The Sales Training AcademyWebsites and email addresses are the most common tools associated with having your own domain name. There are many other tools associated with owning a domain name but for purposes of digital marketing it is important to know that your website and the content on it is valuable and done well will ensure ongoing discovery on free organic search engines.
It is important for you to own your domain name and administration rights no matter who helps you with your website design, email marketing, digital marketing or social media marketing.
If you’ve never had a website before, it can be easy to get excited — or overwhelmed; pick your emotion! — by the prospect of all the exciting features you can add to it. So you’d better get cracking, adding all those features in to your website, right?
Wrong.
There are dozens of different website builders available from TELSTRA Online Essentials to Wix and they all promise ease of use, powerful features and the promise of more traffic, more conversions and more MONEY. One problem with these website builders is that most website designers don’t take them seriously but what I don’t like about them is they tie you to Telstra, Wix or the website builders owner.
I started using a website builder when I worked on our very first website and I loved it so much I couldn’t change – until the developer decided to stop supporting it and my hosting company stopped offering it. That was a scary time because I was starting to rely on my website. It’s even scarier to depend on average website design software these days! See how we helped an electrician migrate away from Telstra Online Essentials and onto a WordPress website hosted with Crazy Domains.
Purchasing a domain name is cheap, setting up hosting is cheap, installing WordPress is FREE but if you’re not technically savvy and you’re trying to do your own digital marketing then it’s Crazy what you need to pay for.
I’ve been working with Aussie and US hosting companies for over 10 years and there is a LOT of competition so these hosting companies tend to focus on the monthly price. Most business owners didn’t understand the value of their hosting several years ago and just went with the cheapest option but here are a couple reasons I recommend you spend a little extra..
If you’d like to set up a website for your business using WordPress or some other content management system (CMS), you’ll need your own domain name and then you’ll need a web hosting company.
You can get a website hosting package with email services bundled together from companies like Net Registry, but if you shop around, you will be able to find a good web host in the U.S. that are usually cheaper and provide better service. Here are the details about the hosting company we prefer and why.
We recently helped an asbestos removal company improve their digital presence by getting them off their hotmail email address and onto their own branded email using Google G Suite.
You can create a branded email address by getting your own domain name and connecting it to Google G Suite, which you can do directly through Google or by purchasing your domain name separately through a domain registrar like Net Registry, MelbourneIT, Crazy Domains, GoDaddy and many more. This is something we cover in our Digital and Social Media Marketing Courses.
Depending on the type of domain name you’d like to register, they can cost you as little as ten or eleven dollars a year, or as much as thirty. If you decide to register your domain with a company like Net Registry, an Australian owned and operated registrar owned by Melbourne IT, you can also sign up for extra services to help you run your business.
Purchasing a domain name from a registrar directly may be preferable if you’d like to connect it to a WordPress website, but you can also buy it directly from Google when you sign up for a G Suite account. This may be preferable, as Google will handle to renewal of your domain at the same time as your G Suite account.
A basic G Suite account costs just $5 a month, and comes with a raft of business tools you can use to make your business more professional and efficient. Aside from the free word processing apps you get access to (also available for free Gmail accounts), you also get free cloud storage so you can share documents with team members remotely, and access to Google calendar.
Because the Google calendar app is in the cloud, you can share access to it with your virtual assistant, so you can both schedule meetings and appointments without any clashes. Tradies can also share it with clients when they’re trying to organise a time to commence a new job, rather than going back and forth with different times and dates.
If you choose to register your domain name separately — it does offer more flexibility, particularly if you ever want to move your email account from Google (who knows, something better and easier may come along in the future) — you do need to be wary of scams that often circulate to businesses.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) recently fined a company $2.3 million for sending unsolicited notices to businesses that looked like renewal notices, but were really registration notices for other domain names often costing upwards of $250.
Remember: a domain name shouldn’t cost much more than $30 a year, and certainly not more than $100. Check the fine print, and make sure you’re using a reputable domain name registrar.
To learn how to set up a Google G Suite account and start using a branded email address to increase your digital presence and make your business more professional, enrol in our Digital and Social Media Marketing Course, which covers Google G Suite and much more.