In the last article we discussed how to drive traffic to your website through search engines. As promised, I’ve created a general list of tactics you can employ to improve your website’s standing in Google and other search engines. Do not ignore the overall strategy of developing a great website. If all you do is accomplish these tasks you have done little more than busywork. Each of these tasks are part of a larger symphony of developing your small business website into a powerhouse!

Stop: If you haven’t read our last article talking about how to drive traffic to your website through search engines, please go back and read it. That will give you a strategic understanding of how search engines grade your website. This checklist will be here waiting when you come back.

by DVIDSHUB

1. Building your site

Build a semantically clean website with valid HTML that is easy for search engines to read. Make sure that search engine spiders are not blocked on your site. Do not use flash, it is evil.

Create a site map and submit it to Google and to Yahoo. Create a Google Webmaster Account and track your progress there. There are several WordPress plugins that can do this automatically for you.

Construct your website so that is has an RSS feed. Ensure that each time you create new content all the main indexing services (e.g. Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! News, etc.) are automatically notified. If your blog platform is WordPress it can be configured to ping these services automatically. If you use some other platform and it does not support pinging when a new post is made, you can manually ping using Pingomatic.

2. Phrasing

Find a phrase or phrases which have been searched for recently. Remember, you are not your customer. Other people may call your services by different names than you do. Cater to what your audience is searching for by constructing your search engine campaign around those words.

Develop your key website landing pages so they contain those those phrases by use of titles, meta descriptions, headlines, etc.

3. Writing

Put a blog on your business website. It doesn’t have to be the front page. In most cases, it probably shouldn’t be the front page. But it should be there and you should be posting regularly. (Hint, WordPress is great for this.) Your site should have an RSS feed that will transmit your articles all over the world where other aggregators syndicate your content much in the same way local newspapers syndicate news from the Associated Press.

Write a combination of long, encyclopedic-level core articles (articles that people want to bookmark, share with their friends and that you can continuously refer back to in your other posts) and shorter news articles. Try writing about the questions your customers ask. Whatever you do, post regularly. Here are a few hints on what to write on your website. While writing, be sure to focus on these elements of your page. Make sure you avoid these common errors people make when writing on the web.

I know this sounds like a lot of writing. Not to worry, it has extra benefits. I focus on writing articles that are based out of questions my clients and prospects ask me most frequently. Once you have these articles on your site, you can email them to your prospect base when they ask. Not only does that help you with the search engines, it makes you look more professional, too.

It doesn’t always have to be about the writing! You can add videos to your website as well!

4. Linking

Find related avenues where you can link back to your website with those phrases as the anchor text. Blogs/forums/websites from which you can either post backlinks or obtain backlinks are great. Using social media to spread the word about your website while including links to your articles is a great practice. Put your and website RSS feed everywhere you can – from a Facebook Corporate page to your LinkedIn corporate page to FeedBurner.

Create profiles in blogging communities such as MyBlogLog. Make sure you’re logged into your MyBlogLog (or other networks) account as you browse other blogs that have their widget displaying latest visitors who are members of that network. (Check a few prominent blogs on your topic to see what networks are popular among them – you can figure out the most prominent blogs on your subject by searching for your keywords in Technorati and checking what blogs have the highest authority there).

Be sure to link frequently to your own previous articles – especially your landing pages and pilar articles. Link to your friends and local business community. Link to your clients and your suppliers. Link to news articles on high quality sites. Every now and then, make posts quoting other blogs in your industry with links to them (e.g. review posts, news posts, analytical posts, etc.) – this should send trackbacks to the quoted blogs and create links on them to your blog, which should increase your visibility. After creating a steady habit of linking to these places, start to seek links back from them.

Consider submitting your pillar articles to Digg, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other similar sites. If you submitted a post, consider adding a “Digg this post” etc. button to the post so that your readers could do some promotion for you on those sites.

Consider writing guest articles on their sites in exchange for editorial credits. Write for other article collecting sites like ezinearticles.com or helium.com and include links back to your own site. Write for your local paper in the same manner.

Read other websites and blogs. Comment on their articles linking your website to your name.

Warning: Do NOT Do This

Don’t use black hat search engine tactics. By Black Hat, I mean the sleazy, scammy short cuts you see advertising to make search engines think you are something you are not. Even if there is a hole in the search engine ranking system it tends to close up quickly. Those scammers selling you easy ways out don’t care about the long term viability of your website.

Do not steal other people’s content. Quoting is fine but do it in a limited context. Obey copyrights and copyright law. Plagiarism is not, and the search engines will punish you for it.

Conclusion

Bonus! My friend Lincoln Baxter has created a great tactical resource titled SEO for Everyone. Lincoln is a developer’s developer with the rare additional skill to clearly communicate complex ideas very efficiently. Please read his article for even more tactics and greater understanding of how you can improve your website.

Most of all, enjoy what you are writing. Enjoy the process of proactively engaging your audience. You’ll notice that there is strong alignment between tactics that are great for your clients as well as being great for search engines. That is no accident. Ultimately this process will strengthen your business.

As always, please share your thoughts, questions and comments below. If you’ve had success, please let us know. If you have had issues, tell us that, too – maybe we can all find a solution together!

Here’s a question for you; what’s the point of having a website if no one is around to read it? Well, perhaps there is some nobility in developing a website for the sake of it. And I won’t argue that website design as an art form is beautiful. But that’s not the focus of what I am trying to share here on Charlotte Web Development. My goal is to provide you the answers you need for your small business to be successful on the web.

One of the most frequently asked questions I get asked by small business owners is how to drive more traffic to their website through search engines. By this they overwhelmingly mean the free, organic results. In this article we’ll step through some of the basics of driving traffic through search engines, explore the foundations of how search engines work, and discuss strategies both to employ and avoid.

The first point I want to unequivocally state is that I do not know what Google’s algorithm is. No one who works outside of Google does. If someone tells you they do, they are lying. This is a multi-billion dollar trade secret and they are not sharing. Don’t be fooled by the thousands of self-proclaimed search engine optimization experts out there. The next time someone tells you they know Google’s algorithm I want you to think of it in terms of how likely someone would be to know Coca Cola’s trade secret recipe. Or Warren Buffet’s next acquisition. Or the ingredients in special sauce. Or the nuclear launch codes. That’s how ridiculous it is that someone would know Google’s algorithm.

Brooklyn Bridge, New York City. by ::novocainated::

So why I am qualified to write this article then? Great question. As I said earlier, I do not know Google’s algorithm. What I do know is the very basics of how you would build a search engine. This is part of what I studied as an undergraduate Computer Science major and then again later in depth as a Graduate student. Additionally, I have built many sites that rank exceptionally well in Google by applying that knowledge. I have had particularly noteworthy success with small business websites in local markets. While I cannot expressly give you any search engine’s algorithm, by my education, experience and by staying current with the news on this subject I feel I have a handle on what’s going on.

The Basics

I’ve previously spent time writing about what I call the 3 C’s of Google. They are Content, Construction, and Context. Let’s revisit each.

Construction

This area covers both web design – the aesthetic layout features and website coding – the underlying nuts and bolts of what your browser renders. In short, your website needs to be built using clear code that search engines can read – and remember, search engines read website code differently than how humans do. Additionally, if a search engine can’t read your code, or if your site has poor architecture, it may not be indexed. Sometimes, Google will even ascribe a penalty to sites that exhibit poor design. For example, see this official Google article on a recent change to their ranking system on web page design.

Tactics here would be to construct a website with easy to read HTML mark up. In other words, avoid flash. If you are not hand crafting your site, use a system that can output clean, browser friendly code. This is part of the reason I advocate WordPress to run your small business website. (Well, that and it’s free!) Use clean styling in your site. Avoid the website companies you see on TV offering easy, turnkey websites – the more automate a website building system is, generally the worse code they spit out.

Content

Now that you have a website that is built in a fashion search engines can understand, let’s move on to what it is that they will be consuming. Great content is essential to have people actually read, bookmark and spend time with your website. It’s that content that describes the value your small business offers to readers but it also gives Google something to sink their teeth into.

Part of this Content metric is ensuring that your website is optimized with words people actually search for. In other words, make sure the search engine knows what your website page is really about. Think what people would type in to Google, if they were interested in the information you have on your website. Put that information into your page titles, into your meta descriptions, and in your text.

Again and again Google states that it’s goals are to reward the best content on the web with high search rankings. This offers a great alignment of what is best for your audience – great, valuable, actionable content.

Context

At this point let’s assume your website has great content that is easy to consume for both people and search engines. You’re almost home free… except for this one catch. Search engines don’t know good content from bad without some help. Given two sites that index in a similar way for content, how would Google rank one site above another? That’s where you and the rest of the Internet population comes in. You do it for them.

Remember that phrase your mom would tell you growing up? “You’re only as good as the company you keep?” Or how about this one, “Birds of a feather flock together?” Those are both applicable here. Your site is judged by who links to it, how they link to it, and what site you link to as well.

It used to be that one of the most important things you could have done for your website was to obtain relevant back links -links from other websites in your genre. For example, if you are a landscape, links to your site from other landscapers, gardening blogs, etc would have been extremely helpful. This is still true to a degree. Back links are a way for search engines to decide how trustworthy your site is.

Of course the incentive to get back links to your site became so huge that people started abusing it. Webmasters sold links from their sites to others. Giant link farms sprouted up. Article marketing took off. After a while search engine results were getting filled with spam so algorithms changed. Today social media is becoming a huge driver of search results. Google just announced a major change to how their search results will now take into account what your contacts in Google Plus think of content on the web.

Conclusion

Another phrase to think about in this arena is “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Effective Search Engine Optimization takes effort but is well worth it. SEO is a skill in itself, which requires education, time and practice. Like any skill, it is something you can learn to do yourself with some effort and patience. Also like any skills, it may be worth your time to hire help with this and focus your efforts where you already excel.

Also remember that there are no guarantees. There are many tools on the web to help you find relevant articles more quickly. There are tools which will help you get posted in social marking sites at the speed of a click. Remember that there are no tools or experts which will guarantee you qualified prospects who are interested in doing business with you. And there are certainly no tools or experts that will ensure you have the spot in a search engine. Just because you can drive traffic to your site does not necessarily mean you should.

Due to popular demand, the next article will cover some explicit tactics you can employ along the Construction, Content, and Context strategies. However, remember that traffic is only one part of the website development process. Once you have attracted people to your website, you still have to convert them to become buyers of what you’re selling, supporters of your cause, or what have you. You’ll probably want a way to make sure they come back. And tell their friends. And to make sure they’re the right visitors you want in the first place.

As always, please leave any questions or comments in the comment fields below.

A few days ago I wrote an article on how to link your Craigslist ad directly to your website. In the comments section of that article, Johnny asked me how to link an image in his Craigslist ad to his website. Today I’ll show you how to do just that.

Linking images to your website is a good habit to get into. People click a lot of images – sometimes just to see what happens – and having a link behind your image can generate some good traffic. Having an image with text on it saying something like “Click here for your free quote… or to learn more .. or to do anything else” is a good way to expand your sales funnel.

Again, these steps can be used all over the web. Not only will this show you how to create a link from the image on your Craigslist ad to your website, you will be able to use this technique to link from multiple other platforms like eBay, bulletin boards, your Facebook corporate page and elsewhere on the web.

Step 1: Create a Hyperlink.

Follow the steps I listed in the How to Link your Craigslist ad Directly to your Website.

Again, your hyperlink code should look something like this:

<a src="http://www.CharlotteWebDevelopment.com/SomeLinkHere">The text you want to be linked</a>

Once you have that hyperlink code set, proceed to Step 2.

Step 2: Get Your Image ready.

Make sure you have a photo set to be put up. Following the steps I wrote in this article How to Post a Picture on Craigslist

Your code from this part should look something like this:

<img src="http://www.CharlotteWebDevelopment.com/Charlotte_Website_Design_Logo.jpg">

Once you have the image code, move on to Step 3.

Step 3: Combine the Image Code and the Hyperlink Code.

Now we are going to delete the hyperlink text and put the image code inside the hyperlink code.

You should come out with something that looks like this:

<a src="http://www.CharlotteWebDevelopment.com"><img src="http://www.CharlotteWebDevelopment.com/Charlotte_Website_Design_Logo.jpg"></a>

Once you put it on the web, the results should be like this image. Go ahead and click it. It will bring you to another page. Don’t worry, I’ll be right here when you get back!

Try it out and let me know how it goes. Any questions, just leave a comment below.

Yesterday I wrote a post about how you could create a free on-line calendar for your website like the one I made for Lake Wylie Friends in Business. Today I am going to show you how to create calendar events using that system on WordPress.

Before starting these steps, be sure that you have the necessary system set up. You’ll need to have a WordPress website along with the the plug-ins installed that I described yesterday. Also, your results may differ depending on how you configure the plugin screen. Again, you can find how to do all of that here.

Once you’re all set, proceed to the following steps:

Step 1: Create a New WordPress Post.

Create a post as you normally would. If you need a refresher, check out the instructional video here: How to make a Post in WordPress.

Once you have your title and information loaded in, it’s time to make this post a calendar entry.

Step 2: Edit the Start and End Dates and Times

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter a start time and and end time for the event. Be sure to enter the correct times for both.

Select the start and end dates and times.

If you would like to create repeating events, just click the ‘+’ symbol at the bottom of the Event Editor and add more dates & times. Remember that these events will all share the same titles and information you include in the post. This can be a great time-saver!

You can create repeating events.

Step 3: Double Check the Post Category

Now that you have set the start and end dates, check to make sure that WordPress has automatically selected the ‘Event’ category. This will be the signal to the rest of the website to treat this differently from a normal post and instead like a calendar invite. If the Event category is not set, go back to Step 2 and be sure the start and end dates and times are set properly.

Check that the Event Category is Selected

Step 4: Publish the Event

Returning to the home page you should see the event is scheduled for the future. This post will not show up in the normal feed as a post normally would. It will show up in the calendar – shown here in our right hand sidebar. The title of your event (the title you entered in the post) will appear when a viewer hovers their mouse over the calendar.

Calendar is updated.

You can do this as many times as you would like to populate future events. Just keep on repeating the process and your calendar will be full in no time!

Hope that helps. As usual, any questions, please just enter them below.

Yesterday I wrote a post about how the Lake Wylie Friends in Business website I built took advantage of the WordPress excerpt function to create a newspaper-like appearance. I showed you how you could edit an excerpt on a WordPress page. Another feature I included while building that website was an on-line calendar. Today I am going to show you how you can put an on-line calendar on to your own website for free. Just follow the steps in this article and you will be all set!

Want a Calendar for your website like this? Read on!

How to Add a Monthly Calendar on WordPress

Quality, free plugins are one of the reasons I love the WordPress community. They are like getting free after-markets parts for your car. Free software that would cost thousands of dollars to build and take hundreds of hours to test are available. This is where some of the true value of having a WordPress website comes into play.

If you don’t have a WordPress website, I would suggest you review these notes from interviews I did with other small businesses on why they decided to build a website with WordPress. Don’t worry, getting a WordPress website is very easy. Check out these videos on how to auto-install WordPress yourself – no Computer Science degree ,necessary! Of course, if you’d prefer to have a professional help you, contact me and I’ll be happy to assist.

Install & Activate the following plug-in

You are going to need the following plug in:

• Event Calendar

Download that and install it through the WordPress auto-installer. No mess, no fuss, just functionality on your system without you having to code a thing. Be sure to activate them once they are installed!

Modifying the Website Event Calendar

Now that the plug-ins are installed, it’s time to configure the Event Calendar System. Navigate to the plugins section in the WordPress admin page. Once you locate the Event Calendar plugin, just click on the link.

Event Calendar Plugin for WordPress

Here’s a screen shot of the Lake Wylie Friends in Business settings. You may want to make yours different. In particular I wanted to be able to schedule events way into the future without having them show up in my article feed. However, I still wanted those items to show up in the calendar I was putting on the sidebar navigation. The solution was to create a WordPress post category titled ‘Events’ where these would live. As long as the Friends in Business website administrators only tag posts that they want to appear in the calendar as being part of the Event category, everything will work fine.

Event Calendar Configuration Settings

The whole system takes about 15 minutes to set up with WordPress. Give it a try and let me know how it works out.

In the next post I will show you how to create a calendar event on the WordPress website.

A few years ago I built a business membership website for my friends in Lake Wylie’s Friends in Business. It allows each of the member companies to post information about their company’s business. This kind of advertising can be very effective, especially when combined with a total marketing campaign.

Since new companies are always joining Friends in Business or wanting to update the community about their news, we decided to build the website with a newspaper feel. The home page lists the latest news sections in descending date order. The newest articles – in this case WordPress posts – appear first.

Why Use a WordPress Post Excerpt

But there was a problem. Some articles could be thousands of words long. That would make the home page incredibly long. The solution was to use WordPress’s native excerpt interface – a nifty bit of functionality that allows you to supply a brief summary of the article and invite readers who are interested in learning more to click to the full article. You will see this same concept in the Wall Street Journal’s web page design as well.

The Wall Street Journal Uses Excerpts, Too

How to Edit an Excerpt of a Post on a WordPress Page

If you are going to make use of WordPress excerpts, you are going to have to learn how to edit them. It’s a very simple process that I detail step by step here. Just follow these instructions and pictures and you’ll be all set!

Step 1: Navigate to the Post you want to edit in the Admin screen.

Step 2: Be sure that the Excerpt functionality can be shown on your post admin screen.

Go to the top of the post admin screen and select the Screen Options drop-down. If the excerpt box is not checked, do so now.

Screen options for excerpt

Step 3: Go to the bottom of the Post edit screen until you see the Excerpt section.

It should look like so…

Excerpt before updating

Step 4: Edit the excerpt here.

You should keep your excerpt short and sweet. While there is no hard limit on the number of words you can use, a good limit would be under 140 characters. Be sure to make it catchy and be very clear about what you want the website viewer to do.

Notice how my excerpt didn’t have a lot of interesting things to say? Well, I’ve changed that. I’ve also included some HTML commands in there. Specifically, I’ve included hyperlinks in the excerpt to provide more value for readers of this page and to drive clicks towards my own website. I’ve written a guide on how you can link to your website from other places here.

Step 5: Save the post and you’re all done!

If you return to the home page you should see that your excerpt is all set!

Hope that helps you learn to edit excerpts in a WordPress post. Any questions, please just let me know!

A few days ago a reader of Charlotte Web Development asked how to link to his website from a Craigslist post. This is an excellent idea and I’ll show you how in this article step-by-step. Not only will this show you how to create a link from your Craigslist ad to your website, you will be able to use this technique to link from multiple other platforms like eBay, bulletin boards, your Facebook corporate page and elsewhere on the web.

First off, it’s a great idea to get into the practice of linking back to your website from all over the web. While making Craigslist or similar type ads can be a cheap and effective way to advertise your business the problem is that they are short-lived. Once the ad expires, so does your advertisement. However, if you can get a prospect to click over to your website, a whole world of possibilities opens up!

Linking to your website from Craigslist or elsewhere on the web gives you multiple opportunities. Here’s a few:

1. Bring qualified leads to you.
2. Capture their contact information.
3. Cross promote your other services and products.
4. Give prospective clients a place to bookmark and come back to.
5. Also, more links to your website can help you move up in search engine rankings like Google.

How to link to my website in my Craigslist post?

In short, you need to make a hyperlink tag to your website.This is similar to the process I wrote about when describing how to put an image in your Craigslist post.

Start with the following code:

<a src="http://www.CharlotteWebDevelopment.com/SomeLinkHere">The text you want to be linked</a>

Step 1: Identify the link destination.

Copy the address of the place you want to link to. In, this example I am pretending to link to the page here: http://www.CharlotteWebDevelopment.com/SomeLinkHere

For the rest of this lesson I am going to refer to the page you are linking to as the URL.

Step 2: Put the link destination as the source.

Just replace the part I have in quotes after src= with the address of your contact page and the link will go to that page. Be sure to keep the quotes on either side of the URL!

Step 3: Write the text you want to be linked.

You can change the wording that appears linked by editing the part in the middle. In the example I have above this is the part that says The text you want to be linked

In the website design business this is called anchor text. Anchor text can be very useful to you in a few ways. For one it drives action for people to do something you want. In the case of linking to your site from Craigslist, you are asking viewers to leave the site they are on – a site they know well – and go an unknown site, yours. To accomplish this mission, you probably want to write something compelling.

The other way this link can be advantageous to you is in Search Engine results. Some search engines rate your site higher depending not only one the number and quality of the links you provide, but also for what words you use in the anchor text. For example, if you use the terms Barbie in your anchor text, it will count as a point in the Search Engine algorithms for the page you are linking to for Barbie. If you would like to rank higher for the terms for your business, you should include those words in your anchor text.

Step 4: Paste the whole Code into the Craigslist ad.

This part is simple. Just take the work you have done in steps 1-3 and paste it into your Craigslist ad, bulletin board forum, or where ever.

Presto! You have a link back to your website!

Let me know if this technique works for you. If you have any questions, just write a comment below and I’ll do my best to get back to you with some help. All the best with your business!

The first thing to do to promote an existing website is to measure how many people are visiting your site right now. I recommend using Google Analytics for this purpose. It’s free and it tells you who is coming to your site and what they are doing when they get there. Just go to their site and follow their instructions on how to put the code up.

Every website is different, but if you have a WordPress website, this is incredibly easy. Just edit a layout file or install a plugin and you are good to go!

If you have any issues with Google Analytics, let me know in the comments below and I’ll see if I can help.

Last time we covered a very easy way for small businesses with websites to fix a simple mistake and make a lot more money. Since then I realized there is an even bigger mistake with a very simple solution that small business owners make before they even get their websites off the ground.

2 Parts of a Successful Website

Making money from the web boils down to 2 components: 1) Attracting an audience and 2) Having that audience enact your business plan.  The key component of this equation is that business plan as most successful websites have an architecture that ‘started with the end in mind.’

And that is the biggest error; Small Business Owners rarely start with a clearly defined goal on how a website design will gain them sales. Do that on a small and focused scale and watch your site succeed.

Lesson 1: Focus on the Desired Result

If you can envision your small business website creating that extra income from the web, a way can be found to make it happen. Examples for a photographer might be ‘My business will make money by A) selling photos on Smug Mug, B) offering engagement photos, or C) selling landscape portraits.

Many businesses will want to have multiple revenue streams. One important lesson I have learned is to aim for early success by targeting your favorite single item and then focusing like a laser on that goal. You can always build in more later but diffusing your efforts over a large spectrum generally does not lend itself to success. Whether or not you have success with that first endeavor you will have a host of great lessons learned that will make the next effort so much easier.

Lesson 2: You’re in your business, not the make the website pretty/awesome/cutting edge business

Another lesson that is contrary to a person selling web design services is that you don’t always need a ton of cutting edge technology. Good enough is, well, good enough. Think of how successful Apple has been with incremental delivery. They generally build something with minimal functionality and then use that success to fund and prioritize the next set of improvements. If you don’t have enough visitors to your website, does it matter if it has a drag and drop interface? Maybe it does but first make certain that the investment of your time or design budget is well spent. Perhaps getting more of the right visitors to your website and analyzing their actions once they are there will bear more fruit than upgrading the design.

Like many other small business owners I have been spending the morning catching up with my clients, helping them out as well as following up on new business leads. No matter if you are in the landscape business, the data recovery business, or the iPhone/iPad business, you’re morning likely starts the same way.

Another common thread between all of us is that we often see small changes our clients and prospects could make that would do a world of good for their business. There is 1 HUGE mistake that small business owners have been making that I have been seeing all morning long. It has a really simple fix and it will page huge dividends for them in the future.

Website Owners: Fix this 1 Mistake, Get More Business!

Fix: Use your business email!

Let’s use me as an example. I have a professional email address that is bound to my website. It is Ted (at) Charlotte Web Development .com. Of course I have other email addresses, but none of those are my professional email address. It’s simple, but I use it for all of my professional dealings and you should, too. It may be the easiest way to get more business and awareness for your company.

Why You Should Use Your Own Company Email Address

1: Free Advertising

I can’t tell you how many people have come to my website because they see my website URL in my email address. And it isn’t only the people you email that will see your small business website URL. The people you email will forward your emails to other people – especially in business.

2: Professionalism

You’ve made the investment into having your own website. Part of that decision was likely to raise the professional appearance of your company. Every joe-shmoe competitor has a Google, MSN, Yahoo, or even an AOL (loser) email address. Maybe you even have one for your local telephone company. Don’t use them. Let your competitors that were too cheap / unprofessional to have their own website use those generic email addresses. The fact that you took the time and care to bring your business to this basic level of professionalism will raise you in the eyes of your clients.

3: Business Branding

Ok, you may not be as big as a brand as Nike or Deere or Ford. But you will never grow without that kind of exposure. Whatever your core business is, you want your customer base to equate you to that concept. You likely chose your domain name like I did with care to branding, memorability, and possibly even greater search engine results. Every interaction I do with my professional email reinforces my brand because my URL is in it.

Worried about losing your old emails? Not to worry. You can easily redirect your old email address to your new one. Even better, send an email to all of your business clients telling them about your new email address. That will be terrific exposure and is a great soft-sell approach that will probably lead to a sale or two. Why not try it out?

Don’t know how to make a business email work? Call your hosting company or let me know below and I’ll see if I can help out!