Everyone wants to be a star and in being a star, you imagine having your very own .com personal website to feature your best work. When you work for other companies, you are one of many and not usually featured very long if at all. A personal website allows you to be the only star of your show.
The industry has changed dramatically over the years. When I first came on the scene about 10 yrs ago, you could make the majority of your income on your site sales alone. Grossing at least $1000 a month minimum, you could afford the expenses of running your own website with ease. Today, that is certainly not the case for various reasons and a whole separate post in itself.
It is necessary to be aware of the costs that are involved with your website, in order to fully understand why in today's market, it is a waste of money. Let's break down the costs included.
1. Hosting - in order to host a content based website you will need plenty of bandwidth to secure your content. Depending on what service you use, and if your site is adult material you will need to find a hosting company that provides reliable hosting services and is adult site friendly.
2. Content Management System - A content management system helps you organize your content, prepare for future updates and schedule them in advance and provides a variety of services that help you better manage and organize the functionality of your site.
3. Security - In order to protect your content from being ripped, hacked or damaged, you will need to invest in a good security product installation.
4. Photography/Video/Editing services - You will need to develop the content and updates for your website and outsource someone to film your footage for you. Quality VS Quantity.
5. Marketing/Promotion - You have to tell people about your website and although social media is helpful, the real conversions come from paid advertising. To make money you have to spend money.
6. Webmaster - Unless you are able and willing to manage your site on your own, you will need to hire someone to do this for you. It's not impossible to do yourself, but it is very time consuming.
7. Billing Service - You want to get paid don't you? You will need to purchase a billing service to process your payments for you. CCBill charges $1400 year for both Visa and Mastercard. Aside from that, you may even have to have other services as well to cover countries that your current processor may not accept payments for.
Having a successful solo website is a lot of work and can be more expensive than you think. Good luck!
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