When are free hosting services useful to my business?

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A free website can be useful to your business

But – only in certain circumstances. Used the wrong way you could risk your business and your long-term income.
Read on to find out why…

Using free web services can come into play when you have your own website up and running or if you are making a website with a short life.

How does a free website help my self-hosted website?

A website using Free Hosting can be used to help boost your main website by talking about a subject and linking to a relevant post on your website. This is known as a backlink.

This can be helpful for any subject or ‘Niche’ as we call it in the marketing world.

A descriptive example of how this might work

Let’s say you have a website selling tools for bead crafts – just an example – it could be anything.

Your main website is self-hosted and lists some of your products or may even have an e-commerce shop. This main website also has a blog on the same domain that talks about all the things you can make using your tools, how to use the tools and so on.

Over time this website becomes quite an authority on the tools you sell and provides good value to the customers, but if there is no-one appearing to recommend your products, how will the search engines know you are such a valuable resource?

And if the search engines don’t know your site is valuable – Why would they show it in their results?

You need visitors to give you approval.  You need approval to get visitors.

It’s a bit chicken-and-egg and there are plenty more websites where you come from.

It’s bound to improve in the end, you might be telling the people you know about it, and may even resort to paying for advertising.

As time goes by and people visit your site, they will recommend it and talk about it, if they find it useful or interesting.

That all takes time and you might want to give your site some ‘kudos’ a bit faster.

So what do you do?

This is where a free website comes in. It’s only one method and you might need to do quite a number to have an effect, but every little helps.

You start a blog on a free platform that is about a subject related to your Main Site. There are many of these and you make a choice.
The purpose of the blog is, as ever, to provide useful and interesting content to people interested in subjects related to your niche. You can link to your main website or to internal pages of it from this blog.

TIP. Be sure to create some good content either without any links or with links to generic sites such as Wikepedia only – before adding the post with the crucial link.

In a nutshell, the Free blog is related to a subject in the blog of the main site and links to an article in that blog.

This is a work-intensive way of creating backlinks to your site, but if done correctly and on several ‘free blogs’ the relevant links can help the main site gain authority.

It is advisable to only do this in one or two articles on each ‘free’ blog and to link to different parts of the blog.
This is only a small part of an overall strategy of back-linking and must be used sparingly or it has the potential to do more harm than good.

TIP: If you already have a free blog, you can write an article related to your main-site subject and put a link in that.

Warning: If you create content on a free site that you think is valuable, be sure to back it up so that if the free account is closed down, you can use that content elsewhere.

Next time I’ll write about using free services to make a website with a short life

What do you think about using free hosting? Let me know in the comments below!

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