Free Or Not Free, It's Your Choice
The internet is one of the world's top sources of information,
products and just about anything else you could possibly want.
And, if you have spent any amount of time online, you must have
noticed that much of it is free.
Many home business entrepreneurs get their start online using
some of these free resources. In fact, some of them use freebees
almost exclusively.
So, just what are these valuable assets that attract so many
home business newbies? Here are just a few:
1. Email - one can get free email accounts just about anywhere
(MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Google GMail, Lycos) plus tons of
others. Actually, free email accounts can be very useful, but
that's another article.
2. Autoresponders - there are many free autoresponders
(getresponse, and freeautobot, just to name a few). Some are
better than others but they are a useful tool.
3. EBooks - You can get free ebooks just about anywhere. These
can prove very valuable as giveaways to get people to do some
sort of action, like join your mailing list.
4. Web Space - Free web space abounds throughout the internet.
Most likely, the ISP you signed up with offers web space for
free for you to put up your own personal web site. You can also
get free space at places like Yahoo Geocities, Tripod, Bravenet,
plus tons of others.
And the list goes on. However, today I would like to talk about
Web Space. Free Or Not Free, It's Your Choice.
Many home business entrepreneurs, when first starting out, want
to keep expenses to a minimum (I did this myself). Therefore,
just after we join one or two affiliate programs and find out
that we can't get the affiliate web page into the search engines
(because there are probably 5 million affiliates with exactly
the same page) we want to build our own site.
Having your own web site is probably one of the most important
steps you can take to get your home business off to a fast
start. Taking the time to find a good web host should be equally
as important.
Read that last line again.
Why do I say that? Just think about this.
You have just spent the past two months learning html or how to
use a program like FontPage to build your web site. You've been
writing your web pages, putting in images and links to your
affiliate web page and maybe even have made a few forms to get
people to sign up for your own newsletter.
All is well and good so far, because it's still on your
computer.
So now you go to find a place that will 'host' your site. And,
being the money conscious person that you are, you look for some
place free. Your internet service provider will give you
probably 5 megs of space but will only let you put up a personal
site.
So you decide to give another place a try. Bingo, you've found
lots of places that will let you have space on their servers for
free as long as they can put a banner ad on your web pages. A
small price to pay you say and go ahead and sign up.
Great, now you have your own web site up and running, it's a
little slow loading because of the banner ad but you decide that
is OK. Now, in order to get your site closer to the top of your
category in the search engines you decide to start doing link
exchanges. Very good, it shows you have been doing your homework.
Now it's 4 or 5 months later and your site is on page 5 of the
search results, people are joining your downline and signing up
for your newsletter. What a wonderful thing this internet is.
One day you decide to log into your hosting account and change
a few things on your site. But, what's up, you can't log in. You
then decide to go to the search engine and type in the url of
your site. Nothing! Error, the page you are looking for is not
available!!!
Just like that, it's all gone. All your hard work, your only
means of getting affiliate signups and newsletter opt-ins has
disappeared. What's up you ask your web host and they tell you
that they have changed their policy and no longer offer free web
space. You're back to square one.
Think it can't happen? Think again. It happened to me.
That's right, all my web pages, articles, newsletter archives,
classified ads, everything gone. And, to make things worse, I
have been making changes to the site at the control panel of the
web host and therefore didn't even have a recent copy of most of
the pages on my computer. We live and learn!
Had I known all along how inexpensive it is to get good web
hosting service I would never have gone the free route. To make
a long story short, for less than $5.00 per month you can get
excellent web hosting services.
I won't make that mistake again, will you?
Randy Justason