12 Jun 10 5:42 pm
luis,
do you want a real business, or are you just playing? i am not meaning to be harsh with that, but it is a valid question. if you rely on free sites, you give complete control of your business to the owner of that site.
If they change their rules, you are out of business literally over night.
Also, as for email marketing, you would have to own your own domain.
most of the free sites like hubpages and squidoo don't allow you to put an opt in box on their site. you can use them to build traffic to your site, which is what Mark teaches here. however, you cannot run a real business on a property that you don't have complete control over.
Also, owning your own website gives you an asset that you can sell. If you build up a site with say 30-40 good articles,with a nice design, and work to build even up to 50 visitors a day, which is not that hard, you can then turn around and sell that site for several hundred dollars.
If you are relying on free sites, you don't have an asset that you can sell.
Of course, building that site into one that makes even one sale a week will increase the price that you can get by flipping it, but just building the site will bring in a good chunk of cash.
Don't waste your time trying to build a business using free sites. IF you can't afford $20 to start your business, and invest 10/ month for hosting, then there are options to make that money quickly.
as you learn how to build and market a site, you will be learning valuable skills that you can sell.
IF you need some cash, you can simply set up a service to offer to other marketers and earn a little cash while you build up your site.
When I set up my first service, I was offering article writing for $5/ article. I did not get rich doing it, but it made enough money that I could keep working on my sites and building up my own business. I had cash in my pocket within 2 days of setting it up. Now, I have built up a client list, and I have some people who pay up to $25/ article. it took time to build it up to that, but start off really cheap, and you will find people willing to take a chance. then as your skills improve, you can start charging more.
You can look at all you have learned to do, and you will find other people willing to pay for that service.
You could do social bookmarking, article writing, create graphics, do article submissions to directories, spin articles, create videos out of articles, and any number of services that will help other marketers, and give you a little cash to reinvest in building your own websites up.
It takes a lot of work to make this succeed, but you can do it. The great thing is that if you build up your services, you have something to work with. I have gotten many good products, and services from other marketers without spending any cash, simply by trading my services.
once you are doing that, you should be able to pay for webhosting, and build your own site that you control rather than putting control of your business to the whims of whover owns the free site that you use.
