Hi everyone, I hope you are doing well. Recently, someone asked me if they should have their own website. They went on to me that they didn’t see the benefits of having a website, since they already have an ebay store. I am not going to tell anyone not to have an ebay store. But never limit yourself to that ebay store. You are at a disadvantage by having a store on some else’s domain.

If you own your own website and domain name you will be under control of everything you can do. There will be no limitations to what you can do on your own website. As long as you stay within your host’s rules, you can do virtually anything with your own website. You are not allowed to advertise or make money with affiliate marketing on your ebay store. But, with your own website you can advertise, use affiliate marketing, ad paid links, anything you want. You can make some great money on your own website, without just selling the merchandise you offer.

If you have your own website, you can choose your domain name. If your business is called Joes donuts; You can see if joesdonuts.com is available. If it’s not available, you have lots of other choices (joedonuts.net, .org, .us, .biz, lots more). Some people even get creative and add a 0 to all the letter o’s. It’s always a good idea to get the same domain name as your business name. This way, if someone wants to find your business; tell them joesdonuts.com & “replace the o’s with zeros”. It’s a new trend that has caught on in the Ebonics era.

You can change the look and feel with your own domain. You can have the freedom to use a website template or build your own website. If you don’t know how to build a website, you can find free website templates all around the internet. Or you can find a good web designer to build you a customer website to fit your business. You don’t have to worry about auction fees. You can list as many items on your website as you want for free. Most hosts charge you by the month. The average monthly fee is $4.99 for bottom end. About $49.99 a month for really good service.

I recommend using godaddy or yahoo for your host. Godaddy is my favorite because they are cheaper. I pay $52.00 for the entire year on each of my websites. You need some ftp uploading experience to use godaddy. I would say you have to be a novice to advanced to go with godaddy as your host. If you have ever uploaded anything you should be okay. Godaddy offers some great customer service if you get stuck. Plus they have some good tutorials if you are unsure about anything. Another thing I like about godaddy is; you can choose a Linux or Windows based host. I have been using godaddy for a while now and couldn’t be happier with them. Believe me; I have tried just about everyone out there.

Another host I recommend is yahoo. Yahoo is $29.00 and up per month for web hosting. Every once and a while you can catch a discounted price. When I used yahoo, they gave me the first 3 months for $19.99 and $39.99 each month after that. They have a beginner based system. You don’t need any web design experience to have a yahoo merchant account. They make it pretty easy to create your own customer website. They even give you a yahoo web builder tool that lets you build websites with Photoshop quality. The customer service was okay. I seemed to get bounced around if I called or emailed them about a question or problem I had. I am a bugger about customer service. And yahoo didn’t impress me much in that department. But, all in all they offer a great service and better than most of the competition out there.

Ebay won’t be around forever. If they aren’t around anymore, you will need an immediate back-up plan. But if you already have a well established website, you won’t need to worry. It can take 6 months to a year in order to receive consistent traffic and sales to your website. If you start building now, you won’t have to worry about rushing in to building a website in a frenzied panic later. Don’t put all your eggs in to one basket. Expand your business all over the net, not just on ebay. The more places you sell, the more sales you will make. Don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

I recommend having your own website domain over some free website also. If you have a free website, you will be stuck with unwanted advertisements and limitations to what you can do. You may be stuck with a web domain name that has nothing to do with your business name (joeshmoesfreewebsitehosting.joesdonuts.com). Another problem with a free website is the size of your domain name. Chances are your domain will be too big for anyone to remember and re-visit. Free websites bring little to no sales because they look very unprofessional.

The only down side to having a website is; all the time you have to dedicate to bring traffic. Advertising is very important when you have a website. You can find out how to advertise your website on a blog post I made here. Those techniques are the same ways that any marketing company would market your business for money. It’s very time consuming to launch an advertising campaign for your website. It’s really easy, but takes a ton of time out of your life. You could hire someone to market your website. But, that can cost thousands of dollars. I look at it this way; I know what those companies are going to do in order to market my website. So, I use those techniques and save myself thousands of dollars.

If anyone has any questions at all, feel free to email me. Thanks for reading and see you all tomorrow.

LP@thehomedropshipguide.com