Free Resources

Small Business Internet Marketing – Free Advice and Useful Resources to help you with any steps you prefer to do yourself eg:

Buy a Domain Name
Buy Hosting for your Website
Set up a Custom Facebook Page
Set up an Email Management System

We’ve included a good Facebook course, if you’d like to learn more about social media (do remember that our marketing packages all come with free membership of our own marketing training site) – plus links to a really useful Free tool

Facebook course
Keyword research tool

1 – Buy Your Domain Name

Your domain name is your website address – ours is www.internetpower4smallbusiness.com. You should choose a domain name which is relevant to your business. If possible it should be based on your main keyword. Most businesses choose a .com or .co.uk. Next best is .net.

Namecheap is a domain name industry leader and we think it is the best value if you want to buy a .com domain. It’s simple to search and buy an available name. The cost is very competitive and a .com usually costs $9.69, although some are as cheap as $2.99. Namecheap also include free ‘extras’ such as WhoisGuard and SSL certificates. It’s simple to transfer your domain to a different hosting account too.

We use Namecheap to register our own new .com domains.

Click on the banner to buy .com domain names…….

For .co.uk domains, we recommend 123-reg (they are a UK company, so they are cheaper for .co.uk domains than Namecheap).

Click on this banner to buy .co.uk domain names…….

2 – Set up Hosting

Next you need to get webhosting for your new domain.

HostGator is a leading hosting provider. It’s very important to use a reputable hosting company, to make sure your website doesn’t keep disappearing as your hosting company’s server is “down”.

You can get hosting for a single domain for around $4.95 a month, but we usually recommend the “Baby” plan which allows unlimited domains, sub domains and email addresses at a great value $7.95 a month.

That means you could host 100 or more websites on just one account. More likely, you may want to add on a couple of new domains. You may simply want both the .com and .co.uk versions of your domain name.

You can check out Hostgator from this banner….(remember to use our unique coupon code: internetpower for an introductory discount)

Helpful Guide to transfer your domain name from Namecheap to Hostgator

Please contact us for our helpful guide. It’s free to anyone who buys their domain name and hosting through our links. We do receive a small commission, so this is our way of thanking you – and the cost to you is exactly the same as going direct

3 – Set Up a Custom Facebook Page

If you want to set up your own Custom Facebook Page, then the simplest way for you to do this is to use FastFanPages. Creating a Custom Facebook Page usually involves setting up a new website and linking that to Facebook. This software cuts out some of these processes, as it does them for you – and they have some useful templates and other great features.

FastFanPages costs from $37 per month and is easy to use – it comes with a good video series to show you how to use it . We know Paul Teague who runs this business, he’s very genuine and he’s constantly improving the software. We think it’s easily the best out there. (Please, do be careful, there are a lot of internet products around which promise the earth and deliver a handful of dust .

You can check out FastFanPages from this (rather tacky) banner…

4 – Email Marketing – Setting up an Email Autoresponder System

An email management system allows you to capture visitors details on your website and / or Custom Facebook Page so you can start email marketing – sending those subscribers emails with offers and information.

Setting this up involves designing and creating the email details capture form (“opt-in”) and putting the code for this onto your website. You can then set up an “autoresponder” series – pre-set emails to go at set times and dates to your subscribers. You can also send out one-off emails whenever you want. You can set up separate lists and send different emails to prospects and to actual customers. You will also need an incentive, such as a free voucher or special report to encourage people to sign up.

Most of the email autoresponder systems are quite complex to set up and you will need to know how to do the website coding.

We consider the the 2 best options are AWeber and our own system, InternetPower emails (based on iContact).

InternetPower emails is our system and costs £95 per month for up to 2000 emails, with all the set up, forms and coding done for you. You then pay for additional emails sent, rather than according to the size of your list.

It’s particularly good for businesses who already have existing databases, since it does not require your existing customers and prospects to “opt-in” again. This is why we choose to use this system for our clients, although we do use AWeber ourselves too.

Please do check out our Online Marketing Services page for more information on InternetPower emails.

AWeber is very reputable and is recommended by all the top internet marketing professionals. It’s a very good option if you have a new, internet based business. It costs from $19 per month for up to 2000 subscribers on your list. So as your list gets bigger, the price increases.

The big disadvantage is that it’s difficult to add an existing database – AWeber requires all new contacts to specifically “opt-in” to their system.

There are lots of videos on the AWeber site and you’ll need to go through all these to learn how to create forms and set up the system.

Check out AWeber via this banner…

Facebook Course – Social Network Academy

We recommend this course if you would like to know more about Facebook and how to use it to make money. It is very much designed for pure internet marketing rather than for small businesses generally, but is still among the best we’ve found. Please do bear in mind that social networks change very fast and the details can get out of date.

We include lots of training resources designed specifically for small businesses with our marketing membership site, which is free with all our marketing packages.

The Social Network Academy is a membership site. It includes masses of information and videos, including how to set up effective personal Facebook profiles, Facebook Pages and Groups, Facebook Ads (as well as YouTube) – and lots of advice on how to use social media effectively.

It costs £28.66 per month, but you can get a 10 day trial for just 65p.