Page 172 - Social Media Marketing

Creating and Maintaining Your Own Web Site 157

Registering a domain name is easy and affordable. Most com-
panies charge a $10 registration fee (per year), and if you use the
company to host your web site, the company may waive the reg-
istration fee. Visit www.internic.net/regist.html for a list of accred-
ited domain name registrars. Compare prices and services care-
fully before placing your order. I've registered most of my domain
names through GoDaddy.com at www.godaddy.com. My co-author
uses BlueHost at www.bluehost.com. both for registering his do-
main names and hosting. BlueHost offers several tools to sim-
plify the creation of web sites and blogs. Choose one service and
stick with it, so you can manage all of your domains through one
web site.

Planning Your Web Site

Although many salespeople have their own web sites, a majority
of these sites are substandard. They simply contain a photo of the
salesperson, the person's biography or resume, and general infor-
mation about the products or services they sell. These web sites may
gratify the ego of the salesperson who created them, but they do
little or nothing to generate leads or income.

A good web site must be interactive. A client who visits your site
must be able to do more than browse through a list of your current
products and read your biography. Visitors must be able to request
and receive information and discover a vast array of data that will
help them make their buying decisions.

For example, one of the keys to any good real estate purchase
is the quality of the local schools. Real estate salespeople ought to
include information about the local schools on their web site. For
example, gather information about local schools from their web
sites (nowadays, almost every school has its own web site) and
present the data on your web site. Why shouldn't you simply add
links to the schools' web sites? Because you want to keep visitors
on your site rather than encouraging them to leave. If you do want
to link to a school's web site, then design the link to open in a