Free Hosting Versus Paid For
Your Website
by Brian Beshore
The thing about free hosting and free auto
responders is, you will likely have to put up with a lot of advertising (not
your own) put there by the host. This is also why I don’t believe in banner
exchanges. You are working hard enough to get folks to your business, and just
getting them there is only part of the work. There is a well known axiom of
Internet Marketing that says over 95% of your visitors will NEVER buy anything
from your website on their first visit. It often takes not 4, not 5 but SEVEN
exposures before they make their purchase. This goes for E-mail campaigns as
well. You must follow up!
(What a pain!) Yes, this is a lot more
difficult than it sounds.
For one thing, you must not SPAM, and even if
you have legitimate leads, you must observe net etiquette, and allow them to
opt-out from your mailings.
This is where an autoresponder will meet the
needs, as one of the essential tools of Internet Marketing.
As far as making your own web-pages goes, there
are again, several ways you can do that. If you know HTML, you can use any
number of programs.
But you don’t have to know HTML, to make your
own web-pages. Many hosting services provide templates you can use to easily
create your own. To be fair, your own ISP probably offers such a service.
Having your own domain name makes it easier for
people to remember the address of your site and also enables search engines to
pick it up more effectively.
If you are involved with affiliate marketing,
it’s a good idea to get your own domain and set-up your own website, rather
than just rely on the affiliate web pages that you get with the program you’ve
signed-up for. Here’s why;
Your affiliate URL looks something like this;
www. The_Name_of_the_Company/referrer=yourID#
The part at the end, after the / is you. This
last part is how your company tracks sales that you have made and guess what? If
you advertise, nine times out of ten, anyone seeing your ad will just go to a
search engine and type in the company name, leaving off the last part which is
the important part to you. Then you’ve just lost a sale and are out
advertising expenses. Many search engines will also not accept these long
affiliate URLs, or, again, will drop-off the last part.
About the Author:
Brian Beshore has been involved with Internet
Marketing for several years. He publishes his own Home Business Guide. http://www.bayshorerecords.com
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