a domain name for $10 or less or sometimes free if you buy a hosting plan, which you can find for as little as $30 per year for a basic personal website. That's for the bare-bones, cheapest service available hosting plan but more realistically, you should be able to get good basic hosting for your website for between $50 and $100 per year at reliable services like godaddy, go-mama-hosting or dotster that includes domain registration and hosting.

You can even get free webhosting at places like 50megs.com but I don't really recommend it. While it's a way to get your own site for free, for giving you free hosting, they will place ads on your site. You don't have any control over what ads appear, so you may end up advertising your own competitors. Free webhosting doesn't really present a credible image either so paid hosting and your own domain name is the best way to go for complete control over what appears on your site and to have the most professional look and feel.

Once you have your own domain name registered and hosting set up, you can fill your website with whatever content you want such as whatever product or service you are selling. You don't need to be an expert in HTML either, but it helps to know a little. With WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs like Microsoft Front Page and Dreamweaver, you can basically build a page like you would type a page in a word processor and the program codes the HTML. These programs are fairly expensive to buy but you can also find free HTML editors like PageBreeze. Just do a search at any major search engine for "free html editor."

You'll also need a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to upload your webpages to your hosting company but some browsers such as Firefox have one as a free add on. You can also find free programs by doing a search on a search engine or at download.com.

There are many different ways to make money using your own website. One way is, as I mentioned, using it to sell your own products or service, but you can also use it to promote multiple affiliate programs if that is what you are involved in.

You can also make money by advertising other people's products on your site. You simply sign up for an account at sites like shareasale, clickbank or google affiliate network and place ads on your site. When a visitor clicks on the ad, then makes a purchase, you collect a commission.

Another way to monetize your website would be with pay to click ads. I'm sure you've seen the "Google ads"

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