Can you run a home business with no website?
by Jason Ryan Isaksen

Answer: Yes most definitely. I don't know why people ask me that question so much. People act like having a website would be like living in a cage the rest of their life without food. Why does owning a website intimidate people? The only reason I can think of that people get intimidated about owning a website is that they think it takes a lot of work and money. And along time ago it used to take a lot of time and cost a lot of money to have a professional looking website.

Yah, that was back in 1995. These days you can have a website up on your own domain name for less than $15 up front and $4 per month. And after you finish reading this course, your website is going to be the biggest income generator you have. I buy my domains at www.AlwaysFun.com. Of course I love to shop there because I'm the owner of AlwaysFun.com, yet another one of my many successful businesses.

In some cases you can even have a website of your own up and running in about 2 minutes. But that's only if you want to be a part of a reseller program or affiliate program. Affiliate programs make it quite simply to have an instant website of your own, but the only problem is that your website is going to look like this:

www.yourwebsite.com/?resellerID=4478320

And the problem with having a website address that looks like that is the fact that many people that see it are simply going to type in www.yourwebsite.com and they will not type in your ID number which in the example above would be 4478320. Since most people know that any long number or affiliate ID appears after the question mark, it's a dead give-away that you are just a reseller and that is why so many people just type in the main domain name, which in this case is www.yourwebsite.com

And every time that happens, you lose another sale! The sale goes to the main company who owns www.yourwebsite.com and you'll never even know that your advertising efforts are what generated that sale. And the main company doesn't mind. The owners of most affiliate programs love the fact that they get to basically steal sales from their affiliates. These companies that run affiliate programs make a lot of extra money this way.

So what is the lesson here? Simple, you want to be the one who owns www.yourwebsite.com and that way you don't have to worry about losing sales.

And there is another important reason you want to own your own domain name like www.yourownwebsite.com and that is because you'll be able to get listed on the big search engines like Yahoo and Google.

Affiliate websites that look like this:
www.yourwebsite.com/?resellerID=4478320 can't get listed on the search engines. Search engines don't like affiliate sites so they won't list them.

If you are involved in an affiliate or reseller program, it's going to be next to impossible to get an affiliate ID or link to achieve a listing on the engines. If you're doing affiliate programs, you should simply forget the search engines all together! Why? Ok, well, there are usually hundreds if not thousands of people involved in even the worst affiliate programs or reseller programs. And that means some where between 500 and 20,000 people have the identical website as yours.

Affiliate programs usually supply all members with the exact same mirror website when they first sign up. Even if that website was extremely well built, optimized, and met the search engines criteria for relevancy, the search engines would never allow 20,000 or even 50 of the exact same website to waste space on their database! Search engines only want unique websites that are original. Search engines hate copies of websites and clones so they simply don't list them at all for any reason.

Cloned websites and copied websites completely defeat the purpose of why search engines exist. If a search engine were to actually let hundreds of copies of the exact same website into their directory, it wouldn't take long until people would no longer use that irritating search engine. Because search engine users want to see unique websites. They don't want to see a bunch of the same thing over and over when they do a search.

So search engines are very careful to weed out all copies, clones, and even websites that just seem very similar. Also, special search engine algorithms tell the search engine to only look at the root domain URL. For example, if you submit this website address: http://www.ProgramReview.com/?800345MYID to a search engine, it only can see http://www.ProgramReview.com so this means your affiliate website never even gets considered for a listing. Instead, you just helped the main company promote their own website, because now http://www.ProgramReview.com just got submitted and you'll never get any credit for helping them.