The first thing you have to decide before building your business website is, "what will my website be used for?". Some example answers include:
- Collecting opt-ins for qualified leads.
- Showcasing your products.
- Selling your products online.
This is super important as once you've decided the goal of your website, then you can start building it with your target audience in mind.
Getting started
The first thing you need to do is register a domain name for your new business website. Hopefully, that will be yourcompanyname.com. It's important to make sure that the .com TLD extension is available for your chosen domain name. If it's not, then you should pick another name.
Once you see that your domain name is available then you'll need to register it at one of the many available registrars. My preference is either at Namecheap or Godaddy. For more details on registering domains on those two sites, you can check out these two links:
Next you will need to get web hosting for your company website. Your goal is to get the fastest and most reliable web hosting available. The type of hosting you will ultimately get though, depends on how much traffic you expect to get at your site. For low traffic websites, shared hosting is acceptable. Bluehost and Hostgator are common recommendations.
If you are expecting a lot of traffic however, it would be definitely wiser to invest in a VPS or Dedicated Server. They are certainly more expensive than shared hosting, but they can handle the load a lot better.
Designing your site
You want your business website to look professional right? If you use Wordpress, then there are a great number of Wordpress themes available for you to choose from. I would recommend browsing around at Wordpress theme gallery sites like WPArchive or WPThemeGallery.net and pick a theme you like. If you filter by Corporate themes, you can find lots of nice looking themes that would be suitable for your business website.
If you are interested in learning more about Wordpress, take a look at this interview by WP founder Matt Mullenweg on CNN here:
http://blondish.net/matt-mullenweg-interviewed-by-cnn-money-on-10-years-of-wordpress/
Getting Traffic to your site
This is the hard part for most people. However, if you already have a built in audience of customers, then you should start from there. Let them know that you have setup your website and ask them to come visit. You have their email addresses right? If not, make sure to add an opt-in form to your website as well. If you are using an autoresponder like AWeber or GetResponse then this is actually pretty simple since they both give you the code you need to add to your website.
Other ways to get more traffic to your site include SEO. This is the process of trying to get your website ranking high in the search engines for your chosen keywords. For a good guide on how to do this, check out this guide by Jason Acidre titled, How I get quick wins in SEO and Content Marketing which is a very good guide to SEO.
Otherwise, you may choose to go with a strategy like guest posting. This is where you write blog posts on other blogs in hopes of getting more traffic that blog's visitors. If you are a prolific writer, then this is definitely a viable option. Here's a good article on Think Traffic about guest posting and making your guest post stand out.
Final Thoughts
Did you get all that? If you follow the steps in this article, you will be able to start the process of building your website, and more importantly, get some traffic to it as well. Hopefully people will like what they see on your website, and you will start making more money as well.
