Build a Website For Free?
If you wish to build a free website that's about your family, your pets, or your hobbies and you only want to pass that website around to your friends and family, a free website might be OK.  There are many available, and it's quite easy to do.

Watch my video about Building a Website For Free

However, if you intend to make money with your website, if you intend to go into Internet marketing, then I'm really glad you found this article first.  You see everyone who begins an Internet business using a free website, either quits out of frustration, or figures out that it does not work to build a website for free.

Read about my choice for the Best Web Editor here.

There are several reasons why free sites don't work; I will outline three of those here:

1. “Free” has no credibility:  If you are selling anything at all with a website, the last thing you need to know is how to build a website for free; you need a REAL website.  If a visitor goes to your free website, and sees the URL is something like www.freesites.com/yourname, they immediately recognize it as a free site, and your credibility just drops like a rock.  You absolutely must have your own domain (s) if you go into Internet marketing. No successful Internet marketer uses free websites as their sole Internet presence.

2.  No flexibility:  Most of the free sites available have limitations on how they can be used.  For example, every website needs to have a opt-in box used for lead generation and analytics installed.  Many of the free websites do not offer the flexibility for inserting the scripts for such tools.  Also, many buy buttons are not allowed, such as PayPal or other shopping cart buttons.  Most of them don't allow Adsense on their sites, and other various scripts that are important for Internet marketing webmasters.

3.  Free sites simply create the wrong mind set in the Internet marketer.  If you aren't willing to commit $3 or $4 per month for real hosting, and only $9 or $10 a year for a domain name, then you really aren't serious about this process. Only those folks who are serious enough to commit at least that small amount of money per month and per year to create a real website will go on and find success.

After beginners understand that it’s not a good idea to build a website for free, unfortunately their next plan of action often is another mistake. Too many beginners don't want to learn how to create their own websites, so they decide to hire someone else to build their site for them. This is a huge mistake.

1. The first idea a beginner has for Internet marketing usually won't work. In fact about 95 times out of 100 the first idea is simply a learning process. Therefore,  it's impossible for a beginner to hire someone to make a website, learn from it and then pay them again to tweak it or to make a new one and to continue that process along the way. This is an ongoing learning process. It is NOT, “Build It and They Will Come.”

2. There is always much tweaking and updating that's required on the website in the beginning. Unless the beginner has plenty of money to spend and a very patient web designer who will work with them, it will be a very stressful process continuously adding to, taking away from, and updating the website. There would also be great costs involved.

3. Web designers are good at what they do. They can make very pretty websites. Unfortunately, most of them don't have a clue about search engine optimization. They know how to make the website look good, but they don't know how to optimize the website in order for it to rank well on the search engine.

4. The beginner doesn't know enough, without going through the process themselves, for what to expect of the designer. So it's virtually impossible that a beginner who has never been through the process can go to a designer and explain exactly what they want and how the site should best be designed.

Web design is not easy; it takes time to learn web design. But it’s not rocket science either. Anyone who devotes at least a month to learning web design will have sufficient skills to begin their Internet marketing business. It amazes me how many people out there understand that four years of college is often required to begin their careers, but yet those same people go into Internet marketing and expect to have success by next week.

This is a process. There are many skills which must be learned, and one of those skills has to be web design. It's absolutely a required skill. There are no successful marketers, past or present, who became successful by using only free websites as their main Internet presence.

I hope now you now understand the importance of getting past the “Build a website for free” mentality.

NOTE: Most Internet marketers use various “free” pages such as HubPages, Squidoo, etc. to enhance their online presence. This is a fine strategy which I use myself. However, Internet marketers do not rely on these free pages alone for their business.