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Owning your own domain name
Obviously, if you have your own business selling your own products, you
will need to have your own website.
But if you joined an affiliate program,
you were probably given at least one sales website, free of charge, to
promote the company's products and/or services.
Why would you want to have your own domain name?
- Having your own domain name gives you more credibility online.
Replicable websites from affiliate programs have been seen on the
internet a million times already.
- More control: you are free to choose the content for your
site. It may have to be reviewed by your affiliate program if
you have more than just a link to it,
but overall you can do what you want with it.
- If you ever drop your affiliate program, you can use your domain
name for any other program you may decide to join later. Or you can add more
than one program on one website.
- Access to your stats through your web host. This is mandatory if
you want to succeed. If you don't know where your traffic and
sales are coming from, you're working in the dark and probably wasting
time and money.
- Your own domain name gives you the opportunity to turn your website into a money making machine in addition to
your main products, services or affiliate program.
You should have a variety of interesting content and update your
website often for people to bookmark it and visit it again.
How to choose a domain name?
If you plan to optimize your website for search engine ranking, you
should have a domain name directly related to your website content.
Not only will this help you in your marketing efforts, but it will also
reinforce your credibility and increase the quality of your hits.
The relevance of your site contents will be clearly stated in your domain
name.
Make sure that the domain name you pick is easy to read and remember, no
typos, and preferably no more than 15 characters total including dashes.
If your website is about entertainment or shopping in general for
example, be creative and pick a fun name but still easy to read and
remember.
How to choose a web host?
If you do a search for web hosting on any search engine, you'll get
dozens of returns. Prices vary from $2.95 to several hundred dollars
per month.
Which web hosting is right for you and what should you look for in a
web host?
First and foremost should be reliability. If your site is
down more than it's online, it really doesn't matter how many options you
have or how much you pay for it because it's not doing you any good.
Actually you'd be losing money.
If you're looking for an excellent web
host, we strongly recommend HostSave
- My-Biz-World has been hosted with HostSave
since April 2001 and it's been a great experience. They are VERY
affordable at only US $8.95 per month, FREE set up, extremely reliable, 99.9% uptime!,
their customer support is fantastic and they can accommodate the first
time webmaster as well as estabished websites that get thousand of visitors per
month. MYSQL, PHP, autoresponders, email forwarding, FrontPage support,
and so much more!
If you are in Canada and you are tired of
paying in US funds and being charged high currency exchange rates, this Canadian
company is for you! They are more than just a web host,
they also offer, free of charge, a website creator with many templates to
choose from and step-by-step instructions, special discounts if you pay
for one or two years (including free domain name!), 99.5% uptime, FREE set
up, unlimited FTP accounts, 50 MYSQL databases, FrontPage 2000/2002
extensions, PHP4, SHTML, Perl, 30 day money back guarantee, and so much more! They currently have
a free
trial for the website creator. New to building websites? Give it
a shot!
How much are you willing to pay for web hosting?
Never pay for services or options you
don't understand and/or will never use. If you're just starting out, you don't need a site that will allow
millions of page views per month. You won't be getting that much
traffic for quite some time, if ever. So no need to pay for
that. Many web hosts will offer you to buy additional options at a later
date if you need them. A basic service is normally enough to get
anyone started and can keep you going for several years.
It really all depends on YOUR needs.
Maybe you already have a website and looking for affordable web
hosting. Or you want a web host that also offers a website builder
at no extra costs so you can build your own website and host it at the
same place.
Choose a web host that fits your budget and offers the services you need at no
extra cost. Web hosting is not a case of "you get what you pay
for". Some inexpensive web hosts are more reliable and provide
better support than their more expensive competitors. Don't be
fooled by a low or high price. Web hosting has become a very
competitive market, and you can get excellent web hosting services with
many extras at very low costs.
Support - Do you need more
information? Do you have questions? Email them. See how long it
takes them to reply and if they actually answered your questions in a
language you can understand.
If you use FrontPage, make sure that the web host offers FrontPage
extensions at no extra cost.
What types of emails do they have? Forwarding? Catch all?
Autoresponder? How important is this to you?
The bottomline is that choosing a web host depends on your needs and how much
you are
willing to pay for the service.
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