So you’re starting a business but you have no online presence. You know you need one, but you don’t know how to do it or what to do. Let’s go over a few steps you can take to go from no web presence to a well known and trusted business across the web.
Phase One: Be Present
Let’s start from 0 to 1 – no web presence to some presence somewhere. You definitely want to at least get this far if you plan on growing your business to any degree in the modern era.
Start an Instagram
An Instagram account is probably one of the easiest ways to get yourself seen online. With a page to get followers, your email, and a PayPal account, you’ll be able to get customers and leads in an easy to set up platform. Plus, with Meta Business Tools, you can buy ads and boost posts so you can get yourself in front of more eyes that may be in need of the services you have to offer. You’ll also be able to direct message qualified leads that are interested in talking to you and buying what you sell on one single platform. It’s a simple place to start being seen online.
As your needs grow, you can always add some links in your bio to get leads to qualify themselves. Linktree (https://linktr.ee) is a good way to add several links to your Instagram bio, leading users to contact or booking forms so that your prospects can submit queries or even book when you’re not active on Instagram.
Beyond the business face, you can leverage your Instagram in a way you can’t leverage a website – you can humanize your brand and connect with leads in a more personal way. Even as you move up on the list here, keep your Instagram alive and active and you’ll find that you’ll have more business than you’ll be able to handle.
Create a brochure site
Another option for getting out on the open web is creating a single page website that showcases your business. You can add a contact form, booking link, and web analytics that let you see how people respond to your site, allowing you to monitor its performance. But this is a bit more complicated than just opening up an Instagram account. You’ll need a couple things before you get started:
- a domain name (the something.com that gets typed in to go to your website – about $15 a year)
- a place to host the site (web hosting – about $5-$10 a month)
- and (again) a calendar + payment method (google calendar & PayPal/Venmo work well)
With those in place you’ll now have to design your website. Fortunately, since it’s a single page, you’ll only have to create one page’s worth of design and copy.
If you find this a little too involved to get started, you can always hire someone to make the website for you (which can be expensive, but leads to good results if you work with the right company) or use a service like Carrd (https://carrd.io) that allows you to design and host a single page website for about $20 a year.
If you’re feeling bold or if you’re a bit more technical, you can work with WordPress (a website building tool you can control) and manually set things up using templates and plugins to create exactly the website you want. Most web developer agencies will also use this tool to make your website if you pay them to do it, so it would still be good to learn a little bit about how to make some changes on your own.
Phase Two: Be Seen In The Best Light
You’ve got yourself a website or some other place you can be seen online, but you want to take it up a notch. A good step to go from here would be to either create a full website complete with a booking & CRM system. On this site you can now create individual pages for your product offerings that can highlight the most important details of what you sell. You can add analytics to this site so you can see how your leads click through the website and where they spend the most time, allowing you to optimize your sales copy and pages.
Plus, with a fully constructed website your business feels much more legitimate and professional, allowing you to close some bigger ticket customers that might look at a simple web presence as evidence of inexperience. But how is this done?
Usually these websites are built in an online website builder (Wix, Squarespace), by a web development agency, or with a tool on your own server (WordPress). Let’s go over these options one by one.
Online Website Builder
These are pretty easy tools to make websites since their interfaces are all drag-and-drop, what-you-see-is-what-you-get systems. So long as you know what it is you want to put on your site, and you have an idea for the design (you could always use a template – these places provide many good ones) you can drag and drop your way into a decent website.
However, there are a few drawbacks to this approach. First, your website is now locked into whatever platform you used to build it. If you ever want to move it to another platform, or your own, you’re just out of luck since these platforms will jealously guard the work you do in them. Plus their fees tend to be higher than some of the other options you have.
Web Development Agency
You know you want quality, but you don’t have or don’t want to spend the time building the website yourself? A web development agency is a good choice for you. Many of these agencies can build a nice looking website for you within days to weeks without much time and effort on your part. These agencies will often build websites using WordPress and may also charge a monthly fee for maintenance, hosting, and domain name all bundled together. This choice may cost you the most depending on the agency you pick, and you will have to do your research to determine whether the work that the agency does is the kind of work you want representing your brand.
If you can afford the cost, this is a great choice with the least amount of effort on your part and will often produce the best results.
Tools Like WordPress
There’s always those DIYers out there that want to do things themselves, and that’s where this option comes in. If you have some technical skills or are willing to put in some effort to learn, this is an excellent option for building your website. You have full control of everything that goes into your web presence, from every detail of the design to where the site is hosted. This option requires you to take a lot more into consideration, below is a short list
- Domain name
- Web Host
- Web design
- Tool to build site (like WordPress) and it’s installation
- DNS settings to connect domain to hosting
If that seems manageable, there are plenty of tutorials that exist on YouTube that will walk you through the process of setting this up step-by-step, and you’ll find that looking under the hood gives you a greater understanding of how websites work.
This does take more time and is a much more involved process, but it can produce great results if given the time and effort.
So What Should I Do?
While everyone’s needs are different, my general recommendation is for you to make an Instagram and then pay an agency to make you a good website when you begin to gain traction. In another blog post I’ll go over advertising details and how you can get more leads to make their way through your website, as well as how to create this funnel.
If you liked what what you read, let me know! Leave a comment for me or share it with someone you think can benefit from this content. And if you’re an owner of a photo booth, photography, DJ, or other event business – please check out Spekkio! I built it based off of my own experience working in and running a family photo booth business and I’m making it the simplest way to get leads, get booked, and manage your business. We use it ourselves, and would be delighted if you could give it a try (now with a brand-new free tier – no credit card required. You only pay when you get paid)!
