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How to Create an Online Store

If you are interested in selling products online, for your small business, you may have come across various companies that will create one for your, or companies that will host the website for you. However before you use one of these companies, services or products you should first learn about the hidden costs of creating a website.

Here are the things that you will need to buy if you want to create a website for your small business.

1) Wysiwyg

You will have to buy a software known as a wysiwyg. This allows you to create a website, without knowing any technical skills. A wysiwyg will cost you either $300 or $400.

The other option is to just hire someone to create the website for you. You will probably end up paying them about $1,000.

2) Web Hosting

Now you need to put your website on the internet so that others can access it. To do this, you will need to find a web hosting company. Web hosts will usually cost around $5 per month. In general with web hosts you get what you pay for. Explaining this is a bit beyond the scope of this article, however you will realize why if you do some more research.

3) Domain Name

Now you need to register a domain name. Domain names cost around $10 a year, and you can purchase them from a domain registrar (most web hosts are also domain registrars). Unlike web hosting, all domain registrars are pretty much the same, so it's best to just look at price. Some times a free domain name will come with your hosting package. This usually occurs when you buy a more expensive package. If this is the case, then you don't need to worry about finding a place to register your domain name.

4) Shopping Cart

Now you will need to create a shopping cart, for your website. To do this you will want to use a third party service. The shopping carts allow you to sell your products directly from your website, so that you can create your own little store online. Shopping cart services will cost you around $100 a year.

5) Auto Responders

If you want to have a succesful website, you will need to be able to contact your customers, to inform them about new discounts, offers or products. This will make them return to your store more often.

The way you do this is by creating a mailing list. You will collect the peoples names, and email address, so that you can send them emails telling them about new offers. A mailing list software will cost a minimum of $18 a month, and that's if you have a really small mailing list.

6) SEO Consulting Firm

You will need to find out what keywords your company should target, so that you can get the most page views to your website. An SEO Consulting Firm will tell you exactly what keywords to target, and how you can change the content of your page to get indexed by Google and Yahoo highly.

7) Link Building and SE Submission

You will need to hire a company (or for smaller projects individual) to help you build backlinks to your website, and submit your site to all of the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.). These services can charge anything depending on how much you want done, however a good price to spend on this is $100. You will want to repeat this 3-4 times per year, for a total of $300-$400 per year being spent on link building.

8) WordTracker

Now you will need to continually research the keywords and keyword phrases to make sure that you are targeting the best search terms. In order to do this, you will need to buy a keyword software tool.

You will end up buying WordTracker. (Again the reason is beyond the scope of this article, and you will find out why when you do more research). The software is very expensive, and it will cost you $300 per year.

As you can see creating a website is very expensive, however it is very valuable in building a sustainable, long term business. You will eventually need to create a website to stay current with the times, so you might as well do it now.

Article Source: http://www.articles2know.com

To make your business look more proffesional, you should learn to Email Proffesionally, and Create a Site for your business. If you have a Family Business this will be especially helpful.

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