The WSJ wrote a how-to article yesterday for small business owners on how to create a web presence for a small business, from scratch and on the cheap.
The article says that it can be done for $10 and while I agree that a small business can do a lot on the web without spending a ton of money, trying to do it for only $10 will probably give you subpar results.
To save money on hosting, they recommend going with a free provider:
Fortunately, in the past year, a number of companies have begun providing hosting services free of charge. They often make money by charging for premium services or running ads on your Web pages.
Please, don’t let a hosting company run ads on your site, even if it means free hosting. This is unprofessional and a nuisance to your visitors. Besides, the ads will probably be targeted to the content on your site, meaning that you could be running ads for your competitors on your own web site!
Designing a site is more challenging and using a template provided by the hosting company is not an idea I’m in love with, but it’s much better than having no website at all.
Having your own domain name is something I really stressed during the last web marketing class that I taught. It’s so critical because it starts the aging clock on your domain (good for trust in search engines) and no matter how ugly or deficient your first website is, you can always get it upgraded and redesigned later.
This goes for blogs too–much better to take a little time to figure out how to use WordPress on your own domain rather than relying on a hosted WordPress blog or a Blogspot blog. That way, any links to your blog will boost the authority of your domain, rather than the wordpress.com or blogger.com domains.
Ads and Payment on Small Business Sites
The article goes on to talk about accepting payment via paypal on your site, which is a good idea and easy to set up. Then they recommend putting ads on your site; which is a bad idea for a small or local business.
A small business website’s purpose should be to generate sales and leads for the business, not to earn $10 a month in AdSense revenue while taking users to other sites.
SEO Talk
I’m very happy to see the article mention search engine optimization and I think that they bring up some good points, especially the recommendation to add your site to Google’s Local Business Center (the starting point for every local SEO campaign).
Ranking locally will take more than that, but it’s a good start.
On the other hand, the article doesn’t mention anything about link building. Even a perfectly optimized web site will fare poorly if nobody else is linking to it. For local sites, the magic number of links varies but it can be as low as 25. For more competitive markets it could be in the thousands.
Overall, it’s a decent article and I’m glad to see that SEO is getting mainstream treatment. Whether you hire someone or take the time to learn on your own, SEO holds great potential for small businesses.
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