Ebay is great for selling things in small quantities, but what do you do when you want to create a real web presence for yourself? There are many options to choose from in creating an online store, but there is only one solution that is super affordable and offers you a ton of services: ProStores.

Packages start at only $29.95 a month. There’s even a 1 month free promotion if you use the link below. Prostores won’t give you a bogus looking location like www.prostores.com/myusername. No, they’ll register a domain, like www.anystorename.com, for free and include all of these other great services:

• Free domain registration
• Unlimited Pages and Categories
• A Shopping Cart and SSL Security
• Integration with Ebay, Paypal, and Major Comparison Shopping Sites

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Forming a business is a great way to add legitimacy to your company. In addition, you’ll likely see many legal tax advantages and limitations of your personal liability.

While the benefits are great, the formation process can seem daunting. Sure, you can cheap out and do it yourself, but you’ll likely be left wondering if things were done properly. To take the guesswork out of the process you can use a formation company. Of the many out there offering this service, BizFilings seems to be the best. Not only have they been doing it for more then a decade, they’ll stand behind you and help you long after the formation is complete. They provide free registered agent service for 6 months with formations.

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Limit orders are superior to market orders. At many brokerage firms, including Scottrade, limit orders are the same price as market orders, so there’s really no excuse not to use them.

Limit orders allow you to set the worst price at which you’ll by or sell a stock or option contract. I say the worst price, because you might get an even better price than the one you ask for. If you place a market order then you’ll buy at the ask price and sell at the bid price. This will generally make your purchases more expensive. For that expense, you do tend to get faster execution, since you’ll buy or sell at the current price without having to wait for someone to match your offer. The speed is nice, but I’d much rather get a good deal slowly than a bad deal quickly and have more control over the price I pay.

Jim Cramer, and his Mad Money TV show, were heavily criticized by in a recent article by Paul B. Farrell of Marketwatch. Cramer responded well and pointed out the major downfall of Farrells arguments: he assessed Cramer after watching one episode of his show.

Jim Cramer’s book, Real Money, is on my required reading list, so you you’d be correct to assume that I am very much pro-Cramer. Here’s why I like him:

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Two things to remember, especially when you’re first starting out in investing, are commissions and taxes.

Commissions:

After I made my first few investments I had a small amount of cash left in my account. So I picked a cheap ($10) stock and bought a few shares. The stock really took off and after a year it had gone up 20%. That’s a pretty nice gain, but the value of my investment was so small that the commissions ate up a large chunk of that gain.

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You always hear about the importance of diversification. In general, that’s true. The average investor is going to be best served having a diversified portfolio. There aren’t any sure things in the world of investment. By spreading your risk across multiple investments you prevent one mistake from ruining your entire portfolio.

The other side of this philosophy is that by limiting your risk with diversification, you’re also limiting you gains. If you were to have all of your money in your best investment, then clearly you would have much better returns. The problem with that philosophy is that many of us don’t know which of are investments will perform the best. I like to think of diversification as ignorance insurance for this reason. Or, as Warren Buffett says: “Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.”

I’m not saying that diversification is a bad thing. It’s just that the best returns are realized when you do the work to find the right investment and then take the large action required to make that work hugely worthwhile.

I was never a big fan of dollar cost averaging. It always seemed like being an active investor would yield the best results. Seeing the results of the one investment that I was using dollar cost averaging for has caused me to reconsider my thinking.

For those that don’t know, dollar cost averaging is periodically investing in something regardless of its current price. For instance, you might invest $1000 a month in a certain stock regardless of it’s current price. Depending on the price, you’d get more or less shares. The method works well for two reasons: You load up on shares when the price is beaten down and you largely take yourself out of the equation.

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Most companies that offer 401K plans to their employees also offer some kind of company matching. They may give you a dollar for dollar match, a 50 cents on the dollar match, or similar up to a certain percentage.

Whatever amount you contribute to you 401K, you should contribute at least enough to get the full company match. This match is basically free money that can add significantly to your portfolio gains. Imagine you put $1000 into your 401K and your company matched 50%. The match could make up for otherwise poor performance. Even if your portfolio didn’t appreciate over the course of a year, on your investment of $1000, your account would be worth $1500 thanks to the match, which amounts to a sizable 50% gain.

If the portfolio did appreciate, the gain would be even larger. The extra funds from your company match will continue to grow as the interest compounds between now and when you make withdrawals at retirement. There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but company matching is about as close as you can get.