Free hosting
- Thread starter ffa
- Start date
Is a free blog at Wordpress.com an option?
For simply a host, I would recommend HostGator.
Their Hatchling account is only $4.95 per month. It comes with a great suite of add-on tools via Fantastico, including WordPress.
IMO, I would avoid free hosts. With free hosting, you tend to get exactly what you pay for and people, including the SEs, don't tend to take you very seriously.
Their Hatchling account is only $4.95 per month. It comes with a great suite of add-on tools via Fantastico, including WordPress.
IMO, I would avoid free hosts. With free hosting, you tend to get exactly what you pay for and people, including the SEs, don't tend to take you very seriously.
i absolutely agree ... you know, in most cases it will take about 1 sale a month to pay for the cost of your hosting ... why spend time setting up on a free host if ultimately you are going to move to a paid host ...
the other BIG problem is, free hosting isn't exactly a sound business model, making it highly likely your site might just completely vanish one day ... you have no control, literally
Hostgator hosting for website or Wordpress?
I hear alot about hostgator, jcorkern can you recommend which package is worth my while if I take the website route? hatchling, baby, or business? This is all considering my previously discussed business model. Now my mind is going back and forth between the website and the wordpress route. But then I see the hostgator packages support wordpress hosting
I hear alot about hostgator, jcorkern can you recommend which package is worth my while if I take the website route? hatchling, baby, or business? This is all considering my previously discussed business model. Now my mind is going back and forth between the website and the wordpress route. But then I see the hostgator packages support wordpress hosting
I started out looking for free hosting, but have heard some free hosting horror stories, got me skeptical. The following forum explains http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5...opics-affiliate-forum/16796-free-hosting.html
Free hosting isn't worth it if your really interested in making money. If you opt for free hosting you have to depend on someone else to keep your site up. When they go down, you go down. Also people are skeptical about purchasing off of a free site. The question comes up, "Is this person really making any money?" If you have a free site people will assume that your not making big bucks like your promising them, especially if you do an internet marketing site. But if you wanna start off free it may be better to start off with one of the free blog sites such as eblogger, or wordpress. Just make sure you have copies of all of the information that you provide on your site so that you can copy and paste is back to your site if you run into this issue.
It all depends on your goals, hope this was helpful
It all depends on your goals, hope this was helpful
Oh yeah, can't forget about hub pages, and squidoo as they also rank high with google.
Free hosting is not worth your trouble.
There is a huge post in article marketing and how it may be hurting you. While I do not subscribe to this theory (as far as article sites go) because my main purpose is the valuable links (and the direct traffic from a few of them).
The main concern there is that your articles are just flat littered with adsense links. The odds of the reader even reaching your resource box is slim unless you can compel your readers into getting that far. The best article marketers just make it a point to write better so that the traffic gets to those links.
Now imagine, your whole website littered with those links. That is exactly what you get from the free sites.
You also get issues with hosting, and bandwidth. If at any point they do not like what you are doing, you get shut down. And most of these free hosting solutions do not like people making money on them.
Simply put, a $10 domain name and a $10 a month hosting account is all you need. That is such a small investment, it is silly. There are tons of ways for anyone to scrape this kind of money, its not like we are telling you to spend $100s.
Now, I will say, you need to do some research before you spend this money, and there are some free sources you can (and should) use to test keywords and niches before you commit to that purchase. That purchase should definitely be your goal, and you should resolve to make that ASAP.
Free sources like wordpress.com, blogger.com, squidoo, and hubpages are great for testing the waters. It does not take a huge amount of effort to set a basic landing page on any of those sites. Blogger and Squidoo are fairly friendly about letting you make some money off of them, Hubpages is a little less so (but I still have a few hubs with affiliate links out that haven't been a problem). Wordpress.com, however, is a little more picky about it. Not saying that they will shut you down completly, but you need to watch out.
Set about writing a couple dozen articles (I would say 3 a day for a couple of weeks at least) to test the niche. Traffic here will be directed to your free landing pages. But even here, I would prefer a domain that I own for a top level re-direct (direct link to what most websites would consider the home page). Most article sites will not allow a direct affiliate link, but many will accept a link to a website that redirects the reader to the affiliate offer. This re-direct is not hosted, so you simply need to just buy the domain. I personally use .info sites for this redirect as they are cheap.
Now, I use Hostgator myself and would recommend the baby package. The reasoning behind it is you get unlimited domains/sub-domains through this one package. You should focus on one website to start, but I would definitely have the resources handy to step up my efforts when I was ready. I personally test the waters with a domain/website since I have that same package. $10 to test a niche is a good investment. I simply slap up a wordpress blog, edit the template a little bit (you do not have to be fancy to test) and let it fly.
To me, $10 a month is a paltry sum to pay in order to secure that my efforts continue to exist. Just google for stories about people who have lost months of effort due to a free site shutting them down and you will agree. I read one where a guy had 12 niche blogs running on Blogger (one of the more friendly free sites for affiliates). Google (who runs Blogger) shut them ALL down as they thought them to be spam sites (even though they were legit). Long story short, this guy went from making a very secure living to making nothing... overnight! That would force most people to quit, even the most dedicated would be heartbroken over this loss (even knowing they gained valuable knowledge in the process.)
I refuse to have that story be my own. If they shut down my test sites... so be it. They are not my money source (though they do make money). They are testing the waters. Learning keywords that sell. Learning what makes that niche click and spend. But overall, it takes a week (or two) to set up. But once a niche shows promise, you need to take complete control and buy a domain. Link those free sources to your new blog/site and you now have control (with pre-made relevant back links).
There is a huge post in article marketing and how it may be hurting you. While I do not subscribe to this theory (as far as article sites go) because my main purpose is the valuable links (and the direct traffic from a few of them).
The main concern there is that your articles are just flat littered with adsense links. The odds of the reader even reaching your resource box is slim unless you can compel your readers into getting that far. The best article marketers just make it a point to write better so that the traffic gets to those links.
Now imagine, your whole website littered with those links. That is exactly what you get from the free sites.
You also get issues with hosting, and bandwidth. If at any point they do not like what you are doing, you get shut down. And most of these free hosting solutions do not like people making money on them.
Simply put, a $10 domain name and a $10 a month hosting account is all you need. That is such a small investment, it is silly. There are tons of ways for anyone to scrape this kind of money, its not like we are telling you to spend $100s.
Now, I will say, you need to do some research before you spend this money, and there are some free sources you can (and should) use to test keywords and niches before you commit to that purchase. That purchase should definitely be your goal, and you should resolve to make that ASAP.
Free sources like wordpress.com, blogger.com, squidoo, and hubpages are great for testing the waters. It does not take a huge amount of effort to set a basic landing page on any of those sites. Blogger and Squidoo are fairly friendly about letting you make some money off of them, Hubpages is a little less so (but I still have a few hubs with affiliate links out that haven't been a problem). Wordpress.com, however, is a little more picky about it. Not saying that they will shut you down completly, but you need to watch out.
Set about writing a couple dozen articles (I would say 3 a day for a couple of weeks at least) to test the niche. Traffic here will be directed to your free landing pages. But even here, I would prefer a domain that I own for a top level re-direct (direct link to what most websites would consider the home page). Most article sites will not allow a direct affiliate link, but many will accept a link to a website that redirects the reader to the affiliate offer. This re-direct is not hosted, so you simply need to just buy the domain. I personally use .info sites for this redirect as they are cheap.
Now, I use Hostgator myself and would recommend the baby package. The reasoning behind it is you get unlimited domains/sub-domains through this one package. You should focus on one website to start, but I would definitely have the resources handy to step up my efforts when I was ready. I personally test the waters with a domain/website since I have that same package. $10 to test a niche is a good investment. I simply slap up a wordpress blog, edit the template a little bit (you do not have to be fancy to test) and let it fly.
To me, $10 a month is a paltry sum to pay in order to secure that my efforts continue to exist. Just google for stories about people who have lost months of effort due to a free site shutting them down and you will agree. I read one where a guy had 12 niche blogs running on Blogger (one of the more friendly free sites for affiliates). Google (who runs Blogger) shut them ALL down as they thought them to be spam sites (even though they were legit). Long story short, this guy went from making a very secure living to making nothing... overnight! That would force most people to quit, even the most dedicated would be heartbroken over this loss (even knowing they gained valuable knowledge in the process.)
I refuse to have that story be my own. If they shut down my test sites... so be it. They are not my money source (though they do make money). They are testing the waters. Learning keywords that sell. Learning what makes that niche click and spend. But overall, it takes a week (or two) to set up. But once a niche shows promise, you need to take complete control and buy a domain. Link those free sources to your new blog/site and you now have control (with pre-made relevant back links).
Very informative. Take that advice, as this is the advice that got me up and running in a fairly short period of time, and so far so good. Thanks again Clintoc!
Similar threads
