Home Business Website Essentials
Home Business Website Essentials
Do you have a home based business, or small business,
with no web presence? Are you operating a successful business but
not a successful website? Here are some suggestions to make your
business site a profit center, instead of a cost center.
Free Hosting: A Smart Move for You?
There are many ISP's offering free hosting services today. Many
of them are first class and offer upgrades to a more substantial
range of services for really affordable monthly fees when you are
ready. Free sites usually have some sort of advertising tacked onto
your site, or email, to cover their expenses but few - if any -
inundate your visitors with ad's or pop-ups like they used to.
When would you use a free site? Free sites are a viable alternative
for any business that wants a "brochure site" and does
not intend to use the net as a source of customers, clients, or
sales.
Brochure sites are designed to take the place of a traditional
paper brochure and are vastly superior to them in many ways. They
are cheaper. They can be changed or updated without requiring an
expensive print run, and they serve the function of providing your
business a minimal web presence.
Have a Presence and Make it Pay Too!
The old saying, "You get what you pay for", is as true
on the net as it is in the offline world. If you want your website
to be a source of customers, and revenue, you need to spend a little
time, money, or both.
How much money? Not as much as you might think. Certainly not the
thousands of dollars you hear about, but if you want to make money
none of the "get rich quick" schemes will work either.
You can build a profitable site that will generate traffic and
bring cutomers to the door of your local business. For less than
$400 you can have your own domain, site hosting, site building tools,
search engine optimization (SEO) and support.
Of course, you still have to put in the work. Plan on about 100
hours for site development, keyword analysis and SEO. Then a few
hours a week, maybe 2-3, to keep it fresh.
Its Traffic, Traffic, Traffic.
There's an old saying in the real estate business that the three
most important things to consider in a property are location, location,
and location. A website site is similar, but the defining term is
traffic. Traffic is oxygen to your site's cash flow. Cut off the
oxygen and the cash doesn't flow.
A whole industry has grown up around methods and products to build
site traffic. Begin to research search engine optimization (SEO)
and you will soon be drowned by a tsunami of instant success programs,
SEO software solutions and the offerings of SEO consultants.
Keep your wits when you are swimming through and remember "caveat
emptor". If the traffic problem could be effectively solved
by spending a few hundred dollars on a mass submission drive or
finding a few optimized keywords it wouldn't be a problem. Keyword
and search engine optimization are part of the solution - not the
single magic bullet.
Traffic built? Add Google Adsense
Google adwords aren't for everybody, but they are a clean, simple
way of making your website produce a cash flow of its own. I say
they aren't for everybody, because it is recommended you have at
least 20 pages of valuable content and are getting about 50 visitors
per day before you apply.
The ads in Adsense are related to what your visitors are looking
for on your site. You can get more information and make application
to Google for AdSense at https://www.google.com/adsense
About the Author Jess Huffman is a Business
Consultant and Coach working from his home office in Calgary, Alberta.
Jess has helped hundreds of his clients start their own successful
home based businesses. http://www.home-business-and-entrepreneur-tools.com
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