Larkland Morley’s Professional Blog

In my opinion, starting a business today almost all the time requires a web presence. Even if your business does not sell anything over the Internet, you can use the Internet as an information portal for your business. A good sequence is to have your website, get a business card with the address, so you can have people followup with you online and get more information on the things you do.

Here are a list of things you can do to setup your business Internet presence, the aim here is to keep it very low cost.

1. Domain Name – Its highly recommended that you get a domain name for your business. Typically, this would be <companyname.com>. The cost for this is about $10/year to maintain. Alternatively, you could get a free site from wordpress.com or blogger.com. The disadvantage to those is that you would naturally have a longer domain name and less control over your site in terms of content. Check out godaddy.com or similar company for domain name registration.

2. Hosting – Once you have a domain name, you would need to have hosting in place to run your site. Nowadays, you can get hosting from about $5.00/month with lots of extras. Alternatively, you could connect your domain name to the free sites mentioned above and eliminate the basic monthly charge but you would have limitations in doing so. Hostgator.com is a great hosting company to consider.

3. E-mail – The next important thing would be an e-mail address that is professional. If you got the paid domain name your e-mail address could be like yourname@companyname.com. This is very good for interacting in the business world instead of using @gmail.com or @yahoo.com. You can get a very good service to manage your e-mail called Google Apps for small business. The basic service is free but you can upgrade to others later.

4. Social Networking – This can be open ended as there are so much options you could consider. The main sites to consider are facebook.com, twitter.com and linkedin.com. The use of these sites will depend on the type of business that you. In terms of facebook.com, you will not need a new account for the business, you would just need to create a page for the business on your existing account.

5. Site Setup – With the basic infrastructure in place, you now need to setup your site and add content in respect to your business. This site becomes like an online brochure which could be use to promote the business as well. If you are not too technically oriented, you could outsource the entire process to a local web company or go to elance.com or guru.com to find a qualified person. Make sure you list out all the requirements you have for the site to ensure speedy satisfaction.

6. E-mail List – Anyone providing services should seriously consider having a mailing list. You could use twitter.com for this but not all persons are up to date on this technology, so you will need to have a traditional e-mail list service to get this done. There are several companies such as aweber.com that offers such service for about $20.00/month but you could get cheaper services if you shop around. Be careful on which provider you use as your mail could end up in someones spam folder which does not help you.

Conclusion

This is a basic skeleton of what could make you a reasonable web presence. As mentioned earlier, consider getting business cards with this information on there. It could help with the information flow especially when you attend meetings and conferences.