It’s easy to see why unlimited domains hosting is so appealing. Pay one fee, get all your hosting done in one account. Convenient, easy to manage. Makes perfect sense. The end to all your hosting problems. Or is it?

As with most things in life, unlimited domains hosting has its advantages and disadvantages, and the disadvantages are well worth taking note of.

Disadvantages of unlimited domains hosting

First, you are hosting multiple domains on a single hosting account. Fine. Multiple domains mean multiple websites however, each putting their own demands on your hosting. All the resources used by all your domains and websites is counted against just one hosting account. If you run popular sites, you can run out of bandwidth. If you run sites that run demanding scripts, your host can start blocking some of your sites from actually running their scripts.

And trust me, these limitations are in place. You may not be told about them on the order page, but they’re there.

So, having said that, I guess you can argue that unlimited domains hosting is a somewhat misleading phrase. Whether you’ll be able to host unlimited domains will depend heavily on what you want to use your sites for, how much traffic your sites generate, how much bandwidth you need, how many demanding scripts you run, and so on.

It is, in fact, entirely possible for a power user to max out the server side limitations of such an account with just a few, or even just one domain.

However, for the average user just getting started in Internet business, the advantages usually outweigh the disadvantages.

Advantages of unlimited domains hosting

You certainly save money, for starters. It’s convenient to be able to manage all your hosting accounts in one place. Adding a new domain is quick and easy, no need to sign up for new hosting all over again.

Just be aware that, if you are going to achieve any level of success in marketing your websites, one unlimited domains hosting account definitely won’t last you until kingdom come. Nor should you put all your eggs into one basket, so to speak. It’s always good to have backup hosting, and it’s good to spread your domains over various accounts to more easily accommodate any sudden growth in your business.

With that said, our recommended source of unlimited domains hosting is Hostgator. We’ve been hosting with them for close on 5 years now and have been extremely happy in all respects, from uptime to pricing to support. Hostgator’s unlimited domain plans start from as little as $7.95 per month if paid anually in advance, which you can do with confidence with this trusted and well established company.

OFFER YOUR SKILLS

Teaching yourself a skill is a great way of putting yourself in a position to generate income online. While delivering services for others may still be viewed as a “job” by some, that’s really how you should approach your online business. It’s work, not a game, and at least you’ll be working on your own time and reaping all the rewards for your efforts instead of making your boss rich while earning a salary.

An example of a service that is in big demand online right now is article writing.

If you have good writing skills, you should be able to find paying work on the internet without too much trouble. Skilled article writers can earn anywhere from $10 to $30+ per 500 word article. You can offer your services in places like the Warrior Forum (where for a small fee you can make an exclusive special offer to the whole forum).

For the rest, any technical skills like graphics design, web design, programming, script installations and so on are in demand and could be a way for you to earn money. Advertise your services on places like Elance to gain instant exposure, or participate in communities like the Warrior Forum where internet marketers who are in need of these services converge.

DEVELOP AND SELL YOUR OWN PRODUCT

Information products and software are multi million dollar industries on the internet. Books in electronic format (ebooks) about almost any profitable topic under the sun (weight loss, dog training, golf, etc.) are turning a lot of money every day. If you are knowledgeable about an in demand topic, writing a book about it and selling it on the internet is a great way to generate a quick income.

The same goes for software, video training products, and so on. Speaking for myself, I made my first decent money online by creating and selling web design tutorials using screen capture videos.

The great thing about creating your own product is that you can set up an affiliate program for it. If you have a good product that sells well in your specific niche, affiliate marketers will pick it up and run with it. Once this starts happening, you’re well on your way.

BECOME AN AFFILIATE

If you feel like you don’t have a product in you, promoting other people’s products as an affiliate is the next best thing. Now the possibilities literally become endless. You’d be well advised to get step by step help on becoming an effective affiliate marketer, but the great thing is you can start with almost no financial investment. Using techniques like article and social marketing you can promote products in any niche immediately for a sales commission.

These are three internet home based business ideas you can run with. There is a learning curve involved so don’t expect it to be quick and easy if you’ve never done any sales or marketing in your life.

In other words, your web space is your own, it is not hijacked by the hosting provider showing ads that you have no control over. There really is no other circumstances under which using free hosting makes sense.

Having no control over what is displayed on your page at any given time is just bad for business, not to mention that it is a distraction for visitors and may see them leaving the page via the banner ads of the hosting company without any advantage to you whatsoever. This is going to hurt you a lot more in the long run than the small hosting fee you’d pay somewhere like HostGator.com.

But if you have to go free…

…here are three sources for free web hosting, no ads.

We Recommend:

Doteasy

Doteasy offers banner-free, cost-free hosting. They’ve been around for a long time. The free hosting package comes with 100MB disk space, which isn’t a lot but if you don’t want to pay you should take what you get. A fairly generous 1GB monthly transfer is included. If you need more than that, you should be making enough money to afford decent paid hosting.

As far as free hosts go, Doteasy is about as reliable as you’ll get.

Other Options:

Mister.net

While Mister.net offers free hosting, they do require that you register a domain at $35 to qualify for the free hosting. Hmmm. Given that you can register domains for less than $10 at places like Namecheap, Mister.net’s hosting suddenly seems to cost about $25 per year.

Still cheap, but in the greater scheme of things, maybe not quite free. On the upside, no banners.

Affordable Multimedia (afmu.com)

Perhaps not as well known and trusted as Doteasy, Affordable Multimedia offers a free hosting account with 5GB monthly data transfer and a healthy 500MB in disc storage. Again, we can’t vouch for the reliability of this service in the same way that we can for that of Doteasy, but it’s an option worth considering if you need a little more space or data.

So, if you really insist on using free web hosting with no banner, the above services are decent options. We can only hope that you need to escalate to paid hosting soon. That means your business is growing!

Here’s a short tutorial on how to buy a domain name.

Keywords in the domain name

The importance of having your actual keywords in your domain name varies across various search engines. Google for example seems more interested in the popularity and perceived importance of your page as determined by their page rank system.

However, when other sites link to you spontaneously, they may simply use your domain name to do so. Having your main keyword phrase as your domain name in these cases will help your search engine ranking for that term a lot.

So, while it may not be critical to have your main keywords or keyword phrase in your domain name, it’s definitely good to have it if at all possible.

Domain name extension

Whenever possible, try to get a .com domain. This is by far the most popular domain extension. Local domain extensions, like .co.uk, may rank better in that specific country than generic domains like .com or .net. If you want to do business globally, try .com first. Opinion is divided about whether the domain extension has an influence on search engine rankings, and in the end it might not.

However, people’s tendency to type .com as a domain extension into a browser rather than any other extension makes .com the preferred extension.

Budget concerns may prompt you to go for the ridiculously cheap .info domain names, which you can pick up for around $1 – $3.

Check domain name availability

Obviously you need to check whether a domain name is available before you actually register it. There are numerous tools online to do this with. Any domain registrar will be able to give you the information, but here are my two favorite tools for the job:

DomainsBot.com

Simply type your keyword phrase into the Domainsbot search block and it will quickly reveal whether the domain name for that phrase is taken, and also what extensions are still available.

Nameboy.com

This service allows you to type in a few keywords, and it will automatically make up hundreds of possible combinations of those keywords, and list which of those combinations are available for each domain name extension. A great time saver and also great for brainstorming domain names.

How to buy a domain name

The price of domain names vary across different registrars on the Internet. It’s important to find a reliable registrar and not just go for the cheapest. Your domain is almost like your home, you don’t want to leave it in incapable hands. Personally I use Namecheap and have been very satisfied with their service. Their pricing is also extremely competitive.

NameCheap.com Step By Step:

Go to NameCheap.com. Sign up for a free account using the link below the login box on the right.

How to buy a domain name

Once registered, you can use the tool on the front page to register your domain name. Type in the desired name and the extension(s) you’re interested in, and click Search.

You’ll now see what extensions are available for your domain name.

If the .com is not available, you may try something else. Otherwise, just tick all the extensions you want to register and click on Add to Cart.

For this example I chose to register the .net extension. Next, choose how many years you want to register. Start with 1 if you’re still unsure about the longevity of your business or the domain itself. The longer you register it for, the more expensive it gets of course.

Click on one of the checkout buttons, complete payment and you’re done. Time to get some hosting!

Here is a quick summary of one of the most popular strategies to employ when doing affiliate marketing reviews.

1. Know the product

It is very hard to write an authentic review for a product if you have never even read it or used it yourself. Understandably it’s not always within everyone’s budget to buy every product you want to review. Ways to get around this is to ask the product owner for a review copy, or trade a review copy for one of your own products or services, if you have any to offer.

This costs nothing and the worst that can happen is that the product owner can say no, so always try this first instead of just sucking a review out of your thumb. It is much easier to review a product that you’ve actually used.

2. Compare at least one, preferably two other products

While just having a page where you review one product can certainly work, it’s better to review one or more other similar or competing products. This way you’ll look like even more of an authority given that you’ve actually tried other products as well. I may well be that your visitor was trying to make a decision to buy one of the products you are reviewing, and either recommending that product, or another in favor of it, could close an easy sale for you.

Comparative reviews often yield better results than single, isolated reviews.

3. Set up your review site

Your review site needn’t be complicated. You can either register a domain like [productname]review.com, or if you’re perhaps low on cash and don’t want to buy a domain for every product you review, just register a generic domain contains the word “reviews” in it and use sub folders to organize the different review pages. Be sure to link to the product using your affiliate link.

4. Promote your page

The quickest way to get traffic to a review page is with pay per click advertising on Google Adwords, Yahoo or MSN. One great thing about review sites is that, if done correctly, you’ll always get a great quality score from Google, which will help keep your cost per click as low as possible.

The ins and outs of pay per click advertising is beyond the scope of this article though.

A free, but slow and time consuming way to get traffic to your affiliate marketing reviews is to write articles and submit them to popular article directories like EzineArticles.com. From here your articles may be picked up and published on websites and in ezines around the web, potentially bringing you a lot of long term free traffic.

Posting content to sites like Squidoo and Hubpages is another way to create traffic.

You can also use search engine optimization techniques to get organic search engine traffic to your page. This is also a longer term strategy, especially in competitive niches.

5. Test and tweak

Any sales site, be it a sales letter or a review site, needs to be tracked and tested to ensure that you’re getting the best possible conversions. Make sure you track the clickthrough rate on your affiliate links in your reviews, and keep making subtle changes to your page while always tracking the results.

For example, just a change in headline for your review can increase your clickthrough rate and sales. If you don’t test variables like this, you may be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Here are the advantages of affiliate marketing

1. No customer support

It’s not a bad arrangement. The product owner has to take care of customer support. You can pocket your commission and that’s the end of the story, if you want it to be. It is highly advisable though that you look at getting more out of it than that, which brings us to one of the biggest advantages of affiliate marketing…

2. You can build your own business while earning commissions

Just sending people straight to the product sales page has its merits in that it requires almost no work outside of advertising on your part. However, you really have to look at the bigger picture here. A far better way of going about things is to send people to your own page first before directing them to the sales page of the product you are promoting.

There are more than one reason for this, but the one relevant to this article is the following:

You can capture their email addresses into an autoresponder, which will allow you to build a list and engage in a legitimate email marketing campaign. Instead of just sending customers to the product you’re promoting, you are now giving yourself the opportunity to follow up with these interested people and promote other products to them as well. You are now building a business for yourself instead of just building someone elses, while potentially earning money while doing so.

3. You have an almost unlimited number of products and niches to target

Even if you’re not an expert at golfing, you can target the lucrative golf niche. Even if you’re not an expert at weight loss, you can target the weight loss niche. There are well paying affiliate programs for almost anything you can sell available online. All you need to do is learn how to plug into this profit stream.

4. You don’t need a lot of money to get started

The least you should do is register a domain to establish an online presence for yourself. This can be something generic if you’re on a tight budget and can only afford one, but later it is advisable to get a separate domain for each affiliate program you promote.

Decent hosting for these purposes can be as little as $7 – $10 per month, while a domain name is around $9 per year, although you can pick up .info domains for around $2- $3. You can start with free advertising methods like article marketing if you don’t have the budget or expertise for other methods like pay per click advertising yet.

5. Earn recurring income the easy way

You can easily target affiliate programs that have recurring membership fees. This way you can build a steady longterm income without having any of the hassles of running and maintaining a membership site.

SET YOUR GOALS

Before you start your own internet business it is important to decide what exactly you want to achieve. Do you just want a small side income, or do you want to build a longterm business that can see you quitting your job and provide you with a full time income.

BE REALISTIC

You have to realize that the Internet is not some get rich quick environment. The people who are making big money online has done so through hard, often repetitive and boring work. There are no big secrets and not a whole lot of shortcuts. Don’t expect to get rich overnight with little or no effort. It just doesn’t work that way.

Treat your internet business as a game or a sideshow and you won’t get very far.

INTERNET BUSINESS IDEAS

There are many ways to make money with an internet business. You can sell stuff on eBay, you can become an affiliate and sell other people’s products for commission, you can create your own digital information products to sell, you can sell physical products, you can build content sites or blogs and monetize them with programs like Google Adsense, which pays you per click.

It’s exactly in these myriad of options where most people run into trouble. Which brings us to the next point.

FOCUS

Decide on a business model and then focus on doing just that. Too many people get caught up in jumping from one type of income stream to the other, without really committing to any single one. This is a recipe for failure. Once you start making money and get more adept at what you’re doing, you should by all means expand into other business models to build multiple streams of income.

To begin with though, pick one and run with it. If you’re going to build content sites for Adsense, throw yourself into that completely.

LEARN

Once you decide what business model you want to focus on, learn how to do it properly. There are an obscene amount of ebooks and video courses on internet marketing available online, so you won’t have any trouble finding any relating to your specific business model.

The best thing to do is to find a good mentor or at least a community of successful individuals committed to your success. Naturally you’re not going to get this for free, but it is without a doubt the best investment you can make in an internet business if you’re just starting out.

TAKE ACTION

Don’t fall into the trap of buying one marketing course after the other or jumping from one opportunity to the next. Learn, and then put what you learn into action. There are no secrets to making money online, despite what all the sales pitches you’ll run into online will try to tell you. Action is what will produce results for you.