Home Business Foundation – Your Real Estate

Posted by Steven Wagenheim on August 08, 2010 in General

In the first installment of this series on building a home business foundation, I began our discussion with picking a niche and sub niche. In this installment, I want to tackle the issue of virtual real estate (VRE) because this is where so many home business owners drop the ball. Some real estate is better than others. Some is downright dangerous to use. I’m going to cover the three general types that I’ve found over my years of running my own business. Please understand that I am lumping a lot of individual types into these three, otherwise we’ll be here until next Tuesday going through these. Apply the VRE that YOU’RE using to one of these three types.

I’m going to start from the bottom of the barrel because sadly, this is where most home business owners start because of lack of funds. Yes, I’m talking about the free sites. There are tons of these.

Here are the most popular, though this list is by no means all inclusive.

Blogspot
WordPress
Hub Pages
Squidoo
Facebook
MySpace

Essentially, what home business owners do who go this route is that they use one of these free platforms to build their business on. Okay, so what’s wrong with this?

Well, one thing…and it’s a killer. Each of these sites has its own terms of service (TOS). If you violate even the smallest of these terms, the site, without any warning at all, can take your real estate away from you.

I read horror stories every single day of home business owners with Blogspot blogs, in some cases dozens of them, all shut down in one day, thus virtually putting them out of business.

When you build your business on a free platform, most of which have very strict terms, you run this risk every single day. In short, it is a fool who builds his business on a free platform.

Next we have VRE that still isn’t the home business owners own but it’s VRE that they pay for.

An example of this would be one of those programs where you join some membership and they give you a site where you pay $X a month to keep it.

There are several problems with this model. For one thing, everybody gets the same site. It’s not like YOURS was custom made. So there is nothing about YOUR business that stands out. You’re the same as everybody else.

Another problem is that if you don’t continue to pay for the site, you lose it. Worse than that, if the company decides that they don’t want your business anymore or they go out of business themselves, you also lose the site. Depending on somebody else to provide your real estate for you is dangerous, even if you are paying for it.

Finally, there is having your own virtual real estate. This is a domain that YOU pay for using a hosting company that is unlikely to boot you to the curb unless you do something really awful. And even if they do, you still own the domain and the site. All you have to do is get another hosting company.

The downside to this option is that it is the most costly over time. However, it is also the most stable.

So there you have it. Those are basically your three options for building your home business.

Choose wisely.

We’ll have more home business foundation info in the next installment.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Looking for a solid 4 step plan to building your own business…FREE? Pick up my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/4steps.html and get started TODAY!