Whether you’re selling items on eBay or launching a consulting practice, a high quality web presence can mean the difference between landing a big contract and staring at an empty calendar. While there are plenty of free and cheap solutions for home business owners to get online, many of them can actually make your home business look bad.
Step One: Set Up a “Backstop” E-Mail Address for Your Home Business
Even if you already have a personal e-mail address, it’s a good idea to set up a free e-mail account for your home business with either
GMail or
Yahoo! (Think about whether would your clients respond
confidently to e-mail addressed from luvcuddlez99203@aol.com.) I like both of these free services because they offer aliasing and strong spam filtering features. While you’re rarely going to use this account, it offers emergency protection in case something goes wrong with your primary domain name.
Step Two: Register a Domain for Your Home Business
Using an inexpensive service like
GoDaddy, you can now register a domain for your home business with the free e-mail address you just registered. This way, spam bots and scam artists will target your “public” e-mail address without bothering your primary inbox.
Step Three: Set Up a Home Business Tumblr Blog
Though
Tumblr is primarily a blogging tool popular among writers and artists, it offers some powerful features for bootstrapping home businesses. First of all, it’s free, backed by a team that expects to eventually earn revenue from its growing user base instead of from site-based advertising. Unlike other free web page builders, it allows you to use your own domain name, so only your brand gets noticed in the address bar. Although Tumblr allows you to use one of its classy templates, you can also build your own. Finally, full RSS support allows you to export your data to another platform if your home business ever outgrows Tumblr.
Step Four: Add E-Mail and Site Tools
Next, sign up for a free home business account with
Google Apps for Your Domain. By tweaking your DNS settings, you can get a custom version of Google’s leading edge e-mail service. As your home business grows, you can easily assign free e-mail accounts to partners, employees, contractors, and even family members. In addition, you also get calendar and collaboration tools that can live under your own domain. By customizing the suite with your own company logo, you can present an efficient and professional web presence both inside and outside your home business.
Step Five: Start Tracking Visitors to Your Home Business Website
Finally, successful business owners understand that traffic patterns tell stories about a company’s health. You can use the free
Google Analytics tool to embed tiny trackers into your Tumblr blog and your public Google Apps content. Daily reports show you what ad campaigns or content attract the most visitors to your site. Registering your website with
Google’s Webmaster Central service can also alert you to potential problems with search engine placement.
Epilogue: Why Go Free When You Can Pay for Home Business Web Presence?
Programmers call “premature optimization” the act of spending too many resources on problems that haven’t presented themselves yet. While web hosting is cheaper than ever, startups with little regular income can use these high quality services and reinvest their projected web hosting costs into marketing or client outreach. In addition, the security and the stability of these free services rival those of paid home business web hosting packages. Thanks to the plummeting prices of storage and bandwidth, most home businesses can enjoy a net cost of ten dollars or less per year for their web presence.