An Internet Presence for your Business

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An Internet Presence for your Business

When you start your own venture, the number of choices you have to make, to get the thing going can be quite overwhelming. One of the issues that inevitably comes up will be whether you want, or need an internet presence. This decisions involves a lot of choices and considerable thought. Besides that, it will require time and money. Not a lot of money, but still money, when the supply is limited!

The two questions you must inevitably ask are:

	Is an Internet Presence necessary, useful and beneficial for my Business? and,
	How much does it cost me to set myself up on the internet and give myself an internet presence"?

Whether you consider an Internet presence depends on your type of business. If you start with a "captive consultancy venture", meaning that you have one or two clients which might come from your former job, then your Internet presence is, initially, of little importance. Your clients know you, and they know what they can expect from you. But, do you want to remain a company with only the clients you could salvage from your former job? You don't have to be specially clever to see, that this would be a high risk strategy. Even if your ambitions for your company are limited, you will have to acquire, in the medium to long term, some new clients.

Having started with few clients from which you need to grow, an Internet presence suddenly becomes an important issue. There is no doubt, the internet is the medium with which you can create an almost instant business presence. The Internet is also a medium with which you can exploit the excellent customer relationship, you have with your initial clients. How else could you tell prospective clients about what you can do and how you can improve their own business? It is like having a permanent advertisement in a nationwide and international newspaper.

Agreed, making your site generally known, on major search engines, will take time and will be a difficult task. But there are ways to overcome and help with that. Some of the products, we show will help you with that. Because it takes time, starting your Internet presence early in your business life cycle, will be positive!

Our suggestions shown below are not only for an Internet related business. They can be used for establishing an Internet presence for any business.

If, on the other hand, you want to start an Internet business, where you sell goods and services through the Internet, you have to be far more deliberate in how you approach this issue. Whether you will make money with that, is another question. However , potentially you can make money fastest and with an absolute minimum cash investment.

There is no guarantee that you will succeed and anyone telling you, that it does not require some serious effort to set up, is "bending the truth more than just a little". The amount of money you can make with an internet business will vary with your effort, the products or services you select and various other factors. In that respect the Internet is not different from any other business.

Let us summarize what you need to start an Internet business:

	You will require a lot of effort, so called sweat equity! This is especially true in the early stages. You could likely have a more relaxed business life later on, when you have set everything up and when you mainly keep the operation running smoothly.
	You require persistence and tenacity, discipline and thoroughness. You have to be optimistic, but not euphoric!
	You require very little money to start the business.

In the end, a lot has to do with your personal effort and investment of time and you cannot put a price on that. Your desires and aspirations will determine this.

The financial investment is, however, something quite different. There are, obviously, many ways to do this, but the one, with the products we we outline below, we know, works. It is made up of the services and associated costs shown below.

Setting up and maintaining an Internet Site with your own Domain

You need to register a domain name. One reliable company is directnic.com - annual fees for a domain costs $15.00 a year and if you want the advertising banner removed (you will need banner free hosting) it will cost another $15.00. The site is easy to use, clean and also offers a simple web builder. You can leave your website on their server and as long as you keep it reasonably small (15-20 pages), it will be fine there. The support by this company is superb. This is excellent for a start-up and you save yourself the money for the ISP below, because directnic is your ISP. They also have a site builder to create your website and they have a site submission program so you can start submitting your site to the search engines. They also offer a Premium Service for around $12.00 per quarter with more than enough e-mails and disk space for any start up.	US$ 30.00 (per year) Domain name registration only US$ 15.00 per year or $12.00 per Quarter for Premium Service
Once you grow, you will need a reliable ISP (Internet Service Provider, where you "host" your website - you will leave the domain registration with directnic). There are numerous good ones available. The ones we have experience with are: XO (formerly Concentric) XO offers a webbuilder (where you can build your websites. It is very easy to use and saves you the costs of having to purchase something like Front Page) They have hosting packages available from, monthly $15.95 to 375.00. The $15.95 package (2000mb/20 e-mails) will be enough for most people. They are ultra reliable. iPowerWeb is an excellent hosting company. They offer you a monthly subscription for US$ 5.95 per month, if you pay one year in advance, and no set up fee. You will get 2000mb, 500 e-mails, SSL, a marketing package, statistics and lots more. It is an outstanding deal. Marketing and search engine submission. Very reliable. Netfirms Web Hosting is a company specializing in hosting small businesses' web sites.They offer you a monthly subscription for US$ 8.95 per month, if you pay one year in advance($107.40), and no set up fee. You will get 2000mb, 100 e-mails, a website starter CD and lots more. PowWeb Hosting- 2,000 MB + 2 Months FREE! - $7.77/month! . The subscription is only $7.77 per month and you get 2 months free if you pay a year in advance. PowerWeb offers a site builder and a marketing package. A good reliable company. They have always specials Jumpline.com Premium Web Hosting for as low as $2.50/mo. They offer plans from US$ 9.95 per month with 500 Mb/5000mb per month/75 pop3 e-mail accounts. One interesting special offer is that you can host 6 domains for only US$ 14.95 per month. your-site.com - Fast, Reliable Web Hosting - $5.00/mo This company offers 50 Mb and 6 Gb of traffic for US$ 5.00 per month. There is free set-up provided you pay a year in advance. The 25 e-mail accounts should be more than enough. HostRocket.Com - Web Hosting This company offers 1000 Mb and 5 Gb of traffic for US$ 6.95 per month (two year contract - otherwise $14.95) with no set-up fee. There is free set-up provided you pay a year in advance. Unlimited e-mails. Offers from Hosting Companies constantly change and it is worthwhile to look around, before you commit yourself. Generally, the best deals require one year payment in advance.	From US$ 60.00 - $299.40 per year
You should have an autoresponder. Most of the web hosting companies above offer one as part of their package. But, if you want to get more sophisticated, or when your site picks up traffic ( you can argue that, you have to have a good autoresponder and mailing list/client manager otherwise your site will never pick-up traffic! This is a valid argument!) you would consider someone like aWeber who offers an integrated suite. aWeber also offers some interesting articles on the subject. Another company is "getresponse.com". The offers are rather similar and reliability and support is very good with both companies.	(aWeber) US$ 179.40 (or US$ 19.95 if you pay monthly) US$ 149.00 a year
The SuperAffiliate Business Book (US$47.00), How to create and Sell Products On-line (US$127.00), and The Lazy Man's Guide to Online Business (US$ 29.00)	US$ 203.00
The APS Accounting System or the QuickBooks Accounting System	US$ 99.00
If you want to increase your Web Site Traffic through better positioning in Search Engines, a WebPosition Gold makes it easy to monitor your search positions & to improve your rankings! Don't be buried in last place, move up to first place!	US$ 149.00

Given, that you create something with which you can potentially earn several tens of thousands a month, this is an amazingly low amount. Moreover, the total start up costs do not all come up at the very beginning, but are probably spread out over three or six months.

One of the aspects you have to consider is that when you have a web site, you will have to maintain it and keep it up to date. The Internet is full of "site-cadavers", web sites that have not been maintained. The maintenance might be easy, if the site is simply a "I-am-here-and-see-what-we-do" site. Regular check and update every two month will be sufficient.

If you sell over the web, then the parameters and efforts needed to maintain the site are obviously quite different!