SpeedieConsulting

When you start a new business or look for ways to drive more business, many people turn to the Internet. With the promise of free sites, free blogs and free email addresses, most first time web marketers get pulled into the world of Blogger, Yahoo, or Google Mail.

Now these are okay for yourself to communicate with family or friends or to run a hobby site, but the minute you decide to run a business, the first thing you need to do is stop thinking about free.

Free web address and email addresses in a business context smells of cheap and will not do your credibility any good whatsoever. Also bear in mind that some of these sites will give you a really long and unwieldy domain name which will be difficult to promote and difficult for clients to remember. This will not be a good start.

Most of these free email services are frowned upon as they have been abused in the past by lots of people so your email might not get through. Some of the free site services have also pulled sites down without any warning. Blogger has done this in the past if they feel you are in breach of their terms and conditions.

If you want to make a good impression online, buy a domain name. They can be bought for a few pounds each year and can come with email addresses too.

In some industries or business opportunities, you are even given a fully functioning free website but you will have no control over it. You don’t and won’t even own the domain name. So what happens if you fall out with the company or the company goes bust? How does that leave you, you have spent all this time building someone else’s website only for you to lose out.

My advice?

What you could do initially, is to buy your own domain name, and have it redirected to your free site. In this way, you are marketing and promoting YOUR web address and if you decided to move companies or change services then you can easily point your domain name elsewhere and you will not have lost any of the marketing you have carried out.

I would only suggest these for those of you who are given a great looking and functioning site, some franchises will give you a website for example, or some networks or professional bodies will.

The other major downside to these free sites is that apart from your contact details, all the other pages and information of the site are the same as any other company that uses the same network as you. This could kill your website before it has even started. Google, for example, does not like seeing duplicated sites across its rankings and therefore will not rank duplicated sites. Therefore your site might not be listed simply because it was given to you by a network with hundreds of other clients.
I suppose the only saving grace, is that none of those will be ranking either.

Search engines can be a major live blood to any new business, so making sure you do the right thing by them is paramount.

I would strongly advise anyone that has one of these sites to make sure they also have their own, owned domain name and have some originally written content for it. There are low cost web packages available that will give you a fighting chance of getting your sites ranked in Google and the other major search engines.

Having said all that, there is a place for these free services. There is nothing stopping you building a free site or free blog that promotes your main website. In fact, I would actively encourage it!

Free services such as

www.geocities.com
www.hubpages.com
www.squidoo.com
www.blogger.com
www.typepad.com
www.freewebs.com
www.bravenet.com

are all good services to quickly build sites that you can link to your main website but do not use them or any other free service to build your main business website.

In summary, if you are looking at building your first company website, avoid freebies. Spend a bit of money to buy a business domain name and get yourself a website. It may seem an unnecessary expense when people are offering freebies, but if you want a website that drives you business, you will need to invest in it.