Do You Need To Buy Web Hosting To Make Money Online?
When many people start out trying to make a little money online, they don’t want to buy web hosting. I can understand that, and when I began trying to build my own online mini-empire, I felt exactly the same way. After all, we want to make money online, not spend money online! The thing is, if you are ever going to make enough brass to be able to quit the day job, you simply have to consider your online ventures as a business. Most people don’t. And to a degree they’ll earn from it exactly what their efforts and sacrifices deserve. Peanuts! And then they will slope back to the day job, satisfied in their own minds that the internet now has no opportunities for making serious money.
The reality is that there is almost an infinite pot of gold, but don’t think you should be aiming to mine all of it. You don’t need to; you just need enough that you never have to answer to a boss ever again, while still paying all your bills and buying whatever you want. So is buying web hosting and building your own websites the way forward? The answer is that it is one way towards financial independence.
There are several models for making online income. If you own a bricks and mortar business, you will probably also want a web presence to expand your customer base. This relies on having a lot of capital, whether that is pure cash or tied up in inventory. A smarter way is to set up websites to sell other people’s products, and take a commission. A large number of companies online will offer opportunities like this to affiliates, and Amazon Associates is one such very successful program. Or you could sign up for Google’s Adsense program if you have a blog with tons of visitors stopping by to read your musings everyday.
The big question is whether you should spend money buying web hosting and building your own websites, or just find one of the many “free” third party platforms to join. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely ways to build your own websites for free; think about large sites such as Hubpages and Squidoo. These don’t cost you a bean. You just sign up, start building up a bunch of pages, add a few Amazon ads, and eBay ads, and maybe you could use Adsense too. So you are making money and it didn’t cost you a dime. Thing is, these big sites don’t do it out of kindness. They take a hefty bite out of your profits – remember I said this is business! In fact, they’ll take roughly 40-50% of the revenue generated by your hard work. Sprinkle in a few rules and “Terms of Service” and you could find that just when you think all your web pages are beginning to make you some serious cash, the rules get changed, and your account gets suspended, or your pages get deleted. Wasn’t your fault, but you are left with all your income plans shot to pieces.
Now if you decide to self-host instead, you are in charge of what goes on your site. You are in charge of all the money the site makes in commissions – it’s all yours. And the best part of it is that, if you get bored with doing a website (let’s say you are running several sites), then you can sell it and make money that way too. With the “free” third party providers this is a far more difficult task. You also get to use a proper top level domain name for your sites, rather than just a sub-page on squidoo.com or hubpages.com.
So, how do I buy web hosting? Is it expensive? What do I do after that? Good questions! I personally use two different web hosting companies, and I can recommend Hostgator, which can offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth for a very affordable price. I host a stack of different sites on one account that costs me less than ten bucks a month – and I do make substantially more back than that from affiliate commissions, including Amazon and Adsense. So it isn’t very expensive. You will need to grab yourself a domain name for your site, so this one is “lifesiren.com“. Shop around online for cheap ones or buy a domain registration from Hostgator. Personally I get my domains from GoDaddy six at a time. They usually last a year and then you need to renew, and it’ll cost the annual fee of something like $10-15 each year.
Once you have a domain name and you have managed to buy cheap web hosting from Hostgator or whoever else you try out, there are tons of tutorials to help you get a site set up. Hostgator has a free sitebuilder tool, but I make blog sites using WordPress – which is free! This can be downloaded straight to your brand new site using a script service on your hosting control panel (cPanel) called Fantastico Deluxe. Then you can modify your WordPress site to your heart’s content. There are hundreds of professional looking free themes on the WordPress site, and you can begin to build up your site with content, writing about whatever interests you. Pick something you enjoy and have a passion for, but which also has a lot of possibilities for products – especially if those products can be bought by customers directly from Amazon. If that’s the case for you, get yourself an Amazon Associates account set up and start featuring these products on your site. If you can attract hundreds of visitors to your blog, some of them might decide to buy what you are offering, and then you get a commission! Keep going, adding more blogposts, making your writing interesting and unique and before you know it, you’ll find your site climbing up the search engines, providing you with even more traffic, and even more commissions.
So you could go via a third party platform and build your own websites for free, and probably make a decent amount of money, or you could go it alone, and make a real long-term success of your new internet marketing business by buying web hosting, building sites and earning commissions as passive income, and who know’s, eventually you might be making enough online money to quit the day job and do website building full time.
(Disclosure: some links on this site are affiliate links, and I get paid a commission if you buy a product or service via that link.)
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