You Need Your Own Website

The biggest single reason why

It all boils down to one word. Control.

When you have your own personal web site you control

	all the content on the site. By and large you can put whatever you like on your website, provided its legal.
	when you get traffic to your site, then while your visitors are there, then to some extent they are 'your' visitors. You don't own them, but you've got an opportunity to lead them where you want them to go. This is an opportunity you don't get when you are restricted to promoting an affiliate link only.

Think of website as a book full of blank pages. Your task is to make all the decisions about the story you are going to write. If you want to change the story at any time, you can just rip out some pages and put in new ones. Rewrite and move things around as you choose. Add extra chapters to test out new ideas. Put in pretty pictures. Add some appendices to explain something in more detail. Whatever you like.

Solve promotion headaches with your own website

As an example, lets say you want to promote Product X - a headache powder - as an affiliate. The company that makes Product X have done a great job with promotional material. They've got a classy looking promotion page for affiliates to use, lots of banners and graphics, and pre-written advertising to use on email lists. You like the product, its an honest business, the product is reasonably priced and the commission rate is fair. So you decide to take the plunge, become an affiliate and promote Product X.

The problem is - 350,000 other people around the world have come to the same conclusion. And 95% of them are just using the standard promotional material and affiliate URLs.

Here's just a few of the things having your own website empowers you to do in this sort of situation

	using the company supplied graphics as a starting point, create your own splash pages for use on traffic exchanges. That immediately makes you different from everyone else.
	find articles about headache causes and cures, and include these as content on your website. Over time you will get visitors to your website through search engine traffic, from people looking for a solution to their headache problem.
	advertise related products on your website. You might get a sale of one of those instead.
	get people to leave their name and email address when they visit your site. You will be able to email them in future if you find similar or related products that could interest them.

I'm not suggesting this guarantees your success with Product X. But don't you think you will have a better chance than those people who just use the company material?

As another example, lets say you buy and sell products on E-Bay. If you specialise in a particular type of product, why not put up a website themed around this product and related topics, and use that as a means of leading people to your auction page?

You can see the new possibilities you can explore, if you have websites with content that you can control.

Once you have a website up and running, its a simple task to add new pages and content to cater for all of sorts of situations relating to the promotion of your online business.

The rules are a little different if your website is intended to be an entry point to a real-world business, for example a garage or plumbing service. In that case, don't fall into the trap of just using your website as another form of advertising. You can do much more with it than that.  

Read on to learn the secret technique of the Adsense gurus. ( I wont charge you $197 for telling you this either.)