Read This Before You Fall Prey To The FREE Website Offer:
We wanted to write about our experience about the T.V. Ads that are seen by millions of Americans tempting them to sign up for the FREE Website programs.
I wanted to preface this with saying that several of these offers are legitimate offers and that it is what is not noted that we wanted to write about.
Over the past 7 years we have been working on our website which started off as one of these offers. After several thousands of dollars and many stressful days and sleepless nights we felt it was our obligation to give our experience so that others can make a sound decision before signing up.
Most people would love the opportunity to work from their homes and have more time with their families. These marketers know this and pull on those desires when creating these ads. We fell prey to one of these programs. After months of no sales and very few visitors our desire didn't fade but the money in our bank account did.
Now I'm not saying that you wont get a beautiful functioning website for only $14.95 per month. For the most part the websites themselves are legit. We went a step further and reached out to a web designer to create a custom beautiful website. We unfortunately signed up with a company that had one of the worst Better Business ratings which we neglected to look into prior to signing up. So make sure to check out any Web Designer on the BBB before committing to any design work.
After spending many thousands of dollars, yes $1000's, we decided to dedicate most of our free time into researching how the internet really works. Common sense prevails! The programs offering a website for $14.95 per month (as example) doesn't really make much money from your membership alone. You see anyone can create a template website and post it live for everyone to see. The problem is that unless you have done your homework on Search Engine Optimization 'everyone' will not see your website. Your site will most likely be posted on page 1500 on Google and since the most successful websites are shown on the first 3-4 pages of any Google search, good luck getting any visitors. If you've done some outside (offline) marketing and people type in your web address directly then those people could be potential customers.
So after several months you haven't gotten any customers or orders and you contact your web service where you are paying $14.95 per month ask them why. Their response most likely will be "we can help you with that for $75 per hour with a 3 hour minimum." BANG, this is where they make their money! So these website are set up, for lack of a better term, to fail. If your website doesn't produce you most likely will not give up. So you find an extra $225 laying around and spend the money to get help.
So now you have paid for some extra programming on your site and you realize after several weeks that you're still not getting the traffic you expect. Another phone call and BANG, they offer you SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is very very expensive and takes several months to produce. The bad news is that without it you are dead in the water AND there are no guarantees. If it doesn't work there is no recourse. If anyone has found an SEO company that offers a money back guarantee please let me know, I haven't found one.
To sum up this post, make sure you know something about web design, SEO, and programming before you decide to start an Ecommerce Website, or any other traffic driven website. If youre just creating a website to communicate with family and friends then SEO doesn't really matter because you're only trying to reach those you know. Believe it or not our experience doesn't end there...More on this later.
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