Taking a new or existing business to the Internet is not easy. It requires a lot of hard work, patience, and even a little luck to make it work successfully. Here are a few tips to help get you started down the right path:

1. Get the right domain name. - Your domain name is one of the first major factors to consider when you decide to take your business to the web. You want something easy for your customers to remember and find, something sharp, and something that conveys the overall appeal and approach of your business. A good domain name is short, preferably less than 10 or so characters at most, easy to spell, and creates a strong brand image in the minds of your potential customers. Keep in mind that while sites like Monster.com and Google.com etc have great, memorable domain names, names like these are a lot more difficult to brand without substantial market saturation. You will have to work a lot harder to build and maintain your brand if you call your carpentry business "zamopow.com" than if you simply call it "johnscarpentry.com." Both approaches can work, but ultimately it is up to you to decide what is the best approach for your particular company.

2. Get the right web host. - Competition in the web hosting business is fierce. Hosting companies have come to accept razor thin profit margins in order to offer the cheapest service possible and undercut their competitors. It doesn't take much to figure out what happens to quality and service as a result. This may be perfectly ok for the average Joe who wants a website with a few family photos on it, but for a professional and reliable web presence, you will need a professional web hosting provider. There are a variety of things you should expect from your web host to ensure that your website isn't "here today, gone tomorrow." First things first, make sure they have a 99.9% uptime guarantee. 99.9% is the number to shoot for. It CANNOT be 100%, and any service that promises this is taking you for a ride. The reason for this is that servers need maintenance, and they need to be updated from time to time. A 99.9% uptime guarantee from the hosting provider means that your website will not cut out for hours or even days at a time and cost you valuable business. Also very important is the service team of the hosting provider. Do yourself a favor and call or email them BEFORE you even make a purchase. See what they are like. Poke their brains, ask a few questions. See how fast it takes them to respond (for email), and how well they answer the questions asked. Believe me, you don't want to get stuck on the wrong side of the contract with this one.

3. Market to your customers, not the search engines. - I know a lot of you will start to moan and groan about this. Search engine rankings seem to be king in today's excessively competitive online market place. Everyone is gunning for that Top 10 ranking on Google or Yahoo. Companies dish out millions of dollars for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services, and seek to create a robotic website that surfs the tides of the vast ocean of search results. You can do this without freaking out about the minutia of your website. Start producing content! Write informative pieces and include them on your website, start a blog, churn out information that people want to read. Google (plus the rest of the pack) places high value on frequent, unique content production. So as people come to read all this great information you are providing, your ranking with the search engines is increasing, AND your product/service and brand is being marketed. Yes, still optimize for the crawlers, but relax! Produce content, gain a readership. Books upon books can be written on this, but for the sake of brevity I will move on to my next topic.

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