To have a web presence you need these things:
1) Create your website
2) Ability to effectively market your website
3) Understand conversion (explained below)
This guide will show you how to get all these things cheaply (in most cases free), with high quality, in as little as few days, and without needing technical skills.
Before you can create a professional website, you need to buy a domain name. Here is a full article for how to choose a domain name for your website.
For many people, creating a website can be a daunting task, but we have just the solution. Here is a full tutorial for how to set up your site quickly, cheaply and professionally.
With WordPress, anyone can create a professional site. The only thing you need to pay for is the domain name for your website, and hosting if you go over the limit that Wordpress gives you for free.
Once you learn the marketing fundamentals and get the online marketing for your site right, people will begin coming to your site. What your site needs to be able to do is monitor what the visitors are doing on your site so that you can better understand whether your site is helping you achieve your goals, or are the users just visiting and leaving.
For that, you need web analytics. Google provides a great free product called GoogleAnalytics which helps you monitor what is happening on your site. You can get started with Google Analytics by visiting https://www.google.com/analytics
After you monitor the behavior of the users on your site, you can see where the site falls short, and where it is good. That will give you insight about what you should improve on your site until the site becomes truly great. That is another benefit of having created a site on your own with Wordpress: you can make changes to your website on your own without needing to call a tech person. It is also much faster and cheaper to make website updates.
Once you have set up your site, you can begin promoting it. And that is very exciting. Because once you have a site to which you can link to on the Web, you can now start doing social media marketing by promoting your business on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. You can also utilize blogging as a marketing tool for your business.
With a website, many exciting new online marketing possibilities open
up to you. For ideas on what is possible, please take a look at our article
on marketing and advertising ideas to get new customers.
Once you have your website, even when you are marketing your business offline, you have a great new tool. When you are networking, or talking to potential clients, or handing out your business cards or flyers, you can point people to come to your website. The website can help because if people are interested in what you are doing, very often, people will want to learn more about your business. And having a website that they can visit can allow them to learn more about your business at their convenience. And if you do not have a website to point them to, people often think that the business is too early-stage or isn't run professionally.
One business I help clients with is Elearning, which is the business of creating and selling online courses. If you are looking into entering that business, I offer a franchising option or an option to have a white label website created for you with online courses already uploaded and ready to be sold. I realize that these are in a specific niche, but it's one website setup option that I can offer and provide with high-quality since I've been in Elearning for over 7 years. To learn more about Elearning in general, take a look at this Elearning FAQ page.