Internet Marketing Business

Starting our own Internet marketing business

The first thing to keep in mind when starting your own internet marketing business is to understand that the internet is a dynamic affair - so not only must you think of interesting ways of maintaining an effective web presence, you must be dynamic too!

To kick-start your Internet marketing business, you must find an Internet service provider (ISP) that is cost effective and flexible for your company's needs. Next, you must decide on a website address name - as simple as possible, so avoid capitalisation, hyphens etc, and be sure to register it. Make sure you register incorrect spellings of your company name too, and automatically redirect them to your site.

Registration companies that have garnered a good reputation in the US include netnames.com and networksolutions.com, and will charge up to around $100 dollars per year to register an address, or $200 to $400 for an address 'lockdown' (a one-off registration fee that means that the address is yours to keep for good). If someone has taken the address, try and think of a unique name that still reflects your company brand. Otherwise, change from .com to .org, .net, .info or .biz.

If you don't intend to author or design the site yourself (see the 'Learn Internet Marketing' section), then it's a good idea to consider outsourcing the job to a design firm - this is a common course of action for many internet marketing businesses, and there are plenty of designers ready to do the job. Word-of-mouth recommendation is a good way to find one, otherwise the American Marketing Association (www.marketingpower.com) has service lists from which you can choose a business: just be sure to pick a company local to your internet marketing business, be sure they have at least two years experience (though five is better), and obtain references from their previous clients.

Be sure to remain clear in the contract with your designer that you own the final content on the site, and establish in advance how long, in man-hours, the job is likely to take. Prices vary depending on how complex you'd like the site to be, and how many pages you require (five to ten is usually the norm to start off with), but expect to pay a thousand dollars or so for a fairly simple site. From then on the site will undoubtedly need some tinkering and updating; decide whether you can do this yourself, or whether you'd prefer to pay your design firm a small fee per annum to make the changes for you.