Free Website Essentials 101: Bootstrapped Budget?
Author: Gary Whitehill
It’s time you start living by this motto: It Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive In Order To Be Effective! When it comes to your website, there are essential tasks that will define its overall success. Strangely enough, most of these tasks can be done using free tools online. It’s true, money can buy almost anything, but like most small businesses, budgets are tight. Follow this guide and I guarantee you’ll save money along the way.
GETTING STARTED
Before you build a site, you need to register a domain name (i.e. www.MyBusiness.com) which also means the use of a personalized e-mail address. I would suggest using GoDaddy.com. It’s a tough economy which means “Coupons” and “Promo Codes” are 100% necessary. It’s easy to find coupon codes that will save you money. I found a pretty good list on FatWallet.com. Half the codes go inactive very quickly, but the forum is constantly being updated. Once you have a website name, you need to consider hosting your site securely. GoDaddy provides those services, but if you want to get a better deal I would suggest the use Blue Host, as they are affordable and you get a free domain name when you sign up with them. The key here is saving money and nothing is better than free.
SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY FORMAT
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the amount and quality of traffic to your site from organic searches within search engines. New to SEO? Check out the Google Official SEO Starter Guide, originally written for Google Employees to “improve website performance with users and search engines“. There’s no cost to get listed naturally in Google, Yahoo and MSN: your job is to try and rank correctly for any given search. For example, if you sell Shoes online, then when someone searches for Shoes in Google, your website would hopefully pop-up. In order for search engines to do this, they use crawlers to find pages to feed out as search results. If those crawlers have a hard time reading your websites code, then your chances of getting listed are decreased. There are free tools out there to help you optimize your website and I would highly suggest the use of Google Webmaster Tools as a starter. Want more tools? Check Google keyword Tool Box for a list of 50 other I can’t stress this enough so I’ll repeat it one more time: Without good SEO, you’ll have to pay for people to find you. Your chance of selling a product to someone who is looking for you is higher than someone who is not.
UNDERSTAND YOUR TRAFFIC
Without a question, analytics is the double-edged sword of Online Marketing. The information you can collect about your visitors is extremely valuable, but the amount of information can be overwhelming. Set a benchmark for yourself and use analytics software to help define whether or not you’re reaching pre-assigned goals. Google Analytics has an internal feature to help track visitors and goal reaching. By understanding such things as, source of traffic and content-overview, you’ll be able to help your site evolve into a stronger source of business: and again, this software free.
BE CONTACT FRIENDLY
A business without a website is like an individual without a cell phone, they’re impossible to reach! If you’re a business with a website, then you should be very easy to reach. Unfortunately, that’s not always the cases. In order to increase visibility, a company should register for local listings on the major search engines. For Google, go to www.google.com/local/add and for Yahoo!, check out http://listings.local.yahoo.com/. When an individual searches for your company, your contact information will come up in the search, making it easier for them to reach you.
On another related topic, a few of my clients have expressed the fear of “e-mail spam” and have refused to lend out their contact information. There’s a very easy way around this: A “Contact-Us” page with a contact form and spam protection methods including a visual based key code that must be entered in order to send. Ask your web developer to put something like this together for you, or refer to free contact form services such as FreeContactForm.com. (Notice how it’s FREE!)
REMEMBER: EFFECTIVE ISN’T EXPENSIVE
It doesn’t have to expensive in order to be effective. Your main objective is to stay focused on your goals, which by now, you should have an idea of what they are. If you’re trying to sell a product, then your goal is to direct traffic as far down the purchase process as possible. If you’re selling a service, then your goal is to get visitors to contact you. Want examples of what I mean? Take a look at Craigslist. The site serves over twenty billion page views per month, putting it in 28th place overall among web sites world-wide, and analysts value the site to be worth over $150 million. The best part is: their interface is simplistic and commonly referred to as “ugly”, BUT it’s effective.
SIMPLE METHODS TO INCREASE TRAFFIC
If you’re looking to bump up your traffic, then consider adopting some of the following trends: Company Newsletters, Blogging, Social Networking, Videos on your website and finding sponsors to host local events. Your goal is to create buzz, drive traffic and create loyal customers. I feel this section deserves more attention, but I think I’ll save it for Part 2, coming May 18th.
If you manage to do all of this, there’s no doubt that success will follow. Somehow “free” just smells, looks and tastes better!
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