A lot of affiliates have been using free hosting sites such as Geocities to build home pages where they place links and banners to promote various associate programs.
While it might seem like a good way to save a few bucks, the opportunity cost of going with a free site, rather than having its own domain, is pretty high as it considerably hurts conversions. Studies clearly show that web surfers will only order from sites that look professional and legitimate. With their long urls and amateurish look & feel, free home pages just don’t look professional enough to convert sales.
If you are serious about making money online, you will need to register your own domain name and get a hosting site, which with all the offers out there, is a rather low investment as you can easily find hosting packages for $20/month.
The next step will be to create some text-rich content for your pages, which will help you get some organic traffic from search engines such as Google.
If you’re using PPC’s to bring traffic to your site, you will notice an important increase of your EPC (earning per click) and you will be able to recoup your investment.