To have a website or not to have a website; that is an occurring online question.

When we set out to search for online business, we receive so many messages telling us that not having a website is not a problem as the opportunity itself will give you a duplicate page of your own that you can promote.

This is great news if you want to market only one business on the internet. But look at all the people who are marketing successfully on the net. There isn't a single person who is actually marketing one single product or service. You would find them Partnering in this or that venture, selling three or four e-books, being affiliates of numerous opportunities…etc.

Now let us say that you have opted to work with one single online business affiliate program that offers you a web page that you can promote. How will you promote it?

Let us look at the things you will not be able to do:

1-Exchange Links: Since you do not own the site, therefore, you cannot make any changes on it; accordingly you will not be able to add links to your site. If you cannot put links on your site then you cannot exchange links.

2-Forums: One of the Forums that I am involved in, and believe me it is one of the best forums around, recently announced that you can add to your signature either a product or a website that you yourself own and nothing duplicate or you do not own.

3-Adding your link to directories: I guess I will be safe to say that at least 90% of directories do not accept links with an extension. Meaning, your duplicate site would be something like that http://www.website.com/affiliate . The directories would only accept http://www.website.com. Although I must say that some companies are overcoming this issue by adding your affiliate username at the beginning rather than as an extension. It would look like this http://username.website.com . In this case your chances to be accepted are better, still not very good though. As directory owners usually do not accept duplicate sites when they review it for approval.

What you will be able to do is the following:

1-Writing Articles: In your author resource box you will be able to put a link to an affiliate page.

2-Traffic Exchange sites: These also accept affiliates

3-Paid advertising whether online or offline.

You will realize from the above that out of the five free options listed above you will only be able to do two of them. While if you have your own website you will be able to build a full marketing effort without having to pay for any kind of advertising.

Remember this is with the limitation of having only one stream of income coming in. If you decided to get involved in more than one business then you will have to duplicate your work for each affiliate program when you are dealing with paid advertising.

The advantages of having your own website are numerous, but we will list a few here:

1-The flexibility of having all your online business opportunities in one place.

2-The flexibility of changing your content for search engine optimization and enhancing visitors' experience.

3-The flexibility of automating your link exchange activity.

4-The Flexibility of automating your content management so as to have always new content on your website.

5-Of course we should not forget that all the things that we listed above that you cannot do with an online business affiliate duplicate page, now you can do them with your own home based business website.

6-Adding a newsletter subscription which will build you a list that no home business/online marketer can do without.

Does this mean that each person who wants to venture into online business must go into the trouble of building a website, designing it, and setting it up? Not really, there are opportunities out there which have the option of building your own website as part of the package. Yet you must make sure that you own the domain name.