I have a new favorite hamburge place called Five Guys Burgers & Fries.  Luckily I did a Google search for them before assuming their domain was either 5guys.com or FiveGuys.com.  That said, a friend of mine wasn’t so lucky and assumed that 5guys.com was the hamburger places site.  He emailed me over the weekend and said: “don’t go to 5guys.com ever!  Just so you know it’s FiveGuys.com”.  Now I don’t want you to go to adult sites or make any assumptions but it does illustrate an important point.  Yellow Pages are no longer the way to find things locally.  It’s now Craigslist, Google or the iPhone.  That means you’re business information will be online and ultimately, people will start making assumptions that you have a website.  Does your business name translate well?

A few things to remember when picking a domain name for your business:

1. Keep It Simple! Law Firms are great because anyone connected to a law firm gets their name in the title.  When 5 partners go in on a new law firm the name can be quite intriguing.  Keeping it simple means ABCDELaw.com vs. everyone’s names spelled out .com.

2. Be Descriptive! Using the same keywords in your domain name that your customers will use to find you has to be a top priority.  Online searching is done by keyword, if you have  a descriptive keyword or keyword phrase vs. a cutesy name and you care about your online success, go with the keywords.

3. Don’t forget the misspellings. Just like in the FiveGuys.com example, the number five can be a numeric 5 or a written five and if you are on the phone, radio or television talking about FiveGuys.com it’s a 50/50 split on numeric vs. written.  Adding an “s” to the end or grabbing the .net and .org is only an extra $10 a year and well worth the saving of a client.

You can still have lots of fun with a domain name (ie:  Zappos.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com, Woot.com) but when you are a local business looking for local traffic every detail counts and by adding the targeted keywords to your domain you will be that much closer to beating the competition and setting yourself up for online success.

I  buy 90% of my from GoDaddy.com or Moniker.com and always recommend a Google search for “Godaddy Coupon Code” before buying a domain.

DOMAIN NAME: What is a domain name?  It’s what everyone else knows as your online business.  Catchy, easy to remember and contains words that customers would actually use to find your products are the key points to any good domain name.  I always buy from Moniker or GoDaddy because of price, features and trust.  I also always do a google search for “Moniker Discount Code” or “GoDaddy Discount Code” before purchasing any new domain to save myself a few bucks.  You should do the same!

COMPETITIVE RESEARCH: Grab a piece of paper and then go to Google.com and search for the product you plan on selling.  Write down who shows up and what they are offering.  Does everyone offer free shipping?  If so, your idea of making money on the shipping fee just got trumped by the competition.  Are they offering the product for less than you are paying to get it at “wholesale”?  If you answered yes you’ll want to find a new product.  What terms are they using to sell the product?  A great tool to figure this out is SpyFu.  Enjoy!

WEBSITE: Now one of my favorite things about the internet is the fact that you can easily find almost everything for free (it feels like everything sometimes).  Building a website is no different.  One big thing to remember for getting started selling on the internet is you always get what you pay for.  Now how can I say you can get it for free but you get what you pay for?  Simple, there are always strings attached to free.  It’s usually worth it to cut those strings IF you like what was free.

Here’s my example.  Weebly.com is a great site builder program.  It is easy to use, fun looking and you can create a site without even thinking.  The free version shows you everything and let’s you create a site BUT the footer (bottom of every page in your site) tells everyone you made a site for free.  If you pay, one of the features is you can customize the footer.   See what I mean?

Building a website, especially your first site, can be fun and can be frustrating.  Doing it is the first step and improving it is the rest of your internet life.  Some key things to remember about a successful website are:

Keep It Simple! Don’t make it so cutting edge that no one knows how to use it.
Set a Goal for EVERY Page! You want to sell right?  Make sure every page has a clear purpose.
Take Good Pictures! It’s worth it to take a nice picture and answer all the question you had about the product.  It makes the sale that much better.

So there you have it.  The first steps to getting started selling on the Internet aren’t super crazy but you’d be surprised how much you learn and few people have actually taken even the first step.  Go ahead and take a step.  The most you are out is $9.95/yr for a domain.