This is often a big question, especially for those who may be just starting their presence on the internet or for those who need to do major upgrades on their existing site. In either case, the question is do it yourself or delegate?

The article below can apply to anyone who is starting a website. Don’t let the Affiliate Marketing focus keep you from gathering other great tips.

Cheers

TnT Dynamic Duo

Should You Build Your Own Website Or Not — The Pros And Cons Revealed

By: Nicos Stylianou

If you have been in the online marketing arena long enough, then you have probably realized that affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate a sizeable income. For those of you who are just starting, affiliate marketing is simply selling other merchants’ products and getting a commission whenever a sale is made.

Now, in order to be able to send prospective customers to a merchant’s website, what you definitely need to do is to establish your online presence, build your own virtual real estate as they say.

There are basically two ways you can go about to accomplish this. You can either build your own website or you can build your own page or pages on existing big authority sites.

Let me explain what I mean by the latter.

In the recent years, we have seen the emergence of the so called Web 2.0 sites which basically promote interactivity between website owners on the one hand and browsers or visitors on the other. Instead of the communication being one way and the visitors just being passive receptors of the information that was fed to them by the webmasters, now it is two way. Visitors now can contribute content in various forms such as comments, videos, articles etc.

This capability has extended to affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer, you can easily build a page (or a lens in the case of Squidoo), in which you can write anything (like a review) for a product you want to promote. In addition, in your content you can include affiliate links. Thus, when a visitor comes to your page, reads your material and likes it, he or she can click your links and go to the merchant’s website. When he or she makes a purchase, you get paid by the merchant.

In the case that you prefer to build your own website, you basically have to secure your own domain name, get a subscription to a hosting service and hire a designer to make your site both attractive and search engine friendly (or make it yourself if you have the necessary expertise).

As all things in life, there are pros and cons in each solution. Below I make a brief comparison of the two options.

1. In the case of hosting your content on a different site, it might be easier in terms of the technical expertise required to build it, than in the case you have to build your own website. Nowadays, sites like Squidoo or Scribd to mention a few provide you with really excellent tools which help you set up your pages in no time.

2. Due to the fact that these Web 2.0 are authority sites, they achieve better search engine rankings than regular websites and so there is a better chance for your page, at least in the short term, to attract more traffic.

3. A shortcoming of the hosted pages is that here is not so much flexibility as to the design of the page. As it is to be expected, website owners of the big sites want all of their pages to look similar in format.

4. In terms of cost, it is clear than it is more expensive to have your own website. You have to pay to get a domain and hosting and you might incur additional costs if you hire a designer.

4. When you use other sites, then it is clear that you are also at their mercy as regards their rules and policies. Whenever they decide to change these, you are facing the risk that you might loose your pages altogether. This is exactly what happened recently, when Squidoo decided, in their effort to fight spammers, to overhaul their own terms and conditions. As a result, a lot of affiliates had no option but to migrate their content elsewhere. As you understand, such a turn of events could turn your business on its feet overnight!

My own opinion is that, although it looks more attractive to use other sites to host your content in the short term, it is definitely to your advantage in the long term, to build your own website.

What you can do is follow a middle strategy: You can test and experiment on new marketing niches for a while by using other sites, in order to discover whether this niche is profitable or not. When the results are positive, then you can proceed to build your own website and use the existing pages on third party sites to serve as backlinks to your site.

About the Author

Want to make money online but you think it’s too hard? Visit my site at http://www.createonlinewealthnow.com to grab your free ebook that will teach you step by step how to create your first website today!

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