“So, What Does It Cost?”
I was talking to a friend at work about my websites. He knows that I’m a bit addicted to BANS, despite the fact that I haven’t made back my investment yet.
He’s been interested in making a living online for a while as well, but he’s better at planning than I am. Me, I get an idea and I fly with it. He actually takes classes. We’ve always said that if we were one person, we’d probably be rich. I think as partners we’d kill each other.
He was only interested in the basic numbers, so that’s what I gave him. I said, domains are about $10 a year. I know where I can get codes to get either 10% off, or domains for $7 a year through GoDaddy, so that’s who I use. I also told him that .info domains are about $2-3. I wouldn’t recommend getting a .info domain if you want to build up repeat viewers, but for a site that relies on search engines for traffic, you could certainly do worse.
Hosting totally depends on what you want. I told him that I pay about $8 a month with HostGator for unlimited domains. I also told him that if he wanted just one website to build up, he can get cheap web hosting even cheaper than that for just one site. I didn’t tell him about dedicated servers and such, because I don’t think either of us expects to become popular enough to need it- and if we do? Then we celebrate!
He’s also interested in my affiliate accounts. All of them. So I told him about BANS since I think the program is well worth the one time $97 fee. Even if you didn’t want to sell anything through the site, you could pay much more than that for a website template. You’d probably get something more out of the box and ready to go, but BANS is highly customizable.
I also told him about Commission Junction and ClickBank. I think his mind began to boggle at that. They’re both free to sign up for, and you get a cut of any sales you make for the other companies that you’re promoting. I don’t think he understands much about affiliate marketing since he kept asking me “and you don’t have to actually have a product, right?”. I’ll need to talk to him about that a little more.
All in all, I told him that if he started a blog and started pimping products on it, (rather than purchasing BANS or anything else other than domain and hosting) he’d be shelling out $6-17 a month. And you know? I never realized just how cheap that is. Where else can you start a business for under $20 but on the internet?
