Theres Always A Catch!
By Gail Hornback   ©2004 All Rights Reserved

You can find some great freebies out there. And for many of us Internet Business Owners, they provide some great resources that allow us to get our businesses up and running without having to come up with a lot of initial monetary investment up front. Just be sure to read the "fine print", and be aware that there IS a cost. Especially when it comes to your website, and your web host.

For the beginning internet marketer, it may be a necessity to take advantage of many of the free hosting options available. Just make sure you know what you are paying for it! There is ALWAYS a catch - which will be a cost to you. It may be well worth it to you to pay that cost in the beginning in order to get things going. But work smart - and don't let the freebie cost climb too high!
Here are some examples of what you will be "paying" for many of these "free" services: 1. Name recognition. If you don't own your own domain name, but are using a URL within the free hosting service, you will lose. http://yourname.theirdomain.com is about as short of a domain name that you will get, but you are advertising their domain for them. Your name will be associated with them in people's memories. PLUS, the savvy surfer recognizes those as less than legitimate, and will more often than not, click on by for that reason only. You have much more credibility with http://you.com. 2 Loss of Your Domain Name. Maybe you CAN afford the expense of purchasing your own domain, but need to take advantage of a free hosting service for a while. Make sure they won't tie up your domain name and make it impossible for you to transfer - EVER. This is common for many of them. 3. Speed, Accessibility, Versatility. Most free hosts only give you online mail, rather than your own personal POP3 or IMAP accounts of which you have FULL control. Most require you to use their building tools. The majority will not give you the ability to offer any kind of downloads from your site, or use any kind of cgi scripts. And all of them, in one form or another will be using you as an advertising vehicle - whether it means imposing frames on your site, or pop-up ads, all of which take away from your product, and can affect the speed of your site. Bottom line - you are ALWAYS giving up some level of control over your business, which you are working day and night to build. When you get down to the fine print you will always find a catch. You always pay a price -that will ultimately be expressed as a dollar amount, when it comes to your business. Free services have their value. And the beauty of the Internet is that it is a very exciting place where it IS possible to get a business going with a next-to-nothing investment. But you won't be able to KEEP it going, if you don't learn to discover and read the "fine print" and discern the REAL cost of any resource. Work hard. Work long. Work smart. And ALWAYS be aware of the catch!

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GAIL HORNBACK is a stay-at-home, home-schooling mom of 5. She is owner of WebWorksAtHome.com (http:/webworksathome.com), and co-owner of Team Mentor (http://makemoneyhowto), CM/YMTC Publishing Services(http://coyote0art.com and author of "Publishing an Ezine: The Easy Guide". You may write her at: mailto:gail@webworksathome.com

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