Starting Your Internet Business - Free vs Paid Services

When you are just starting your Internet business and you have no experience, you want to keep your expenses down. This gives you an opportunity to explore the business without spending much money. For that reason alone, it is a very good idea. Let’s face it, some people are not equipped to operate a website. As in any business, some people are better at it than others. So, if you can try out an Internet business for free, you should probably do so.

Almost everything you need for your Internet business can be obtained for free. Do you need a free payment processor for your website? PayPal, along with a number of other companies, can handle that quite nicely. How about a free autoresponder? A search will provide many alternatives for you. What about traffic, is it available for free? It sure is, writing articles, visiting forums, placing free classified ads, and posting to your blog are all free methods to generate traffic. By doing a search, you can find many more ways to get free traffic, but you’ve probably got to put some effort into it, and it won’t happen quickly. But, it is free.

The final item that is required to operate an Internet business is a website. Are there any websites that are available for free? You bet! Doing a search for free websites will bring up hundreds of possibilities.

And that brings us to the point of this article. Is there any advantage of using a paid webhost versus a free one? That depends on the type of website you need. If you are just using your website as a photo gallery so Aunt Mary can view a few pictures of the new baby, you’re probably fine with the free version. However, if you have a commercial website and you are trying to make money, paid webhosting is something you will want to explore as soon as you can afford it.

In addition to the fact that free websites load more slowly, free sites contain ads that are embedded on your site by the host. You make no money from these ads, the company hosting your site profits from these. Sometimes they can be very distracting to your visitors, especially if they use numerous pop-up ads.

Another big disadvantage to using free websites is the limited amount of bandwidth allowed. Each time a visitor comes to your site and downloads something; they are using some of your bandwidth. Free websites provide you with a very limited amount of bandwidth each month. If you have used your monthly allowance of bandwidth, visitors to your site will see a message that says, ‘Website Closed – Exceeds allocated Bandwidth’. This is not acceptable if you have a commercial website. If you see this happening to your website, you need to investigate paid webhosting. Most paid hosting solutions will allow you to have many times the bandwidth available versus your free website. And the cost is quite reasonable, you can have your website hosted for as little as five to ten dollars per month.

As you can see, it is possible to start an Internet business with little or no money. However, if you are operating a commercial site in order to make money, you should switch over to paid services as soon as your budget permits. In almost every case, the paid service is far superior to the free alternative.

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About Auto Responders

People ask me about auto-responders all of the time. My answer is always the same. To make serious money in the article marketing business, you absolutely need an auto-responder!

The top two in the industry are Aweber and GetResponse. I think you probably couldn't go wrong by choosing either one of those for your auto-responder needs. Before choosing one, I did a fair amount of research. Ultimately, I decided to go with Getresponse and have been very happy with them. Aweber and GetResponse are actually quite similar as far as features offered. GetResponse is somewhat cheaper. You can start out with their free version and then transfer to a paid subscription.

With GetResponse, you have the ability to set up an unlimited number of campaigns. This is ideal if you have websites in a number of different niches. You can set up different auto-responders for different sites. I also like their spam check system. This feature allows you to design your emails so that spam filters will not think they are receiving spam and send my emails to a bulk file.

I also investigated the autoresponders that reside on your own computer. It is nice in that it gives you complete control over the entire process. These auto-responders were significantly cheaper (some of them were free). However, I decided against it after investigating the laws governing spam. There are some very strict laws in effect regarding spam that carry significant penalties. GetResponse's procedures keep me out of trouble in that regard and that was very important to me.

GetResponse currently allows unlimited follow-up messages. As time goes on, you will come to realize that is a very important feature. It also provides 19 alternative domain names to receive messages.
It has a spam-check feature to avoid detection by other ISP's spam filters, and provides a list builder service to help you build your opt-in list (at a cost).

The current price starts at $17.95 per month for a basic account, with a refund period of 30 days. You can get it even cheaper if you sign up for a longer period. Another great feature is the fact that they provide toll-free phone support. Phone support is very important in the event that your computer (or theirs) goes down.

If you are looking for an autoresponder, I can recommend GetResponse very highly.

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Just Starting Out? You Need an Autoresponder

Who needs an autoresponder? If you are just starting out online or if your Internet business is not making money, you need an autoresponder. Virtually anyone who is trying to make money online would benefit by using an autoresponder. The real money is made online by selling to your list of people. A good autoresponder is an absolute necessity to manage and sell to a large and/or growing list of subscribers.

What is an autoresponder? An autoresponder is an e-mail marketing and mailing list management tool. The first autoresponders were developed for email delivery systems. They sent an automatic notice to an original sender if an email could not be delivered to its intended address. Their messages were very simple, such as, “your email was not delivered to its intended recipient because…” Since then, autoresponders have come a long way.

It can perform multiple repetitive, but essential communication tasks for you. For example, you can use an autoresponder to send follow-up messages for e-courses and information you offer through your website. It can help you to maintain regular contact with prospective and existing clients. It can diseminate general information. It is an essential ingredient in building an opt-in subscriber list. You can use it to follow up with visitors, follow up with buyers, offer multi-part ecourses, sales presentations, and customer support. An autoresponder has hundreds, maybe even thousands of possible uses. You are only limited by your imagination.
By adding follow-up autoresponder marketing to your business automation, you are free to concentrate on those business tasks that require a higher level of human interaction, such as managing your business or developing new products.
How can you make money online using an autoresponder? First of all, you need to advertise so that people can sign up for your list. One of the best and cheapest forms of advertising is to write and submit articles.

To do this, you simply write 300-500 word articles like the one you're reading now. Make your articles useful and related to the information you are selling to your list. Pack your articles full of content that people need and can use. At the end of your article, place a resource box that contains a little ad and the link advertising the benefits of subscribing to your list. When people read your article, they will be able to click on your links and sign up for your list.

Set up your autoresponder to send out messages to your list every few days. Some of your messages will contain valuable information and or free reports and some of them will contain ads for the products you are recommending.

Of course, this is a very simplistic overview of the process, but it's an outline on how to get started making money with autoresponders.

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