Out of many ways to start making money online owning your own website or blog and monetizing it is one of the best. This is so because making money with a blog or a website you own is a passive way to make money online. Unlike other ways of making money online like freelancing where you are paid for every hour you spend working or after completing the job, passive income streams like owning a websites include investing a lot of time and hard work in the beginning to help your website takes off and start driving lots of targeted traffic without making lots of money, if any.
But as your website is established and drives lots of traffic, you can start monetizing it with Adsense ads, affiliate links, selling your own product or other ways and you only need to put a little work in maintaining it but your profit at that point has a potential to surpass your full time job earnings.
How to build a website or blog and start making money with it?
If you want to build a website of blog of your own you can choose to build a self hosted site which will be fully owned by you. Building a self hosted website or blog will cost you some money.If you decide to build a self hosted website or blog you will need to invest at least in domain name and web hosting. You can register a domain name which will cost you about $10 a year and you can buy webhosting for a few dollars a month. Once you have your own domain name and webhosting you can start building your website. Building a website today is not too complicated and does not require large technical knowledge.
Even people with little experience can use platforms like WordPress and start building their website. There are also many free themes, plugins, template that make it very easy to build a decent website. If you want a website or blog that is more professional you can hire someone to do it for you or buy premium themes you can use on your site.
Although bulding a self hosted site is cheap, costing less than $100 dollars a year, and relatively easy even for beginners you can also choose to build a free website. There are many places online where you can create a blog or business website for free. To start building your free blog or business website all you will need an email account to open a free account.
Once you have a website you will need to create and publish content and promote your site to drive traffic. Most important thing for a success of a website is unique and original content optimized for search engines that will drive targeted traffic. You can later monetize the traffic by placing ads, affiliate links, selling your product and other methods.
Disadvantages of building free website or free blog
You can monetize both free sites and self hosted websites or blogs. Although free website may seem more appealing because you don’t need to pay anything to build a free website or blog there are number of things you must consider before investing hard work and time building your website:
- You don’t own the domain name of your website/blog if you build a free website. Because of this the provider can delete your website or blog at any time.
- If you own free website you can’t sell it on website marketplaces like Flippa.There are many online entrepreneurs who are making money online building websites and blogs and later selling them. You can’t sell a free website or blog.
- Some free websites do not allow to make money with them. If your purpose is making money online by monetizing your website than you must consider that many free website providers do not allow monetizing the websites hosted by them.
- Many free websites place their ads and banners on the webpages. Some free web hosting sites will in return place their advertisements on your free blog. Others are taking portion of the revenue generated by advertising on websites or blogs hosted by them.
- Many free websites do not come with all the features included in the free account. Many free website providers request paying certain fee to unlock all features of their platforms.
- Having your website hosted on free websites may seem unprofessional. This is especially true if you are building a business website. What will clients think about your company if they find your website hosted on free web hosting site. You will also most likely don’t have email address with your domain (youremail@yourdomain.com) which also looks unprofessional.
- There is no guarantee how long your website will be available. Free webhosting may stop being free after a while. Your provider may decide to ask for some fee for hosting your website after you have invested lots of time building and promoting your free website or blog.
- Free websites are usually poor for search engines optimization. This is because search engines tend to give less importance to subdomains.
- You will have less freedom in designing free website or blog. On the other hand if you build a self hosted blog you have complete freedom, from choice of platform to niche design, monetization methods etc. than you would have if you build a self hosted blog or website.
- Free websites and blogs usually come with a limited available disk space. Many free websites will give more options and more disk space for a certain fee.
Advantages of using free website hosting.
- You don’t need to pay anything to build your blog or business website. If you decide to build your own self hosted blog or website you will have to pay around $10 for domain name and pay monthly fee for web hosting. With free websites you will get free subdomain and webhosting.
- Many free websites allow you to transfer your site to your own domain. If you buy a domain name you can host your website on that domain and still use free platform to build your website or blog, or you can decide to go with free subdomain.
- There are many free templates, themes, widgets and more. Many free websites come with easy to use web builder you can use to build your websites from scratch even if you don’t have much technical knowledge.
- To start a free website all you will need is an email address to open your free account.
- You can open many free websites or blog with a single account, all of them with their own subdomain name. You can start many blogs all from the same of different niches and all that completely free that you can monetize if you want and if that is allowed in the terms of service.
- Free websites are great for inexperienced bloggers. They can build their first blog and develop their skills before moving into self-hosted blogs.
List of sites where you can build your free website or blog
There are a large number of places online where you can build a blog or website for free. Opening an account is free and and with your free account you can build more than one website. Many free websites offer paid membership which will offer more web space and other benefits not available to free mebers.
Here is a list of some free websites which also allow monetizing of their websites:
- Blogger – is a free blogging platform owned by Google. If you have Gmail account you can use your Gmail password to log in to your Blogger account. You can build one or more free blogs and they will be hosted on a subdomain (yourblog.blogspot.com). Bloggers offer many free templates even beginners can use. Blogger allows to monetize your content using Adsense among other ways of monetization. To make money with your blog using Adsense you will need an Adsense account. If you don’t have an Adsense account you can apply for one using your free blogs on Blogger once you have published several posts. Placing Adsense ads on your blogs is very easy using Adsense widgets. You can monetize your blogs by other methods including Amazon Associates.
- DevHub – is another place where you can build blog or a website for free. To join DevHub you will need an email account. Once you join you can choose what do you want to start a blog or a website. After you select the type of website you want you can select name, write description and start writing content. To start making money with your site you will need to promote it to drive traffic. Monetizing your blogs and websites on DevHub is easy and you have many options available. You can very easily place advertisements and affiliate links from many different networks using modules. DevHuib alloes you build more than one websites or blogs. They will be hosted on a sub domain (yoursite .devhub. com)
- Weebly – is another great free platform you can use to build a website without investment and start making money. Weebly is platform that is very easy to use and offers many templates which can be further customized. Unlike many other free platforms Weebly does not place their ads on your site. You can make money with Weebly many ways using Adsense as well as affiliate links and banners. The disadvantage of using Weebly is that free accounts are limited to 10 Webpages.
- Yola – is a great place to build a free business website. You can build ecommerce website for free and sell your products. You can choose from large number of themes and add videos, and photographs. You can sell your products and use other ways like Google Adsense to monetize your Yola site.
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