There are many offers on the internet that will provide you with a free website that promises to generate fast income selling someone else’s products or services. At no cost to you, the company will accept you as a distributor for their products and give you a ready made website.  Any sales that come from your website will translate into a huge commission check for you. On top of that, if you manage to recruit more people to accept this free website, then you can receive a commission on their sales as well.

All of this is free and while it sounds good on paper, you should realise that there is no such thing as a free lunch, or website, for that matter. Yes, most of these companies will give you a free website - which is basically a replica of their own site - and it will be configured with your name or company name on the landing page. It will also track the visitors that place orders through your site and you will be paid the promised commission. The challenge, then, will be for you to get visitors to your website.

This is where your free website will start to cost you money. Using a company that sells vitamins as an example, imagine you are now a vitamin distributor for company X. Chances are, you will one of a group of more than 100 other websites selling vitamins for company X.  What’s worse, you will all have the exact same website and selling pitch. A person searching for the company name may end up with a choice of 50 or more sites with the same name through their search results.  Research shows that most users only look at the first 10, and in rare cases 20, of the top search results.

The odds of your website making the top 10 list on a search engine is extremely low so you will have no other choice but to employ network and online marketing to make your site standout. Additionally, if you do manage to recruit others into the program, you now have added competition for sales. While you can use print advertising with your specific website name which could work, most internet savvy users know that anything past the “/” in a website url is usually meaningless. 

Most of the people who notice your print ad will end up visiting the company’s main website and you will not be credited for any sales.  For instance, your website’s url would be something like www.brandX.com/yourname but people will end up typing in brandx.com, taking them to the company’s main website. Although you did the advertising, you will receive none of the financial benefits because the sale will not be tracked from your website.

Alternatively, you can spend money by producing articles about the benefits of vitamins with a signature link that includes your web address, however, most free distribution articles are not picked up. Paying for distribution to a few hundred potential users increases the chance of your articles being read.  While the cost may be small, it will need to be a recurring activity if you hope to achieve any real success.

Although you can market and advertise a free website and make a profitable income from it, it is important to realise that though your website will be free, other aspects of running this website will not be free.  In fact, it can work out to be as costly as starting and running your own internet business.  You will also need to do more work to make your website stand out from the other distributors who are also marketing the same free website.  You may want to reassess your free website before signing on for one.