3 Key Reasons to Have a Self-Hosted Internet Marketing Website

Internet marketing is a bit like a vast ocean: There is so much information out there and so many stimulations, distractions and new products launching every two seconds which makes it too easy to find yourself lost, aimlessly drifting away if you’re not holding tight to the steer, with a clear destination in sight.

A good place to start though, is building yourself a website. I would recommend registering your full name as a domain (ex. JohnDow.com). That would help you establish your online presence and gain credibility as an expert in your field. Later on you can branch up to other areas and have other niche specific sites to your name, but your personal site could serve as a hub, which would link over to all of your other sites and would showcase the rest of your Internet activity in a nutshell.

Don’t worry too much about monetizing your personal site, as its main purpose would be to brand yourself and to build your list.
I would also advice you to build it as a WordPress blog using your own domain & hosting provider. There are 3 main reasons for that:

1.Having your own .com asset helps you come across as professional

Think about an Internet marketing ‘guru’ you respect. What would your reaction be if you’ve Googled his name (and people will search your name online when you sell them products) only to find that his website is JohnDow.blogspot.com?

2.These hosted blogging solutions are not reliable

Building your business using them is like building your house on quicksand.  2010 saw the demise of 2 popular blogging services: Vox.com and 12seconds.com, much to the dismay of millions of users. Tumblr.com, another popular blogging service, has had long downtime periods. The mega popular bookmarking service Delicious is soon expected to go through the same path. Drop.io has been an excellent file sharing service and is now a thing of a past.

You don’t want your business to rely on unreliable solutions.

3.Having your own hosted site gives you more control

If you install your own WordPress blog, for example, you can use wonderful list building & traffic plug-ins to your benefit, place banners and a lot more. Normally, you would have more hosting space for photos, videos etc. Furthermore, you are not subject to someone else’s terms of service, which gives you complete freedom as far as your site. Blogger, for instance, has been known for banning some marketers for having breached its terms of service. (Whatever that means…). When you are the site owner, you set the terms!

While hosted solutions and social sites are a great source for traffic & creating connections, it is advisable to leverage them to draw attention to your website and to interact with your audience, but your main asset should always be your own website.

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