There are probably more places to host your content for free these days on the internet than there are paid hosts. Between the free sites and social networks where you can have a profile, a page or even a blog, there are many people saying “Why should I host on my own domain?”. And there are just as many people saying “Why would I want to drive people to xxx instead of to my own site?”. Use your own hosted website as a homebase and all those “other places” as traffic cops to get the traffic safely to your home.

You want to own your own content, you don’t want to give it away to another company and you certainly don’t want to worry about being censored or your content “disappearing”. Each “free” host has a catch, each social network has a Terms of Service that allows them to censor your content, and “own” your content. Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.com (the hosted version, not the downloaded version) all have clauses that allow them to remove content that they feel is inappropriate. WordPress.com controls whether you can advertise on your blog there or not. Blogger removed content from a blog that was managed on the blogger host, but was not even actually hosted there! You have the ability to publish from Blogger to your domain and as someone recently discovered, they can remove your content from that domain also. So beware.

Geocities is another example of a place where people hosted for free for years and years and thought they would never have to worry. Yahoo is shutting it down. Several other “free” hosting services through the years have done the same, some vanishing into the night without warning. Hypermart changed from free to paid accounts. If you didn’t upgrade *poof* content was gone.

Free sites have their place, and social networks are certainly great places to have a presence, but keep in mind that all your social marketing should be driving traffic to a central place, and that central place should be under *your* control. A domain you have purchased on hosting you pay for. It can be a simple set of pages that sell your product, a blog that you can change or a complex website, but at the end of the day, you are in control of it. And while we are on the subject, be sure you keep a local backup so that if your host goes down, you can move that content to a new host without worry, and quickly.

Anyone remember NBCi/Xoom.com? More recently, Podango? Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, Flickr, YouTube and a myriad of other sites are wonderful for creating a presence and connecting with people. But don’t use your Facebook page as your presence on the web. Use it as a funnel to send people to your space where you control the content and the ads. Anytime you rely on another company or their business model to host your content, you are playing with fire.

We recently did a podcast on this subject that you can listen to here, and this article is also published in FeedFront Magazine, which Deborah is a regular contributor to.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 6 here

Social Media can be a powerful traffic driver, just make sure your content doesn’t just live at the Social Media sites. In Affiliate ABCs podcast #10 Debbie (a.k.a Loxly) and Vinny (a.k.a NYFalcon) explain how to use social media sites to drive traffic to your website by interacting in communities and online social settings. And it doesn’t have to take up all of your time to be effective either.

Links mentioned in the show:
MySpace Account for Awesome Wreckage Website
Facebook
Orkut Social Network
Loxly’s Twitter
Awesome Wreckage Twitter
Roboform – Keep track of all your logins
Knowem.com – Check on and register all your social media identities
TwitterFeed – Feed your blogs to your Twitter accounts

James Martell has a series of podcasts that people subscribe to, but this month he is giving one away. He and I did a Coffee Talk back in November about how to effectively use Twitter to grow your business. Today he released that Coffee Talk as part of his May Newsletter and it’s available to listen to here – If You Don’t Tweet, You Should.

A couple of show notes:
Viator Affiliate Program is now Shareasale exclusive, not at CJ as noted in the show.
James Martell on Twitter
Loxly on Twitter
Arlene on Twitter (Epilepsy Moms)
And links to join our Clients, including Loxly Gallery and Cool Card Shop, plus a couple new ones to be added in May

There are probably more places to host your content for free these days on the internet than there are paid hosts. Between the free sites and the social networks where you can have a profile and maybe a page or even a blog, there are many people saying “Why should I host on my own domain?”. And there are just as many people saying “Why would I want to drive people to xxx instead of to my own site?”. In this episode of Affiliate ABCs your hosts Deborah Carney (a.k.a Loxly) and Vinny a.k.a NYFalcon address these questions and tell you how to use your own hosted website as a homebase and all those “other places” as traffic cops to get the traffic safely to your home.

And remember, you want to own your own content, you don’t want to give it away to another company and you certainly don’t want to worry about being censored or your content “disappearing”.

Let us know if you have any questions, post them here or follow us on Twitter and drop them there:
Loxly
NYFalcon

And the Twitter account mentioned in the podcast: AwesomeWreckage

People are already responding to Getting Started with Twitter Part 1 so here is Part 2! In Part 2 we cover creating posts, how and when to Retweet, and what are some good examples of who is using Twitter in business. We talk about hashtags, Twitter Search and Twitter parties.

Twitter accounts we reference in the podcast:

http://twitter.com/JetBlue
http://twitter.com/Starbucks
http://twitter.com/DirectTV
http://twitter.com/Mashable
http://twitter.com/ProBlogger
http://twitter.com/skydiver
http://twitter.com/sfzoo
http://twitter.com/GeorgiaAquarium

And here is the link to the Twitter Search using the #asw09 hashtag to follow the goings on at the summit.

Some more folks you might want to be following on Twitter if you are interested in affiliate marketing:
MissyWard
AffiliateSummit
ShawnCollins and AffiliateTip
Haiko

And of course, your hosts:
NYFalcon
Loxly

A tip we didn’t mention in the podcast about finding followers is to find people you admire and listen to and see who *they* are following. Click on those names to see if you like what they have to say, and then follow them. Or not One of the beautiful things about Twitter is that you can follow a conversation using Twitter Search or just by clicking on people’s names. You can read them without following them, and even @ reply to them without following them.

As always, feel free to post questions below or in our twitter thread at ABestWeb or the NYFalcon forum. Affiliate ABCs series isn’t just about Twitter, but it seems to be a hot topic right now, and it is a great way to build a following for your site/company so we will probably do another podcast or two about using it. Also feel free to post requests for future shop topics that *aren’t* about Twitter

Many thanks to the folks over at GeekCast.fm for hosting our show, be sure to head over there and listen to their other great podcasts.