Internet Marketing For Free

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Do you really need a website?

If you are a writer, or you plan to sell your own products and services, then I absolutely positively believe that the only answer to this question is YES.

That doesn’t mean that your site has to be anything complicated or that you have to spend thousands of dollars on having someone build you one.

What it does mean is that if you want to present a professional appearance on the internet, and you want to show others that you’re a professional, then you need to build a site that tells others who you are, what you sell, and how you can help them solve their problems.

There are two types of websites you can build, and anything else in between is a combination of these two models.

You can build straight one page websites. These include sales letters, squeeze pages, lead capture pages, and any other type of websites that simply do one thing, whether that’s make a sale, get someone to subscribe to your list, or accept an offer you are making through pay per clicks.

The other type of site is content sites, and your content can be just about anything. If you’re a writer, like I am, you’ll want to offer articles, blog posts, information about your books or writing, an author bio, maybe a press kit. You’re only limited by your imagination.

The big argument raging on the internet has always been, and will always be, which type of site performs better? Although many internet marketers will tell you to stick with one page sites because you are only asking your visitors to do one thing, the current evidence of this being a better model doesn’t bear out.

The most popular sites on the internet are content sites. For those that don’t believe me, just visit Alexa. The top 500 websites are all content sites.

I think it’s an insult to say that your visitors and customers are so stupid you have to hold them by the hand and tell them exactly what to do when they get to your site. Many are looking to be educated on a topic, as well as find reviews on products, or find out if a business opportunity is a scam. We all surf the internet for different reasons, and when I do research, it’s because I want to know something.

If you build a following for yourself, others will come looking for you, and they’ll usually use the search engines to do it.  I do that a lot, and if I can’t find the information on that person I want, I give up. My time is valuable. Make it easy for people to find you.

What type of site you decide to build depends on you. There are plenty of good alternatives like Cafe Press, Lulu, Squidoo, and others. The disadvantage, especially with a site like Squidoo is that if your content gets deleted, it’s gone. Nothing you can do about it. By building your own sites, you have control.

In my next two posts, we’ll talk about these two different content models. I’ll give you some pretty nifty free tools that will help you build different types of websites without having to know HTML. This will save you a lot of time.

For those of you who are anxious to get started, the easiest way to learn how to build websites is by watching video to see how it’s done. You’ll also learn the terminology as you go along.

Here’s a free resource where you can get video:

Internet Home Business Videos

For those of you who are interested in one page websites, whether as an affiliate, or to build lists for your own products, I would recommend you read Affiliate Money Machine, and watch the videos. It’s a complete internet marketing education for any business.

Affiliate Money Machine (Just click to download. You will need a zip manager to unzip the file, but it’s free. The ebook is in PDF, so you will need Adobe. You can get the best free zip manager here: ICEOWS - It’s the one I use.)

For those of you who may have trouble with some of the terms I’ve used, you can use the free internet marketing dictionary here to help you learn the terminology. (It’s how I learned it).

Internet Marketing Dictionary