By Martin Zwilling
These days, if your startup does not have an Internet home base up and running, you are not ready for business or potential investors. Customers go there to check on the details of your offerings and verify that you are not a scam, investors look there to check out your management and sales approach, and suppliers expect to find contact information.
There should be no doubt that an Internet presence is as basic to success in business today, as brick and mortar was a hundred years ago. Yet I am amazed to see from recent data that nearly 36 percent of small businesses today still have no web presence at all. These are soon to be the walking dead, and the competitors you can beat today.
In fact, you need to have at least a prototype web site published several weeks before you expect anyone to find yours, since it takes that amount of time for the web search engine “spiders” to find you and index your content. I still remember my disappointment the first time I published my website, did an immediate Google search on the name, and it said my company didn’t exist.
There are many practical reasons for going to work early on your web site. Here are a few:
Register domain name and set up hosting. I’ve said many times that the Internet domain name should be reserved at the same time you incorporate your company name – they need to be the same, or highly related. Yet I still hear stories of companies being well down the road on products and collateral with a given name, only to find out that everything has to be changed because of a domain name conflict or availability problem.
Websites do take time to get done right. I’ve also known startups who have worked for months on the infrastructure of their business – front office, manufacturing, product design, marketing, personnel, and sales – then started work on a web site in parallel with their “grand opening.” Two months later they still didn’t have a web site, and didn’t have a customer. You should allow three months for the design, building, and rollout of your first site, and you can actually build it yourself these days.
Finalizing the web site validates your product plan and sales strategy. Many founders find that building the web site forced them to commit on the product design, set final pricing, define ordering and delivery procedures, and actually schedule and staff the marketing events that they had in mind.
Viral marketing needs a website. Everyone knows that word-of-mouth advertising is an effective and important part of any small business. But word-of-mouth and viral marketing doesn’t work without a web site. On the other hand, don’t assume that viral marketing is the only marketing you will need.
The website can be a source of revenue. If your business and product are as attractive as you believe, the traffic to your web site will build quickly. Now you should monetize that aspect of your business through the use of Google AdSense to display ads for related products and businesses, and get paid for the “click-throughs.”
Your web site will promote your business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Like you probably do, many people search for products and services on the weekends and in the evening. They are busy business people and very often this is the best time for them to concentrate on researching a new product or service. As a business owner, there is nothing more satisfying than having several orders and email inquiries waiting for you when you get up in the morning!
In fact, you can set up a web presence these days on social media alone, by creating a company page on Facebook, company profile on LinkedIn, or a free blog with static pages on WordPress. These may not have the globally recognized www.companyname.com domain name, but will certainly put you in touch with the new Internet generation.
I’ve heard all the excuses for not stepping up to this requirement – like I don’t have the time, skills, or money. But believe me, the costs these days are trivial, compared to the benefits. For the first time you have at your disposal the whole world market for whatever product or service you happen to provide. It’s time to turn the light on, and let the world know you exist.
The writer is a veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech professional, professor, and investor. Published on Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, Huffington Post.