by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: March 30, 2009

There are a great many free websites for starting Internet businesses. There are certain things which we have to be very careful of, however, when we are selecting same, as we do not wish to waste a lot of time in setting up our website only to find at some point down the line that it is unsuited for some of the purposes for which we intended it.

The first thing we have to consider about free websites for starting Internet businesses is how adept we are in the ways of Internet technical procedures. If we have no knowledge as to how to go about setting up a website from scratch, we therefore wish to choose one which will be extremely user friendly and not involve complex templates or coding.

I have experience with quite a number of sites which claim to be extremely user friendly and have found - fortunately quite quickly - that almost all of them are anything but. The problem here is that the people advertising their sites as being suited to the novice are generally highly skilled Internet professionals and although the procedures may seem ridiculously simple to them, the technical know-how required is still far more than most of us possess.

I therefore would always recommend that anyone seeking a free website for an Internet business start off in the first instance by building themselves a Squidoo lens. This is not only an incredibly simple and skilfully assisted process, the additional benefits which Squidoo lenses offer in terms of income generation to standard websites is profound.

Squidoo basically allows us to build our website by utilising a series of tools called modules. There are dozens of these tools and they all serve very different purposes. The text module, for example, allows us to include the details of our business and what it offers potential customers while the Flickr and Polaroid modules allow us to include photographs of any products we have for sale.

Squidoo also has modules designed for affiliate marketing products. Amazon, eBay and CafePress are the principal players in this field on Squidoo. These modules allow us to monetise our website by selling the products without having to go to the bother of becoming affiliates of the companies and constructing our own banner adverts.

Squidoo also has a great many help areas in which new members can find assistance regarding any issue which may be causing them difficulty on the site. These help facilities are usually compiled by veterans of the site so it is people who have been in that novice position for themselves who are giving the advice. This obviously makes a huge difference to the quality of the advice provided and helps to get our business site off and running on the right foot.

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