Many people who work 8 to 6 jobs as wage slaves, often decide to try their hand at making a living on the Internet. They discover a product, program or service to promote, and set out about trying to build a blog or a website without spending a single penny. They use a free website building service or a free blogging platform. They work very hard getting the site built and try to attract visitors. Then they fail, and they say: \”Earning money on the Internet is a Scam.\” But, making money on the Internet is not a scam, you can do it, but like with any business you must invest in your business to succeed.
1. They Look Free — Most free website or blogging platforms look free, some do not even allow you to use your own domain name to point your visitors to. So you have a strange URL that mentions the other companies domain name. Some even include a link for your visitors to \”build their own website free!.\” That hardly incites trust with your visitors. Not only that, it\’s not that expensive to own your domain and use a self-hosted platform. It\’s also not that hard!
2. They Own You — Well, they own your content. Even if you are able to purchase your own unique URL, you don\’t have control over your content, they do. Sure, you can download it and back it up, and save it all the time but if you cross the line and ignore their terms of service you may find out after spending a lot of time and effort making your site look just right, that it has been taken down. You do not own your own content, unless you own the space the content is in, either by outright ownership or by renting server space.
3. Transferring is a Pain — Let\’s say you start out with the free sites, thinking you can just transfer it all over to a self-hosted website later if you become successful. There are two things wrong with this idea:
a. Why are you assuming you won\’t be successful? — You need to believe in your business and yourself to be successful. If you don\’t believe in yourself enough to invest a bit of money into your website, why would anyone open their wallets to you?
b. It\’s not that easy to transfer. You\’ll never have the exact same look, which is great, but you won\’t be able to transfer most of your inbound links you\’ve worked so hard to obtain. All transferring to a new domain is going to cause you to lose traffic, thus stall your business. Why not build it right the first time and avoid these issues?
It literally costs about Five Dollars a month to purchase hosting for a basic website. The domain might cost you Twelve Dollars a year. Joel Comm recommends Bluehost.com. They have a one-click solution to set up a WordPress website within minutes. The Socrates Theme is a recommended theme designed to help people create niche sites quickly and easily.
Have you used a free blogging platform and regretted it? Did you encounter any of the issues I mentioned? If you have any other comments or questions, please use the comment form below.
Guest blogger, Stephanie Watson, works with BarryPublishing.com