The Fastest Way To Raise Your Online Profile
This briefing note takes you through the basic options for getting your business online. It assumes no prior knowledge but does assume you have read the briefing notes Do I Need A Website? and you have answered or at least looked at the 20 or so Questions To Ask Before Building A Website.
Here’s what we’re going to cover:
- First Steps Online - aimed at complete beginners
- Easy and Low Cost - things to do for very little time or money
- Slightly Less Easy - if you have a bit more time and money
- More Complex Solutions - the longer, more costly approaches
STOP right now. Put this down and go and make a list of web pages that you really like - use bookmarks or favourites and put them in a separate folder. Also mark a couple that you really hate. Come back when you’ve done it.
Done that? Good. You’ll need them later. Let’s carry on…
First Steps Online
I’m going to assume here that you are new to all of this web stuff, that you want to have some sort of web place where people can contact you. If you’re just putting a toe in the water, these are the suggestions for you.
Get a Google email address
I thought I’d seen everything until one day I met someone who asked me rather sheepishly ‘How do I get a personal email address?’. Turns out she was leaving work after 20 yrs or so and had always used her work email for everything.
So, first, get a Google email address. Even if you already have several others. Why? Because it opens the gateway to a lot of Google goodness that we are going to use later on - for free.
Go to Google and click on the top right (‘Sign In’) to start an account. Google with give you a free email address that looks like this ‘yourname@googlemail.com’. Later on you will discover that mail sent to ‘yourname@gmail.com’ also works.
You now have a Google account which means we can use all their free tools to help you online. More on this later.
Next find the Google Profile page and fill in as much as you can - publish it. We will return to this later.
Use LinkedIn
The cheapest and quickest way to get represented on the web with a professional looking bio is to get your LinkedIn profile 100% complete. Follow the instructions here, here and here to create a crisp professional bio that shows off your skills and abilities. Oh and here. Top it off with a good photo of yourself.
When you’ve finished, logout of LinkedIn and navigate to the public view of your profile. Notice that there is a handy PDF button where people can get a copy of your profile. Click on it and see what happens. Keep working on this until you are happy with how you present yourself.
You will notice that LinkedIn offer you the chance to customise the URL of your profile. Make sure you do this until you have a URL like this http://www.linkedin.com/in/YOURNAME. For a laugh, here is my LinkedIn profile. You now have your first ‘website’.
You can do lots of things with this URL but I suggest that you add it to your email signature file so that it appears under your name in every email you send. This way, contacts can click through to your ‘site’ to learn more about you. Read the business card briefing note for more hints about your contact strategy.
Make a Squidoo page about your business
Again, experimenting with easy and cheap ways to get online…
Take a look at Squidoo. It is very easy to use and allows you to rapidly put up a web page about your business or even about you. It’s free and well indexed by Google so there is every chance that a Squidoo page with your name on it would get thrown to the top of Google search results.
Make an Amazon Wish List
An Amazon account is free and easy to open (you don’t have to buy anything). Make sure you open it using your real name. Then create a wish list filled with items or books related to your business. Make sure you leave the settings on the wish list so that it is visible to all.
After a while, a Google search on your name will start returning your Amazon wish list near to the top of the search results.
You can get really creative with this and create lists of ‘Ten Best Project Management Resources’ etc. Again, this associates you with those items and helps you figure in search results.
Start a company Facebook page
Facebook has reputation as less professional than networks like LinkedIn BUT Facebook have 500 million accounts and growing. There is every chance that your customers could be spending large amounts of time using this software, indeed for many people Facebook is the web.
Smart companies are now creating Facebook pages where they post updates and invite people to become ‘fans’. It allows a much more direct interaction with the Facebook users among your customers.
Easy and Low Cost
All of the suggestions so far make use of free software and templates used by others. If you want to go further than this to create something a bit more customised then here are some options.
All of the companies below will host your website for free. All you have to do is take more of an interest in the appearance and features of your site. I know you’re wondering but there really is no catch. They offer free services as a way of attracting large numbers to their site - some will buy advertising and some will buy premium accounts with more features.
Free templates - Blogger + Google Docs
Remember that Google email address? If you have a dig around the other tools that Google offer your will come across Blogger and Google Docs. You can use all of these to help you create your first real website. Google Docs allows you to upload your Office documents to the Google servers. This means you are able to access these documents from any computer in the world that will let you login to your Google account. This is very useful if you are travelling AND it also means that you can add presentations and pictures to your Blogger or Google Web sites.
Blogger is Google’s software for producing a blog but it does not have to be used for that. You can use it to create a set of linked pages and arrange it so that anyone who visits the site sees only these pages. Voila, a website!
Free templates - Wordpress
At Wordpress you can start a website of your own using some fantastic and free templates. Wordpress is also blogging software but, again, you can set the site so that it is just a set of linked pages and people who visit your site see only these pages.
Sidebar: What is a blog? *A blog is a ‘weblog’ that works in a similar way to a journal. You make dated entries in your journal and the most recent entry shows at the top. There are infinite uses. You might tell an interesting story, point people to cool suff you have found, add pictures of your kids, write an online diary, comment on politics or share cake recipes. Many blogs allow visitors to comment on what you write, allowing for interesting conversations to develop. Examples: Lifehacker, Daring Fireball, 43Folders, Bird Droppings
Free templates - Posterous
Posterous is a lovely looking blog software site that handles photos, video and audio really well. If you have a very visual business or lots of nice products to display then I highly recommend Posterous . It has fewer theming options than Wordpress or Blogger but it is much easier to create a static website using Posterous and if great design is your thing, take a look. Tumblr is very similar. Very quick to set up and looks beautiful although aimed firmly at those who wish to blog.
An example which isn’t completely free but does offer beautiful and very easy to use websites is Square Space. Well worth taking a look.
Get A Free Website From Google and BT
Check this out. A completely free website funded by BT and Google. I guess the idea is that they will give you a free one and when the funding runs out in a year or two they will ask you for a few pounds to continue with it. As far as I can see there is no upfront commitment and you'll risk nothing by looking at the deal. Here is what they say: Why is it free? Because we're working with Google & BT we're able to offer you a free website for 2 years, after that you'll only have to pay a few pounds to renew your domain name for a further 2 years - you're not tied in to a contract and we won't put ads on your site without your permission. Getting British Business Online
Buy your own website address
The big drawback with everything I’ve suggested so far is that the ‘address’ of your site will be fairly long and possibly unfriendly, certainly quite hard to communicate on the phone. The solution is to buy your very own website address and point it at one of these sites. When people type in your web address they are automatically routed to the site you have created in one of these places.
Sidebar: What is a website address? A website address like ‘www.yourname.co.uk’ is really a long number which acts as routing instructions. When you type it into a web browser, you are shown whatever the web address is pointed at. To create a website you actually need to buy two things - a bit of space connected to the internet and then a web address that will point towards it. If you buy just the address then you can point it anywhere on the web, anywhere. To your Wordpress site, to your LinkedIn page or just to a blank wall.
How do you buy a website address? That’s easy. Go to someone like Names and use their search facility to find and register your website address. But before you do there is a potential problem.
Most web addresses that feature common English words have already been registered by someone else. This means you need to be creative in devising one AND you need to search quite hard to find a name that has not been registered. You can do a search at sites like Names. Navigate to the front page and you will see a large friendly box ‘Domain Name Search’. Enter the name you are looking to register and they will tell you whether it is free and how much it is. If it is free then buy it there and then. Search for the same name too many times and someone will register it instead of you. Yes, that happens.
How much? Expect to pay less than £10 for a ‘.co.uk’ web address and less than £25 for a ‘.com’ address. This money is a rental fee - you are renting the name for two years and after that you will have to renew your rent if you want to carry on using it.
Sidebar: Who owns YOUR domain? Seriously, who owns ‘www.yourname.co.uk’ and ‘www.yourname.com’. If you don’t and they are available then grab them now. One day, very soon, your personal site will be the gateway to how we do business on the web. Imagine a facility or a device where everything you do online comes together in one place. And apart from that, how cool would it be for your customers to put your name into Google and find a website about you and your business really easily?
Slightly Less Easy
For those with more time and more money.
Once you get to this point you are ready to buy some space, on a computer somewhere, that is connected to the internet. You can then create webpages to sit on this space or pay someone to create them for you. You link your web address(domain name) to this space and when I type your web address into my browser, like magic, I see whatever you have put in that space - pages, video, audio, movies, files to download etc.
We call this space a ‘hosting account’ because, for a fee, someone agrees to act as the host for your webpages by letting you put them on their computer. Bear in mind this might be anywhere in the world - it doesn’t really matter where it is, only that you link it properly to your web address.
If you buy a web name from Names (above) they will offer you the chance to get some space (a hosting account) at the same time.
Your very own space on the web
So. You have a couple of gigabytes of space on a computer somewhere on the globe. Now what? Here are some options, starting with the most expensive and working down to the cheapest.
Pay a web designer to create web pages and upload them to your space
I said this was the most expensive but of course you could ask your nephew to design your website. As long as you don’t actually want any customers that is. The least hassle but most expensive way is to pay a web designer to design you a set of web pages and upload them to your space on the web. Although this saves you the hassle of having to code your own pages, actually finding one can be a pain, for you and your wallet.
Sidebar: Finding a web designer. It’s just like finding a builder. Ask around and then look at examples of their work. Maybe your friends know one. Dig out that list of great websites I asked you to start and visit them all to see if you can find out who designed them. Hint: Often if you scroll to the very bottom of the home page you will see a link to the designer. Sometimes it’s on the ‘about’ or ‘contact’ pages. Eventually you will find examples of work that you like. Contact as many as you can asking about rates etc. And just like a builder, the way they handle that first contact is the same way they will treat the job so be sensible about who you choose.
How much? Ha! Anything from £50 to £500 to £5000 and much more. That’s why you need to ask around. And why you need to be very clear about exactly what you are asking them to do.
Use free templates and do it yourself
There are many places on the web offering free templates. You could choose a set you like and fill them in. If you are willing to pay, there are also other places who will sell you a very decent template for your site.
Create from scratch using web building software
Feeling creative? Got a lot of time? You can create your very own webpages using software like Rapidweaver or Dreamweaver or iWeb and then upload those to your web space. Your costs will be the time it takes plus the cost of buying and learning the software.
Learn to code
Why use web building software when you can learn to code? All you need is the text software that came with your computer - TextEdit on the Mac or Note Pad on a PC. Web pages are just text files. It’s the web browser that makes them look nice. The actual files themselves are very plain text files written in a code called HTML - HyperText Markup Language. It’s perfectly possible to learn this language and code pages yourself.
What’s the catch? Thought you’d never ask. It will take you ages, time that you should be spending with customers or looking for customers. And while HTML is easy to learn, using it creatively is best left to the professionals.
If you are curious though, the best place to start is with two books by Liz Castro Creating A Webpage with HTML and then HTML Visual Quickstart.
Don’t Miss The Point
While all of this online stuff is funky and cutting edge be careful not to miss the point. A great website does the job of pre-selling your customers, allowing you to share information and one day, make sales while you sleep.
It won’t do any of these things though without great content. It’s great content that brings people back and great content that makes the site work for you.
How to get great content
If you want to turn your website into a Marketing Hub for your business. I recommend you take a good look at a Website Toolkit written by Robert Middleton. It’s a comprehensive guide to putting together a website that becomes a marketing hub for your business. It is worth the purchase price just for the examples and links he includes. Take a look: The Website Toolkit.
And finally - update your Google profile
Here is mine. Take a look. Like most Google things it’s pretty stark and obviously designed by engineers rather than designers but it does tie together a whole bunch of my online stuff.
It’s totally free. It enables you to tell Google (and the world) about your site and you. And it improves your chances of appearing in search results.
Take this final step to tie everything together. You have nothing to lose.
Does this work? Well let’s put my neck on the line. Here is a saved search on my name. Have a poke around and see whether you think I have taken my own advice or not.
All the best with taking your first steps online.
Andrew
