Business Marketing Plan - Website Creation Strategy

A key component to your Business Plan will be the marketing of yourself.  Internet visibility is critical, not only for big businesses . . . but essential for self-published authors and artists. In retrospect, I had the cart in front of my pony before I established my own website which resulted in many self-inflicted mistakes.

There are basically three tracks one can take.  Have it done by someone else, do it yourself or a combination of both.  In either case you need to have a strategy.  I provided a link to Microsoft's website that has a user friendly template to assist you in developing your own website creation strategy.  I sure wish I googled "website creation strategy" before I started my own website.  Please note that the completion of this template goes hand-in-hand with your business plan.  So do your biz plan  first.

The track that I chose was to develop my own via a google account. My up-front cost was only $10.00 for the registering my domain name.  The back-door cost was a lot of time at the keyboard getting it to the point that it now exists.  Please note, that I'm still on the upside of the learning curve but I have developed more confidence.  So would I do create a website on my own, again?  Yes, but only after I developed a website creation strategy. 

A key part of a website creation strategy is Web Hosting.  A do-it-yourself website owner does not always host their own site.  There are great benefits for professional web hosting services and I am researching them now.  Once you create your site the next challenge is getting the traffic to your site.

The learning curve, if you are not experienced in this area is steeper that that of getting your site on the web.  Word of mouth is still alive and well so run your website creation plan by folks that you know that have their own site and find out who and how their sites are hosted before you spend any hard earned dollars.  Balance the dollar investment versus your sweat equity in doing it yourself.  The downside for a do-it-all-yourself(er) is that it takes you away from doing your creative art stuff.