for in an affiliate program. Here’s how to maximize your sales of those products and services and, therefore, your commissions:

Get Your Own Website

No ifs, no buts. DON’T rely on the you-beaut self-replicated job the company provides all its affiliates. Link to that site from your main site.

Get Your Own Domain Name

This presents a much more professional image. Many people won’t give the time of day to a business that thinks so little of its prospects that the owner won’t shell out 70 bucks for a domain name. So mean business and look like it.

Get Traffic To Your Site (Duh!)

As a rough guide, you will need at least 500 targeted unique visitors a day to your site to make reasonable money from affiliate programs.

You Must Have A Site That Will Attract Repeat Visitors

If your website is nothing more than a splash page consisting of little else other than banners for umpteen different affiliate programs, forget it. Your site must be worthy of your visitor’s time and interest before you can even begin to think about converting that visitor into a paying customer. So create a real site with real content that will keep them coming back for more.

Personal Testimonials

A personal testimonial will result in more sales than a mere link or advertisement. So take the time and trouble to write a personal endorsement of the product or service you are promoting. And, of course, it goes without saying that in order to write a personal endorsement, you must know that of which you speak. NEVER promote a program you haven’t first purchased yourself. If you don’t think enough of your program to invest in it, how do you expect to persuade others to?

Promote With Your Sig File

Include a link to your site in the signature of every email you send.

Promote In Your Own Ezine

Finally, if you’re not already publishing your own ezine or newsletter to stay in touch with your site visitors, start. It’s a great way to promote not only your site but also the affiliate programs you promote from your site.

MAKING SERIOUS MONEY FROM AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

The only way of making SERIOUS money from affiliate programs is by creating your own product or service and recruiting affiliates to sell for YOU.

The affiliate program phenomenon is one of the Internet’s true success stories. It provides a toe-hold for the would-be internet entrepreneur to begin a real, live business of his or her very own. But the real beauty of affiliate programs lies not in what they can do for you, as an affiliate, but what they can do for you, as a recruiter of affiliates for your own program. By all means jump on the bandwagon and start promoting other people’s products to get your start. But don’t wait too long to start developing your own product line. There is a ready-made salesforce numbering in the millions ready and waiting to sell it for you.

Elena Fawkner is editor of Home-Based Business Online. Best business ideas and opportunities for your home-based or online business.

Domain Parking

Mini-Sites

Ecommerce Store

Wordpress Sites

Domain parking is great if you have a lot of good domains with natural type-in traffic because you will likely generate decent revenue for all the PPC’s that you receive.  The only caveat is that there is a lot of talk about how the PPC earnings have gone down likely due to the economy and other factors.  I personally think people have gotten more technically savvy and realize what a PPC site is and avoid clicking on the links.  

If you’re new to domaining, some of the places you can park your domains are Sedo.com, Skenzo.com, Parked.com, TrafficZ.com, WhyPark.com, ParkingRevolution.com, or ActiveAudience.com,.  Some of these sites have strict requirements regarding their acceptance of your domain portolio such as you must currently be earning a certain amount of revenue through your current parking provider or you must have at least 1000 domains, etc.  I believe Sedo is the only one on my list above that does not have any requirements while the others do.  (Sadly, I tried to get a couple hundred domains parked at Parked.com and I was rejected probably because my domains were not of the caliber they were looking for so for now I stick with the one that still loves me, Sedo.  :)  )  

However, I’m considering WhyPark.com.  Why? While it’s one of the few places where you PAY to park your domain, you have the greatest customization through them.  You can add images (theirs or yours), relevant unique content, SEO, custom pages, etc.   You can even ad your own ads!  You can park up to 100 domains for $100 so that essentially costs you $1 per domain if you have 100 domains to park!  (Sorry Sedo!  I still love ya though!)  :)

So, with that said about parking domains and stagnating revenues, there has been a lot of hype of a new way to develop domains called mini-sites.  This is a neat concept but a fairly new one so I’m going to wait on this until the results are in.  The concept being that you purchase a mini-site for your domain from a company such as MiniSites.com or AEIOU.com.  The site or sites that you have created are usually a 1-page up to a  5-page site with a few articles written for that sites keywords and, of course, advertising so you can earn revenue.  Costs vary but can range from $80-$250 per site from the two sites I mentioned.   I’ve read mixed reviews on these especially regarding the actual results of their SEO generating a true increase in traffic.  If that’s the case, then there’s always room for improvement and with a little time, who knows…maybe they can achieve true SEO perfection.

E-commerce is one of the more time consuming ways to develop a website; that is if you’re going to go the traditional route (eg. create website, get inventory, market your site and then sell/ship products).  If you’re planning on creating multiple e-commerce sites at this level, then I’d have to say you’re nuts! It could be possible even if you hire a full-time shipping staff and leased a warehouse for your inventory, but even then, having just one e-commerce store would be enough of a management workout!  One of the other ways that you could have your own e-commerce store with minimal management and no inventory is to have an Amazon Associate Store.  I wrote a couple of posts about doing this if you’re interested: A great way to setup and online store and Instructions for setting on an Amazon Associate store.   I’ve got a couple of AOM stores setup and plan on creating a couple more but need to work on the SEO for them (gosh, it seems that darn SEO is a full-time job in itself!)

Lastly, you can setup simple Wordpress sites.  Those are probably the easiest to mass produce on your own.  This is what I’m considering doing but WhyPark is still in the running.  

Wordpress pros - free, lots of free templates

Wordpress cons - time, time and time (time to setup which isn’t too bad but the time it takes to maintain articles is going to be painful not to mention all the SEO that needs to be done for every site), plus I would have to pay for hosting all my sites.

WhyPark pros - I will have more free time then compared to the Wordpress option (even if I spent time customizing my sites through WhyPark) 

WhyPark cons - it will cost me $1 per domain and I probably won’t know how good their SEO truly is until AFTER I sign up.

So for me the bottom line is how much is my time worth and which option is likely to generate a nice monthly revenue in the long run.

Well, after following some seriously experienced tweeters, I’ve ran into a bunch of Twitter slang (RT, HT, OT, etc) that I had NO IDEA how to translate. Oh thank goodness Google exists for this ol’ broad!  I found a wonderful post about what the heck all these acronyms  mean plus other cool Twitter tidbits that I wanted to pass along to you!

http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2008/08/twitter-101/

Happy tweeting everyone!

Joomla! is a content management system often commonly referred to as CMS.  CMS is your best friend when it comes to managing any website with content.  Joomla! in particular is easy to install.  Customizing how your content will be displayed will likely be the most time consuming thing but it will be the most time consuming thing regardless of the application you use to setup your website.

Joomla! can be installed typically two ways: through your hosting provider or uploading the Joomla! files and running the install on the hosted server.  Of course, the latter is easiest because it’s literally point-and-click.  WebMom Domains offers Joomla! and other open source applications with every hosting package.   Of course, other hosting providers also offer Joomla! and other open source apps as well.  You’ll want to check the hosting provider before purchasing a hosting package to ensure they have these apps if that’s your interest.  You should also ensure that your hosting provider has Linux running PHP 4 or 5 (5 is recommended) and Apache 1 or 2 (2 is preferred).  You can use Windows hosting but personally I think Linux will give you less headaches.  Check out Joomla!’s technical requirements.

Just to give you an example of the simplicity of Joomla!, take a look at www.byebyediapers.com.  I created this website in TWO hours.  Of course, it’s not stellar nor is it complete but what you see took me less time I would have imagined.  I installed it through my WebMom Domains hosting account by clicking the Install button.

Just to give you an example of the point-and-click ease of using my WebMom Domain’s hosting, take a look a these screen shots:

When I logged into my hosting account, I selected “Your Applications”

And then I clicked on Content Management on the left and then Joomla!

And then I clicked the red Install button.  

For my website ByeByeDiapers.com, during the installation I chose to install Sample Data (which is essentially the Joomla! Demo Website you see on Joomla!).  Ideally, you would not chose install Sample Data but I wanted to see what it looked like out-of-the-box.  

I made a few changes such as changing the template under Template Manager and what took me the longest was how to figure out the Category, Article and Section Manager.  Because I had installed the sample data, I had to disable or rename most of the information (that’s why I wouldn’t recommend installing Sample Data unless you want to play around with it and learn it).  

With Joomla! you can get free Joomla! templates or you can pay to purchase premium templates. Just search “joomla template” on Google or your favorite search engine.  Also, you can pay a PHP developer who is familiar with Joomla! to customize your Joomla! website.   If you’re familiar with elance.com, you can hire a freelance Joomla! expert for a reasonable price.

Also with Joomla!, you can find an endless amount of extensions which really allow for the greatest customization of your website straight out-of-the-box.  For example, you can add a Google AdSense Module or extension to display Google AdSense on your site.  Or you can add Photo Galleries, Calculators, Maps, Rating systems…the list goes on and on.  

You don’t need to know any programming nor do you need to know any HTML to install Joomla!  Of course, the more you know, the faster you can get things done.  :)

The website I created with Associate-O-Matic is http://www.identifygreen.com/shop.php. It’s not fully configured yet.  I think that is the more difficult (and time consuming part)!  

Don’t forget, you need 4 things :

1)   domain name (WebMom Domains has this.)

2)  hosting with Apache and PHP 4 or 5 (WebMom Domains has this also!)  :)

3)  Amazon Associate ID (free and quick to signup)

4) Download Associate-O-Matic software

Installing Associate-O-Matic on your website

The idea from an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint is that you want to be picked up by search engines such as Google and you want to rank highly (that is, you want to appear on the first search page ideally…not several pages in!)  In simplest terms, this is called Organic search results.  You don’t pay Google for showing up “organically” on their searches.  However, if you want to, you can pay Google through their Google AdWords program to show up in their Sponsored Links.  More about that in another post.

So, back to content…

Where do I get this content you ask?  Well, of course, the best way is to write it!  You can also pull RSS feeds to your website but the problem is that others are doing the same thing and the more duplicate content that is on the internet through these RSS feeds, the lower your website will rank according to the search engines if you have those RSS feeds on your website.

Do I have to write it all myself?  No, you don’t!

If you are in a position to write all your content, that’s great.  However, if you just don’t have that kind of time, you can do a number of things.  You can hire a writer through freelance service websites such as elance.com or shelancer.com or you can purchase PLR (Private Label Rights) Articles from various PLR websites. 

How PLR Articles work is that you purchase the rights to an article and then you rewrite that article’s content for your website or newsletter and use it as your own.  You can also purchase the rights to eCourses or eBooks to use as your own.  Just be sure to read the rules for obtaining and using these rights as they can vary slightly from website to website.

A great place to purchase PLR Articles is EasyPLR. 

The owner, Nicole, thoroughly explains PLR on her website and even compares against other PLR sites so you know what you’re getting through her website.  This is a great place to start if you’re interested in using PLR Articles to build content on your website!

What’s an Amazon Associate store you ask?  It’s your own online store featuring Amazon products.  When people purchase Amazon products through your online store you can earn up to 15% referral fees through Amazon.

All you need is a Domain Name and a Hosting account with Apache and PHP (WebMom Domains has both for its hosting so you don’t have to worry about it if you sign up with us!).  

You can sign up for Associate-O-Matic’s Lite or Full Version.  The difference between the two is that the Lite version is FREE while the Full version has more functionality.  They have a comparison checklist for both versions on their website that you can check out.  You can also sign up for a 30-day Full version trial which is what I will be doing.  I’ll report back to you on the ease of setup when I’m done!

Besides needing a domain name and a hosting account, you will also need to become an Amazon Associate which is easy to do.  The sign up is FREE and once you create an account, you can use your Amazon Associate ID and build your online store with Associate-O-Matic.  Actually, if you sign up for an Amazon Associate account, you will find there are many other opportunites to generate revenue.  I will be adding those ideas later…

If you don’t have any accounts at the following social networking sites, you should create one for each:

http://www.facebook.com

http://www.myspace.com

http://www.twitter.com

http://www.linkedin.com

Facebook

Besides just connecting with friends and family on Facebook, you can also do a couple of important things to help your business:  start a Group for your business or create a Page.

My personal preference is creating a Page for your business.  Why?  Because Pages are more customizable then Groups, you don’t have any limitations on the number of fans you can have and your personal information including your name does NOT appear on the Page unlike Groups.

Once your Page is created, you can post updates on your Page via the Wall message or just add Notes that your Fans can see.  Oh yes, what’s a Fan?  It’s someone who likes you or your company and wants to follow what your business is doing.  By someone becoming a Fan of your business Page, it simply lets others know they like your business.  When they become a Fan, it shows up in their profile for others to see.  It’s displayed as “xxxx just became a fan of xxxx” and the link appears for those curious about checking out this newly added fan page.

You can also add a Link to your profile that will remain static on the left-hand side of your profile so your other Facebook friends will see it whenever they look at your Profile. That’s why it’s important to create a growing presence for yourself and your business on places like Facebook.  It may be not huge but…it’s free advertising and has the potential to be huge or viral.  (Viral Marketing in simplest terms is “word of mouth” marketing - your company URL or website info passed on from person to person.)

MySpace

With MySpace, you can have your MySpace page be your business or you can have your own profile and put your business and/or website info on it.  Ideally, you would create the MySpace page with your business name being the name of the MySpace page.  You will want to get a little personal without getting too personal.  What that means is that you want your visitors to feel comfortable knowing a little bit about you but don’t give too much information about yourself since there are weirdo’s out there!  Also, you can say “No Answer” to some personal info such as your religion preference, etc. 

Here’s a great blog article on MySpace setup for your business http://onlinebusiness.volusion.com/articles/myspace-business-page

The difference between Facebook and MySpace is that ANYONE on MySpace can see your profile versus Facebook where you can only be invited by your friends to be added as a Friend on Facebook.  A nice safety mechanism if you ask me!  The only caveat is that while your Facebook profile is hidden from the general public, your Facebook Page is not.   Anyone with a Facebook account can see your Page (not your Profile) so I would be careful not to put too much personal information on the Page.

Twitter

Twitter is another popular place for social networking.  Twitter’s concept is pretty simple and this model may or may not work for your particular business, but hey, it’s worth a shot.  Okay, after you create an account on Twitter, you can put out messages on your Twitter account (which should be your business name) giving your Followers updates in 140 characters or less. 

So you put out very short messages or as the industry calls them “tweets”.  Other tweeters or followers may see those tweets and if interested, they will start to follow you.  In these tweets, you can put out short messages such as “hey, I just read an awesome article on generating revenue for your business” for example, and then ideally you’d put a URL link to that article so people can click on the link (which is nice because it validates your tweet).  The more followers, the more hits you’ll receive on your website. 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is another great site although it’s more for networking from a career standpoint.  However, it’s good to create an account because it’s another good inbound link to your website (helps with SEO).  When you setup your profile, you should add your business information and URL link also.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg.  There is so much more you can do with using social networking sites to boost your company’s business and I’ll be adding those in the next week or so.

For example, WebMom Domains has a variety of hosting and server options from the very basic hosting for your personal website to an enterprise solution for a large company.

When you take a look around the internet, you’ll see hosting plans labeled something like beginner, economic or cheap.  They usually offer a small amount of disk space, small bandwidth or transfer rate and most  include email accounts, MS SQL or MySQL databases as well as software tools that would allow you to do things like create a forum for your visitors.

The larger hosting plans offer essentially the same things as the cheaper plans but the big difference usually is the amount of disk space and transfer rates - they tend to be much greater plus have many additional features.

Well, which one is right for me you ask?

Do you have a strong online presence already? Or do you have a lot of potential traffic coming to your website in the near future?  Hopefully, you have done a business plan and have projected business growth for the next 5 years (or at least the next couple of years) which will help you determine how many customers you are likely to have coming to your website.

If you project high growth in the first couple of years of your online business, then you will want to get a premium hosting plan now.  However, if you are not sure or you suspect business growth will be slow the first couple of years, then obtaining a simple hosting plan with minimal disk space and bandwidth would be just fine.

If you get a small hosting plan but then find you have a lot of incoming traffic or that your database files have grown to the maximum capacity for your current hosting plan, then you can always upgrade to a premium hosting plan.  What that means is that either the hosting provider will give you more space and bandwidth seamlessly or you may need to move your website files to a larger server or a dedicated server with possibly just a tiny bit of downtime.

The Good (Not free but guaranteed NOT to give you any headaches!)

There are thousands of domain and hosting providers out there.  Most of them carry decent hosting plans and most are similar to some extent but they are going to cost you money.  Most of the basic plans start around $5 and go on up depending on the hosting provider and services provided.

They are yours to do whatever you wish with them.  They are not ad-supported in any way.

Some things to consider…

You’ll want to make sure they guarantee 99% and higher uptime (in simplest terms this mean the amount of time on average that a hosting provider guarantees their servers and/or networks to be up and running).  This is important because as an online business, you cannot afford to have lengthy downtime.

For example, what if you spent lots of money on a Google ad campaign for a weekend sale you were running on your online store and just as business started picking up over the weekend, the server your website is hosted on crashes or they take it down for maintenance (technically you should pay attention to any downtime notices given to you by your hosting provider and therefore you wouldn’t plan such an ad campaign during this time…right???)  So, they take the servers or network down for 4 hours for emergency maintenance and all the people coming to your website during that time will find it unavailable.  Not only will you have lost potential business from existing customers, you will have lost money on your ad campaign because you were trying to draw new customers to your website as well and it was not available.  Most of those customers, especially the potentially new customers, will likely not return.

But wait, it’s not just this one weekend they have 4 hours of downtime, it’s every weekend or it’s an hour every evening and so on.  That’s less than 99% uptime and that will hurt your business.  So make sure your hosting provider guarantees 99% or higher uptime.  WebMom Domains is one of many places offering 99.9% uptime. You can’t afford anything less.

The Bad (Semi-freebies, aka Free with a purchase)

Okay, this is not entirely bad (but it sounded kind of cool saying Good, Bad and Ugly, didn’t it?)  Domain and Hosting providers such as WebMom Domains, Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Dotster, etc.  offer free websites and hosting when you purchase a Domain name or other products from them.  The only caveat is that while the website setup and hosting is free, it will include some form of their advertising on your website generally termed “ad-supported”.  Some Domain providers may have pop-up ads that show up on your free website, some use ad banners at the top of your website while others use a small area of your website such as WebMom Domains.

Again, while it’s nice to have a free website, if you intend on running a business or blog for profit this is probably not the best route to take for the reasons mentioned above. If you want to have a place to put your family pictures to share with friends and family, then this is a great option.

Another good reason not to have a free website is that you are generally given a small amount of bandwidth, disk space, emails, etc.  Say for example, you are the person that designed the Snuggie^TM and you want to sell it online.  After you launched your online store, business was slow but then through some aggressive marketing your business suddenly and exponentially grew.  Let’s say the number of people coming to your website grew from 30 hits to 3,000 in just a month!  If you have small bandwidth (meaning the amount of traffic going to and coming from your site), your site will slow down because it cannot handle all the traffic.  If your site is slow, guess what?  People are going to get irritated when they click to purchase that Snuggie^TM on your website and it takes one minute for the web page to load!  You will lose customers real fast.  You need to consider paying for a decent web hosting plan if you are going to take your business seriously and you want to make sure you can upgrade your hosting plan easily should you need greater bandwidth, disk space, etc.

The Ugly (The Freebies)

Completely free websites.

That’s right…for absolutely free, almost no-strings attached websites, you can go to places like Webs.com to get your very own free website.

The catch?  Like the free with purchase websites mentioned above, your website will have Webs.com advertising somewhere on your website (they have to make their money somehow since it’s free to you). This means that there’s some advertising competition between you and Webs.com should you try and advertise for yourself on your Webs.com website.  I really wouldn’t recommend it for a business especially since you don’t have much control on where the Webs.com advertising will be placed on your website.  Again, this would be a great place to put up your family pictures to share with friends and family. They might give you a hard time about the ads on your website but who cares!?  It’s free.

Another reason why I wouldn’t recommend free places like Webs.com is your website name or URL is going to be essentially THEIR URL.

For example, your free website on Webs.com will be YourDomainName.WEBS.com (YourDomainName being whatever you name your website)

If you plan on running a business, I guarantee that you people will not take your business seriously if your URL is, for example, ShoeEmporium.Webs.com.  (WebMom Geek Alert:  in this example ShoeEmporium is what we call a Sub-Domain )  There is a caveat to this however, you can buy a domain name and forward it to YourDomainName.Webs.com.  Check out my other post What is Domain Forwarding.

Free services like these are great for personal use such as sharing photos or stories or experimenting with creating your own website.  Not a good idea for a business. If you’re going to start an online business invest a few dollars a month into a small web hosting plan.