Website Technician

Want to start an online business? It can be fairly easy to do, but will require a bit of work. How much work depends on a couple of factors. A traditional HTML based site requires a bit steeper learning curve than a WordPress Blog as a Web Site. The easiest approach to an HTML based site is to find one of the thousands of templates available, many totally free of charge. I have tools available to help set up a Wordpress Blog as a Website.

Domain Name

A domain name is your address on the Internet. The domain name to this site is www.WebsiteTechnician.com. I recommend you own your domain name, not tagging on to a free service that has control of your business. What if your business takes off, hundreds of customers bookmark the link to your site. If it is part of a free hosting site and that host folds up, you are out of business. With your own domain name, that name comes with you. Picking a domain name can be a bit of a science. If you are up on to speed Search Engine Optimization, you probably have key words that your site will emphasize. If a domain name is available using those key words, get it. One of my other sites targetes the kew words: Barbeque Sauce Recipe, but barbequesaucerecipe.com was taken, so I got barbequesaucerecipe.net. Had the .net had been taken I would have gone with a hyphen in there somewhere.

Hosting

I use and recommend Lunarpages for a web host. They run $4.95 a month hosting specials all of the time and they will give you a free domain name for life, as long as your account is with them. The domain name is registered to you and is completely portable. They also use cPanel for site management. I’ve built sites for friends using another famous host. That host had a confusing layer upon layer of things to navigate just to get to some simple feature like adding email addresses. Lunarpages also includes $700 worth of free software. The best software there is Logo Creator by Laughingbirdsoftware. My logo above was made with it. There are a couple of other items there worth getting.

Another big plus for Lunarpages is the Unlimited bandwidth they allow. This is huge, allowing the use of embedded videos with no worry of extra fees associated with exceeding bandwidth limits.

Click here to check out Lunarpages for yourself

Payment Processor
Okay, now that you have your domain name and hosting, you will need to have a payment processor that will take payments for you.  The only way to go here is with PayPal. Almost everyone buying things online uses it, so there is no need to fight that trend by using something else. If you are just selling one or two items you can use PayPal’s ‘Buy It Now’ buttons and you are in business. If you have a lot of different things to sell I would recommend Mal’s eCommerce. I use their free shopping cart service and have a guide to setting it up. I even offer a free button code generator if you have Excel.

Using these building blocks, you can get a business started fairly quickly.  Promote it by adding good content and then get the word out. Try using SocialMarker.com or Traffic Bug to spread the word. There is a list of bookmarking sites there that you will need to set up accounts with, but that goes quickly.
Steve