[Online Marketing] – 5 Quick Steps To An Inexpensive Product Website

Interested in setting up an individual website for your product or product line, but you’re worried it’s too difficult and time-consuming? You’re in luck! Just follow these five easy steps and you’ll have a product website set up in no time… and for practically nothing!

1) Find a reliable host. Your web host is the company that will be providing your “space” on the web. They’ll also provide the software you’ll need to make your website run smoothly. There are a lot of hosting options out there; some are great, and some are a complete rip-off. A lot of them will only give you a deal on hosting if you’re willing to pay up front. That’s bad if you have a problem, though, because they have your money, which gives you less leverage. It’s better to pay a little extra and be on a monthly billing cycle.

Two hosts that I’ve had great luck with are 100MegsWebHosting (the host for this site) and EasyCGI (the host for my Army Ant Publishing site, which is not yet publicly available). 100Megs offers a $5 per month hosting solution that’s enough for any small website, and I can vouch for their excellent customer service. My only complaint about them is that they’re stingy with the disk space compared to many of their competitors; if you need more than 40Mb of space, you have to upgrade to the $10 plan. EasyCGI, on the other hand, offers a hosting plan for $8 per month that will give you 350Gb of space. I can’t imagine why you’d need that much, but for the price, it’s an amazing option.

Set up an account with either of those companies, or one of your own choosing, and you’re ready to go.

2) Acquire a domain name: This is your name on the web: www.yourcompanyhere.com. Many places will register these for you for anywhere between $8-$25, but there’s no point in paying top dollar since you’re essentially paying for an electronic service. Two registrars that will both register a .com or a .net for $10 are GoDaddy and EasyCGI. Also, if you’re setting up a brand new site, 100Megs is currently giving away free domain names if you set up a hosting account with them.

I used to swear by GoDaddy, but lately, I haven’t been too impressed. GoDaddy tries every trick in the book to sell you service, and they’ve had to raise a lot of their prices recently because, I’m assuming, they’ve been spending too much on their questionable advertisements. EasyCGI doesn’t hustle you, and they charge the same amount; get a $10 domain there and you’ll be fine. If you own a domain already and you paid more than $10 for it, you can also transfer it to EasyCGI for $10 and get a one-year extension on your registration.

A word of warning about domain names: either set up auto-renew or make sure you renew 14 days or more before your domain name lapses. There’s nothing worse than temporarily losing your domain name (as I recently did!) and having your site go down for days. It’s quite aggravating.

3) Download Wordpress. You can find it at Wordpress.org. To put it simply, it’s the easiest and best small website software I’ve seen out there, and it’s absolutely free. Wordpress will set your site up blog style, but it has tons of options and is very easy to configure. The site it kicks out for you will be just as good as something you could pay a professional to design, and it will give you access to all the bells and whistles you need to change the site to suit your style.

The directions aren’t tricky, but they may require some technical ability; you can always ask your webhost to help you install it if you’re stuck. Wordpress will walk you through most of the installation and give you some simple forms to fill in to create your settings.

From there, you need to install a theme (which you can find on the Wordpress site) and any plugins or widgets you think you’ll need. The nice thing about Wordpress is that you can add in new options or changes, see how they look, and change them very easily without having to write a single line of code. Another advantage is that Wordpress will automatically update your entire site on the fly so you don’t have to worry about keeping your pages consistent. This means that if you change your logo on your main page, you change it on all of them.

As you select a theme to give your site a unique look, I would recommend only using a one or two-column design for your website. If you opt for the two-column design, you’ll have a main content area (where your posts go) and a sidebar. You can do anything you like with the sidebar by clicking on “presentation” and then selecting “widgets” or “theme editor” and making changes. Widgets are much easier to use and edit than the theme editor, so play with them first. Wordpress has plenty of widgets you can add in, so be sure to check some of them out!

Wordpress can generate two types of webpages: posts and pages. Posts are archived by category and will show up on your page in chronological order. I suggest using these for company news and announcements, and keeping them archived in sensible categories. Some categories I would suggest for a publishing site include “Company News,” “Press Releases,” “Reviews,” and a category for each book or line of books that you’re publishing. You can file posts under multiple categories, so a press release about your “Doggone Good” line could be filed under both “Press Releases” and “Doggone Good.”

Pages are a little more permanent, and they’re meant for content that you want immediately available from every location on the site. If you look up at the top of my own site here, you’ll see entries for things like “Home,” “About Sean Jordan,” “Comic Book Writer’s Guide” and “Guide To the Site.” These are all pages that I want to be available to anyone who surfs in so that they can easily find their way to content. I could have done these as posts, but they’re much more useful to everyone when they’re visibly available.

I would suggest having a page called “About Us” that gives some basic information on your company, and a page called “Store” where you either set up your own shopping cart (we’ll discuss that in the next step) or have links to your books on a retail site like Amazon.com. You should probably also set up a page for each book or line of books with information about your titles, including the cover, the author’s name, the publication date, the ISBN, and a summary of the content. If you want to include previews, put those on a separate page and then, using the “Manage / Pages” option in Wordpress, assign those previews to be “children” of the related project page by setting the project page as the “parent.” Just don’t forget to provide a link readers can click on to access the preview!

Wordpress also features something called a “blogroll,” which is really just a fancy name for a “links section.” I would discourage using a blogroll in a product website, unless you really want to link to outside sites. If you do, make sure every link has its target set for “_blank” so that it will open links in a new tab or browser and not take visitors away from your site.

4) Get some shopping software. What you’re looking for here is not just something that will allow you to do ecommerce, but something that will take your visitors to a secure site and allow them to make purchases with a credit card. This will be the most expensive part of your site, but depending upon your scope, it doesn’t have to be.

If you just want to test the waters or you don’t anticipate high sales, you can start with Paypal’s ecommerce service. What I like about this service is that it’s easy to set up and it doesn’t have any usage fees. When a customer makes a purchase, Paypal collects the money, removes its fee, and deposits the rest into your account. The fee is a little high ($.30 plus up to 2.9% of the sale), but the fact that you don’t have to spend a dime on the software up front makes it an ideal solution for a small publisher who’s only going to sell a few hundred books over the course of a year.

If you’re planning on selling a few hundred books a month, you might want to consider a small business merchant account with Yahoo!. There’s a $50 setup fee plus a monthly fee of $39.95 for the basic package, but you only have to pay a 1.5% fee on sales. Paypal has a similar program for $30 per month (no setup), but with a fee of up to 2.9% plus $.30. I think the Paypal service has a little bit more to offer the small business owner, personally, but Yahoo!’s service is reliable as well. It’s always good to know what’s out there.

Here’s a link to a useful article that really goes in depth on other ecommerce options.

Chances are good your host has an ecommerce frontend and backend you can use on your site to keep track of orders, so you may just need a credit card service to ring out your orders. Fortunately, these companies often don’t charge you much more than a small merchant fee on transactions. Unfortunately, they tend to hit you hard with a lot of extra fees. If you’re going to use one of these services, I’d recommend CardService International, since they are one of the least expensive and one of the best rated.

If all that sounds too complicated, or if you’re set up to do Print On Demand through a site like Amazon.com, you can just go ahead and link directly to your products and let your retailer worry about the payment. But if you’re selling through Amazon, you can still make a little bit extra by joining the Amazon.com associates and getting credit for link click referrals to your products or other products you might like to feature.

5) Keep your site updated. Once you’ve got everything you need to get your content rolling, start actually cranking out posts and pages about your products… lots of them! Every time your products are reviewed positively, post a link and a quote from the review. Every time you or one of your authors conducts an interview with a website, podcast, radio show or television show, post up a link with an excerpt. Every time some big piece of news happens with your products, post up an announcement. Every time you’re nominated for an award, or pass a goal, or have something else worth bragging about, post it up on your page. Don’t be shy about talking about your company!

I say this for three reasons.

1) You will naturally improve your search engine results just by having lots of content. There’s no reason to pay someone to submit your sites to search engines; if your site is online long enough, it will be indexed. Registering the site with Wordpress and sites like Feedburner, Technorati, Digg and Reddit will help you get indexed faster because you’ll have more links coming in to your site.

2) Visitors like fresh content — and I can attest to this from experience, believe me! They also like to read about the things they’re interested in. If you’re constantly talking about how great your books are, and they’re interested in your books, they’re more likely to come back and buy your books.

3) The more focused you are on keeping your content fresh, the better a job you’ll do promoting your product, because you’ll start seeking out interviews and reviews, start looking for good promotional quotes, and start thinking about the good news you have to share with your fans.

When it’s all said and done, you can set up a fully-featured, functioning, professional-quality product website within 2-3 days for just under $20. It’s just that easy.

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