So, you want to start your business on the Internet and yet you are not sure if that is the right thing for you. The first question you need to answer is what business are you thinking of starting on the Internet. Knowing what you want to do is being one step ahead and this will guide you to that journey.
Fist you must understand the concept of free. Free does not have to translate immediately at zero cost. Thinks of it this way. Why will someone give anything for free without any return. How do this developers get their funding? Well, some of them will probably have a donation box, where you can give a donation and some will be ad supported. This means that they will offer you the right to use their application, and in return they will stick some of their ads. This allows them to get paid by advertisers and this is how they get funded. Why am I telling you this? Because it is essential when you are looking to start your Internet business that your website or blog will have the least of distractions. The last thing you want is to have a competitor running ads on your own Internet business.
Let's stick to the point. Free website. There are some basic things that we must remember when we are talking free website:
Free website can be - the design or template in itself, it could be a template for a static website or a blog
Free Hosting - a place where you will have your data stored, this including your website or blog
Free domain name - you URL (uniform resource locator) or web address if you prefer
Technical support
OK. Now that we know what we are looking for and we also know at this point what we will be doing on our Internet business, the next step is to decide whether we will set up a website or a blog. Remember that we are talking "free" here. For the purpose of starting an internet business, I recommend to start with a blog. The advantages are numerous compared to a static website and are very easy to manage. So, where can we get a decent, reliable (very important) and credible tools to set up our Internet business for free?
My recommendations:
Blogger.com and Wordpress.com are the most popular ones and they are widely used over the Internet. They are both reliable and has a Content Management System (CMS) that enables you to set up your blog and be up and ready within a few minutes. They will offer, hosting, templates (with free designs that you can later customize) and a sub-domain. A sub-domain is your URL. An example will be yourname.blogspot.com. This means that your blog - yourname - is under the domain of blogspot.com (or blogger). The drawback is that you do not oqn this domain and can hurt you in the future specially if your blog takes off. However, both blogger.com and wordpress.com offer you the possibility of having your own domain pointing to your blog. The only thing you have to pay for is the domain name which you should get from a registrar like dynadot.com, godaddy.com, just to name a few. Prices can be as low as 10$ a year and it is worth it. I really do recommend you get your own custom domain and use it. Alternatively, you can get a free domain name where you can even have access to features such as forwarding, DNS, etc. at co.cc (www.co.cc).
Obviously, there are other alternative to blogger and wordpress but I strongly advice for you to stay away from them. The major problem you will encounter is the lack of support and since both are widely used, you have a vast community of bloggers or blogs that gives you tips, tricks, hack, fixes and just about anything.
To summarize: You can get your free "everything" to start your Internet business, at the following:
Blogger.com or Wordpress.com (Blog hosting, free templates, email accounts, etc)
Free additional templates - falconhive.com, eblogpemplates.com, or google "free blog templates"
Free widgets creator - wowzio.com
Free forms (to embed on your blog) - emailme.com
Free domain name - www.co.cc
Free blogger support, fixes and tips - bloggerbuster.com, bloggerindraft.com, google webmaster central
Free wordpress support - wordpress.com, wordpress.org and "google" free wordpress "?" the question mark being whatever it is you need.
The above free resources will get you started and with a little bit of hardwork might just give you what you need not only to start but to use it for a while, until you think it is necessary to sophisticate.