Domain names are little slices of the internet that you can own. Wouldn’t you like to be a part of it? Of course you would! That’s why WebStarts is making it extremely easy to not only register a domain name but build and publish a website as well. We believe that it doesn’t have to be difficult to get an online presence. Why should you get your domain name now? I’m going to give you the top 3 reasons:

1. Domain Names Are Scarce

When the internet boom occurred, people registered the most important domain names right away. Those domain names like ‘shoes.com’ or ‘makemoney.com’ are now either huge websites or very expensive domains. That’s not to say that domain names can’t be purchased and made popular today. Look at Bing.com or Tumblr.com. That’s why you should get your domain name today. Especially if you have a brand name that is public, people will jump on that domain name leaving you with two options: buy it from them for, typically, an exorbitant price or find a different, creative name for your website. Since domain names are so affordable, I recommend getting yours now. I, myself, have 5-10 domain names at any given time for future projects or to protect my personal name.

2. Domain Names Are Affordable

In today’s market, domain names are very affordable. WebStarts provides a free domain name with every pro or pro plus account. A pro account is less than $60 for a website, hosting, and a domain name! If that’s not worth it to have your own slice of the internet, then I don’t know what is!

3. Domain Names Separate You From the Crowd

This is a general statement but I really believe it to be true. Whether you have a small business or you’re just on your own, it is valuable to have your own space on the web. The benefits are obvious if you are a business owner. You get a domain name and a website and you are all of a sudden more legitimate than the business that has no website. If you are an entrepreneur or freelancer, get a domain name just for your email addresses. Jim@JimSmith.com is much more professional than Jim@hotmail.com.

I believe that it is more important today for you to get a domain name and even your own website than it has ever been. Since domain names are getting snatched up more and more every day, there is definitely a big reason to get yours as soon as possible. Whether its for your business, for personal use, or any other reason, get your domain name today.

Get a free domain name with any pro or pro plus upgrade at http://webstarts.com/.

People are getting used to giant companies providing all of their services and products. That’s why I believe you have the advantage in many cases. Sure, some people will always go for the larger company when provided the choice but I believe most people are more inclined to do business with a small business. That is why I think you should make your website personal. Here are my 3 favorite ways to make a website seem personal:

1. Pictures of You and Your Staff

Nothing says “personal” like a face. People love to see faces. They feel more comfortable about spending their dollars with you when they see who you are. That’s why I believe you should provide a fairly apparent way for people to see pictures of you and/or your staff. An about page would be great for this purpose. You don’t necessarily need to put your pictures on the home page but make it easy for people to find you.

2. Use Natural Language

When you’re talking to a customer face to face, you aren’t spouting marketing jargon or technical knowledge. You are being friendly and helpful and using the best terminology you can to relate to the layman. This is what you need to do on your website. Make sure it is compelling and makes them want to take the next step to use your product or service but make it down to earth at the same time.

3. Have a Phone Number

A huge mistake that many big businesses make is not having a phone number. Apparently, when their revenues blow up and they get thousands of customers, they don’t proportionally scale the phone answerers… anyways. Having a phone number on your site will make you seem more personal. Even if you aren’t able to answer the phone 24/7, let them leave messages and get back to them.

Making your website more personal is a very important step. It will lead to your customers being more comfortable with spending money on your site and trusting your business. There are many more ways to do this through the website you build, social networking, and others so don’t limit yourself. Get out there and make it happen! Make a free website at http://webstarts.com/.

At WebStarts, we understand that creating a website and getting on the search engines can be hard. Designing the site, finding photos and other graphics, creating logos, writing content, and marketing the site on the search engines can be a daunting task. Luckily, WebStarts takes care of a lot of that for you and is very easy to use to build the website and get online. For all other in between decisions, look to those who have come before you. I’m going to give you three things to remember when looking to your competition for inspiration on the web.

1. Your competition has already started.

The other names in your business have already been there and done that. Provided that you’re looking at business that have been around for a little while, you can guarantee that they have already thought about 90% of what you need to think about. This works for their website and marketing as well as their business model. If they are offering things for more or less than what you offer them for, its worth looking into why or how they are able to do that. Maybe they’ve found that they can get a lot more money for certain services. The point is, they’ve done some research and trial and error to get where they are, why not take advantage of that information?

2. Inspiration is easy when critiquing others.

Of course its always easier to find the problems in others’ work than finding the problems in yours. You need to leverage this fact to make your product, service, and website great. Sift through every page of your competitors’ websites. Find out what you like about their design and what you hate. If your competition is very professional, then most of the things they do on their website are for a reason. Take note of where their ads are, how you contact them, what design elements they’re using. You don’t have to copy what they’re doing, but it is extremely helpful to shop around before you make your own website.

3. Your competition isn’t necessarily your competition.

Of course if you copy your competitors from across the street, people are going to take notice but often times, your ‘competition’ isn’t actually competing with you. What I mean is this: if you are selling tires in Lansing, MI, feel free to take all the advice you can from the guy selling tires in Little Rock, AR. This will allow you to get inspiration from all over using the internet and never be afraid of copying your competition. It may sound a little shady but there are no new ideas under the sun.

I hope you’re able to take some good advice away from this. WebStarts makes it easy to make a free website and get online but there are a lot of parts in between that you may want some help with. I suggest looking to your competition.

Now that the holidays have come and gone, we’re all evaluating what our new year is going to look like. While you’re considering your many new years resolutions, I’d like to encourage you to set some resolution aside for search engine position for your website. Its going to be some hard work but with enough time, you can get your website to the top of the search engines for all of your target keywords. You’ll be making money in no time and not have to pay a search engine marketing firm to get you there. Here are 3 easy strategies to apply to the website you build with WebStarts to get higher search engines position in 2012:

1. Evaluate Your Website and Make a Strategy

One big mistake that people make after they build a website and try to get search engine position is lack of planning. You can have as much time and ambition as you want but without knowing where you are going with your seo, you are not going to get where you want to be.

Start with an article like this one: How to choose keywords. Once you know your keywords, you’ll know where to start. You’ll know what to start writing about and what to set as your page titles and descriptions. You wouldn’t start driving without knowing where you’re going, don’t start trying to optimize for the search engines without knowing where you’re going.

2. Fill the Gaps

When you first built a website and started getting on the search engines, you did the very basics. You need to go back over those basics to make sure you aren’t missing anything. Things like page titles, descriptions, and keywords need to be setup properly. Make sure your content is keyword rich and reflects the titles, descriptions and keywords. Look around for updated basics as well. Things change every year and you need to keep up with the times.

3. Produce Content

This is most important strategy you need to adopt and adopt now. Keep a consistent flow of content coming from your domain. Start a blog or just put articles on your pages. It doesn’t have to be any special blog format or anything like that. Simply put out relevant content. Share this content on the web with your friends and family first, then everywhere else on the web that will take your articles. A new tip for 2012 is to focus on videos and images. With internet connections becoming faster and people becoming less apt to read a long article, consider putting out youtube videos and relevant images to get attention from the less patient crowd. A youtube video that is 3-5 minutes can quickly be digested without too much investment and a funny or interesting image can be digested with almost no investment. This is the direction the web seems to be going so Google will reward you for it. Start producing content today… nay… this very minute.

Imagine where you could be in January of 2013 if you just applied these strategies with a little bit of determination. Since WebStarts is built from the ground up for you to build a website and get on the search engines, you can trust that your work will not be in vain. Thanks for reading! Make a free website today at http://webstarts.com/.

Bonus Video:

Check out this simple instructional video for some help using search engine optimization.

Social media is absolutely necessary in this day and age. If you are not using facebook or twitter, you are missing out on very valuable, free advertising tools. If you are able to connect with your customers, or potential customers, and drive them back to your website. While these tools are very valuable, and there is no definitive right and wrong way to use them, there are guidelines and things to avoid. I’m going to share with you 3 things to avoid when using social media like facebook and twitter to advertise your business.

1. A Constant Sales Pitch

Too many companies are using their twitter or facebook accounts to spam their users. Consider yourself lucky when you get users following you on twitter or liking you on facebook. These people are using their personal accounts, that they use to keep up with family and friends, to stay in touch with a business. If you constantly bombard them with sales pitches and offers, they are going to quickly stop following you and then you’ve lost them for good. A good ratio is 80/20. Give them 80% free, useful information and 20% promotion of your business. If you are offering them useful advice or information, they will be a lot more likely to pay attention to you when you’ve got a good sales offer for them.

2. Lack of Information

Too often do I see companies promoting themselves and participating in the community but failing to provide a link back to their website or a way to get a hold of them. Make sure you have a complete profile on all of your social networks so that if you get somebody looking around your information, they will not be disappointed. Then, at every opportunity, share a link back to your website. You should constantly be looking to get them away from the social network they’re looking at to your web page. Be careful not to get too pushy though!

3. Inconsistency

Keep a schedule that forces you to keep updating your profiles and statuses. Just about everybody has started a twitter or a blog only to abandon it a month later. Its easy to be excited about something. Its difficult to be persistent. The persistent ones are the winners at the end of the day. So stay plugged in and never stop updating your social networks. If you forget about it, then your customers will too.

I hope this has encouraged you to get involved in social media. These three tips will help you avoid what makes 90% of businesses fail in this area. Don’t forget to make a free website at http://webstarts.com/!

After you build a website, the next thing you need to think about is how to drive traffic to it. While there are many ways to do so, I’m going to share what I believe to be one of the most effective ways, video marketing. Video marketing is something that is relatively new on the web since the advent of video sharing sites like Youtube and the widespread availability of video capturing hardware on digital cameras and cell phones. So how do you take advantage of that? Here are my 5 favorite ways to use videos to market your website:

1. Product Reviews

Everybody uses the internet to research products these days. If you can review products related to your niche or industry, then you will get some viewers. Some of those viewers will then take a look at your website as long as you leave an easy way for someone to click a link to your website. If you are selling anything at all, then this tip is for you. Review not only your products but products of competitors. If people come across that review, you can always drop a line in the video to promote yours as well. After a while of doing product reviews, you will have a lot of videos and a lot of search engine keywords covered that are sure to drive people to your site.

2. How To Videos

If you are teaching people how to do things by making videos, you are sure to get traffic to your site. Make the videos as relevant as possible and you will get great search engine ranking as well… provided that you link back to your website from the video. Try getting creative for these videos and think of what people are searching for on the internet. “How To Make Cookies” is going to get a lot of views on youtube. If you sell cookies or other baked goods and you have a link from that video to your website, you will get some good, directed traffic that way.

3. Video Testimonials

The videos don’t have to be made by you. If you can get your visitors to make video testimonials about your product, you can post them on youtube with a backlink to your site. This will help bolster your reputation as a company as well as get your search engine ranking on the way to the top.

4. Interviews

Interviews can be a little more work but if you can score an interview with someone working in your niche or an authority working in your industry, you can definitely get some views and some traffic to your site. Just ask some simple questions about things your viewers or your potential customers would be interested in.

5. Livestreams

If at all possible, do a livestream of your work. If you remodel houses, stream a video of your work. If you make custom guitars, do a livestream of a guitar in progress. The possibilities are endless and with the WebStarts website builder, its super easy to add a livestream to your page.

So go out and get started today. You won’t regret making videos and posting them on the web. For many, it is the primary source of traffic for their site and if you are not taking advantage of this large portion of the web, then you are missing out. Make a free website at http://webstarts.com/.

Getting found on the web is something everyone wants to do. While there are many ways to do it, not many are faster and easier than using social bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites are websites that aim to gather the most interesting and shareworthy links on the web to provide them to their many users. This is extremely valuable because anybody can submit their link to these sites and instantly get viewers. If your content is popular enough, the link will be higher on the list and can snowball into a very highly viewed link. Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to promote your free website built with WebStarts. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you some of the best social bookmarking sites and how to submit your site to them.

1. Digg.com

Digg is one of the original social bookmarking sites. Its not quite as popular as it used to be but you still want your website to show up on this site. This one is by far the easiest to submit to. You’ll get a quick backlink and have the chance to get a ton of people clicking to your link from Digg.

2. Delicio.us

This website can be great for personal use. The main focus is to keep track of your favorite links and categories. Since your profile is public, Google indexes the pages and thus, you have a backlink.

3. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is one of my favorites as a user. When you log on, you simply click ‘Stumble’ and the website chooses a page to show you. It chooses these links from user submitted links. You can then thumbs up or thumbs down the link. The more popular links will get served to more people. The more you use it, the more the site knows what type of links you like. This site is also fairly easy to submit to and I highly recommend it.

4. Pinterest

Pinterest is a great up and coming website that has a large population of people interested in art, food, decoration, and design. If your website or blog appeals to any of those, you may very well get a lot of views by submitting to this site.

Get out there and start submitting! You will want to submit your home page link as we as begin writing great content to submit as well. Remember, even if you don’t get a ton of pageviews from your submissions, the search engines still see it and still count the backlink so it is worth your time.

Are you throwing a party, hosting an event, or having a wedding? If so, why aren’t you using a website as your invitation? Even if you have paper invitations already, having an online presence is easy, fun, and very convenient for you and your guests. In this tutorial, I will show you how to quickly set up a website for your event to show people the details of your event and to get RSVP’s from your invites. Follow these easy steps:

1. Set up a free website at WebStarts.

Sign up is completely free and easy, no credit card required. You’ll choose a design in your sign up process. Don’t worry, you can change your design later.

2. Add your event’s information

Make sure to include all the basics as well as any specific information your guests will need in order to attend your event. Things to include:

•  Name of the Event

•  Time of the Event

•  Ending time of the Event

•  Map of location/directions

•  What to Bring

•  Who to Bring

I’m sure there are more so think hard!

3. Add a contact form, email address, or other means of RSVP.

I recommend using the WebStarts form builder but there are many other ways to do it. It can even be as simple as posting your email address to let someone know they can send you an email from your website. Google even has a docs feature that allows you to create forms and gather the information quickly and easily.

Chances are, you’re a relatively new business or company. In this first stage of your business, you are going to want to choose your pricing wisely. Even if you are just making a website for the first time, you want to be confident that your prices are working for you and not against you. Does this mean that you need to find your competition and offer lower prices than them immediately? I don’t believe so. Here are a few reasons why I believe it is better to outperform your competition rather than undercutting their prices.

1. It Takes The Pressure Off

Jumping into a business where others are already successful can be difficult. One of the main reasons is that the competition has already streamlined their service to provide lower cost products and services. Since you are new, you may find it difficult to match these prices. However, you are much more likely to be able to match and surpass their level of quality and customer service. Since it is more feasible to do this, it takes the pressure off your bottom line and allows you to acquire customers based on your quality of service. You can always compete on price once you’re a little more established but in the meantime, beat them in the quality category.

2. Since You Are Smaller, You Can Pay More Attention To Customers

This will work for you in two ways. 1. You can easily pick up the customers that care about the smaller business feel. 2. You can charge more money and sell more to those customers. The customers that care about the smaller business feel will usually stay away from the larger companies regardless of pricing. This works in your favor because you have fine tuned your product, service, and customer service to treat these customers better than the big company. You will also pick up any customer that may have had a bad experience with the bigger company. Then, when your customers are happy with your service, you are much more likely to sell them more and make more money per customer than your competition.

3. You’ll Feel Better and More Confident About Your Business

At the end of the day, you want to do something you can hang your hat on. Being a large company can definitely be a goal but its going to take a certain level of confidence in your business to get there. Giving your customers a great level of quality products or services and charging a fair price will allow you to build your business with loyal customers.

As a new business, you would benefit from beating your competitor’s prices. I believe that you would benefit even more from beating your competitors’ quality. Consider this advice when settling on pricing for your products and services especially when building a website.

Make a free website at http://webstarts.com/.

When you are running a website online, you want to get as many eyes as possible looking at your site. That’s why you always need to be thinking of new ways to generate buzz around your product or service. That’s why I’m suggesting this. Give out a portion of your product or service for free and start attracting newcomers to your site. Here are a few guidelines:

1. Give out something of high perceived value.

It is possible to give something out for free that doesn’t break your bank. For some businesses, you may need to get a little creative and for others, it will be quite easy. For example, WebStarts provides a free website to anyone with an email address. The cost for us to provide this is relatively low so the hundreds of thousands of free websites that people are not paying for are not preventing us from running our business. Another tip is to make this free giveaway something that causes the customer to depend or rely on your product or service. If you are a lawn company, give out a free cut for the front yard only. After they see how well you’ve done and how long the grass is in their backyard, they’re likely to give you a call back and ask you to come back around.

2. Get their contact information.

Never let a customer interaction go without getting some sort of contact information from them. At the very least, get an email address so you can contact them about future offers and to remind them about yourself. Try automating the whole process so that the customer can come to your website, get what you are offering for free, and leave their contact information. This can be done very easily with a contact form on your site.

3. Ask for the sale during the giveaway.

There are times when it is tacky to ask for the sale. While giving something away is not one of those times. It is a perfect opportunity to ask for someone to purchase your product when they are at your site. They are already interested in your product, obviously, if they are looking at your site and trying to get something for free. Don’t worry if you don’t get the sale every time, just don’t be afraid to ask for the sale either!

So get out there and find something to give away. Its important that you find a good balance between cost and perceived value so that you are not giving away something useless but at the same time, you are not breaking the bank. When you do find that balance and start giving away something free on your site, I believe you will be generating all sorts of attention about your product and you’ll never regret it. Make a free website at http://webstarts.com/.