The internet has become a business haven due to the minimal start up costs required for entrepreneurs to launch their ideas. For under $1,000 you are able to have a website professionally designed, hosted, and marketed. That $1,000 could easily turn into $10,000 or even $100,000 if you play your cards right and hit the right markets.

Even still, there are costs associated with running an online business. Like any business, overhead is something that you need to consider when you are analyzing your profitability and overall performance. One mistake that I made was forgetting to include the cost of my marketing into my profit analysis, leading myself to believe that I was making more money than I actually was At the end of my first month I came to a rather brutal observation: instead of making $6,000, as I had originally thought, I had only actually made $3,900- still a decent income, but a full $2,100 less than I had figured.

Typical Website Overhead

Here are the main costs associated with running a website:

• Hosting - You need your website to be on a server somewhere. Hosting starts from $2.99 a month (see my review of DSBHosting here) and can run upwards of $50 a month.

  Ensure that your hosting package gives you the option to add more domains, scripts, and customizations. Also, be conscious of how much monthly bandwidth your host is offering- exceeding this amount can ring up extra charges.

• Design/Construction/Content - If you don’t know how you design, build, or update your website yourself there is always the option of outsourcing these services.

  For example, I am a copywriter. You could call me up, request some content, and then that part of your website is taken care of. The same is true for designers and coders.

  If you do these tasks yourself there is no cost.

• Marketing/Promotion - There are both paid and free methods of promoting your website Generally, paid methods create results a lot quicker, and if you are able to maintain profitability, jump-starting your marketing with a good PPC campaign is an excellent way to start.

  Free methods of promotion, such as article marketing (bum marketing), viral marketing, and forum/spam marketing (not technically “legal”) are capable of achieving results as well, though they generally take more time than paid methods.

Unless your website really takes off and begins to use a lot of hard disk space and bandwidth, there aren’t too many other costs associated with it. In fact, as an internet marketer, you want your website to start costing you a more money to stay online- that means that it’s generating a lot of traffic, and possibly revenue as a result.