There are many reasons why it is important to have your own domain for Internet marketing purposes. I’ll give you a list of some of them and then discuss in more detail what I believe is the most important reason why owning a domain is essential for any Internet marketer. Here’s the list:

• Ownership of your own website lends credibility
• A domain name relating to your marketing niche can increase your placement in the search engines
• Having your own website gives you complete flexibility of design and content
• You will be building something of value – if you own your website, you can sell it for a profit (free blogs just die)
• Paid hosting gives you full control of your business.

The most compelling reason for having paid hosting is that this is the only way you will have full control of your Internet marketing business.  If you rely on free hosting, there is nothing you can do if the host’s server crashes.  If the hosting company shuts down overnight, everything you have built will be gone.  If you build your marketing websites on blogger.com, there is a very real risk that Google might shut down any or all of your sites (maybe even close your account altogether).  It should also be noted that Google tends to just do these things without any warning.  Something you have spent months, or even years, building can be gone in an instant.

Any web pages you create using free hosting such as with Blogger.com or Squidoo, are not your property; the content is yours and you can lay claim to copyright, but the actual web address belongs to the site owners and they are the ones who have control.  If the site owners decide to close down, your pages just disappear.  If they decide they no longer want content relating to your niche, your web pages will be toast.

Case Study

Squidoo decided that a particular topic was attracting “spammy” content and closed down hundreds of pages relating to that topic.  The topic was in the relationship niche, there was nothing wrong with the topic apart from the fact that it attracted too many Internet affiliate marketers who were posting thinly disguised advertising and duplicated articles.

In an effort to rid their website of this undesirable content, Squidoo closed the doors to anyone trying to put up more lenses in that niche, and deleted existing pages in the niche.  Of course, pages containing valuable content were also wiped out in this cleansing operation.  The people who put time and effort into building and promoting those web pages could do nothing, because they didn’t own the pages, Squidoo owned them.

When you consider that you can buy domain names for less than the price of a cup of coffee, it is obviously a false economy to rely on the use of free web pages for an affiliate article marketing business. You can get reliable web hosting for $4.95 per month.

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