This week I thought I would write a quick 4 step guide that will help people get their business online. I’ve kept it simple and easy enough to understand so that those who aren’t in the know will now have a starting point with a path to follow.

Register a Domain Name

A Domain Name is the first ingredient needed when getting your business online. Think of a Domain Name in the same way as your home or business address, it’s where people will come and visit you. There are lots of different extensions available however the most popular domain extension that businesses in Australia use is ‘.com.au’, for example our business is Crucial Cloud Hosting and our domain name is www.crucial.com.au. The ‘.au’ part of the domain stands for Australia and this helps people identify Crucial as an Australian business.

Choose a hosting provider

Your web hosting is the next ingredient needed to get your business online. There are thousands of web hosting providers globally and hundreds offering Australian hosting so how do you work out which will offer you the service that you need? The first thing to do is establish what is important to you, is the website for your business or a personal blog? Will you accept orders from  your website or just provide information? Answering these simple questions will start to point you in the right direction. As a business your priority should be to have the highest uptime, knowledgeable support and the fastest page load times available. Other important factors to consider are Disk Space, Bandwidth and how many email accounts you can set up on your web hosting account.

Build a website

The final step to getting your business online is to create a website. When creating a website you can build the website yourself using templates or you can use a CMS system with the most popular being WordPress and Joomla. If you’re not really the hands on type there are hundreds of web designers able to build your website for you or you can take it that step further and work with a Digital Agency who can manage the whole design and build process that includes your branding.

Online Marketing

Now that you have your website online you can start looking at marketing it. There are many different ways to do this but lets look at the most common.  Search Engine Optimisation is the art in which you optimise your website (On Page) to rank higher in search engines and you also build links to your website or offer resources for people to link back to you (Off Page). While most people focus on page 1 rankings I believe that Online Marketing should be there to drive traffic to your website because after all traffic sells not rankings.

Social Media

Social Media has become a lot more popular over the last few years and it’s driven by the fact that consumers now control the marketing and agencies have had to take a roll where they rank social influence a lot higher when planning and executing their marketing strategies. The most popular social sites that businesses use are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and if you offer products Pinterest may be of interest to you as well.

For those who are looking for that starting point I hope this article has been useful and you now have a starting point and are ready to take that next step with your business!