Internet Marketing For Small Business

If you’re a small business owner, a freelancer, self-employed, or an artist – you really should have your own domain name.

Having your own domain name says a lot about you. The first thing it says it that you’re willing to invest the $6.99 US* a year in your business.

Yup – that’s how little some domain name registrars charge for registering a domain name.

Along with proclaiming your commitment to your venture, and thus upping your credibility, having your own domain is the cheapest way to promote your business. Every email you send will market YOUR business name – instead of your Internet Service Provider’s. Why spend time building someone else’s brand when you can be building your own?

The third best reason why you should invest in your own domain name is that it will stay with you no matter where you go. That means it doesn’t matter if you move and have to change Internet Service Providers (your ISP, like Rogers or Bell in Canada, or Comcast or Verizon in the US) – it won’t affect your email, so you don’t have to notify anyone or worry about losing important contacts.

The fourth reason is that it’s better for search engine optimization. If your name is in your domain, it’s a much stronger match.

Want to look professional and show people you are in business and not so cheap that you won’t fork out the $6.95 on your own domain name? Then get yourself a real email address and start building your brand.

Here are 3 popular and cheap domain name registrars:

• Go Daddy – $6.95/yr.

• Netfirms – $5.99/yr.

• 1and1.com $6.99/yr. Free if you buy a hosting package with them ($3.99 a month but they don’t have one-click installs of WordPress.)

Want to buy a .ca address cheap? This is tougher – some prices are still way out there. But you can try here.

• 10dollar.ca

• Payless Domains

If you want to make sure the company is Canadian, the complete list of registrars is at CIRA

Tip: If you own your domain name but pay a lot more than $6.95 a year, as was common a few years ago, you can try to negotiate a better deal with your domain registration company. They know competition is tough now, so are usually willing to do that versus losing you.

If they won’t budge, you can transfer your domain to a new domain registration company. There’s no reason to pay lots of money anymore.

Also – as was mentioned briefly above, if you know you are going to set up a web site, some web host companies throw in a free domain name if you buy a hosting package with them. Check out some of these web hosting companies.

Next: Why you should host your site on your own domain name.

And coming soon – how to set up your email. For all the people who have bought a domain name – please use it! Nothing makes me go crazy more than people having a URL, but not using the email address that come with it because they can’t figure out how. Such a waste! Sniff.

Tags: domain name, registration, registrar, branding, email, business setting up, small business marketing

3 comments

This is a great deal from An Hosting, one of the more reliable hosting companies out there.

Thinking it’s time for a site or blog? No more excuses – now is the time to jump in because $4.95 USD is a great price for hosting, and this package is hot. It even has One-Click Installs Of WordPress – the best blogging software out there.

Here’s what you get for $4.95 US a month with their AN Hosting “One Size Fits All” Plan

• 999GB of disk space (up from 250GB)
• 9,999GB of bandwidth (up from 2,500GB)
• Host 999 domains on one account (up from 20 domains)
• Free domain for life!
• Free site move!
• 30 day money-back guarantee
• Free website builder
• 24/7 phone/e-mail support
• Free scripts library
• Only $4.95/mo with no setup fee!

To put this in perspective, let me explain what it means.

Most of the web sites I have built for clients come in under 5 mb, unless they have hefty media sections with a lot of press ready art.

7 years ago, 100 MB was considered a lot of hosting space.

999 GB of storage space is 4 times more than the average computer holds…so that’s a huge amount. I can’t think of how you can use that up unless you actually host 999 blogs on the site.

9,999 GB is a also a huge amount for bandwidth. Bandwidth means how much data is allowed to be downloaded from your web site. It’s a way of measuring your site’s traffic. Some hosting companies put caps on the bandwidth, meaning if your site is super popular, and lots of people are going to your site, hence downloading images, text etc from your site, and you hit the limit, you may have to pay a surcharge.

With shared hosting, this number can be deceptive, but the short answer is the more bandwidth the better. You’d have to be very popular to hit this amount of traffic, so I wouldn’t worry about it. The long answer is that your hosting company may still put a cap on you…but that’s for another post.

Host 999 domains on one account? Wow! Are you a filmmaker with lots of films to promote? Then this package is a great way for you to set up a site or blog for each one of your films. Or how about a blog for everyone in your family. It’s easy to do with one click installs. If you want your own blogging empire, this would be the way to do it.

You only get one domain name free for life with this package, so you will still have to pay for the other domain names every year. But domains start at about $6 USD, so you’ll save at least that much. Some companies are still charging (or rather, ripping people off) $34.95 a year for those people not in the know. Now you know not to pay that much.

You don’t want the web site builder. They build awful sites. Better to put up a WordPress blog and use that as your web site. If you want it to look less “bloggy,” switch the home page to a static page, and title your blog section as News. I did that here on my writer/director’s site.

All the rest is standard. No one dare charges set-up fees anymore, so that’s nothing special. 24 hour support is another standard practice, though if they actually provide that is another question.

I just sent an email to these guys and it was responded to in under 5 minutes, so that is impressive.

All in all, a very good deal. Sign up before Nov 22, 07, when the price goes back up to 6.95 USD a month.

Tags: web hosting, one-click installs, specials, sale, AN hosting

2 comments

I think RSS is great. I have been using RSS to keep in touch with what’s new at my favourite web sites for about 2 years now. It’s convenient, saves you lots of time, and is actually quite easy when you get the hang of it.

You’ve probably seen the acronym RSS on web sites. Sometimes it’s beside a little orange icon, like the one at left. Sometimes the words “Subscribe to this feed” are placed beside it.

If you’re curious, you may have clicked on the link and been taken to a weird-looking page, where most of the same content was displayed again but without the pretty formatting. Something like the page below.

That’s what happened to me the first, second and third time I clicked on the link. I scratched my head, felt stupid and left.

It took me a while to get the courage to go back and try it again, but since it’s my business and I am a research hound, I had to learn about it.

So I picked a morning where I wasn’t feeling pressured for time and typed the word I type most often into Google: “tutorial”. This I followed with the letters RSS.

I probably had to read about 10 articles before it started to make sense to me and I felt comfortable enough to try and set it up. Now I am a complete RSS addict, and I hope you become one too.

So here are my “Coles Notes” style cheat sheets on how to use RSS.

What is RSS good for?

To explain it simply, RSS is a way for you to find out when your favourite web sites have been updated – and even better – have these latest articles collected and displayed for you to read all from one spot.

It’s like having your own personal assistant whose job is to cut and clip out the latest articles from your favourite sites, arrange them all for you in an orderly fashion, and place them on your desk waiting for your imminent arrival. Now how handy is that?

How does it work?

You don’t need to worry about what it stands for or how it works. There are tons of articles explaining that if you are interested. What you need to care about is how to make it work for you.

The first thing you have to do is set up an account with a news reader, sometimes called news aggregator. It’s pretty easy; the hardest part is choosing the one you want because there are lots of good ones out there.

There are 2 types of readers: 1. those that are actual little programs that you download to your hard drive and run from your desktop, and 2. readers that run off the web. I suggest starting with the latter because they are free and don’t require a huge investment from you. Popular ones to try are: Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo and NewsGator.

For the sake of clarity I am going to only talk about how to use the Google Reader. This is the one I started using a few months ago, and am quite happy with. Since then it has become super popular. It doesn’t hurt that everyone knows the Google name either.

First thing you have to do is sign up with the Google Reader. Go to google.com/reader.

The “Sign In” area is on the right (see A). If you have a Gmail account, or Google account all ready, you can use that login and password to sign in. If you don’t, there is a link under the blue box (see B) that says:

“Not using Gmail or other Google Account services? Create an account now.”

Click on that and fill out the few requisite fields. That’s it – you now have a reader. PS. Don’t forget to save your password.

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10 comments