Based in Brisbane, Andy Pudmenzky is a marketing consultant with over two decades of experience in web technologies, marketing, graphic design, theatre audio / visual and event management. | More...
There a four main steps to an internet presence. These are:
Each of these steps is outlined in more detail below…
A domain name is the name attached to your website. Yours may be xyzcompany.com.au or xyzbusiness.com and so on. You can register as many of these as you like, as they are relatively cheap… and we recommend you register at least two – your normal business name, as well as what you do and where you do it. For example, if you run a self storage facility called KB’s Self Storage Centre (in Keppel Bay), then we would recommend that you at least register kbselfstoragecentre.com (or .com.au, .co.uk etc – depending on your region) as well as keppelbayselfstorage.com (or .com.au, .co.uk etc – depending on your region).
You may also like to think about getting just keppelbaystorage.com (without the word ‘self’) and a few other variations. Additionally, if your business name is hard to spell (or can be spelt numerous ways), we recommend registering domain names for each of the possible spellings – for example, Kasey Anne Marina may be spelt Casey Anne Marina, or Casey Ann Marina or even Kasey Ann Marina. See where I’m going with this? Don’t immediately dismiss this idea either – read this important post from a few years back to find out why.
Okay, so now you’re probably asking if having so many names is going to cost a lot of money. But it won’t. Not when you think about the benefits. Firstly, realise that each domain name is generally paid either annually or bi-annually and the price isn’t even triple-figures (around $90 for two years in Australia, but it depends on your region and the type of name you wish to register). A measly $0.12 (yes, 12 cents) per day is nothing in your business, am I right? Good. Secondly, if you have some nearby competition, there’s nothing stopping them from registering a domain name similar to yours – for example, if you only register keppelbayselfstorage.com, your competition has every right to register keppelbaystorage.com (without the word ‘self’). If for whatever reason their website ranks higher in Google than yours, you may well loose a customer to them. Yet for an extra twelve cents per day, that person could have been your customer. So think about the advantages an extra domain name or two may bring you.
With the above in mind, your next question is now probably be something like “won’t it be hard to maintain 5 different websites for 5 different domain names?”. Absolutely not… because you would just pick a ‘primary’ (main) domain name and all of the others are redirected to it.
Hosting is the process of having a fast, secure, always-on internet server ‘serve’ (hence the name) web pages to internet surfers. There are a number of web hosts out there, one of which is StorMan. Hosting is normally made up of a small ongoing monthly fee to continually serve your web pages to the world. Email addresses are also setup at this stage – something like yourname@keppelbaystorage.com – or whatever your primary domain name (from Step 1) is.
Before I get onto Step 3, however, I’d like to point out that while you may get a number of free email addresses with your internet connection from your internet company (for example, Telstra / Bigpond in Australia, Xtra in NZ, etc), it does nothing but advertise them. Seriously! Look at the email address they’ll likely give you… it’ll be something like keppelbay@bigpond.com or keppelbay@xtra.co.nz. And what happens if you change internet companies? You’ll have to reprint your business cards & flyers because keppelbay@bigpond.com is now something else. Either that, of you could continue paying for an email address at an ISP that you no longer use. Talk about a waste of your money!
Why stick with that, when you can have info@keppelbayselfstorage.com? Or, better still, yourfirstname@keppelbayselfstorage.com …now that looks professional! An added bonus is that users will instantly know that your website is going to be the bit after the ‘@’ symbol. To find out more about why you too should stay away from ISP-provided email addresses, please refer to my blog post from 2008, appropriately entitled “What does your email address say about you?”.
Okay, on to Step 3… the fun part! There are a number of different things we can do for you here – anything from a simple website that shows off your services, right through to a website that has an online system of some kind where customers can log requests, or get quotes, or buy products, etc.
The final step is promoting the website. It’s all well and good to have a website, but if no one visits it, then you could have some issues. Promoting the website can be done a number of ways…
…these are just some of the many ways you can promote your business and its website.
Easy – just contact Big Budda Boom on 1300 660 937 and they’ll take care of the rest!
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