{"id":167,"date":"2015-03-31T18:03:47","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T18:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/?p=167"},"modified":"2015-04-14T18:31:27","modified_gmt":"2015-04-14T18:31:27","slug":"when-are-free-hosting-services-useful-to-my-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/when-are-free-hosting-services-useful-to-my-business\/","title":{"rendered":"When are free hosting services useful to my business?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A free website can be useful to your business<\/h2>\n

But<\/strong> – only in certain circumstances. Used the wrong way you could risk your business and your long-term income.
\nRead on to find out why\u2026<\/p>\n


\nUsing 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.<\/p>\n

How does a free website help my self-hosted website?<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This can be helpful for any subject or ‘Niche’ as we call it in the marketing world.<\/p>\n

A descriptive example of how this might work<\/h3>\n

Let’s say you have a website selling tools for bead crafts – just an example – it could be anything.<\/p>\n

Your main website is self-hosted <\/a>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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

And if the search engines don’t know your site is valuable – Why would they show it in their results?<\/p>\n

You need visitors to give you approval.\u00a0 You need approval to get visitors.<\/span><\/h3>\n

It’s a bit chicken-and-egg and there are plenty more websites where you come from.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As time goes by and people visit your site, they will recommend it and talk about it, if they find it useful or interesting.<\/p>\n

That all takes time and you might want to give your site some ‘kudos’ a bit faster.<\/p>\n

So what do you do?<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

You start a blog on a free platform that is about a subject related to your Main Site.<\/strong> There are many of these and you make a choice.
\nThe purpose of the blog is, as ever, to provide useful and interesting content<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

TIP.<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.
\nThis 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

TIP<\/span>: If you already have a free blog, you can write an article related to your main-site subject and put a link in that.<\/p>\n

Warning<\/span>: 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.<\/p>\n

Next time I’ll write about using free services to make a website with a short life<\/a><\/p>\n

What do you think about using free hosting? Let me know in the comments below!<\/p>\n

Want more Free insights and tips? Sign up for my occasional Newsletters here:-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-backlinks","category-hosting"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179,"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/179"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julieashti.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}