A Work From Home Guide

STEP 9: Build Your Own Website.

This may be the most effective way to promote your home business. As you gain more experience in marketing your site, you will find out that having your own webiste is a great way to advertise your home business.

This might sound intimidating, but creating a website is easy. In a nutshell, here are the steps you would need to do and guidelines you need to follow, when creating your site:

1. Establish Your Domain Name
Securing your business name in the internet is one of the most important step in establishing your presence in the internet world. Thousands of domain names are being registered everyday so you need to register yours as soon as you can.

Here are some guidelines that you may use in choosing a name:

Click here to see if the domain name you've chosen is available.

There's a lot of domain name registrars on the net and you'll find varying prices for domain registration. Personally, I recommend BizEasyDomain.com . It's backed by one of the trusted and most affordable domain registrar on the net. I use it to host this website.

For $7.85 a year, which is a fraction of the usual cost of registering a domain name, you can already secure your business name.

Make sure you're prompt in renewing your domain name every year, otherwise, you will lose your name and that will have a big impact on your online business.

So you won't get caught unaware, use a domain registrar that provides this auto renew feature. You will find it handy and very useful when your renewal date comes.

Click here now to see if the domain name you've chosen is available.

2. Design and Create Your Website
Your site is a window to your home business, so you would need a plan on how you want to showcase your business. You can get consultants to work on your site or you can build it on your own.

While designing your site, you would need some guidelines with regards to planning and creation of your site. Here are some pointers. I suggest you put every effort on planning your site as this will save you the time later:

• decide on your site's mission. your site should be able to answer why your website exist.
• decide what your target audience will be. what demographic group are you targeting and how will you provide value to that demographic
• you've probably heard this a lot of time- "content is king". it still is. with the above 2 questions answered, you will know what content you will provide in your site. you should have valuable and fresh information so your target audience will visit your site again and again.
  

Now that you have your site's mission, you're now ready to build your site. You have several options: (1) get customized professional services (2) build the site yourself or (3) buy package website creation services.

You can find professional companies on the web that can provide you web creation and design services. I personally build my sites and I use Adobe GoLive as my tool, so I can't recommend one. But I think you can find freelance programmers who can give you quotations at www.elance.com.

If you decide to build it on your own, you would need to get familiar with HTML even if you're going to build your website using site generating tools such as MS Frontpage or Adobe GoLive. You don't need to be an expert but just have an understanding of the basic HTML tags will do.

Search the web to find sites that offer free tutorials on HTML and you're going to find a lot of these sites. One of the best self-help sites around is www.webmonkey.com

This is the third option- you can purchase website creation services to help you easily create your site and launch it immediately. Check out WebsiteWizard an "all-in-one" web hosting package of tools that anyone, from beginner to expert, can use to develop, host and grow an income-generating website fast.

3. Launch Your Site
When you have completed your website and you're satisfied with how the site showcases your home business, you're now ready to launch it.

Search for a company that will host your site. Criteria in choosing the best hosting company will depend on what your priorities will be, but the following criteria are a must for a hosting company:

• Service Reliability
• Set-up and account activation
  
• Site access
• Backups and Monitoring
• Technical Support
  

You have several options for web hosting. I suggest getting a paid host rather than free hosting. Paid hosting will make your site look professional because your site will be free of banner ads or pop-ups.

Free Hosting
If you're working on a tight budget you can have your site hosted for free. You will find out as you search the internet, that there are FREE webhosting services available for you. The only catch in using these free webhosting sites is that your website will have advertising pop-ups or banners. Some of the most popular free webhosting sites are

• geocities.com (owned by Yahoo.com), has a sitebuilder that you can use and you won't need a knowledge of HTML!
  
  
• 123freehost...yes, it is free, and yes you can upgrade, but it does give you a free webpage (with a contact page) a place for your logo, and photo, just "Great" for that "Exposure" and "link"..to your selling items...or announcements...and very easy to use!..just follow the steps, and you are up and running...