How To Make A Free Website
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
A question that I frequently get asked is how to make a free website. It’s an understandable question but one that’s difficult to answer. I realize that money can be tight but it’s difficult to truly build a free website especially if you want to create a professional website.
What I plan on doing is listing some tools on how to make a free website along with some affordable tools that allow you to present a professional image. Just keep in mind that if you don’t have a professional image it’s likely that you’ll lose out on sales.
Free Domain Names
A domain name is pretty affordable at $6.95 for the first year and $9.95 through www.WebsiteSpot.com for every year after that. Again, this is per year not per month so it’s extremely affordable. I don’t know of any site that offers absolutely free domain names unless you purchase a pre-paid year of web hosting or some other sort of annual service.
Free Website Hosting
This is another service that it’s difficult to find for free and still portray a professional image. You can always use a service like BraveNet.com as they actually provide free domain hosting. The thing is that they amount of resources that they give you is limited to sort of force you to upgrade to one of their paid plans once you’ve outgrown the free space.
An affordable option is web hosting with www.WebsiteSpot.com, we offer a Deluxe hosting plan for $7.95 per month but it gives you ample space to grow your site. Best of all, you an host unlimited domains on one hosting plan. This allows you to host multiple sites such as Domain1.com, Domain2.com etc all for only $7.95 per month. Plus you don’t have the adds that display on your site that you’ll find with many free domain hosting providers.
Free Website Builder
This is going to be very similar to free website hosting as you will have the providers ads displaying on your site and doesn’t look professional at all. www.WebsiteSpot.com offers an ad-free website builder that allows you to update your website on any computer and offers 100’s of free templates to choose from to get that professional look that you should strive for.
How To Make A Free Website
As you can see it’s actually very affordable to build a website with www.WebsiteSpot.com and still achieve that professional look that you’re looking for. If you haven’t had a chance to look at the site, we put together www.MakeAWebsiteSpot.com which offers all the tips & tools that will help you learn how to make your own website.
I’ve built the site with a search box so that you don’t need to search all over to find what you’re looking for. I recommend that you check out www.MakeAWebsiteSpot.com before committing to any given domain names or web hosting provider.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
Domain Name Registration Mistakes
Thursday, September 11th, 2008I received an email the other day asking me what I thought about the domain names that he was thinking about ordering. It made me think that I’d just put together a post of the types of mistakes that people make when registering domain names. By the way, these are simply my opinions, I’m sure that some people will disagree or would like to add a few mistakes so please feel free to leave comments with your thoughts.
Not Register A .COM
The reason that I think that this is a huge mistake is because people are accustomed to typing in a domain name with the .COM extension. If you register a .NET, .ORG, .US, etc you are just losing out on repeat traffic.
The reason is that people remember the domain name but often times don’t pay attention to the extension. When they attempt to go back to your site they type YourDomain.com which of course belongs to your competitor and thus you’ve lost out on return traffic.
Not Registering Every Extension
With domain prices being so affordable it just makes sense to register every extension during the domain name registration process. There’s no reason to let a competitor or domain squatter register the other extensions of your domain name and possibly put up a website of questionable content or even try to sell you the extension for many times more than you could have paid.
Using Too Many Dashes
I understand the importance of keywords in a domain name for search engine optimization purposes but if you want to brand your website for people to return to the last thing you want to do is register Your-Main-Website-Keywords.com.
It’s difficult to remember and I can’t think of anything that looks more unprofessional.
Not Registering A Domain Name For Multiple Years
The chance of losing a domain name due to it expiring isn’t great considering the number of reminders that are sent but I just don’t see how it’s worth chancing it. You may change your email address and not receive the notices or something like that.
It’s best to register your domains for multiple years so this doesn’t happen, plus you generally receive a discounted rate during domain name registration for registering for multiple years.
Well that’s about it. These are the main mistakes that I can think of during domain name registration. Again, feel free to chime in with anything that you can add or that you may disagree with.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
Selling Niche Products To Stay Competitive
Friday, September 5th, 2008In today’s internet market it’s extremely difficult to start a new website in a market that’s competitive. With the larger companies able to spend so much money on marketing it’s important to find a market that they overlook or simply aren’t interested in
Niche marketing is the method of focusing on a specific portion of an industry or service. The idea is to focus on a product or service that the main street companies aren’t actively pursuing. The demand may not be as big but it’s a market that’ll allow you to compete without the large marketing budget.
What Is An Example Of A Niche Market
Finding a niche market is easier than you may think. The example that I’m going to give you is a very seasonal niche market but it’s a niche market just the same.
I was searching for a Christmas related domain and found that the domain name ChristmasToiletPaper.com had just been released. I did a bit of research on WordTracker and found that during the Christmas season it was actually something that many people searched for so I registered the domain name.
I think use The Drop Ship Directory and found a wholesale provider and I was instantly in the Christmas Toilet Paper business. I know it sounds funny if not extremely odd but it’s a market that had demand during a certain season and there was virtually no-one offering a decent website offering the product.
Benefits Of Niche Marketing
The obvious benefit is that the ‘big guys’ aren’t spending their large advertising dollars on niche markets. They focus on the mainstreet products. Think of it this way although Apple sells accessories for their iPods & Macs the lion’s share of their advertising goes to marketing the actual iPods & Macs, not the smaller accessories.
Another benefit is the lack of competition, like I mentioned above, there is a seasonal demand for Christmas Toilet Paper but not enough to get a lot of websites interested in it. This makes optimizing for search engines much easier along with making any Pay Per Click advertising much more affordable.
Hopefully this helps in your search for product or services to offer online.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
