Few businesses these days are without a website and, as a
work from home business, your website is one of the most powerful
tools you have available. A good website can really work for you,
but you need to know what you're doing.
Hire Foreign
Designers
Web design is something that you shouldn't
try to do yourself, unless you really know what you're doing —
you’ve probably seen what happens when incapable people try this.
Hiring a web designer, though, can be quite expensive.
However, the Internet puts you in touch with
designers all over the world, and it's easy to hire one of
them relatively cheaply to design your website. They don't do any
worse of a job than someone in your country would, it just happens
that your few hundred dollars is worth as much to someone in India
or Romania as a few thousand would be to you or
I.
Use Search Engine
Optimization
There are a heck of a lot of websites
out there with thousands being added every day. Search engines try
to return everything relevant to a user's search. So how can you
possibly get your site ahead of the thousands of others search
engine think are relevant to your keywords?
The answer is to
use basic search engine optimization techniques. For example, make
sure you use phrases you think your target audience will be
searching for (your 'keywords'), and include them in your web
addresses if possible.
For this article, for example,
www.website.com/home-business-website would be a much better web
address than www.website.com/articles/205. That's just a brief
introduction — there's a lot more to Search Engine Optimization than
can be covered here.
Have Lots of Useful
Content
When you have a website, you're not just
trying to reach people who were searching for you — you're
trying to get people to check out your website, read your latest
news and offers etc. The best way to do this is to add fresh and
useful content on a regular basis. Write short articles
about topics your customers are interested in. If your home
business is computer repair, for example, you might keep track of
the latest virus threats on your site and offer help to anyone
affected.
Make It Easy to Update
You
should make sure that whatever software you're using to design your
website makes it easy to post new articles. One solution to easily
updating a site is to add a blog.
Keep a
Weblog
One of the simplest ways to have fresh,
useful content on your site is to keep a weblog (or 'blog'). A blog
is a series of entries, like entries in a diary, that are displayed
on your site starting with the most recent first. It is easy to log
in and quickly write a new entry, and it can be as short or as long
as you like.
For your home business' blog, the only
rule to stick to is not to post anything that isn't related to your
industry and your work. It might be great that you've got a
new baby or sad that your cat Mr. Tibbles died, but you should start
a personal blog on another website if you want to post about
personal opinions and stories. Keep your blog posts related to your
site’s niche.
Let People E-Mail You with No
Hassle
One of the worst mistakes people often make
when they're starting a website is to think it’d be a good idea to
give their customers a 'contact form' to fill out. People really,
really don't like filling in forms, and you'll lose a lot of
potential customers if you require them to reveal personal
information before you've even talked to them.
The best way
is to list your email address on your site as a clickable link, and
advise customers what type of information would be useful for them
to include in an email. It might sound strange, but people are far
more willing to go to the trouble of typing their thoughts when it's
on their own terms, and not into an annoying web form.
