Using Hubpages, Squidoo, Weebly, Ect..

Here are a couple of threads which will explain it to you really clearly and unambiguously, and in detail, when you have time to read them slowly and carefully enough.

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...e-blogger.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...y-website.html

Note that Weebly (which you also mentioned) is totally different from Blogger and HubPages and Squidoo, in most of these regards.

Key concept - it's not about whether they're free: it's about whether their terms of service and the ways they're interpreted and applied make them safe to use. At Blogger and Squidoo and HubPages, you can never own and control your own site/pages. At Weebly you can.

There's a "trade-off", of sorts, with both approaches, qwerty.

At the forefront of many people's mind is, like you had mentioned, the issue of cost....even though, with a clear direction and vision, the "cost" of purchasing your own domain and hosting, really isn't THAT much in relation to the huge opportunity the online world has provided to many people.

With that said, the reason the sites you mention are so appealing is just that...they are free to use. Not only are they free to use, but there is very little learning curve, at least in relation to opening up a page, typing, and publishing. Where you will gain tremendous pre-established search engine authority that has been developed around a business model that, typically, incentivizes the collective to produce large volumes of content.....you don't actually OWN these sites yoruself.

Ownership, of anything, is a pretty big deal. It means you have complete control over that property, and can move it in any direction you like. While I'm a big--huge--proponent of using those sites, I also hold them close, at a distance...if that makes sense. When you don't actually control the online property yourself, you are subject to the will and decisions of the ownership. What if they make a decision you don't like or aren't necessarily agree with, when it comes to monetization/ad placement/functionality/etc? Depending on the site, you may or may not have a REAL voice.

With your own online property, you make the decisions. You call the shots.

Personally, I believe the best approach is to use these sites in conjunction with your own online properties. You'll have people on both sides of the argument--some who swear by Web 2.0 sites exclusively, and those who say that you should never touch them.

As I see it, it is the difference of building your own business or other´s. You put your content on someone else´s site, you build their asset; you put it on your site, you build yours.

Said that, if you want to get the feeling for it, but you have no business in place, you can start using the other platforms and see how it goes.

Just don´t get too comfortable; if you make money, you might be wiped out.

I use these sites for promotion and to lock keywords I wouldn´t rank for in a million years. It works very good.

Sandra

I don't use hubpages anymore, as my traffic there has never recovered after they got hit by panda. Squidoo, however, I use often.

You do not and never will own a squidoo website, however, the attraction of squidoo *for me* is that lenses do not take long to make at all, they are very easy to make, and they rank in hours. I can literally start getting gobs of Google traffic within hours with a squidoo lens.

It is a wonderful way to make money *for now* and also a wonderful way to test niches. Make a squidoo lens and see what kind of traffic there is for a subject. If you decide to make your own site on the subject then you already have lenses that you can put links to your site on.