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Common Mistakes | Article #30 : MARKETING BLUNDERS – PART 1

Let me start off by saying that every once in a while you can do something stupid when it comes to marketing and still get away with it, IF you have enough positive things going for you. But start to compound those blunders and you are looking for a world of trouble. So the next few articles in this series are going to focus on some really common things that people do that are just not good business practices. Like I said, you may be able to get away with one or two, but if you do most of these, it's going to catch up to you.

The biggest blunder that most people make is to get a free web site. The common new marketer will call to Yahoo and get a Geocities account and throw a web site up on it. Bad idea for so many reasons.

For starters, did you ever notice what these free web sites make you put up with? Just go to them and you see all kinds of garbage that has nothing to do with your site, such as banners and frames. Geocities has got their ads all over the place. And if visitors don't know enough to close a lot of this junk, crucial parts of your site can be covered up to your visitor. It's just a bad experience for them since the environment is not professional looking at all.

Another problem is that with a free web site, your domain is something like

www.theirsite.com/yourname/somethingelse/index.html.

This is not a professionally looking company.

With your own hosting and domain, your site looks like this:

www.yoursite.com

A lot better, don't you think?

Another big problem with getting a free web site is that you are severely limited to disk space and bandwidth. It's not like getting a a professionally hosted site and getting 1000 megs of disk space and 10 gig of bandwidth each month. What happens when your site starts to grow and your free hosting company doesn't like all the traffic you're getting that's eating up their total bandwidth? Think they're going to let you keep your account? What happens when you decide that you want to start to offer products to your customers that they can download right off your server and you only have 10 meg of disk space? Think the free hosting company is going to give you more for nothing?

What happens when the server your site is on goes down? Do you really think that your free hosting company is going to get it back up and running quickly? When I used to have a free hosting account, there were times when my web site was down for days. If this should happen to a successful business, it can literally cripple it in no time. Certainly you will lose lots of customers.

Considering how cheap web hosting is these days, it's insane not to get a paid hosting account. Some hosting companies are as little as $5 a month.

Get away from free hosting. It will kill your business.

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