Today, when internet businesses are growing faster than ever before, it would be very rational to at least try to start your own online business. But it probably wouldn’t be as smart to invest a lot of money into it if you are just testing your potential abilities and don’t know the possible outcomes yet.
There are many services that let you create websites for free. Every company does it’s best to impress potential new customers just like you. Some companies can offer very convenient drag & drop website building tools, free promotions to a certain extent, better SEO optimization, technical support.
Others focus on plenty of additional features like training, information resources and forums for their customers, affiliate programs, sometimes even small monetary rewards for their users and so on.
If you are a beginner, just like I was not so long ago, you would probably want more information resources and simple dummy-proof tools. Today we will focus on one of the best free website building platforms for beginners with over 800 000 active members worldwide, which I personally use.
It might look like yet another promotion, but how else would you discover the best products in the world, if not from promotions? Also, this article is not the shortest, and I my explanations are very detailed. If you don’t have much time, click HERE and read only the summary.
Free Services vs. Paid Services
Before creating a free website, you need to understand that a company which offers you this opportunity has to make money somehow and the quality of free services is always considerably worse. Companies will find a way to profit from you even if you don’t want to pay.
Often they will place their own advertisements on your website and won’t let you place your own, others will limit your website space, place your website in a poor hosting server, thus making it very slow, unreliable and limiting a potential number of visitors. And all of them will constantly attack you with their suggestions to pay and get highly superior services.
Another very important factor is that free domains will always be just subdomains on the host’s domain instead of top-level domains. A subdomain is www.yourdomainname.hostsdomain.com. A top-level domain is www.yourdomainname.com.
That’s also a major disadvantage because first of all, it can highly affect your rankings in search engines. People who control the algorithms of search engines know that free domains are usually created by inexperienced and irresponsible people, so from their perspective, it’s logical to give them lower rankings.
Second of all, your potential visitors also know that a 5-year-old kid can create a free website with a couple of clicks these days. By having a free unprofessionally looking domain name, you are giving your readers one less reason to trust you and read your content, let alone buy something based on your recommendations.
Comparing Different Services
When I was looking for the best place to build my first website, I looked at different companies and tried to compare their services. All of them have very easy-to-use website builders, the majority have forums and one or two additional features, that sound good but probably have little practical benefit.
I’ve noticed that the vast majority of them is emphasizing the simplicity of their tools and how everyone can use them. The truth is that today all website builders are more or less equally simple.
You won’t see any coding or programming in neither of those. Basically, all you have to do is to choose a template (theme) for your website, name it, and create a new unique domain name. That’s it! Your website is theoretically ready to bring passive income for you! (Of course, prior to that, you usually need to do some work. But the bright side is, that how long it’s going to take, depends entirely on you.)
So in the current situation, where all builders are not so far apart, what makes the difference and what can help you to decide which company is the best? At least, in my opinion, the main determiner is all the additional services. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
When I did my research back in 2015, all companies seemed virtually the same. “Simple, fast and professional looking websites just a couple of clicks away!” (And don’t forget that it’s going to be just a subdomain.) – basically, that’s all companies with a free plan have to say these days.
I needed something more, and I kept looking for a company which has something superior to offer. There were a couple of companies that caught my attention: one of them had $100 gift coupon for advertising with Google AdWords, the other had very cheap (although of very questionable reliability) paid plan for $3 a month.
But one particular service had much much more…
My Choice for Free Website Creation and What They Can Offer
All my returning visitors obviously know what my choice was. That’s right – Wealthy Affiliate. They had to offer not just the same elementary website builder as mostly everyone, but many more tools, some of which I haven’t seen anywhere else.
Wealthy Affiliate’s free membership will give you two free SiteRubix.com subdomains, access to awesome training courses (first 20 lessons with free membership), a keyword tool (30 free searches), a huge amount of other people’s posts, one of the best affiliate programs in the world, and even the access to some of premium membership tools, over the first seven days of free membership! Now let’s get into details:
Two Free Websites: Free membership lets you build two websites. You can build and delete them as many times as you like. Some people might say that it’s a quite small number, but think about it this way: If you are looking how to build a free website, you are obviously a beginner. So how many websites does a beginner need?
First of all, one single website can easily bring you a couple of thousand a month. One is enough because you, as a beginner, probably won’t be able to properly maintain two of them at once anyway. So with this company, you can have one main and one secondary website. You can try to pay equal attention to both of them, but I highly doubt that would be possible for a beginner.
Beginner Training Courses: Wealthy Affiliate has to offer two main beginner courses for free! Both of them consist of 10 lessons that will walk you through the different aspects of creation and setting up of a website. The main course is called “Online Entrepreneur Certification,” and the other is “WA Affiliate Bootcamp.”
The first one is orientated towards the creation of a website. It will walk you through the creation of a website within your own respective niche. Ant the second one is orientated towards Wealthy affiliate’s awesome affiliate program. That knowledge can be applied to any affiliate program, but this particular one is so profitable, that you won’t be able to resist using it.
Probably the most logical and practical decision would be to use one of your websites for your own niche and the second one for the affiliate program. (Click the picture below to go to the WA page for more information.)
Classrooms: Wealthy Affiliate has so much information, and their forum is so huge that it become necessary to group some of those recourses into 13 different classrooms. With a free membership, you can access 2 of them, but that’s still a lot, considering what you can learn here. Each classroom has four main tabs:
- Questions & Answers. Here you can ask any question and help other members if you know answers to their questions. The process of asking is elementary.
- Tutorials. Here you will find very detailed and useful tutorials made by knowledgeable community members and the CEOs themselves. If you know something really well, you can create tutorials too.
- Video. Here you will find related webinars and videos made by CEOs and ambassadors.
- Courses. Here you will find training courses related to the topic of the classroom. (Again made by CEOs or ambassadors.)
Keyword Tool: The creators of Wealthy Affiliate really know what their customers need. Without a keyword tool, you would be writing articles that very few people could ever read. Of course, there are a lot of similar tools online, but their free services are intentionally very poor and limited. All of them just try to make you pay monthly fees (sometimes as high as $150 a month).
Wouldn’t it be convenient to have a keyword tool included in your free service? Wealthy Affiliate will give you that! Of course, since it’s only free service, you will have 30 searches, but the service is not limited otherwise.
With other providers, you may have 50 or even 100 free searches, but some search results will most likely be hidden. I think we all can agree that having all essential tools in one place is definitely better, faster and more convenient.
The Community of More Than 800 000 Members: Yes, you read it correctly, nearly one million active users, and this number is increasing as you read this. That says a lot about this company.
People in the community are very active. In the main homepage, there’s a chat. You can ask any questions in it, or just say “hi” and make friends. These people are blogging, sharing their experiences and knowledge about their online businesses. Hundreds if not thousands of blog posts are created every day.
It’s pretty much like Facebook or any other social media platform. Just this one has many additional features that are actually useful, and it’s designed to help online entrepreneurs. The founders of Wealthy Affiliate clearly knew what people like about social media and perfectly leveraged their knowledge.
Affiliate Program: When you have your first free website, it’s perfectly fine that you want to make money with it. That’s probably the main reason why you created it in the first place. If you don’t know what kind of website you want to build and what niche to choose, you can promote Wealthy Affiliate services.
And even if your website is not related to marketing or business, you can still promote WA with their banners that they provide and by writing a simple review of their services just like this one. Additional revenue probably won’t create much inconvenience, right? 😉
Their affiliate program is one of the most competitive ones in the world! They give you $23.5 (47.9%) from each sale if you are a premium member and $11.75 (23.9%) if you have a free membership! Don’t forget that these payments are recurring, which means that you get money every month as long as the person stays with WA!
And even more, when you make 100 sales, you get an invitation to the all-paid affiliate conference in Las Vegas. There are hundreds of new people who achieve this in several months. (Click the picture below to read more details.)
Special Discount and Acess to Premium Tools for Free: When you sign up for free through an affiliate link (mine for example), you have seven days to use some of the premium features, including private letters to the founders of the company and more.
If you decide to buy premium membership during these first seven days, you get a 59.5% discount for the first month of the premium membership, so it will cost you just $19!
If You Enjoy, Let’s Upgrade to Premium!
There’s no doubt that you will find the free starter membership useful and superior to competitors. So natural decision will be to upgrade to paid premium membership just for $49 a month and no upsells ever!
Wealthy Affiliate is all-in-one service, and if you pay this price, you will never have to buy another expensive membership or service. Here’s what you get when you upgrade to premium:
Hosting for 50 Websites: We already discussed that two websites would be more than enough for a beginner. Imagine what you would be able to do with 50 when you gain more experience!
Those 50 consist of 25 top-level domains and 25 siterubix.com subdomains. If you have at least 10 websites and each of them brings you at least a couple of thousand a month, that’s quite a number!
Not to mention that hosting for premium members is just outstanding. Wealthy affiliate servers can process 500 000 visitors a month for each website, and you have protection from hackers! (See what else you will get with premium membership. ↓↓↓)
Acess to All 12 Phases of Training: Each phase has 10 lessons, and at the end of each lesson, there are several tasks to complete. There are 5 phases of “Online Entrepreneur Certification” course and 7 phases of “WA Affiliate Bootcamp.”
They will walk you through every little aspect of website building, keyword research, content creation, getting social media engagement, tasteful and effective marketing, PPC campaigns and much more. If you finish all training and complete all tasks, there’s 99% chance that at that point, you’ll have a good income online. Supplementary or even full-time!
Access to All 13 Classrooms: We have already covered how useful classrooms are and how much information you can find there. With premium membership, you get access to all 13 of them!
Unlimited Searches With Keyword Tool: You already know that without a keyboard tool no blog could exist. For one single premium membership price, you get this service without any limitations. You will never have to worry about keyword tools again. Also, you can save desired keywords to lists, so you won’t forget anything important and potentially profitable.
Website Comment Platform: This is an exceptionally useful feature I haven’t seen elsewhere. You can simply request comments on your posts and pages! Remember that comments are considered content by the search engine algorithms. This can tremendously improve SEO, rankings in search engines, traffic and of course your revenue.
Comments mean that your visitors like your posts, it can spark a discussion, and that means better visitor engagement.
To ask for comments, you need to have credits. They are given for writing comments upon other people’s request. You can also purchase credits, but that’s optional, and I’ve never done that. I’m perfectly fine with earning them myself.
Website Feedback Platform: This is also one of a kind service, which allows you to get feedback on your websites, posts, and pages from other premium members. Feedback from real people lets you know what others think about your website and content and improve your website’s user experience. If visitors likes your website, you get more visitors, they click on your links, and you get money.
To request feedback, you need the same credits as for comments. You can also get them by giving feedback to other people or purchase them if you want. The same credits can be used to request both feedback and comments.
Live Webinars Every Friday: Every Friday one of Wealthy Affiliate ambassadors, by the username “Magistudios” hosts live webinars for premium members. The guy has a lot of experience, and he knows what he’s talking about.
While a webinar is in progress, you can use live chat to talk to other viewers or the host himself! At the end of every webinar, he takes the time to answer viewer’s questions.
And even if you miss the live broadcast, you can watch them later in the video library. The downside is that you can’t ask questions and chat with other viewers.
Amazing Technical Support: No matter how good the service is, no one is fully protected from technical issues. I had some of them as well. More specifically my websites were down. But I contacted the support, and those problems were solved literally in ten minutes! The people are very polite, and they immediately let you know when the problem is solved.
Summary
Today a five-year-old kid could easily create a website for free. All website builders are not very far from each other in terms of simplicity, convenience, and limitations for free services. What set them apart, is all the additional services. One company has to offer a lot of those. That’s Wealthy Affiliate (WA for short).
Wealthy Affiliate has over 800 000 members worldwide, and there are definitely some reasons why this company is so successful. Probably the main reason is that this service is more like a social media platform for online entrepreneurs than just a simple and convenient website builder.
And it’s far from an ordinary forum as well. Members are blogging, writing articles, asking and answering each other’s questions, messaging each other privately and so on. Not to mention the awesome training courses designed for everyone, from beginners to experienced marketers.
Besides huge, exponentially expanding community and training courses, Wealthy Affiliate is all-in-one service. It has all tools that you need to create, grow and maintain a successful online business. That includes:
- Website builder, which builds websites with a couple of clicks.
- Powerful and reliable hosting with protection from hacking.
- “SiteComments” platform, where you can request comments for your articles.
- “SiteFeedback” platform where you can request for feedback on your work.
- Keyword tool, without which any website could hardly exist.
- One of the best affiliate programs in the world, which gives you 47.9% of company’s revenue.
- And in this article, we didn’t even cover advanced WA features, like link tracking and rapid writer.
Some of these features are for premium members only, but Wealthy Affiliate’s free membership outperforms all free services out there, and even almost all paid ones! And the premium membership gives you one of the best (most likely even the best) services in the world just for $49 a month and no upsells ever! If you have a premium membership, forget about paying to other companies for necessary tools!
Thank you for reading, share with friends if it was helpful 🙂
See you inside Wealthy Affiliate!
-Grey
I am a premium at Wealthy Affiliate and have learned so much in such a short time. Very true that the free membership is better than alot of the paid ones out there. I have done alot of research and WA far exceeds the rest. After experiencing the free membership, I knew that the premium would open up the door for unlimited potential and I am very happy with my choice.
I’m very happy for you and that you made the right decision. It’s always a pleasure to hear positive feedback about the services I’m describing. Wealthy Affiliate really helps people progress considerably faster than they would on their own! Thank you for your comment.