Free is Not Always Savvy

I remember what it was like when I first started my home business. I was all about the freebies. Free
advertising, free services, free-free-free! Give it to me for free!

The next best thing to free was Cheap! LOL!

I’ve been there and done that. My first attempt at a money making website was hosted on a free service-and it was a flop!

One of the saddest things to see on the forums is a ‘Look at my new site’ post from a new work at home Mom-and she’s just spent hours and hours building her business presence on a free hosting service.

She doesn’t know any better-chances are that she’s been using free hosting for a personal site for a long time so the choice was just natural-but it’s still a wrong one.

I don’t know of anyone who has done well with a site hosted on a freebie host like Bravenet, Homestead, Geocities, etc.

I know that in the old days-when we paid $35 a year for our domains and $30 a month for hosting-a free website was often the choice for a fledgling home based business owner.

Today we can pick up domains for around $7 and hosting for as low as $5 a month. If you don’t have $12 to invest into your new business idea-girlfriend have a yard sale!

Why is it such a bad decision? Well let me give you a list:

1. People don’t take you seriously on free hosting.

2. People don’t spend money with businesses that they don’t take seriously.

3. Long freebie subdomains are hard to remember, look bad on a business card and are often misspelled.

4. The free host is serving their own ads to your
visitors. These ads often flash or even pop up and annoy your guests.

5. You’ll work hard making the site just right and if you happen to decide to move to a standard host-the files you created on the freebie hosts site builder are non-transferable-now you have to start over from scratch.

Let’s look beyond the website itself. Let’s look at support services that you use online.

Are you using a free email list service that is advertising to your leads as they sign up? Are you using a freebie script that comes with no support? (Watch out, free scripts are usually often susceptible to hackers.)

Yahoo Groups are a popular list service among WAHMs-but take a good look at the service next time you can. Every single page view has advertising. Someone else’s marketing message is reaching your list members with every click. Not good!

I’ve been telling people for a long time to bit the bullet and pay for a good autoresponder service like Aweber.com and the most common response I get is that they can’t afford the additional payment until they are profitable.

I understand. Money was tight for me too when I got started. You have to realize that cheaping out now will make more work for you later-and if you do start making money and decide to make a switch later- It won’t be as easy as you think.

A good paid service will require you to re-opt your entire list in when you import the list. That means that you’re readers will have to say again that they want to keep getting your mailings-or they won’t be added.

This idea freaks many of us out! We worked hard for those subscribers-now we have to woo them again? Better to just get it right the first time.

Building a successful business will require savvy investment, I hope you won’t believe anyone who tells you different.