The Secret to Building a Cost-Effective Business Website

Although small businesses understand the need to build an online presence, sometimes the cost of building that site just isn’t in keeping with a tight budget. Actually, it costs more not to have a website than it costs to build one if you know how to offset your expenditures. In time, your site will be generating enough income to more than compensate for what you’ve spent getting it up and running. The secret to building a cost effective business website is to get it to pay for itself!

Keep the Initial Cost Low

The first thing you need to do is come up with a domain name. It could be the name of your business, but if that is taken, another descriptive or easy to remember name will be your best second choice. Now you need to buy that domain name and register it. Or do you? Sometimes you can find web hosting that also offers a free domain name as part of their service. While you only pay for hosting as long as you remain with the company, the name is yours to keep as long as you renew it every year. Hosting companies like Certa Hosting in the UK offer packages where a domain name is offered for free as part of the hosting package. That’s your first moneysaving, cost effective tip for building a website.

Alternative Ways to Monetise Your Site with Adverts

While you do have a website on which you are selling products and/or services, you can also monetize your site with a variety of adverts that you will get paid to post on your pages. Some are PPC (pay-per-click) adverts from which you earn income whenever someone clicks through from your site. There are banner ads you can display and ads to run on sidebars as well. You can display adverts from companies that are not competitors, but closely related enough that they will get their fair share of clicks.

Become a Hosting Reseller

One of the ways in which startups begin generating income to offset their website expenses is to resell hosting. Each time a visitor buys web hosting through your affiliate link you earn a percentage of what they spend. As time goes on you may find that you resell enough hosting that your bit of real estate in the Cloud is paid for; you might even realise a profit. At this point, you will begin earning enough to ‘pay back’ your initial expenditures and you might even have enough left over to take some to the bank. That’s a cost-effective website if ever there was one!

With a few tips like these, you can build a cost-effective website that will not only cost very little to get started but may, in turn, begin generating revenue going forward. The question to ask yourself is whether you can afford not to build an online presence because that is where you are likely to generate more foot traffic to your place of business while creating the ability to sell online to an almost limitless market. The choice is yours but really, there is only one answer. You need that website, so build it!