Step 2 - getting the logistics of the site set up - the site name, the domain name, the web hosting, 800 number, merchant account, business license, etc.

Once you have decided to go ahead with your site, I think it is a good idea to attend to the basic web business issues you will need to address. Some of these take awhile to get taken care of, so start now and hopefully they will all come together by the time you have finished your site.

Picking a Domain and Business Name

First, you need to come up with a name for your site and a domain name. These issues kind of meld together since often you will use your site's name as a domain name as well.

Coming up with a website's name is very different than coming up with a name for a brick and mortar retail store. Offline, it often makes sense to come up with a catchy, interesting name that people will remember - or one you simply like for whatever reason. Or starts with AAA so you are first in the Yellow Pages for your retail type.

But online, choosing a site's name and domain name revolve around other considerations. While you may have heard that the main issue is a search engine consideration - having a name and domain name that has your most important keywords may help you get better search engine placement - I have a different point of view. That is, the domain you pick should be the one that helps the most with your PPC (pay per click) advertising.

Why don't I think that the domain should be based on keywords for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes? First, back at the end of 2012 Google announced it was changing its algorithm so it wouldn't be giving exact match domain the extra boost they had been getting in the search results.

I saw this happen in my market. Where www.memoryfoam.com had for years been ranking first for the keywords "memory foam", in just a few months it has fallen all the way to the third page.

So while having certain keywords in your domain may not hurt you, no longer will it give you this great SEO benefit of showing up high in the search results just because of the domain name matching the search.

That being said, it is still nice to have your main keywords in your domain name if for no other reason than it tells your visitors what you do and what type of products you sell on the site.

I know this takes our a fair amount of the creativity of naming your business, but unless you have a lot of money to spend branding your site like Amazon, having your keywords in your domain is still one of the best ways to get across what your site is all about.

My website is an example of this - and I'm sorry to say, it is an example of what not to do.

I named it "Healthy Foundations" because I liked the image of this (building a strong foundation for health). And because my initial vision of the site was to have different areas of the site addressing different areas of interest in building a foundation for health. So I came up with this umbrella name, and the site would have subsection devoted to my different interests -- one for memory foam since it helped my back so much, one for vegetarian cooking and recipes since we are vegan, one for back pain issues (which I've subsequently spun to its own site), etc. And I added in this sub site, ZASM, after a few years since I wanted to share my experiences building a web business.

But after I started out in this vein, I quickly saw that the business part of the site on memory foam products was dominating the site. And I didn't have the foresight to think to spin it off to its own site, which I could have at that point, with a keyword name. To be fair to me, this was back before Google and keywords in the domain didn't mean anything. At that point, Yahoo ruled and I was #1 due to ... well, I don't know why, but I was and life was good.

So I kept the memory foam business under Healthy Foundations, and it wasn't till years later I realized that maybe I had made a mistake as I saw my competitors all using names more specific to memory foam or mattresses.

Now almost all my competitors names that reflect our business - names like "Memory Foam Factory", "Memory Foam Outlet", etc. I don't like their names nearly as well, but they do immediately tell customers what their specialty is - memory foam - and in the past having your keywords in your site's name and domain name may have really helped a website come up higher in search results.

And again, having the keywords in your domain aren't a bad thing. While Google may not give the boost it used to for sites with the keyword in the domain, they don't penalize and it still helps with the credibility of the site (I tend to click on a site that has the specific keyword I put in as the domain since I figure they are most likely preeminent).

But as you will see when you get to the traffic section of the site, there is one other important consideration when picking a domain name -- and that is how well it works as a display URL for PPC (pay per click) advertising.

When you get to this section, you will see that I am a strong proponent of paying for clicks. In short, I believe that paying for clicks -- if you can make the numbers work -- is a much more sustainable business model than SEO.

I see SEO as gravy. If you get free organic clicks, great. And doing the basics to optimize your site certainly makes sense.

But with one change to Google's algorithm, your organic traffic can evaporate -- and with it your business. And this isn't hypothetical. I used to be #1 for a lot of my most important, money keywords. And over the last 2 years my organic traffic has plunged by 80% or so due to my losing this positioning.

And despite what the SEO guys tell you, no one has the ability to get your positioning back as a guarantee. You can certainly try, but once you slip out of the #1 or first page, getting back is something that may never happen regardless of what you do.

So ... I buy clicks. That way I have control of the traffic to my site. And while my sales have been hurt a bit by the loss of organic traffic, I am still able to continue with my business since I invest in PPC.

This gets me back to the domain name issue. The display URL which shows in your Adwords ad can have a fair impact on the click through rate. I've heard people say different domains increased their click through by 20 - 40%. And since click through has a big impact on the quality score you get (and a higher quality score means you pay less for a click), this can make a big difference.

The old way to figure out a domain, using PPC, was to buy a few and just test out ads using different domains and see which one got the highest click through.

This isn't as easy to do now, since Adwords won't allow you to use more than one domain per adgroup.

So if you want to test a few domains, the safest way it to test a couple at a time. Put them in separate campaigns with the same keywords. But since you can have two campaigns bidding on the same keywords (you can try this, but Adwords can see this against their terms of service I've heard), you need to change the settings for the campaigns so they run in different hours.

I have heard about this, but I haven't tried it personally. But I believe you can run them in alternate hours, so that they don't overlap but it is a fair test. You don't want to have one run in the day and the other in the evening, since this can be very different types of folks and the click through may be very different.

Run the test for a few hundred clicks each, and see what domain gets the highest click through. Simple as that -- no more guessing, you can see which one gets the best reception from customers.

One other thing -- given Adwords rules, the domain used in the ad needs to match the domain of the site you land on. So you will need to make sure that this shows appropriately for each domain you are testing. You may need to do a mirror site or two for each domain you want to test to make this work (so the site will look the same, but the domain name will show differently for each copy of the site.) If you don't know how to do this, ask your webmaster to help you.

So, how did we come up with the name for the baby carrier site. Well, we knew we couldn't use the products name, ERGO, in our businesses' name - the company wouldn't allow this. And we knew we wanted to have "baby carrier" in the name.

And not really for search engine purposes, although this was a consideration, but instead because it would make clear for people quickly what is the purpose of the site. People searching on the net make their choices pretty quickly as to what site they will click on, and we wanted to make sure people saw that we specialized in baby carriers.

In contrast, one of our competitors uses the name "Peppermint". And while that is a nice sounding name, it doesn't give people any idea of what they actually do. So we wanted to stick with a name that would quickly let our potential customers know what we did.

We played with a lot of names that ended in "baby carrier", but when we explained to people about the site, my wife would say she wanted to sell the ERGO on the web because it was her favorite baby carrier. And this seemed important - she wasn't just someone trying to sell a product on the web, she was a real fan. So she thought we should just call the site "My Favorite Baby Carrier".

She realized it was a limiting type of name - how could she add in other carriers some day with this sort of name. But she didn't care to add in other carriers, she only wanted to sell this particular baby carrier and she liked the personal feeling she had for the carrier that the name encompassed.

I wasn't that thrilled with the name originally because I didn't think it sounded like a real business. I thought it was too personal. But we checked out different names with a lot of people, and they like this name best precisely because it was very personal - and so they might click on it just to see what this favorite carrier was. So "My Favorite Baby Carrier" it was.

Next, we turned to the domain name. First, when considering domain names, I absolutely believe it should always be a .com name. While there are lots of other options these days (.biz, .net, etc), any serious internet business should use a .com name. Don't be swayed on this one - take the time to figure out a .com name and stick with it.

But what should your .com name be? There are different considerations that will drive how you should go about creating the name. Certainly most domain names tend to reflect the business name. But there are other considerations that can go into your domain name as well.

Such as if you will be using the name offline and want people to easily remember your domain name. But if you will just be using the domain name as an online name - that is, it will only be used for links and for being found on search engines - then it really doesn't matter if you come up with a short, catchy name that is easy to remember. Instead, you will want to factor in the same kinds of concerns that went into coming up with your business name - mainly, whether your main keywords need to be in your domain name.

This has been the school of thought for a few years. It was seen as an edge to have your most important keywords in your domain. And even better would be to separate the keywords in the domain with dashes so that a search engine could easily determine what your keywords were.

As I said above, I think it is absolutely valid to use keywords in your domain name that reflect your business name. However, using the dashes version of the domain name is a bit different. The only reason to use the dashes is to help distinguish the keywords, and this is a search engine optimization driven type of result. So this may be a riskier way to go, although one that may still work. At this point, I'm not sure it matters since Google no longer gives a benefit to those domains having the specific keywords in the domain.

We decided to go with the business name as the domain name. This made our domain name consistent with our business name, and it did have our basic keywords in the domain. We also decided at that point to go with the dashes version of the name when we would submit it to search engines.

So our primary domain name would be www.my-favorite-baby-carrier.com. But we also reserved the non dash version as well. After the big Google upheaval I questioned whether we just should have gone with basic non-dashed name when we submitted the site to the search engines. I really don't know if the dashes in the domain name will be held against the site in the future, but as of now I would tend to go with a name without dashes - I just think the reward isn't worth the risk.

One thing you may come across when trying to come up with a domain name is that all the .com names you try are already taken. A basic way around this is to use a descriptive name with your keywords, as we did here, that will hopefully give you a domain name that no one has yet registered.

But if the basic domain names have been taken for your important keywords, then sometimes you can come up with options by adding on at the end modifiers like "online" or "warehouse", etc. We did this for our futon covers site. All the basic ones were taken, but we added "online" and, viola, we had our domain name. And this then became the business name as well. This is an example of how intrinsically the domain name and business name may be tied if you make these decisions around keyword considerations.

How to Register a Domain Name

As for actually finding and reserving your domain name, I use Go Daddy - it has worked well and is inexpensive ($7.95 a year as I write this for a .com name). And it has a search function on the home page which you can use to see if the domain name you want is available. Go Daddy's sign up is pretty easy, and you can reserve even before you have a web host by just letting the domain name be parked at Go Daddy. Then when you have a web host, ask for the DNS information (Domain Name Server) for your account and you can update your account at Go Daddy so the domain will be pointed to your web host account.

I would advise always registering all the basic combinations of your domain name. Registration is cheap enough these days that this just makes sense. So register the domain name, the dashed version, and singular or plural versions if this makes sense. I overlooked this years ago when I registered the www.healthyfoundations.com name, and now some Hong Kong company controls the singular version of my name and wants $1500 or more for it. I find this kind of thing offensive, and I could have avoided this by just registering this basic variant of my site's name when I started my site.

Getting Hosting for your Site

After getting the business name and domain name sorted out, I then usually set up my web host account - the service that will host my website. There are a million and one web hosts out there, at a tremendous range of prices. And they offer a number of hosting services - from shared hosting (also called virtual hosting - the least expensive and most common alternative for a small business) to managed dedicated servers (a server just for your company, which is much more expensive). For more information on hosting alternatives, see the article "9 Things to Know Before Selecting a Web Host for Your Business."

I have always used shared hosting for my sites, although as my business has grown I've been considering going to a managed dedicated server to host all the sites I manage. I've used at least 4 over the years, and moved usually because of problems I was having (mainly the server would no longer support the shopping cart I was using). I've settled in with a small company that has worked well for me - The Diamond Lane. Their basic package (lite) is $9.95 for hosting your domain, and this should work fine for most people starting out. While for this price you do share the server with a number of other companies, TDL limits the number of users on any server and only allows a certain amount of capacity on any particular server. I've never had a problem with TDL's shared hosting - my site's always seem to come up fast and I've haven't experienced any significant downtime.

But one consideration you may run into is the one that drives my hosting decisions, and that is what shopping cart you end up using. So you may want to defer setting up your web hosting account till you decide which shopping cart you will use. It may make the most sense to host with the same place you get the cart from (and may significantly reduce the problems in getting the cart to work). And don't sweat this issue right now - hosting can usually be set up fairly quickly and it then will just take a few days to a week (if all goes well) to get your domain name pointed to your hosting account.

For the My Favorite Baby Carrier , we went with TDL since it has worked well for my other sites.

Order Management Software

One vital piece of software you will need is some sort of order management software. You will need this software to enter your customers order information - their names, addresses, what they ordered, etc. An order management program will allow you to quickly search for and find an order, deal with returns, keep track of inventory, etc.

Order management software will also give you easy access to important information about your business such as sale totals (for accounting purposes), product sales and track your marketing. While you can try to use general accounting programs like QuickBooks for your order processing as well, I've found that a specialized order management program is much easier to use and much more functional.

Order management software can be pricey, though. The most well known player is Mail Order Manager (MOM), which starts at $1000. I spent a lot of time researching order management software when I first started back in 1998, and I finally came across Order Pro (OP). I liked not only the price, $300, but also that it had all the basic functionality that I was looking for.

I've used OP for years now, and while I like it, as a small software provider it has its issues. Getting updated versions has sometimes been a real problem, and as of now I'm working on an old version in the XP emulator because that works best.

As it is, if you are starting out new, you may want to look at Quickbooks and see if their order processing software in their package can work for you. Most shopping carts are set up to export to Quickbooks, and it is easy to get your orders from your cart to your accounting software. I'm considering doing this myself, but it would be heavy lifting to switch over so I keep putting it on the back burner.

Merchant Account

Another consideration that comes up in conjunction with hosting and shopping carts is your merchant account. A merchant account is what allows you to process credit cards. And this is a real area of sleaziness out there. All sorts of people sell merchant accounts, and many will try to tie you into long term, very expensive deals. A general caution - this is a real minefield, and make sure you are dealing with someone reputable and that your deal offered is fair.

The reason I am addressing this at this point is that 1) it can take a long time to get a merchant account going, so you need to start now, and 2) if you intend to have your online orders run in real-time (through what is called an online gateway), your choice of merchant accounts may be influenced by having one that offers an online gateway that is compatible with your shopping cart software.

Kind of a chicken and egg issue here - where do you start, with the merchant account or the shopping cart software. Believe me, I can feel your frustration growing - it can be a lot to put together. Personally, if you want to have the shopping cart run the transactions in real time, then I would advise holding off on this just a bit till you have made a shopping cart decision. Then you could choose a merchant account provider that would offer a gateway that would integrate with your cart if you wished.

As for where to get a merchant account, this is a tough one given the sleazy landscape. If you have an existing banking relationship, it probably makes sense to start with your bank and see what their rates are. There may be a lot of fees associated with merchant accounts, and some will lock you into long term contracts for processing and equipment (terminals or software) that can be expensive or only broken at a great expense.

So ask lots of questions and review the offer documentation carefully. Some will also have expensive application fees. And others will want to keep a reserve on funds that you process so that in reality you don't have free access to this money for a fair amount of time. I've had all these problems come up, and did get taken when I first signed up. But that was when getting a merchant account for an internet company was difficult, and now it is pretty easy. So definitely shop around, and ask lots of questions.

One good place to try is the Costco merchant account service -- about as low cost as you can get and doesn't have an application fee.

I also use Authorize.net as my payment gateway. This is how the shopping cart interfaces with my merchant account. Once you get signed up for a merchant account, they should be able to help you then set up the Authorize.net gateway.

The merchant account provider we used for the My Favorite Baby Carrier account was a new one that I knew had worked closely with the software I use for running my credit card charges. We decided to try this new provider because they were offering lower rates than the one I was using based on a new business doing a relatively small sales volume at first. While everything seems to be working now, the process didn't really go smoothly and I can't say I was thrilled. If I was starting from scratch again, I might just go with Costco's merchant account.

I know this can be a confusing area fraught with peril. So take what I've said into consideration, and hopefully you will come up with a merchant account solution that is both fair and fairly priced, and that serves your site well (either integrates with your shopping cart to run the orders in real time or integrates with your offline processing software).

On other possibility is to go with Paypal at first. Paypal allows people to pay for a purchase with credit cards as well as through Paypal's own payment mechanism.

I don't recommend this for a few reasons. First, you pay a fair amount to use Paypal to process your credit card transactions. Their rates may be 1% or more higher than if you had a merchant account.

Secondly, if you use Paypal you would need to use its shopping cart to process the orders. I don't like Paypal's shopping cart, and I think it could significantly diminish sales because of its setup. Shopping cart abandonment is a very serious problem for any online merchant, and I don't think Paypal's shopping cart interface has a number of serious problems that could significantly diminish sales.

Lastly, I never increased my sales much, if any, by adding PayPal as a payment option. But it doesn't hurt to add more payment options. So when you are setting up your shopping cart, go ahead and also set up a Pay Pal business account so you will be able to add PayPal in as a payment option on the checkout. Just don't have it as the only option -- still have a merchant account so you can directly offer the ability to pay with all the basic credit cards.

Setting up an 800 Number

Another thing that can take some time is to get an 800 number for your business. I strongly believe that every online business needs to have an 800 number on their site. Even if this only feeds into voice mail, as the one for My Favorite Baby Carrier does for the moment, this is important to customers to see a live phone number and ads credibility to your business as well. I know I hate not having any way to phone a company if I have problems or questions. And I know that customers may often not buy from a business, especially a small business they have never heard of before, if there isn't a phone number prominently displayed on the site. They may never call the number, but having the 800 number there ads credibility to the site.

And getting a toll free number is also essential. Not only is an toll free number more customer friendly, but it also adds to the business credibility as well. Business that just list a regular number don't look as legitimate as those with toll free numbers. And people are much more likely to use a toll free number as well, so it is just better for business.

All toll free numbers aren't equal, though. I think that there is just a certain comfort level that an 800 number gives that you just don't get from and 866 or 877 number. The problem I've found is that if you contact your phone company, it is often difficult to find an 800 number that is available.

So what we've found is that an easy way to get an 800 number with attendant voice mail services is through the company Accessline. They have different levels of service, and we chose just the basic $9.95 voice mail solution for My Favorite Baby Carrier. This gave us an 800 number that goes straight into voice mail.

I use the more expensive solution that not only gives my voice mail, but allows me to have the 800 number calls ring to whatever phone I tell it to (or have it go straight into voice mail). The setup for this can take a bit of time, so it is good to start this early in the process. They do have a great deal of 800 numbers to choose from, and if you want you can ask them to send you a bunch of choices and you can then pick the number you like the best.

Need to Take Phone Orders?

This brings up an attendant question - should you really try to answer the phone in realtime and take phone orders? Or should you just try to go with having the calls go into voice mail.

I know from personal experience that actually answering the phone can give you 10 - 20% more sales at a minimum, and probably more since many people will call with a quick question and then actually order online. There are certainly a fair amount of people that just feel more comfortable ordering over the phone still, or want to check in with someone before placing an order.

And some products just need more phone support than others. For example, the mattress toppers I sell mainly sell directly on the web. The price point is low enough that people will just order online without having to phone. But when I've sold much higher priced mattress sets, I really needed to provide phone assistance since many people only feel comfortable spending this kind of money after talking with a real person.

So you will have to sort these considerations out, as well as whether you will even be available to take phone calls. My wife decided that she just couldn't make herself available for calls given the time she spends raising our two year old. So we decided to set her up with an 800 number that just goes straight into voice mail.

She explains she can't come to the phone and asks people to leave their name and email address so she can get back to them with answers to their questions. And this works pretty well, and allows her to answer questions when she has the time. To give you and idea of the time involved, she will typically get 1 - 3 of these messages to answer a day.

Business Licenses

Finally, you will probably need to get started early on your business licenses. The type of licenses you will need to get vary by your location. While you will invariably need a state sales tax license, there will sometimes be local business licenses required as well. And you also may need to register your trade name as well.

Check with the state and your local government, often they will have small business guides that explain the process. At a minimum, get going on the state sales tax license. Many product suppliers will only sell to those people that have a sales tax license or resellers license. If you have an existing business you may already have these licenses, but if not at least get started on the state sales tax license.

Whew - now that we have dealt with these business logistic issues, we can move on to the fun side of the project - Creating and Designing your Web Business. The first step in the actual site design will be coming up with the site's navigation.

Next > Step 3 - Laying out the site's navigation

Previous < Step 1 - Seeing if the Idea is Viable, Testing it out with AdWords

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