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Reply With QuoteFirst off, free hosting will rarely bring in good results. However, I agree with you that it is a very sensible place to start.
Posting on this forum, and giving your site a link is also a very good place to start.
Now, repeat the above step on every other forum you can find where people in your target market are likely to 'hang out'.
When posting to a 'customer' forum, don't start out by advertising your site. Start engaging in conversations. Say very little at first, maybe just ask a few short questions or give very short answers to other posters questions. Over a few weeks, became an accepted member of the forum and only then start to ask people what they think of the site - you don't need to tell them it is your site. Use the responses to build another site - again on free hosting and continue repeating the learning curve until you have a feel for the market and who your customers are.
The first rule of successful marketing is to offer customers benefits. Not what they want (they don't know what they want), they are only interested in knowing what benefit your site can offer them. Once you have an understanding of what benefits your target market is looking for then you can start to write a site which answers all the questions they may have about those benefits. Sell the benefits.
I don't know how much of your current site you have written yourself. All I do know is that when I try to read the text, my eye keeps getting pulled to the animated graphic below the text, and that is not good.
Once you start to earn some income, then write a new site on quality hosting and keep the free hosting to feed into your main site.
Learn about HTML. Learn about optimising your pages. If your budget it tight, expect to take longer before you earn an income. At least if you do your own marketing it will have cost time but not money. You will have learned a lot and whatever you do earn will go into your pocket rather than filling up a hole.
There is no reason for an internet business to cost anything other than the cost of domain name and hosting - should not cost more than £100 a year - and that is very much on the expensive side.
Just because you are on the internet does not mean that you must forget all the traditional marketing methods. Hand out leaflets. Talk. Chat. Ask people to try your sites and give you feedback. Put contact details on your site - get a free non-geographic number that directs to your landline that will help protect your privacy - PM me for details if you don't know where to get this service.
Originally Posted by Bud
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