The first critical steps. If you don't get this part right, the rest of the information on Promote Your Business Now won't do you any good. You may need a few domains. Then you need an place to host the site. Next is picking a content engine, adding the content and finally design.
Domains
Your domain is your business name. They go for under $10 a piece for .com's and usually less for the others. There are a lot more than just .com, .net and .org out there. You want to get a few that are connected to your business - but remember they won't do you any good if you don't use them. One strategy is to get one domain for your business and another with free information connected to your business. If you're a lawyer, you can have one business site and an additional site with free legal tips. If you're an online store, your second site would have free information and even interactivity. An online bookstore can have a second site with free recipes and ebooks (that they're allowed to give away, of course!). Your commercial site will usually end up in the business category and your information-interactive site will end up in better categories (like Free Legal Tips, Food and Cooking, or other hobby-sounding categories).
Content Engine!?
What's a content engine?? Your website needs to be run on some sort of platform. You want something that will allow your website to have lots of features (databases, interactivity and more) and will let you make changes from anywhere in the world. Internet software that does this is called a content engine.
The first choice you need to make is whether to go with commercial or open source content engines. Large companies will usually go with commercial software - there are some excellent ready-to-go content engines out there. A large company will prefer being able to pay the software company extra to help them get started.
Open source is gaining ground since 2000. Why pay for a content engine when there are a few free engines that are often better than the commercial ones? Spend your money on a programmer implementing it, not on the software itself! The most popular one out there is PHP Nuke. We use a flavor of it called Dragonfly.
I still don't get it, what is a content engine?? Ok, let's use Yahoo as an example. Yahoo has a directory of websites (Yahoo's first gift to the Internet!), but it also has tons of other features. Yahoo also has web mail, forums, chat, polls, articles, shopping and much more. That's an incredible content engine running it all. A good content engine will let your site have all of these features.
Now that you have your domains and you've picked a content engine, you add your content. That could mean adding articles to an information website or adding products to your ecommerce site. Get it done and you'll have something to market!
Hosting Your Site
You want to host your site with an Internet Service Provider who supports your content engine. If you use PHP Nuke, they should be familiar with it and the requirements that come with it. Find out how much it'll cost you per month and how much service will cost you. You don't need your own server at first - a few domains can be hosted without actually owning a server. The biggest mistake beginner's make is overdoing it on technology, programming and web hosting. You can always upgrade things once you have some experience. A good content engine will run itself and let you spend your time adding content and processing orders!
