Jul 29 2009
Starting A Business – Planning Your Web Presence
Once you have made a decision to start your own business, there will be many important things to consider, ranging from business planning, finance and development, through to sales and marketing, managing resources, production, delivery and so on.
At some stage of your business planning and development process, you will want to give serious consideration to establishing a professional web presence for your business. In today’s modern global economy, having a web presence is essential for any business, no matter how small or local you plan your enterprise to be.
In this article, I want to outline a viable strategy you can use for setting up, growing and establishing an online presence for your business which, from the very outset, meets all of the following criteria:
- Your web presence should be inexpensive
- Your web presence should be easy to manage
- Your web presence should help you grow your business fast
- Your web presence should give you measurable results
- Your web presence should be flexible enough to meet all of your needs as your business grows
All of the above criteria can be easily met if you are willing to consider using a smarter, better, cheaper, easier and faster alternative to setting up a regular website for your business. This alternative is called a blog.
A blog is similar to a website, but it offers business owners – especially small business owners – many more additional benefits and advantages that regular web sites don’t provide. I have written about these differences in more detail here, as well as created a video that explains these significant differences here:
Click on the image below to watch the video
(window opens in new browser – please allow a few seconds for video to load) …
Let’s now take a deeper look at how a business blog meets all of the criteria I have outlined above:
An Inexpensive Web Presence
Many people will argue that you can’t get cheaper than “free”. When it comes to having a “free” web presence for your business, however, there are many pitfalls that you will want to avoid, such as “free” webhosting, or setting up your web presence on a domain name that belongs to someone else. In the long run, “free” solutions could end up being quite costly, especially when you need proper and timely support from your host, or you decide to make certain customizations or configuration changes to your site.
So, let’s ignore “free” options for a moment and let’s focus instead on setting up an inexpensive yet professional web presence.
Regardless of the type of web presence you ultimately decide to set up for your business, you should plan to at least own your own domain name and use a professional web hosting service. You can find inexpensive resellers for both domains and web hosting from several online locations for around $150 or less. (If you don’t know where to go, then we recommend going here for affordable domain registration, and here for reliable and affordable webhosting.)
Getting a web site built by a web developer or web designer, however, is a different story. Sure, you can always ask a neighbor, niece or nephew who knows HTML to build you a website for next to nothing, but it will probably also end up doing nothing for your business, just like the majority of websites out there.
A blog is different. With a WordPress blog, for example, you can download the full working version of the publishing software at no cost, host it on your server, and then choose a professional design from hundreds of available free WordPress blog templates to give your web presence the look and feel of a site that might cost thousands of dollars to design. Here are some links for more information about how to set up a WordPress blog and links to hundreds of free WordPress blog themes you can use.
A Web Presence That Is Easy To Manage
With a regular website, unless you know how to modify web page code like HTML and upload files to your server, you will need to you will need to get someone like a web developer, web designer or webmaster to help you manage your site. This not only makes managing your web presence more complex, but it can also cost you in terms of time (waiting for other people to get the work done) and money (paying others to make changes to your site).
A blog makes the process of managing your web content very easy. You simply write out your thoughts and click a few buttons to instantly publish your information online. There’s no messing around with HTML code, no uploading files to servers and no fiddling about with technical stuff. Just write and click to publish. It doesn’t get any easier than that!
A Web Presence That Helps You Grow Your Business Fast
Most websites are static, which means that once your content is published, you then have to figure out ways of getting people to visit your site. A blog, on the other hand, offers many dynamic features which can help to automatically drive visitors to your site. For more details about this powerful difference between websites and blogs, go here.
A Web Presence That Gives You Measurable Results
Whether you decide to build a website for your business or set up a business blog, you will want to have an information system in place that gives you access to data about your site (like what words people are typing into search engines to find your site), so you can evaluate your site’s performance and make better business decisions. Google’s own web analytics application is an excellent tool for this. It’s free and gives you access to an incredible amount of useful and valuable data about your site.
Here is a video we recorded that shows you how to use the results from your business blog to improve your business website and vice versa:
A Web Presence That Is Flexible Enough To Grow With Your Business
Adding new functionality to an existing website can mean a whole new level of expense and a considerable investment of time, especially if you need the help of web developers to integrate new software applications, set up databases, etc.
With a blog powered by a content publishing platform like WordPress, for example, adding new functionality to your site often means downloading one of thousands of available plug-ins – most of which are free – then adding them to your site and activating them inside your blog’s administration panel or dashboard with a click of the mouse. In just a few minutes, you could take your web presence to a whole new level, such as adding e-commerce, creating a membership site, enhancing its multimedia capabilities, and so on, by simply adding external modules created by plug-in developers for the blogging community.
In terms of flexibility, therefore, it is very hard to beat blogging technology. You can start off with a very simple barebones blog to inform and educate your site visitors about your business and totally scale things up as and when you need to.
Hopefully this article has helped you gain some new insights into setting up a web presence for your new business and we wish you a very happy and successful business blogging experience.
Want to save time and money getting a business blog up and running?
We normally charge clients several hundred dollars to install, set up and fully configure their business blog. We recently turned this service into an inexpensive and easy to follow ’step-by-step’ video training tutorial package that shows you exactly how to set up a professional business blog in 48 hours or less, with additional training and comprehensive resources included to help you grow your business online fast.
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