Today, to continue the discussion on website hosting, I am pleased to have a guest blog post by Tiffany Dow. Over to Tiffany:
A website hosting service is a service that handles storage and ability to connect to your website. You’re basically renting a place to store your website. You can have a domain name but you can’t put anything on the site.
You can’t have an operational website without hosting. For businesses, that means nothing can be promoted or sold – no one will be aware that the business exists except in name only.
Business owners aren’t the only ones that need (and benefit from) having a website. Writers can use sites to build a platform and promote their work. Writers are creative people. Shouldn’t they stick just to writing? Not if they have dreams of getting their writing into the hands of an audience.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a ‘big’ writer and don’t have the goal of hitting the New York Times best-selling author chart, you still need a site. If you have writing talent, the gift of gab or even the desire to write, then that means that there’s something creative within you that’s dying to be let out and shared with others.
Words are so powerful – they have the potential to move people emotionally, to make them stop and think – they have the power to change lives for the better. Let’s say that you have a lot of poetry you’ve written over the years, but you’re having trouble finding a market for your work – a site of your own can help you achieve that goal.
Poetry is an extremely difficult field to break into. Though there are contests, small ezine sites and even a few literary magazines that accept poetry, the acceptances are few and far between and the pay tends to be on the lower end of the pay scale.
You can put up poetry on your own site or publish it yourself and sell it on your site. To do that, you need a website hosting service to store the files you’ve created to house your poetry work.
If you have a story to tell and you love writing fiction but you don’t like the length of time it takes for traditional publishing companies to act (sometimes it can take a publishing company six months or longer to get back to a writer), then you can upload files to your website and share them with the world.
Thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) your work is protected – once a creative work is created, you automatically own the copyright, so you don’t have to worry about someone getting away with using your work illegally.
You can write fiction eBooks, upload them to your site and you’re automatically a published author. As an added bonus, you get to keep 100% of all the profits – no sharing with an agent or having to ‘earn out’ cash advances before you start seeing steady income from the book. You can also put up excerpts of your work – which gives viewers a preview and makes them want to read the rest so they buy the book.
Maybe you’re a writer but you’re more into writing non-fiction than fiction. You would still need a website hosting service to get your work online on your own site as well. Many bloggers don’t realize that some blogging companies can freely take whatever is written on their site and use it without compensation – or delete it on a whim without warning.
So anything you have that has the potential to make money for you, you want that stored on your own site. You can take your blog posts, put them in an eBook and sell them on your own website – especially if you’re an expert in a topic and you’ve been blogging about it for free. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t benefit from the knowledge you share.
