If you are interested in affiliate article marketing you will probably have read on numerous occasions that one of the great things is that you can earn money with article marketing using all free tools. That is absolutely true, but there is one very important reason why you should at least consider purchasing a domain name if you intend to take your affiliate marketing seriously.

You can write and submit ezine articles with a link directing visitors to a free blog page or a Squidoo lense (also free). Your visitors won't know or care who owns the piece of internet real estate they have landed on; they are only interested in the content of your web page. So why should you get your own website? In a word: "control".

Any web pages you create using free hosting such as with Blogger.com or Squidoo, are not your property; the content is yours and you can lay claim to copyright, but the actual web address belongs to the site owners and they are the ones who have control. If the site owners decide to close down, your pages just disappear. If they decide they no longer want content relating to your niche, your web pages will be toast.

There is a very real risk of this happening. For example, Squidoo decided that a particular topic was attracting "spammy" content and closed down hundreds of pages relating to that topic. The topic was in the relationship niche, there was nothing wrong with the topic apart from the fact that it attracted too many internet affiliate marketers who were posting thinly disguised advertising and duplicated articles.

In an effort to rid their website of this undesirable content, Squidoo closed the doors to anyone trying to put up more lenses in that niche, and deleted existing pages in the niche. Of course, pages containing valuable content were also wiped out in this cleansing operation. The people who put time and effort into building and promoting those web pages could do nothing, because they didn't own the pages, Squidoo owned them.

When you consider that domain names can be bought for less than the price of a cup of coffee, it is obviously a false economy to rely on the use of free web pages for an affiliate article marketing business.