Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

If you are new to the web, you may want to get your feet wet by creating a free site; however, it may be better for you to begin by having your own site hosted. How to choose?

You are going to waste a good deal of money on marketing when you start your business. Most of this will be because you have been told that some marketing technique will generate business. To save money, you may concentrate on some pretty ridiculous free measures proclaimed by others who work in your industry. It will happen; it did happen to me. Hopefully, by showing you my mistakes, you will not have to experience that for yourself.

Can you establish an online presence for a local business for free? Yes. It is quite simple actually. My focus is on the real estate industry, so if you are looking at another type of business, you may have to do a little research, but the basics to guide you are here. There are various places to create free blogs that you can use to promote your services or product. Real estate professionals can socialize and blog on a site like ActiveRain. This is a very supportive community where you can learn social networking skills and blogging. If your goal is to learn how to create an effective website with no money, I would recommend creating a blog on WordPress.com. ActiveRain may be the better training ground and support for a newbie. You can find a social networking aspect to the WordPress site, but you will start to learn about websites with them.

A free blog will get you noticed. If you need to dip your feet into the water, free sites are not a bad option. One fear may be that you cannot hone the site to achieve the best results with the search engines. The ability of users to find us through search is paramount. This can be more easily accomplished by having a site hosted, but a WordPress.com blog can produce great results with little tinkering. Several of my posts on a blog there have brought me business, because those posts rank high in search results. That is the key. Having a web page that is in the first, second, or third position on a search page will drive a visitor to your site. A free blog may not offer you all of the opportunities to fashion a high ranking web page, but it will happen with good content. My free blog outpaces my hosted site for many keywords. Do not underestimate the power of such a blog. However, my hosted site does bring in more business through my marketing efforts.

Hosting a site may seem daunting when every term that you encounter is new, and you have no guide. I had many false starts, but it is not hard to learn by typing questions into your favorite search engine. Hosting packages can start as low as five dollars per month. You may find a respected company offering to help you create and host a site for thirty dollars per month. I would not do it. Good hosting can be had for under ten dollars a month. More than that I consider to be not worth it. By going with a cheaper package, you will have to do work on your own. I spend about four hours a week on all aspects of my website; you can find such a groove too. This was not the case when I started, so be forewarned, you may need to put in extra effort to begin.

The main benefit of hosting your own WordPress site is that you can add plug-ins to help you market the site. This cannot be done on the free sites. The beauty of WordPress is the ability to fashion a site that serves your needs so easily with the plug-ins. You can craft the elements that help you get noticed. Another benefit to WordPress is that there are amazing free templates which can be used to enhance your site. To edit these templates to create a presence that reflects your needs is not all that difficult. Future posts will discuss how you can modify a template and how to shape your site with pug-ins.

My advice is to have your own site hosted rather than a free site. Free is good, and it can be a great way to introduce you to the tasks involved in administering web pages. To accomplish more, you have to be in control of every aspect of the site, which can only be handled through your own hosting account.

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