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Hard Knocks Guide to
Choosing
a Web Hosting
Company
Hard Knocks Guide to
Setting Up a Website
By now, we should have an acceptable and
possibly a nice looking website and should have contracted a web
hosting company to host it. We should have loaded our files and
the site is up and running.
The first day will be exciting, particularly
because you realized that you were able to finish a complete web
site and now, it’s all there. You are totally mesmerized by such
an achievement.
Your web hosting company will have given you
your IP address and you will be able to upload your files from
your own computer by using your assigned control panel. This
address is usually www.yourname.com/menu
and this contains all the sections that you can use for managing
your website.
Your web hosting company provides you with an
online manual to refer to, and teaches you how to use each
features in the control panel. If you have problems or do not know how to use some of
the features, this is the right time to shoot as many questions as
you can to your hosting company’s support team. They should be
watching you while you are on your way and once you become
familiar with these functions, you have good chances of having no
serious problems with your website later on.
You have to realize that your web hosting
company is
probably serving thousands of Web sites and you will be better off
if you reserve your support needs to major problems than using
their time on petty questions which can be answered from the
online manual.
Once you have uploaded your HTML files,
whether you used FrontPage or Adobe Pagemill, or Dreamweaver, view the website yourself and look at it
from a
new visitor’s perspective. Pretend to be the viewer. Be as
objective as possible. Imagine that you are surfing the web and you accidentally stumbled on this
site -- will you like it at
first glance? Or will you immediately jump to another site and
plan never to return to this website? If you want to look further,
are there directions to follow? Is it easy to navigate from page
to page? Is there anything inside that will induce you to come
back? Are the links working properly?
Some of your links may not work and some
buttons may not have been linked properly. Get back to your drawing
board and check everything. Your site has to function
efficiently before you tell anyone about it. It doesn’t matter
if you spend the whole day or two, making revisions on your html
files. Bear in mind that first impressions will last; and if the
viewers' perception is not good, then you can kiss them goodbye
forever. You should make every
possible way to bring people in and keep them coming back.
When everything is running fine, it’s time
to announce your presence in the World Wide Web.
Let us take into consideration that we are a
small home-based business with very thin pocket books. Therefore,
sophisticated media advertising will be out of the question. No
million-dollar SuperBowl ads for us. We
will have to promote the site without fanfare. Slowly, without the
big she-bang that you hear from the deep-pocketed sites. Everything will
have to be done, well, not necessarily the hard way.
1. The
first set of people who should know will definitely be your family
and relatives.
Ask them to help you promote the site to their
friends. Ask them for suggestions, too.
Send email invitations to friends whose email
addresses you may have filed. Ask referrals from them and to help
you spread the word to others.
These contacts can generate you a good number
of hits on the first few days as everyone on your list will be
flocking to see what’s new about you and at this point, you will
be in a position to notice how effective is your site by the way
you get responses, comments and suggestions and if you have a
newsletter, subscriptions may start coming in.
2. The
newsletter is one way of keeping as well as getting them to come
back to your site.
It is recommended that whatever your product
is, always offer a free newsletter. You can have a daily, weekly,
bi-weekly, tri-weekly, bi-monthly or monthly newsletters depending
on how you want to spend your time.
Definitely, if you have other things to do in
your website, avoid the daily schedule otherwise you will easily
run out of new ideas to write about. Also, your subscribers can
get fed up in a very short time. Many
subscribers use the free email services like hotmail and yahoo
and a daily newsletter from you can easily fill up their
allocated kb and you will have bounced-backs or undelivered
emails. Besides,. seeing your newsletter in their emails everyday would
eventually trigger their finger to reply and type “remove” and
you’re gone.
We recommend a weekly, a bi-weekly or a monthly time
slot because the newsletters will not be seen for a while between
issues. There is that feeling of missing the issue. The key lesson
is to make your newsletter valuable as possible, that people will
actually look forward to getting it.
Also, try to make your newsletter short. If
you accept advertising in your newsletter, allocate only three or
four at a time. People do not like to scroll very long newsletters
which goes up to fifteen pages when printed with so much
advertising. We recommend that advertising should be limited to at
least four lines of 65 characters including the hyperlinks. Even
if you have an HTML version of your newsletter.
While your website starts attracting new
visitors everyday, you must keep coming up with new ways of
promoting your site.
3. You can print flyers for distribution in
your neighborhood and areas near you.
Make sure that
the lay-out of your flyers projects a professional image of your
Web site.
4. Send out Press Releases to as many
newspapers, local or national media that you can think of.
Be wary
though. Before you send out those news releases, always direct
your press release to the right section editor. You can check it
out in their directories or their websites. Making the mistake of sending your press
release to the wrong person may annoy the person and accuse you of
“spamming”.
5. Print nicely designed business cards, with
your website URL on it. A
well-designed card is the mirror of your site. Give one to
everyone you know, and to everyone that you meet.
6. Talk about your website whenever you have
the opportunity to meet new acquaintances.
7. Register or submit your site to the search
engines. If you are not familiar what they are, these are the
website that keeps directories of almost every website in the
Internet and where people go to search for websites in categories
that they need.
The most popular search engine at this time
is www.google.com There used
to be so many, however, to be listed at Google.com or Yahoo.com
would be good enough. Yahoo
is quite well known as a tough engine to get listed with (it
sometimes takes up to six months to get listed), however
you can always find a way.
Being listed in the search engines won’t be
of much help if your goal is just to get listed. You must aim to
be listed among the first 10 or 25. How do you do this? That will
be another Hard Knock’s Guide Topic.
8. Go back to the search engines and search
for websites with similar category as you have. When you find a
long list, that means you have that much competition. However, you
can move them to your side. Click on their websites, contact them
and request for a reciprocal link. Reciprocal linking works well
in search engine link popularity and can increase your ranking.
Reciprocal links, however should be limited to sites that are
related to the theme of your Web site. Linking with unrelated
Web sites can pull down the ranking of your own.
9. Participate in discussion forums. A lot of
websites provide message boards to attract traffic. You can post
messages and invitation to your site in these message boards.
Some sites you can go to are
Inc.com, About.com, MSBNC, and of course, PowerHomeBiz.com
There are also business chat rooms where you
can introduce your website to anyone in your product line.
10. Place an ad in Free For All classified
ads.
This may not be so effective
and could flood you with business opportunity spammers but it can give
you the feeling that
your site is getting the popularity that it is supposed to have.
All these will be enough to keep you busy 16
- 18
hours a day and may never end as long as you are on the Internet.
You should always be looking for new areas where you can promote
with minimal expenses. Remember, this is hard knock’s guide and
we are not talking about spending our start up funds where we can
do for free. If the business starts earning revenue with minimal
expenditure—why not?
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