Are you trying to decide whether to create your own Website? Here are 19 great reasons for having an online presence on the Web:

1. Improves your credibility as a marketer and as an SFI leader.

2. Gives you the freedom to present and emphasize the information you want the way you want to.

3. You can send e-mail using your chosen domain name.

4. Makes your training information and tips easily available to your affiliates.

5. Allows you to set up a blog on your site. Posting to your blog on a regular basis will improve your site's exposure on the search engines—very beneficial.

6. You can create a forum where your Personally Referred Affiliates (PRAs) can find and help one another...and you could help them all.

7. Adding your own content on a regular and continued basis also will likely get you noticed by the search engines. You can use articles your affiliates submit, providing exposure for them, along with a link back to their SFI Gateway or personal Website.

8. You can setup a page to attractively frame your favorite SFI Gateway(s).

9. Allows you to offer more training options for your team with ebooks, software, and special reports in downloadable form.

10. You can host a site for your "technology challenged" affiliates. It could be as simple as just another page within your main Website. For instance, you could create "mysfiwebsite.com/XXXXXXXX," where XXXXXXXX is affiliate's SFI ID. You could also use the affiliate's name or company name.

11. Setting up a form on your Web page allows you to collect visitors' names and e-mail addresses. Set the form to post the information to your Autoresponder or a database on your site. Check with your Web host for instructions on setting this up.

12. You can setup a page for exchanging relevant links to other Websites. This could help you improve your search engine rankings, which would then increase the traffic arriving at your site.

13. With your own Website, you could then join Traffic Swarm and other traffic exchanges for some free traffic.

14. You can install your own autoresponder on your Web server to automate your e-mail followup tasks. Even better, by hosting the autoresponder yourself, you won't have to pay monthly fees for a separate autoresponder service.

15. By copy/pasting some code, you can setup a Web page to redirect to another page, letting you "hide" long, awkward links with affiliate numbers that' are often rejected by many search engines and advertising places. For example: http://moreinfo247.com/xxxxxxx/free could become http://mydomain.com/sfi/. NOTE: If you would like a service like this (called URL forwarding) without having to actually set up your own, separate Website, check out SFI's Lifetime Custom Prestige Domain For Affiliates.

16. You can provide helpful FAQs for your affiliates, providing a simple page in which to direct your new PRAs for questions.

17. Adding audio, video, and other multimedia content can improve the attractiveness and effectiveness of your offer.

18. Creating and maintaining your own Website allows you to learn more about and become more comfortable with today's technology. As you grow more confident with running your own site and online business, you can pass this valuable knowledge on to others.

19. As you learn more about setting up an online business and Website, you can then sell your skills in the form of content for others' sites.

Best of all, creating your own Website is extremely affordable. Check out CPanel, Web.com, or iPage for cheap, highly rated domain name and Website hosting services.

Thanks to John Wilson, SFI Team Leader