How to Get Started With a Website for Your Home Business

If you have a home business or hope to have one, you need a website. While most home business owners don't rely on the internet to sell their services or products, they do rely on the web as a marketing tool to reach customers around the globe. Within the last decade, the internet has become one of the best marketing tools available. There are still the traditional advertising methods out there, and they work well. But none of the traditional marketing methods can even touch what internet marketing does for a business. Direct mail, postcards, brochures, word of mouth, newspaper and magazine ads.....these are all great marketing tools for letting people know about your home business and service. But as good as all of these are, none of them can match what the internet has done for business marketing. The use of the web to advertise yourself allows anyone in the world to find you by the click of a mouse, at a cost much less than traditional marketing methods. Internet marketing should not replace traditional marketing, but should be an enhancement to it.

Putting your home business service or product on the web might sound intimidating, especially if you've little experience with the web, domain ownership, or building sites. Don't let the lack of knowledge in these areas cause you any fear. When I went online in 1997, I knew nothing about a computer except how to type. Five years ago, I had no idea how to go about buying a domain name, let alone how to build or make a website, and the idea of researching hosting plans was a joke to me. Today, we have over 50 sites which we build and run ourselves, all self taught.

After deciding on a hosting company, you'll want to go back to where you bought your domain name and add the name servers to your new domain. You should receive emails about this from the hosting company when you purchase a hosting plan. After adding the name servers (NS) to the domain name, it generally takes 24 to 48 hours for the changes to show up on the internet. In other words, your domain name will not show up for at least 24 hours, and it could take as much as 72 hours, although it can be as soon as 30 minutes.