For those of you who are unaware, this was a drawing from all the subscribers to GiftEntrepreneurs Magazine.  The deadline for the drawing was March 31 and the drawing was done yesterday, April 1.  Every subscriber was assigned a number with the numbers put into a box.  Rhonda’s number was the one drawn.

You can still subscribe to GiftEntrepreneurs online magazine at www.giftentrepreneurs.com.  The next issue (which will be available by subscription only) will be online on May 1st and promises to be as informative as the first issue.  You can still download and read the first issue for free.

Many of us create our own websites using either FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or Expression Web.  Pat Geary and Tina Clarke, owners of the website www.frontpage-to-expression.com , provide a wealth of information for FrontPage users who want to migrate to Expression Web.  If you have any interest in learning how to use Expression Web to create a website, this site is one that you should visit.

But back to this marketing idea. . . the two ladies have created a giveaway with prizes that any user (or potential user) of Expression Web would love to win.  All you have to do is write about the giveaway on Facebook, a blog, etc. and let them know about it.  Some lucky writers will be the lucky winners of the great prizes. 

This is my entry because I would love to win any of the awards but also because I think they provide outstanding information to anyone interested in the program.  I’ve made it a practice to never recommend something that I wouldn’t use myself and this is not an exception.

Now that I’ve encouraged you to enter that giveaway, let me also suggest how you might use a similar idea to market your own business.  People love FREE.  They love the opportunity to win something.  And they rarely hesitate to enter their name in a contest that is giving away something they want.  But what makes this marketing technique different is that you have to tell others about their product if you want to win it.  In other words, you give to receive. 

Some gift basket companies have a monthly drawing for a free gift basket in order to collect email addresses.  Why not make those entering your contest work a little bit for it?  Enter their names in your drawing if they mention your business on Facebook or write something about you in an ezine or newsletter or blog.  That giveaway gift basket (and you could make it even more enticing by adding a few other simple prizes) then provides a return on your investment.  And isn’t this what marketing is all about?

So go check out their giveaway at Expression Web Giveaway and create your own marketing campaign.

Facebook is all about building personal relationships.  The Facebook term for those relationships is  ”friends” .  While you’ll suddenly discover “friends” from your past, you’ll also find “friends” who really want to be friends, not with you individually, but with your company.  You’ll find some big name companies there that you can follow and become friends with — but these won’t be personal relationships.

Step 1: Create Your Profile

It’s all about how you use it.  First, you need to create a profile for you, using your real name.  To build that profile, you can upload a photo, enter your education, business, and contact information, and even join your local networks.  The more you include in  your profile, the more easily you can connect with other people. If you’re concerned about privacy, Facebook offers highly customizable privacy settings that control who can see different elements of your profile. This way you can share photos of your kids with friends and family, but not with your boss or customers.

If you have a database of your current contacts, you can upload it to Facebook to see if any of them are already members.  If so, you can ask them for permission to add them to your list of friends.

Step 2: Create Your Company Page

Once you have a personal profile, you can create a page for your business.   This is where you can upload photos of your products, your retail location, and any other information about your company that you feel would be valuable to someone searching for your products and services.  You can even add an RSS feed from your blog or embed videos from YouTube.  These company pages are available for the search engines to index so you definitely want to include links to your website.  This contributes to the SEO of your site.  You can add what Facebook refers to as “fans” to your company page.

All of this may sound silly or a waste of valuable time, but just think of it as another way to network without having to participate in small talk or eating snacks that you really don’t need or want. 

You can promote your company page via email, your blog, and through the Facebook network to drive more traffic and build up your fan base.

Step 3: Join and Create Groups

Another way to network on Facebook is through the use of groups…but be careful that you select only those groups that you are really interested in or it can become overwhelming.  Groups, unlike pages, are only visible to Facebook members. Groups can be formed around any subject you like.  You can join an existing one or create a new one. 

A Word of Caution

We’ve all been to networking groups where people are there just to sell you something with no interest at all in what you need.  Be careful that you don’t act that way on Facebook.  If your only object in joining Facebook is to make a quick sale or to increase your business, you’ll be disappointed.

Like any other networking function, it’s all about building relationships.  You create your network and increase your reputation over time by giving instead of also wanting to take.  You need to share information, reach out to connect with others, and build rapport.

Is Facebook right for you and your business?  Only you can determine that.  Check it out.  You might be pleasantly surprised.

In case you’ve noticed and wondered why my posts have been sparse, the reason is those d*%$ pirates have also stolen my time.  This has happened four different times now, with four different hosting companies.  I suspect the person, who appears to be from China, is responsible for all four raids. 

I’m writing about it to share what to do if this happens to you. There are several different ways to determine if your site has been hijacked.  The website www.copyscape.com  allows you to type in the url for a page on your website and it will show you any sites that have the same page.  Or you can type any unique text from your site into google and see what other sites have the same text.

Then you need to find out who the hosting company is and send that company a letter that meets specific requirements.  This is called a DMCAA letter.  Just google DMCA and you’ll find sample letters.  The hosting company is required to remove the site if it is copied once they receive the DMCA letter.

Three of the hosting companies that I contacted worked with me, even telling me what info I had neglected to include in the DMCA letter.  One, however, dreamhost.com  (located in California) was a different story.  My opinion is that they didn’t want to let go of the money they were receiving from the fraudulent company in China.  They made it extremely difficult to get the site removed–even telling me that just because my copyright info was on the homepage of the site didn’t mean that I owned the copyright on the other pages (even though there is copyright information on each and every page of the site.)  They also told me that I had to hire a copyright lawyer to get the site removed.  Not a good hosting company and not a very ethical one either, in my opinion!

Hopefully, you will never be highjacked by these crooks.  But if you are, there is something you can do about it as long as the hosting company is in the U.S.  If it is in another country, most don’t respect any laws.  And your primary action will need to be contacting google and the other search engines.

1. Pages can “leak” pagerank. A misinterpretation of a statement by Google lead to this myth. It was really only perpetuated by people who thought that writing an SEO book was the key to getting rich quick (unfortunately they rarely knew enough about it to get it right!). There were enough of those though, that this myth is regularly ressurected, even though pagerank isn’t that valuable a marker anymore.

2. More content is better. Wrong. More content is just more content. More GOOD content IS better. If it ain’t good, it is just debris.

3. Articles help you promote better. Not unless they are GOOD articles. There are so many bad ones out there that even mediocre articles are a waste of time. They’ve gotta be original, and they’ve gotta be good.

4. Keyword tags matter. Not anymore. Don’t bother with these they’ll just waste your time and risk doing more harm than good.

5. Start with keyword research. Start with COMMON SENSE. That will get you further, with less effort, than any amount of research will. Research is only good AFTER you’ve done everything you can with common sense.

6. You have to be on the first page of Google to get any traffic. Absolutely NOT true! This is so badly misunderstood that even fairly popular SEO “gurus” think it is true, or like to say so because it gets them more money. Fact is, you don’t even have to be on the first 10 pages for your top keywords to get found, and to make a boodle. There are plenty of backdoor tactics that get you traffic without first page placement. This is so important, we’ll explain it all in our next issue.

7. Bold the keywords on your page. No, don’t. Bold the words you want people to pay attention to, and bold the thoughts that are most important. That is how you are SUPPOSED to use bolding.

8. Keyword density matters. No, content matters. Good, understandable text that explains what you are trying to say, and explains it well. Keywords happen naturally from that, without even trying. And the keyword patterns look so natural to a search engine that you never have to calculate the percentages.

9. Search engines don’t read words in domain names unless they are separated by a dash. We’ve proven that in fact, they do! Search engines will interpret words in the domain name, based on the words in the copy. If there are similar words in the domain name, they’ll pick them up and rank you for them whether or not there are dashes to separate them. This isn’t theory, we’ve proven it.

10. Search engines can now read Flash. No, they can’t. Google recently acquired the technology from Adobe to read it, but it has not yet been fully implemented. Further, when they CAN read Flash, they will only be able to read text that was entered into the animation as text, not text that is part of an image. So the ability to read Flash will depend on how the animation is constructed, and the value will vary from site to site. There has also been no word on whether or not they’ll delay reading it to reduce the load on the bots – reading Flash is VERY time intensive for the bots.

11. Search engines index plain HTML sites better than they index dynamic sites. NOT true. As a rule, search engines are just as capable of crawling and indexing a content management or shopping cart system. Years ago there was a difference, but this has not been an issue for many years. This is only an issue with badly coded sites, or with excessive use of Flash.

12. SEO is hard/easy. It isn’t really either. It is more a matter of understanding what really matters. Once you understand that, it takes work to create what matters. But it isn’t really hard to understand what matters – it is people! Help people understand what you have, in a way that appeals to them, and in a way that search engines can read. Everything else is just implementation.

Laura Wheeler and her husband Kevin own Firelight Web Enterprises in Wyoming. We like to feature articles from Laura periodically as we consider her one of the experts that can be trusted.

If not, here are some tips:

• Don’t scan your document as an image file and then save it as a PDF.  When you do this the PDF is an image and there is no text for the search engines to read.
• Save it as a text file
• Optimize the text in the PDF just as if you were optimizing a web page, including important keywords and phrase in the title, tags, and within the body of the text.
• Include keywords in the title of your file.  Different programs have different ways that you can modify a document’s title.  If you are using Acrobat,you can usually modify the Document’s title by choosing “File” in the toolbar, then choosing “Properties”, and modify’s the “Title” on the Description Tab.
• Use the title of the PDF file as your link from wherever you are linking to it within your website.
• Put the most important text near the beginning of your PDF
• Include an “active” link to your website url within the PDF file
• To create the smallest possible PDFs for the Web minimize the number of fonts and bitmapped images.  If you have the capability, use vector images.
• Use common fonts.  Every font you add can increase the file size by up to 40 KB

I’d say “yes” and “no”.  The internet has provided us the opportunity to operate a business model that can compete with the big corporate giants that are able to outspend and outemploy more than we ever could.  The internet allows us to expand outside our local market and sell to people all over the country–or even around the world, if that is our goal.  Yes, the internet has definitely helped us grow our businesses.

Social networking and all the other new-fangled ideas, such as blinking pictures, videos, podcasts, flash pages, streaming javascript (which allows us to have constantly changing photos or text on our site) are another story however.  They’re cool! They’re neat!  They’re fun! But do they really increase traffic and sales conversions?

My answer is a resounding NO!  That is why, even though we have the knowledge and capability to do so, we don’t incorporate most of these new techniques in the websites that we own and seriously want to convert.  And the reason is simple.  These are gimmicks that are intended to make a website look “professional”, “up-to-date” and “cool” .  But, in reality, except for the “under 30 age crowd” (which are only a very small minority of my customers), most customers dislike them.  And, unless they are incorporated very carefully by someone who understands search engine spiders very well, most search engines dislike them even more.

Many users of the web are technically-challenged.  That’s true of even many of our gift basket company owners.  They don’t understand all this new-fangled stuff and prefer to avoid it.  But it’s all too easy for a webmaster, who enjoys adding this type of glitz to a shopping website, to convince you that it’s the thing to have if you want to be “up-to-date”.  But what is much more important is how does it help you convert visitors to buyers?  Does it make more money for you?

If used correctly and you have the time to spend on it, social media  has its place and can help to a degree.  Social media doesn’t yet come close to competing with search or email in terms of effectiveness. But marketers are still asking themselves whether that is because social media is ineffective or simply because, despite the hype, a huge percentage of people online aren’t actively or regularly engaged with social media sites and channels. 

By social media, I’m referring to Facebook, My Space, Linked In, Twitter and the many others out there.  These social networking sites can be used to promote your business.  I use them for that purpose.  But they are just a tool and are not nearly as effective as other means of driving traffic to your website.  There are ways to automatically post your blog posts on your Facebook wall and as a Twitter.  But you have to understand how they work and how best to use them.  And learning that takes more of those precious minutes.

Forums and Blogging are two other forms of social networking that can be very effective.

How much time do you have to spend on all these sites?  When I asked the members of my Gift Basket Network what their biggest problem was, the most frequent answer was “Not enough time in the day to do everything that needed to be done for their business”.  Add to “not enough time” such activities as posting “I’m going to my son’s ballgame tonight” on your wall on Facebook or “Today is a beautiful day.  Just don’t have time to enjoy it” as a Twitter post and what do you have?  Not more traffic to your website, that’s for sure.  You’ve just deducted precious minutes from those hours that were already filled with your “have to do” list. 

Blogging, posting on related blogs, and posting in forums can help build your business…once again, only if used correctly.  A blog, that is built specifically to drive traffic and is properly optimized, is a fast, effective, and efficient way to communicate with your customers and prospects  — just as I am communicating with you.  It can make you “real” to those customers and help them to get to know you as a person.  It can also be used to sell products if done right.  But you need to know the techniques necessary to do it.  Posting on blogs, that are related to your website and have good search engine visibility, can help your own website’s seach engine optimization by providing valuable links to your site.  And you don’t have to have any technical savvy to do that.

Forums that are related to your industry can’t be beat for effective communication with others in the industry.  In the gift basket industry, there are a number of them that you can participate in.  You need to be selective and use those that are used by others who have information to share.  But, as with anything, you must give in order to receive.  Just signing into a forum, reading what others have shared, and signing out is not enough.  You need to contribute as well if you hope to receive that info you must have when the time comes and you’re desperate for an anwer to a question.

Post Foods ran a Shredded Wheat ad recently that asked this very question about progress and answered the question with:
 
” Honestly, what thanks do we owe progress?  We’re up to our necks in landfill, down to the wire on resources, and climate change is out to get us — or at best leave us with a nsasty sunburn.  Historically, civilizations are destroyed by progress.  Just ask the Pharaohs…”

And, just as the ad went on to say, “That’s why at Post Shredded Wheat, we put the “no” in innovation”, we, as owners of Gift Basket Network have also said “no”.

I created Gift Basket Network about six years ago.  One person (me).  One ingredient (professional gift basket company owners that wanted more traffic to their websites).  One website.  It was simple to navigate.  No add-ons or plug-ins.  Heck, it was even built in basic html and optimized following the severe requirements of the search engines.  We didn’t give it a fancy name or a lot of glitz.   Our market was not the gift basket company owner.  Our market, at that time and still is, the potential customer who is ready and willing to buy a gift or gift basket and is just looking for a place to do it.

We market to the gift basket company owners in other ways.  One of these was in the form of Gift Retailers Network after we had clearly established Gift Basket Network  one of the top gift basket directories on the web.  This blog that you are reading right now is another way that we market to you.  It is our way of demonstrating to you that combining the tried-and-true methods of internet marketing with a few carefully selected “social networking” methods is using progress to build your business. 

Does it work? History has proven it to be true so far.  But time will tell.

As the owner of giftbasketnetwork.com, my directory can send you potential customers that are ready and willing to buy.  But it’s up to you and your website to convince those customers that you’re the company they want to buy from.  Here are 25 easy tips for creating happy website visitors.

1. Make sure your site loads quickly.  Use your photo program to reduce the pixels in all your photos and graphics.  Photoshop Elements will do this automatically for you if you click “save for web”.  Other photo programs should have the same capability.
2. Provide easy-to-find contact information on every page of your site.  People need to know that you are real and can be reached in case there is a question or a problem. 
3. Send an e-mail to customers to confirm that you received their order and then a follow-up one with tracking information when the order ships.
4. Answer all emails from your customers quickly.  If you have an online business, you need to check emails at least two to three times daily.
5. E-mail your customers around two weeks after they receive their product and thank them once again for ordering from you and ask if you can do anything else for them.  This is a good time to send a discount offer for their next order. 
6. Don’t make them log in before they can checkout. Customers, including me, hate that.  This is one of the most frequent reasons for abandoning an order that has been placed in a shopping cart. 
7. Use a type size that is no smaller than 10 points.  Some of us are getting to be old geezers and can’t see as well.  Others sit slouched in their chair several feet away from the monitor.
8. Make sure your photos are ones that will sell your product.  I find all too many gift basket photos on the web that look like someone just stuck some stuff in an empty basket.  Or that have a huge piece of cello wrapped around the gift and tied with a pull bow.  Pull bows are not the enemy.  I use them on low-cost gifts.  It’s the total presentation that makes the difference.  Also gifts wrapped in cello usually do not photograph well.
9. Make your products easy to find.  Navigation that is clear and direct as well as categories that make sense are important.  Home pages that have the product link simply say “catalog” or “products” or “gift baskets” invite the customer to click to another site.
10. Write clear accurate descriptions.  Don’t keep the customer guessing.  Many of us don’t use specific brands, using a more generic term such as gourmet cookies instead, because our product inventory changes and varies throughout the year.  Most customers seem to accept that but if you are using the exact same product all the time, specify what it is.  If you have chocolates listed as part of the gift and you substitute something else in the summer, say so.
11. Tell people who you are on your website.  An About Us page is ideal for this.  Customers trust people they know and the only way they can get to know you is if you don’t hide who you are.  All too many “Who We Are” pages are so generic that you may as well not even include it.  For an example of an about us page, see “Who Is Behind Gift Basket Owners” on this site.
12. Give your customers all the pricing information up-front. Don’t hide the shipping cost until the end of the process. Let the customer see the shipping cost as early as possible in the checkout process. 
13. Use dark text on a light background on your website.  Those dark backgrounds may make you look creative but they’re hard to read.
14. Make sure your shopping cart is secure.   Your customers won’t thank you for security. But they’ll  hate you if you let someone make off with their credit card info.
15. Keep your website  simple.  Flashing pictures, slide shows, music, and flash entry pages (those pages that say click here to enter the site) are real turnoffs.  Think of your customer and your budget.  Customers look for gifts while sitting at their desk at work.  They will click away as fast as possible if they hear music when they open your site.
16. Words are powerful.  Be careful of what you say and how you say it on the website as well as in your emails. You’ll win more business.
17. Offer ways to stay connected. Let folks sign up for an e-mail newsletter or subscribe to a latest news feed (or a special deals feed).  You’d be surprised how many folks appreciate that sort of thing.
18. Don’t be sneaky. See that ‘Register for our newsletter’ checkbox in your information request form? Is it checked by default? Change it to unchecked. That’s not a decision your customers want made for them.
19. Make them feel special. Give past customers a special deal just for being a customer. Too often we work like mad trying to create new business while ignoring our old customers.
20. Don’t stereotype and never assume that your target audience is a niche demographic.  That golf bag gift that you are offering just for men may be the perfect gift for a woman golfer.  And women can be junk food junkies as much as men are.
21. Be descriptive in your page’s title tag and headline.  This is what most search engines show and will determine whether they click to your site or go down to the next one.
22. Write content that can be easily scanned.   Write for your customers — not for the search engines.  Use bullets and short paragraphs to  break up the page. Have no more than 14 words on a line.  Many gift basket websites have long paragraphs at the bottom of the page filled with links.  These are obviously written in order to increase links within the site and to increase keyword density.  Or how about the “We deliver to” with a list of every state in the Union and even some major cities thrown in for emphasis. Seach engine spiders are aware of these “cutesy” ploys and mark you down for it.
23. Make sure that your site looks good, not only in the latest version of Internet Explorer, but also in Firefox which is becoming a popular browser.  Others that are used by many people are Opera and Safari.  Different browers show your site differently in many cases.
24. Check for errors and fix them. Your server logs every kind of error thrown by your site: Review the list periodically.
25. Always think like the customer.  Think about what makes you abandon a website when you are ordering online.  Put your own ego aside and create your site so that it intrigues rather than turns off that potential customer.

Sure, some of us have more of a “natural ability” in some areas.  But there are many people with no natural ability that are successful.  And there are many people without a so-called “natural abiliity” that are very sucessful.  Like a foot race, this natural ability just gives you a few feet headstart over the ones behind you.  It’s what those in the starting position do — with or without that natural ability — that makes the difference.

To understand what I am talking about, you have to understand a little bit about the brain and how it works.  No, this isn’t going to be a science lesson — but it could be one of the most important things you will ever learn.

What does the brain do best?  The brain recognizes problems and figures out a way to overcome them.  If you’re walking up the stairs and encounter a closed door at the top, your brain would tell you what to do and you  would automatically try to open that door.   You’ve encountered a lot of closed doors since childhood and your brain learned that you could either open them or you had to turn around and go back.  No matter how many closed doors you come to, you would try to open it.

Now, if you reached the top of those stairs and instead of a closed door you found a huge snake blocking your way, your brain wouldn’t know what to do.  So it panics.  You either turn and run down the stairs or you freeze and can’t move or even scream.  Your brain doesn’t know what to do so it shuts down instead of telling you how to react. 

For those of us who are writers, it is referred to as “Writer’s Block”.  But this same thing affects all of us, regardless of what you are trying to do. 

You sit down to try to write a sales letter.  You try to tie a bow for the first time.  You stand up in front of a group to talk about your business.  You try to build a website.  You make a cold call to a corporate client that you hope to impress.  You go to a networking function for the first time.  Anytime, you try something new, the brain goes into panic mode.  It quickly scans through all your memories for a memory of success at doing this.  And it fails to find one. 

Instead it finds failure.  And fear of failing again.  And you believe that you can’t do it. 

Everyone else is just born to write a good sales letter, speak in front of a group, make a cold call, build a website or whatever it is you are trying to do.  They are the talented ones.  You have no talent.

But what you fail to understand is what the brain of these so-called “talented people” is doing.  And why.  The secret that successful writers use to overcome Writer’s Block is the same secret that you can use to overcome “Cold Feet”.

Those who are successful at doing what you are attempting and failing at has a brain that has

• A memory of success
• And it’s not just success that happens occasionally or sometimes.
• It’s success that is a direct result of having structure, a mentor, and a memory filled with success.

They didn’t just sit down in front of the computer and write a great sales letter on the first try.  They weren’t always dynamic speakers.  That first website that they built was pretty pitiful. 

They’ve been through the drill before.  In the process, they learned the techniques needed to acquire the skill they were striving for.  And these “talented” people had a teacher or a mentor (or even a book or manual) that helped guide them past the obstacles that lead to failure.  The more the drill is repeated, the more it became ingrained as a part of their memory process.  As a result, they’ve built a structure that makes it possible for them to succeed each time.  And they’ve created a memory bank of successes.

And then suddenly it happens.  You need to build a website that gets results.  You need to stand in front of a group that is looking to spend lots of money on gift baskets.  You call on that corporate client that has a huge holiday budget.

And, if you’ve been through it before, you have the structure and techniques instilled in your memory.  And the memories of success become the dominant ones.  Your brain no longer goes into panic mode.  Instead it whirls through all the memory banks and pulls up just the right one — without your even being aware of the process.

This is the same way that you learned just about everything in life.  It’s how you learned to walk.  Watch a child take his first steps.  He falters and falls.  Mom encourages him to try again.  He pulls himself up using the coffee table for support and tries again.  Over and over until he is walking, then running across the room.  And now, you don’t even think about the techniques, the structure required to walk anywhere you want to go.

Remember when you learned to swim for the first time.  How about riding a bicycle?  That’s why they say, “Once you know how to ride a bicycle, you never forget.”  Actually your brain pulls up that earlier success from your childhood and, even though you may falter a bit in the beginning as the memory of the techniques are whirled into place, you climb on that bicycle and ride away.

So if you’re sick and tired of having cold feet and feeling the fear of failures, stop believing in this myth called “talent.” Do what the so-called “talented ones” have done and create your own memory bank of success.

There are mentors ready to help you, to teach you the techniques, the path to follow and those to avoid.  That is the very reason why I’ve created this website, why Gift Basket Network exists, why I’ve created Gift Retailers Network, and why I’m continuing to create new opportunities for you to create those memory banks that mean you don’t have to have talent to be a success!

You can have it built by someone else who will teach you how to make changes and maintain it.  They will usually continue as a fee-based consultant for those times when you run into problems and need help.  This can be less expensive over the long term, is more time consuming for you, and allows you to have some control depending on how much you wish to learn.

The third option is to build your own site.  And once again, there are several options.  When creating my first website, my business hadn’t grown enough to allow me to pay someone.  But what was of greater concern for me was that I wanted total control.  The trade-off was time.  The first website was built on a “free” service and wasn’t beautiful but I learned the basics. 

After a few months, I made the decision to move it from the free server to my own domain and to learn how to build it myself from the ground up.  I purchased Front Page and several dummie type books and dug in.  I joined a google group about Front Page where my questions could be answered, and the site began evolving.

Knowing how important search engines are for providing traffic, once again I learned how to do it myself.  There are many companies out there begging for your business, guaranteeing they can put you on page one of google by optimizing your site.  Some are legitimate.  Many are not.  But no one can guarantee you a position on page one of google unless they pay for a Pay Per Click ad and then you’re not in the organic search results–you’re in the ads. 

I am the kind of person that doesn’t want to hire someone to do something for me when I have no idea of whether or not I’m being taken for a ride.  Optimizing is not hard.  It’s just knowing how to do it and taking the time to implement what you know.  There are free classes online and books available if you are willing to invest the time.

Fast forward a few years and I can honestly say that doing it myself was the very  best decision I could have made.  I now own a number of different websites, all of which I’ve built and optimized myself.  Believe me, it’s a wonderful feeling when those orders come rolling in and you know that you did it!

But my decision may not be the best one for you.  Each has to weigh the pros and cons and decide what is best for themselves.  For those of you who have the desire to step out into website building, here are several options that are currently available to make it easier for you.

Microsoft, the creator of FrontPage, now offers their newest website building program called ExpressionWeb.  If you would like to try it with little cost, for a limited time Microsoft has a page listing web hosts that are offering a free copy of Expression Web v2 with 60 days of free hosting.  For this offer, see  http://www.microsoft.com/web/ jumpstart/ platinum- hosting/default. aspx for more information.

If you would like to have someone build a site for you and hold your hand as they teach you how to maintain it, I recommend Laura Wheeler of  Firelight Web Creations.  Located in Wyoming, she can be reached at webtech@firelightbusinessenterprises.com .  She’s honest, patient, and has worked with several members of GiftBasketNetwork either building or rebuilding their sites.

If you want easy, you might take a look at ProStores. They say that ProStores has everything you need to start selling online today- shopping cart, domain hosting, merchandising, reporting, and more!   I build my own sites so haven’t used it but it does appear to be everything it says it is.  Check it out and decide for yourself.

Regardless of which option you go for, in today’s world, every business should have some form of internet presence.