Free vs paid websites

Of course! Many people here use wordpress, which is free, and make a ton of money. You can have a very professional looking website for nothing! Some awesome wordpress themes are free for instance. It has nothing to do with the earning potential of your site. It's how you market products through it that makes a difference. The website is a tool.

Now it depends how you want to monetize it. Like if it's with adsense, you need to compare the different ways to create a free website as some are more adsense optimized.

hope that helps a lil'!

You can earn from free websites, but you'll find in the long run it's completely not worth it. Why spend all that time creating content, backlinking and getting traffic to a website that you don't own or control?

Eventually webby might go out of business, or won't support the new widget you want, or can't take custom programming, or might decide to ban affiliate advertising (like Wordpress.com does, not to be confused with Wordpress the awesome free content management system).

The cost of owning your own site ($5-$10 a month) is so very low compared to how much more you can make in the long run than with free sites. I started out with a free Wordpress.com site, now I pay them $10 a year to redirect my formerly "free" site to my self hosted site so I can keep all my years old backlinks. That plus weeks of transfer headaches and bugs.

I wrote an article on this a while ago, it might help you:
Why Free Site Hosting Is A Waste Of Time And Money

I'll definitely be devil's advocate here - though really good points above about not owning the site & basically being SOL should the site change it's policy... definitely something that you should think about - I think free sites are just the bee's knee's!

Of course, you're going to buy your own domain and hosting plan. Don't fight it, it's going to happen, but I supplement what I do on my own sites with projects I run on free websites like hub pages, squidoo, etc., etc. I wouldn't put all your focus into those sites, but they're awesome places to pick up some extra change on top of what you're doing elsewhere.

Also, while you are kind of at the mercy of those free sites that you use, their policies and limitations, chances are they're not going to change much. Some of the smaller guys might go under or redesign heavily, and policies will always change, sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages (not sure how well established Weebly is, though it's pretty big at this point) have a vested interest in keeping the communities around that they've built. Check and see what their current policies are, and you'll probably have a pretty good idea of what they'll be doing in the future (i.e. Hub Pages is not a site that's tolerant of affiliates abusing their service... but I make good money publishing info articles and collecting ad revenue there... Squidoo is going to let you sell affiliate products, that's never changing... etc.). I wouldn't be afraid to use free sites - heck the bum marketing folk use only free services and I know plenty who make good money doing only that. I doubt any of them are going to go under (at least the larger ones), and most are going to give you some kind of trade off for your contribution - without it they wouldn't have a website!!

It all depends on you... but if you're going to get serious about IM, you're going to buy at least one (or a dozen, or a hundred... ) domain in the future... but that's completely up to you.

Free sites are an awesome way of sending traffic to your main site and for helping you to establish your experise in a niche, but I would definitely want control over the bulk of my content and my other pages and for that I use a hosted, domain site.

Best of luck
Ellen

of course why not. You can earn more to create a site.

Weebly is fine and it is even newbie friendly for me than wordpress. It doesn't matter which platform you use as long as you are comfortable with it.

Andrea

of course you can earn but if you create a paid site so you can more earn

If you are only planning on learning then free is the way to go.

However, if you are planning on sticking around for the long run and maybe even making a living online, then it would be a much better option to pay for your own site. Host gator offers web hosting for as little as $3.96 per month.

Many free websites have too many rules, some have ads and many have to be pre-screened by a live person before any of your articles and content go live.

Buying your own domain and paying for web hosting is inexpensive and will give your hard work a professional feel.

Aren't you worth it?

by a free website if you mean a blog then my answer is yes you can...

The question is how to make more money, Its very hard to get tons of visitors .