The downside about the prospect of Marketing your brick and mortar, organization or affiliate business is getting your first site online. Big companies like Amazon or Groupons probably pay their site designers hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to keep their sites functioning properly.

As an individual, company or business just starting online, you may not be able to generate this extra expense.

All it takes is one completed website or blog to generate an income. You should have at least one professionally built site. A blog can be put together quickly and rather cheaply but still look good and bring in the results you are looking for. And it doesn’t need to cost a fortune.

Domain Purchase

The first thing you will need is a url. This is your sites web address. This is where your potential customer or client can find your site or blog and your business information online. http://www.yourbusinessname.com - http://www.diggin-digital.com/

Choose a domain name that is closely related and explains to the searcher what you are selling. The more closely related your domain name is to your product the more traffic you will receive from organic searches. And, the easier people can find what they are looking for.

Keep your domain short and to the point. And always purchase a .com extension when ever possible. Most of the good domains are already taken but by adding an extra word such as best or online after your key phrase you can still come up with a killer url.

The best place to purchase your url or web address is GoDaddy.com. They have been online selling url’s since 1997 and have sold more than 50 million domain names regastered with them. They also have a immense customer base of  over 9 million customers. There longevity in the domain business and experience customer support team have made them the #1 domain host online.

Hosting Companies

There are many hosting companies out there that offer you a hosting service. When deciding on which hosting company to use, there are a few things to consider before purchasing.

Bandwidth

When a visitor goes to your site they begin to use a certain amount of bandwidth the moment they land. The more visitors to your site and the amount of time they actually spend viewing the pages on your site will determine how much bandwidth your site is using.

Disk Space

Disk Space is how much ‘space’ you will be using for your site files. If you plan to have a site that has a lot of pictures, offers zip files or some sort of downloads you may want o consider looking for a site that offers you unlimited disk space.

Some sites offer only a limited amount of space or bandwidth. Those are ones to avoid. Your site can shut down or you can be charged more than your monthly fee if you go over the bandwidth allotment.

Look for hosting sites that offer you an unlimited amount of bandwidth. Companies such as Hostgator, Hostmonster, Bluehost or Fatcow are just a few of the hosting companies that offer unlimited bandwidth and space. My personal choice for hosting is Hostgator. Hostgator offers excellent customer service, cPanel and 99.9% uptime, plus a whole lot more.

Leave Room for Expansion

If you plan to expand at a later date finding just the right hosting company that allows you to do this is beneficial to your success. This is especially true if you want to set up several affiliate or informational sites. Or you are an Internet Marketer who creates a wide variety of products and will need different domain names to promote each one.

You may decide later that you need extra domains to sell your various products and with Hostgator you will have many oppurtunities to expand. The more experienced you become the better your site will become. and It is always good to have room to expand.

Blogs vs. Websites

There is a lot of controversy on whether having a blog is better than a website. If I were to choose I’d take a blog over a website any day. Having a site means constant updating and html creation. Many people don’t have a clue on how to work html or the expensive ftp software that site creation takes.

A blog on the other hand is simple to use and is more functional than a static website. If your hosting company has cPanel you can have a blog installed in seconds. You have thousands of blog themes to choose from and it is easy to find one that matches the look and feel of your site content. You can also update the look of your site at anytime.

To update your blog you just log into the admin panel and create a new post. There are also hundreds of performance blog plug-ins that you can use to help improve the function of your blog, read visitor stats and auto post to Twitter if you want.

It may seem confusing at first but it becomes more natural the more you work it.

If you don’t want the expense of hosting your own site you can begin with free sites such as Hubpages, Squidoo, Blogger or Weebly just to name a few. Each offers you your own space where you can add multiple blogs or articles for free. Each site is considered an authority site and is easily indexed in the search engines.