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Creating an Internet Marketing Web Site

If you've begun researching internet marketing and work from home opportunities, you already realize that there are many different angles and approaches you can take. In fact, there are so many it can sometimes make your head swim!

Almost all of these approaches to internet marketing have one thing in common: They require that you build and maintain at least one Web site. That makes perfect sense: We are talking about internet marketing and online business, after all!

It might make sense, but some of us don't know how to create a Web site. More to the point, some of us have no real desire to learn. We want to publish eBooks or promote products as affiliates or build some other kind of online business. We don't want to learn how to speak to computers or Web browsers in their own language.

Fortunately, relatively new software technology enables people like us to build a Web site without really knowing what we're doing. These tools are known by the techie acronym "WYSIWYG," for "what you see is what you get."

WYSIWYG programs do just what the name suggests: They allow you to build the Web site by showing you only the finished product, not all the underlying code (e.g., HTML, PHP, and other stuff you don't really need to know).

There are mainstream commercial programs such as Front Page and Dreamweaver you can buy, but they come with a couple of caveats. First, they're expensive. And second, they can still have a steep enough learning curve to be daunting for those of us with absolutely no technical skills or inclinations.

The first problem is nicely answered by an open source WYSIWYG editor called Nvu (pronounced "N-View"). Nvu is based on the Mozilla platform and is free to download and use. You can't beat the price.

Nvu is fairly easy to use, but its learning curve will still be a little steep for true technical illiterates (such as me).

When I finally admitted that I could no longer avoid learning how to build a Web site, I went to Google and typed in something like "easiest way to build a Web site." One of the search results that came up was for a program called BlueVoda.

BlueVoda looks a lot like a word processing program. In general, it's more intuitive and easy to use than Word. You click on a button to create boxes for text or images. You put your text or images in those boxes. You move them around until you like how they look. You preview the result in your browser. You click on the "publish" button. You're done.

BlueVoda is by far "the easiest way to build a Web site" I've found. And believe me, I've looked really, really hard...

As with so many things in life, there's a catch. BlueVoda was created and published by a Web hosting company and it's proprietary. In other words, you won't be able to do anything with the files it creates unless you have an account with the hosting company, VodaHost.

Fortunately, VodaHost is the kind of company that produces free tools like BlueVoda for their customers. They're innovative, reliable, and they really emphasize customer service and satisfaction. They have a very active customer forum that makes it a snap to get useful advice, tips, and solutions from both company reps and experienced users.

VodaHost is also reasonably affordable. As of this writing, you can get free domain registration when you sign up for hosting service as low as $7.95/month with no setup fee.

If you're not already an expert Web designer and don't particularly want to learn, it doesn't get any easier than BlueVoda. The program earns Internet Marketing 101's highest recommendation - and, in fact, is the program I used to create the IM-101.com Web site.