Whenever I started training someone how to make money online, the VERY first thing we do is start with their websites. A website should be considered a home base so to speak. It is your online store location and the base of operations for everything else that you do online.

Let's think about the different online advertising methods...Search Engines, Banner Advertising, Ezine Advertising, Newsgroup/Mailing List participation, and Classified advertising. I know that doesn't cover everything, BUT It is the major source of advertising online. Think about each of those advertising methods.

Search Engines are the #1 traffic generator on the web right now and they absolutely REQUIRE that you have a website. Many online experts estimate 95% of your traffic could come from search engines. YOU are leaving out 95% of your business by not being able to take advantage of search engines...

You may think that just getting a free server such as FreeYellow or Angelfire might take care of this problem, BUT it doesn't. Through helping other people advertise their websites I came to an alarming discovery. Both of the above mentioned web hosts are being BLOCKED out of some of the search engines such as Infoseek. You can still place them on most of the search engines, BUT registering web pages from them is becoming extremely difficult.

With banner advertising, You obviously have to have a website...Both for Free Banner Exchanges and For Paid Banner Advertising.

WIth Ezine Advertising, You can use an autoresponder, BUT your response rate goes UP when you include BOTH an autoresponder and a website in the classified ad. The same rules go for classified advertising. You should have both an email address and website in your ads for MAXIMUM effectiveness.

When participating in online discussion, the best form of advertising (Accepted in every online group) is the signature file. This gives you space for a short 4 - 5 line ad for yourself.  The best approach is to tell them your name, phone, email, and website address along with a basic idea of what you do. Your website address needs to be there so that they can go somewhere to find out more information immediately.

In all of these advertising forms, a website or domain is absolutely essential to your success. I personally favor a domain for many reasons...

• Name Recognition - It is much easier for people to remember a name like http://www.bizpromo.com than http://www.freeyellow.com/members2/bizpromo/
• Stability - Having your own domain gives an image of more stability to people when they see it. It appears that you will be around for a while.
• Secure Ordering - In most cases you cannot get orders online through a website because there are no secure ordering options. Currently, 80% or more of our orders come in through our  secure ordering pages!
• Growth - It will be much easier to grow when you own your own domain...If you have just a website and you run out of space or you start having trouble with your host, you are stuck. If you leave, all of the traffic you built will be going to FreeYellow not your new domain...If you own your own domain, if you move everything comes with you to your new host.
• Selling Multiple Products - This hooks up with the above, but it needs to be mentioned again...A Domain is perfect for adding more products to and selling more items. You spend money and/or time to get traffic to your site. You need to make sure you are taking advantage of it as much as possible by offering multiple products and/or services.

All of these benefits are EXTREMELY important to making your online marketing a success. I honestly think everyone should purchase a domain upfront in their marketing avenue and then start driving traffic to it immediately. Instead of wasting their time and money by losing their traffic they worked SO hard for and upgrading later.

Now, the next problem I ran into was that some of my clients were operating on an extremely small budget - around $100 or so.

The domains I had been recommending cost AT LEAST $400 to get setup...So I had to go in search of a web host which was both HIGH quality and low cost to get setup and running.

What I found was a company named Virtualis which fit the bill perfectly...It has all of the options...They sell smaller domains at a size of 15 MB with 5 different types all the way up to your own server...Plus, there are NO upgrade fees when you expand from one domain to another.

To get a domain started there only costs $132 instead of the $400 I had been recommending. I highly suggest that you go there now to check out all of the options available:

http://www.virtualisys.com/vr/tdean2/

Now, a person on a low budget will be able to get a website and start producing traffic to it (And with good design - Sales) for under $150...

For those of you who would like to offer this same type of service to your customers, they also have a free reseller option which you can take a look at by clicking on reseller at the bottom right hand of the above page. I was more than happy to find a company that offered good quality service at low prices, and it also would pay me to refer them to my clients. I am not against earning extra money while recommending the best options to all of my members.

All in all, the very first thing you should do when marketing online is to setup your own domain...Your home base. Now, there is a low cost option for doing so that everyone can take this opportunity to develope an effective online marketing campaign instead of throwing time and money down a blackhole of marketing without a home base.