Are You Developing Your
Virtual Real Estate or Just Sitting on Vacant Land by Joe Reinbold
Are You Developing Your
So you found yourself a service provider, got 50mb of space and created and uploaded your home page and you are ready to do business online. Now what are you going to do with the rest of your approximately 5,000 pages of online real estate?
Getting your own site and domain is like having
your own little strip mall in your own hometown. But in this case you will
have
visitors from all over the world on a regular
basis. So the first thing you have to do is determine what kind of storefronts
you
are going to have at your complex. I refer to
your own site as "real estate" because that is exactly what I think it
is. Whether
you have a 10mg site, 50mg site or a 100mg site,
you have to consider it as and manage it as a piece of property to develop,
if you are seriously going to operate a business
online. You wouldn't buy that strip mall down the street and leave
all the
storefronts vacant. So why would you consider
doing it with your online property?
What you need to do, and this should be done ideally
prior to purchasing your online property, is lay out a plan. Figure out
exactly what you are going to market and what
the theme of your online site is going to be. Doing it prior to purchasing
your
property will also help you determine just what
size site you are going to start with. For economic reasons, you may want
to
start with a smaller site and expand your space
as your business grows. Most hosting companies make it very easy for expansion
and the good ones don't charge you additional set up fees when you want
to add additional space.
After you set up your primary page, which will
be your home page, what additional information or services are you going
to add to the content of your store. One you might think about is a biographical
page, telling your prospective customers about you and your business. It
doesn't have to be detailed, a summary will do just fine. We added one
to our site recently if you need an example: http://www.homebizlink.com/about.htm
Dealing in the world of email and URL's is sort of anonymous
most of the time, so adding a little personalization
to your site for your visitors can help them to get to know you.
Free services are always great to have on your
site to attract potential customers. And it doesn't really matter what
type
site you are putting up. There are some freebies
that you can offer that will help any site build traffic. Here's a couple
that you might consider:
Free Classified Ads to 5000 Sites:
http://www.homebizlink.com/freecl.htm
Free FFA Links Page (Download site):
http://www.submitad.com/files/ffalinks.zip
Give away a free e-book on starting your own online
business:
http://www.homebizlink.com/ebook.htm
Start your own bookstore and highlight/recommend
books geared towards your site theme. We just put one up and sold several
books within the first three days. Example at:
http://www.homebizlink.com/bkstore.htm
Give away free vacation certificates:
http://www.homebizlink.com/freevac.htm
One of the things that you can do for your site
is sell advertising. Even if you don't have your own online ezine, you
have all this online real estate to sell space
on. Start your own mall and sell links/ads, or set a page up and sell business
card size ads. Sell full page ads. Remember what
I said earlier, if you have 50mg of site space, you probably have an average
of 5,000 pages available if all you have is a
home page up. You can do whatever you want with that space, sell it, give
ads
away as a bonus, exchange links, etc. You also
name the price you want to sell the space for.
One thing to remember when you are looking at
space for your business is that the only things that take up that space
are
the pages that you upload to it. If you are involved
in affiliate programs or network marketing programs online, normally they
furnish you a reseller or promotional site along
with your membership. All you have to do at your site is place a link with
your ID number. The pages they assign to you
are not on your site even though it might look that way. So don't over
estimate
the amount of space that you might need.
So you need to treat your online business just
like any other business. Do a little planning before you jump right in.
It will
pay in the long run. You can always expand, but
you don't want to be sitting there with vacant signs on three quarters
of
your space.
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Article by Joe Reinbold, owner of The Entrepreneur's
Home
Business Link http://www.homebizlink.com Need
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