It’s a new year, and if you’re one of the few affiliates out there who are still trying to make money online without having a website of your own, it’s time to get off your backside and build something.

And no, I don’t mean setting up a spam blog on Blogger.

Building a professional website will not only give you a lot more control over your business, but lets you control your online destiny as the future seems to be increasingly bleak for spammy hosted pages and “thin” doorway page websites.

The good news is that getting a professional site put together is really not all that hard, and in most cases it can be done in a couple of hours (this doesn’t really include time for creating content for the site, which should be your next priority). In a world where having an online presence is no longer optional; a whole industry of easy and inexpensive (if not free) website creation platforms has cropped up.

One good example is Weebly – a site that lets you create and download entire websites for the low, low price of free. Weebly gives you a number of attractive templates to choose from, the ability to add all sorts of page elements, and even options to add Google maps, videos and blogs to your site. The great thing is that you don’t have to know HTML to use Weebly - but if you do you can do some customization to your site as well.

Once you have your site built, Weebly will either host your site for free or will let you download everything you created into a .zip file so you can upload it to your server (if you are doing PPC or SEO, make sure you host the site yourself, ok?). It’s easy as that!

If you are still one of those affiliates who relies on framing, redirects or just plain old direct linking to merchants, make a resolution to get a site of your own up by then end of January. It’s not hard to do and it will help you future-proof your business.

[Big thanks to Web Worker Daily for pointing out Weebly. Also check out their other two recommendations SiteKreator and SynthaSite. And if you are looking for more of a content management system, make sure you read my posts about WordPress and Web Site Baker.]