Every small business should have a website. It's just what's expected now. But worse than not having a website, is having a poor website.
The Challenges:
- You don't have enough money - Getting a visually appealing, functional website costs a little bit of money. I usually recommend my clients to anticipate spending about a $1000 for a good website using a professional website designer.
- You can't reserve the domain name you want - All the ones with your business name are taken.
- You don't know where to start, you don't know what to do - Who do you hire? You need time to research and figure things out.
- You don't want your website to look cheesy - Services like Go Daddy offer website builders for a fee, but they don't look very good, nor are they functional.
- You want something now - Building a good website can take 4-6 weeks (no matter what the developer says).
Squidoo is a service that invites you to build a "lens" and share your knowledge with the world. I think it's a great source for you to put up a free, interim website.
I put up this "lens" for my company: The Marketing Spot
It took me less than an hour, but it might take you a little longer, because I already had much of the content on my main company website.
The biggest benefit is that when you add your lens, you get a unique URL, which in effect, makes it a website. Notice that my lens domain name is www.squidoo.com/themarketingspot. I can direct people directly to my Squidoo lens with this URL. It's now my website.
With my site you will notice that I added pictures, videos, description of my services and my blog content. You can definitely get creative with your content to promote your business. Here's one of my favorite lenses: http://www.squidoo.com/laptopbag/
Squidoo has some limitations, such as color scheme and layout flexibility. You also have to endure Google ads and Squidoo offers. But hey, it's free and it's quick.
Try it out, but hurry so you can get the lens name you want. Now you have no more excuses to get a website.
DISCLAIMER: I was neither compensated nor approached by Squidoo for this post.
For small business marketing lessons and advice, see my other blog: The Marketing Spot
2 comments:
Great post about creating a free web page. I thought that I would let you know about a similar service that I co-founded called Launchtags.com. The platform lets you create a free web page, use multiple SEO tools to achieve a great page rank and sharing tools to get the page traffic. I think your blog audience would enjoy it. Plus, new pages are always featured on the front page of our site. If you have any feedback, please let us know. Thanks and keep up the great blog posts!
Brady Launchtags.com
brady@launchtags.com
Thanks for the information, Brady. I will check it out and build a Marketing Spot page.
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