Perhaps you were at your local Best Buy store or even at Target and you saw something like Eazy SuperFast WebSiteBuilder on sale for $29.95 or you were up late watching Comedy Central and heard about how you can make $8000 a month at home with an Internet home business, or you got an offer in the mail to renew you website domain for an easy payment of $49. And I won’t even mention the spam emails from people willing to sell you your domain name for just $69. The problem with all these offers is that they are mostly scams or outright bad deals.
The true objective of these offers is to get you to pay up what seems like a modest fee for something which is either not that valueable to begin with, or not even legitimate. For example, a domain registration does not cost $69 or even $35. At WebKeyDesign, we sell domain registrations at $15, as a service to our friends and clients. Just yesterday I got an offer to renew all of my domains for $35 each, and they included search engine submission and all these extras. Too bad all these extras either cost nothing or they can’t guarantee that you will actually get them! When it comes to domains, paying too much is a bad deal, but paying too low is also something to be avoided. If you are paying almost nothing for a domain registration it means the registrar is selling the domain at almost cost, which equates to very limited support and possibly having your email address used for marketing purposes.
The easy site builder software is actually a good deal, if we were still in the 90’s. Today’s internet users expect quite a lot from a website, and the simple truth is that a cookie cutter style web site that these inexpensive software packages produce, just does not cut it anymore. There is a reason why Dreamweaver costs $300. If these $29 software packages worked well, then Dreamweaver would not exist at all. The simple truth is that you are better off buying a $29 book on HTML and using a free application like Nvu to do your web site, than buying cheap software.
The most outlandish scam of all is the one that promises you the most money. Can you really make thousands of dollars with just a web site? The answer is yes, but it requires a lot of work and investment. You either have the skills to setup and maintain a site all by yourself or you have to pay someone else to help you. Most online ventures that work either have a lot of money behind them or they are very small and do not make huge profits. Consider that there are people who have the technical skills to setup a site, yet they never do it! Why? Because, the maintenance alone requires a lot of time and some people rather use their free time for other things. If however you are interested in starting a home business and using the web to help your business grow, then it is a good idea. Just realize that like anything else you do in business, you have to know what you are doing and spend wisely. Looking for the best return on investment is what business is all about. Spending money without knowing the rate of return, well that’s how you can go out of business.