Actually, you only need to worry about three things to procure your own website:

1. Design and content of the site – If you want to have a handsoff approach to web design, then you can go to a site like www.Elance.com and get freelancers to bid on the work. That way you’ll already have all of the bells and whistles in place.But, you can save money by doing some of the work yourself. There are free, high quality templates available on the Internet that make it easy to launch your own site.

2. Hosting your website – There are dozens of free or very low-cost website hosting services available on the Internet. The type of service varies from the amount of space you can use to the number of free enhancements, such as a guestbook and message board.

3. Acquiring a domain name – You must have a unique domain name and it must be registered. You can take care of this yourself by taking advantage of Internet help sites such as www.godaddy.com. It will guide you through each step of securing a domain.

Don’t stress out about planning a website for your business. With all the help that the Internet offers, you can easily do the work yourself and find ways to get what you need for a minimal cost. They key is to keep moving forward with your goal in mind.

Be Your Own Writer

You know your product or service better than anyone, and with the help of spell-check and grammar-check you can easily write your own sales copy and product descriptions.

Software is also available at a nominal cost that will provide templates for some of your writing needs. See what might work for you by taking a look at some advertisements and sales copy that you admire, and then pattern your own with what you’ve learned. However, NEVER plagiarize, or steal someone else’s words or design. Aside from the fact that it’s unethical and will ruin your reputation before you even have a chance to get started, it could result in serious financial consequences for you.

Do take note of the words that were used to make a dynamic statement about the service or product and use those words in your own writing style. Have a trusted friend or colleague look it over to make sure you got the point across.

Partnering to Cut Costs

On the ‘net, everyone is looking to link up in a way that benefits both parties. If you have a skill, such as writing, but you lack in another area, such as marketing, you may be able to barter your services or provide one half of the equation while your partner provides the other much needed input.

You can also go to www.sba.gov and work out a viable business plan and try to secure funding through more traditional means. Just because your business is in the virtual realm doesn’t mean it can’t secure a small business loan, especially if the plan is well thought out.

The great thing about launching an online business is that slow growth is rewarded. You can register your domain and start out slowly building momentum while consistently investing spare time as you continue working in the “real world.”

Then, whenever you’re ready, you can dedicate yourself fulltime to your online efforts and leave the comfort of a full-time career outside of the home. It may seem scary at first, but as you start seeing results, you’ll find the payoff is worth the careful planning that you put in.

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You might want to launch five mini sites with information products – each with their own domain name. Although web hosting is relatively inexpensive in most cases, it adds up and multiple accounts are often unnecessary.

For instance, if you register a domain name at Godaddy and buy web hosting services for it, you don’t have to buy hosting the second, third, fourth, etc. times you register a domain. The only time you need to pay for more hosting is if you exceed your allotted bandwidth (caused by an excess of traffic) or storage space (the amount of data stored in your account).

Check to see how much bandwidth and space is available in your original hosting account. If you’re running out of either, check to see if your hosting company offers upgrades or add-ons to your account. That’s usually less expensive than a second hosting account.

If there’s room to spare, then you might want to use a parked domain, subdomain, or add-on domain. A subdomain is part of a larger domain, delineated by a dot, such asnewsletter.yourdomain.com, or a forward slash, such as yourdomain.com/newsletter. In this example, “newsletter” is the sub-domain, where yourdomain.com is the primary domain.

If your online empire has a steady growth, then you may want to employ  subdomains to separate the elements of your product line. Let’s say you own www.WebDesign.com. A sub-domain of that primary domain name might be www.Hosting.WebDesign.com or www.Graphics.WebDesign.com. You’re just dividing the primary domain name up into different categories.

You can also create it this way: www.WebDesign.com/Hosting – it doesn’t matter if the sub-directory comes before or after the primary domain name. You’ve probably seen this all the time and didn’t think anything of it. Yahoo uses it for separating their categories, like music.yahoo.com or news.yahoo.com.

You may have a primary domain with subdirectories to house your online courses, newsletters, and articles. You could register a domain for the newsletter and park it so that it points to the directory within your site. For example, if you owned the domain mynetbusiness.com and you bought mynetnewsletters.com, you could park the mynetnewsletters.com domain and point it to the sub-domain of ,newsletters.mynetbusiness.com.When someone visits mynetnewsletters.com they are immediately taken to newsletters.mynetbusiness.com.

That way, your newsletter gets branded with its own domain name, but it still shares hosting with the original site. Many affiliate marketers use this strategy to cloak their hyperlinks to other affiliate websites to avoid having their commissions stolen. Some consumers are turned off buying from affiliates, so sending them to a unique domain is helpful so they don’t bypass your link.

For example, using the domains above, if you are promoting a company’s web hosting as an affiliate, you might set up a sub-domain on your site of hosting.mynetbusiness.com and have it point to your affiliate URL with the hosting company.

A parked domain means that you buy all the versions of your most popular domains to keep others from stealing traffic that’s rightfully yours. For instance, let’s say you go to GoDaddy.com and register Site123.com.

You also register Site123.net, Site123.biz, and Site123.org so that nobody else can buy these domains and capitalize on a consumer’s error in typing the wrong domain extension. You don’t need to actually put a website on those extra  domains. Just “park” them on your existing hosting account and just have them redirect (or “point”) to your primary site at the dot com address.

An add-on domain is a new domain name that you set up to point to a sub-directory of your primary domain. If you own www.MySite123.com and you also own www.My-Site123.com, then you can make the second one an addon to your original domain.

When a web user types in the My- Site.com address, they’ll be redirected without them knowing it, to a web folder on MySite.com, but their browser won’t display the new address. When you set up an add-on domain, you get the advantage of a cgi-bin and the statistics you need to evaluate traffic to that domain.

Always remember to ask your current host if any of these options are available to help you reduce the cost of doing business online. Some companies will charge a one-time fee to set up your addon domains. Some charge nothing, and others charge a monthly fee. Steer clear of those charging you on an on-going basis when you could get a better deal elsewhere.

Just remember that once you have a hosting account, you can maximize its use before you either upgrade to a larger server with more bandwidth or buy another hosting account. Don’t get sucked into the notion that for every domain you register, separate hosting is a requirement.

If you’re shopping for Ecommerce web hosting services make sure to check out VodaHost. They probably have the best offer available today. On top of the quality hosting they offer you also get an award winning website builder(this one’s realy amazing) and the recently introduced Soholaunch eCommerce Builder.

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