Internet Marketing For Free

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You’ll need to take certain steps to creating your first website.

When you first decide to create a website for your business, you will need to ask yourself several questions. This will help you decide what tools to use, as well as how to set up your website.

1. Types of Websites

There are two main types of websites you can consider building:

Mini sites - A minisite is usually a squeeze page (lead capture page), or a sales letter. You can also combine these two types and capture leads while selling a product.

A lead capture page, or a squeeze page, is simply a page where you offer an ezine subscription, a free membership, or some type of premium for getting others to subscribe to your list.

Content Sites - Because of Web 2.0, there is a very wide variety of websites you can build here. This includes video sites like You Tube, social networking sites like My Space, article directories like Ezine Articles, as well as combinations of these types of sites.

These types of sites make a lot of money from advertising, like Google Adsense, because they get a lot of traffic. You don’t need as much traffic as these websites to make a good income though. You can still get a lot of traffic and earn an income from this model.

Although some internet marketing gurus claim that these types of sites aren’t as effective as mini sites, because mini sites only ask the visitor to do one thing, the fact is, all of the most popular sites online are large content sites.

One final thing you should consider here is that if you create a content rich site, you’ll probably want to use a content management system. A content management system allows you to separate design from content, and it makes it much easier to manage your site. A content management system is a script, and so you’ll need to learn how to install the script unless you have your site remotely hosted. (More on this later.)

To get an idea of what content management systems are, and find the one that might be the best for you, then check out Open Source CMS. This site allows you to try out content management systems to find the one that’s right for you. Most of the scripts on this site are free, so you can download them and set them up on your site.

Your Hosting or Remotely Hosted?

When I say your hosting or remotely hosted, what I mean is that if you decide to host your own website, then you’ll need to buy web hosting. I use Ultimate Marketing Center because it allows me to use Fantastico to install my sites. Fantastico is a system you can use where you choose the type of script you want to install. You add the settings (very easy), and then click to install. Once you do this, then all you have to do is start adding content to your website. UMC also offers videos to show you how to set this up, so you can watch the videos and follow along.

Now, if you don’t want to deal with setting up your own site on your hosting, you can use remotely hosted scripts. The advantage here is that the initial sites get a lot of traffic so you can leverage that traffic to help you get more traffic. The disadvantage of these types of scripts is that you will be somewhat limited on the design of your site (unless you know a little HTML), and certain features that you can use in the full script won’t be available in the remotely hosted version.

Examples of these types of scripts are Blogger and Wordpress.com. You can also set up sites on sites like Lulu or Cafe Press and sell your own products.