Get Online in 24 Hours!

3 Tips to market your small business idea on the web overnight

You’ve got a great product or service idea, and you want to get it online quickly. Think you’ll need 6 to 8 weeks to get yourself up and running? Think again. If you’re itching to get online, you can get most of the work done in just 6 to 8 hours. Here’s how:

Build a Website – Given your short timeframe, stick with a one-page layout for now. That should be just enough to tell visitors to your website about your valuable product or service offering. If you’re not a web designer, don’t worry. You have two options to get going. The first is to purchase a copy of Microsoft FrontPage. FrontPage is by far the easiest product to use for designing websites. If you are familiar with Microsoft products, you’ll be fairly comfortable with the user interface and should have no trouble getting started. Don’t worry if you’re not a graphic designer either, as there are some great websites online that sell FrontPage Templates that will dress up your website in a hurry. For less than $30, you can purchase a template designed by a professional, drop your text into their layout, and have a crisp, well designed looking site in under an hour!

Alternatively, you could search websites such as www.cnet.com to locate a shareware web design program to set up a simple web page, although the FrontPage templates will not likely be compatible with this type of program.

Accept Credit Cards – You can look to PayPal to get started with credit card acceptance online. They will accept all major credit cards for you, then forward the funds to your PayPal account less a specified handling fee. You can set up a small business account in minutes, although you won’t be able to access your funds until you’ve completed a verification process. Still, you will have the ability to accept your customer’s credit cards online, a key to selling anything over the internet. They’ll even provide you with some pre-written code that you can simply cut and paste into your website, which will result in a professional “Buy Now” button appearing on your site. The button will link people directly to your order page on PayPal’s website.

ClickBank is another outstanding company that will enable you to accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Eurocard, Visa-Debit, MasterCard-Debit and Novus cards. No merchant account is required. They charge a one-time $49.95 activation fee, and a $1 + 7.5% fee per sale. There are no monthly fees. The great thing about this company is that over 60,000 affiliates can choose to sell your products for you. ClickBank enables any web seller to automatically pay sales commissions to affiliates. ClickBank will bill your customers, pay you, and pay your affiliates a commission. In other words, they'll run your entire affiliate program for you. In addition, their services are available for non-US merchants.

Drive Traffic – The Internet can be a lonely place if you don’t drive traffic to your website. With so many sites out there, nobody will know you exist if you don’t promote your website. The quickest way to do this is with Google AdWords. The AdWords program is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) arrangement, whereby you bid on certain keywords that you think web surfers might type into a Google search to find a product or service like yours. (For example, “Small Business Marketing” would be a term applicable to your business if you offered some type of marketing advice to small businesses). When someone searches on your chosen term(s) a small ad appears on the right side of the screen that links to your website. You only pay if someone actually visits your website.

A Google AdWords campaign can be up and running in less than 10 minutes once you have provided them with the necessary billing information for your marketing campaign.

Using these three steps, you could realistically build a website, set up a basic e-commerce credit card acceptance facility, drive traffic to your site, and most importantly, generate revenue overnight. If you are serious about an online venture, your one-page site should just be a starting point. You’ll need to continuously build and improve your website to maintain a professional online presence. However, if you really need to get going in a hurry, you can use these 3 steps to get online in no time flat.

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Will Dylan is the Author of “Small Business Big Marketing” a powerful e-book for small businesses available through his website www.marketingyoursmallbusiness.com. Will also offers article and news release writing services.