Do I own my website?

Are you 100% sure you are the owner of your website?

Should you be using free websites at all?

The only way to be 100% certain that a website belongs to you:

  • You must personally register the domain name
  • You must personally host your website
  • You must at all times be able to publish any content you want
  • You must at all times be able to change the design of your website in any way you want

If you can do all of the above, then your website belongs to you. If not, you are using free website tools or a system that belongs to someone else. In the following videos I discuss what the differences are between free website creation and owning your website outright.

Owning Your Website or using Free Websites: Video Part One

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnszItJ_QqQ

Owning Your Website or using Free Websites: Video Part Two

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QOs9_XhvH8

making own website

Making Your Own Website

Let me put it to you this way, if you are even a little bit serious about publishing a website that will earn you money, then a free website service is completely out of the question.

For the following reasons:

  • The content you publish is not really your content
  • You do not have control over the domain name on many free websites
  • You have very little to no control over the design of your website
  • A free website is not scalable, you cannot add new functionality of your choice
  • You have no control over how you monetize the content you publish

My own experiences with free websites have not been a good one. Too many of them will suddenly start charging you when you get some good traffic and if you do not pay, they take control of your website. This is not true for all free websites, but it’s not worth the risk. If you have not read the “Making Own Website” basics post and watched the videos, please visit that first, it sets you up for the rest of the steps toward creating your own website.

If you are willing to create quality content and you are going to spend the hours doing this, then why not spend a little money up front for a strong domain name and a few dollars every month on quality hosting you control.

You can then control how and when you want to start monetizing your website. It is not a good idea to start monetizing from the beginning, more on this later. If you have your own website and your own hosting you can control this. You can control the functionality of your website, on the WordPress platform you can choose to add extras using plugins. For example you might want to use your website to do event management or project management; you can easily add this to your own website.

What will a paid website cost you?

To register your own domain name with Godaddy will cost you $7.49 if you buy through us ($11.99 if you buy directly from Godaddy). Get very good starter hosting deals with Hostgator Unlimited Hosting starting at $3.96 or Godaddy Limited Hosting for as low as $1.99. The hosting package deals all offer different benefits, we will look at hosting in detail in a future video.

The best part is, once you have your hosting account setup, you can host as many websites as you please. This means once you have once niche focused website up and running, you can launch another and another in the same broad industry, each focused on specific keywords. Each one of these websites could potentially become passive money generators for you if stay focused and build your websites correctly from the start. (We will show you exactly what to do in upcoming videos)

In future videos we will show you exactly how to register your Godaddy account and your Hostgator account and what you need to do to setup your account. It is VERY simple and absolutely worth it to get your own website setup this way. Everything remains in your control, your content is yours to do with as you please, you can add selected functions in the form of new plugins to your website and you can monetize your website the right way (more on monetization later).

My expert opinion, stay away from free website hosting. For the extremely low price of a domain name and quality hosting it’s just not worth it to take a chance with free hosting.

If you do choose to still to go with free websites, then go with a service you can trust. Here is a short list of quality places to launch your free website/blog:

These are mostly viewed as blogging platforms, but the difference between a website and a blog is only in the name. You do not have the freedom with these services as you would have when running your own website, but they are very good for launching a test website and playing around a bit.

You can even launch a few of these blogging sites and keep them active, because later we will need them to build the credibility and search engine ranking of your own website.

To continue on your journey of making your own website, you will need to get yourself your own domain name and open your hosting account. We will be showing you exactly how to setup your account, how to manage your domain name and how to start publishing YOUR OWN website.

There are hundreds of services out there, we recommend the following:

For domain registration:

For your hosting account:

But we will take you through choosing and setting up your account in detail in future videos. For now go and do your topic / niche research and start making a short list of what you want to write about.

Remember to have a look at the “making own website” page to get a big picture view of how to approach creating your own website.