Advertising (and direct mail marketing) are shotgun approaches to getting your company information to your potential customers or clients. A web site is much more selective in that most potential customers or clients have a specific area of interest and are searching for a type of company, organization, product, or else information about a specific company, organization, or product. That means people who visit your web site are already "pre-qualified" and the ratio of positive responses is much higher than with advertising or direct mailing.

The Internet is all about information. The very minimum is information about your business: what your business is, contact information, hours of operation, and background information about your business such as its history and core values. Additionally, information should be included that describes your products and services, tips and suggestions, examples of successful projects, and customer testimonials. Since the Internet is a visual medium, you should also include photographs of your business and your successful projects or products.

Offer lots of information and keep adding new content. Remember that visitors can view as much or as little as they want during each visit. Also, visitors will want different levels of detail during different visits.

One way to keep up interest in your web site is to offer a newsletter (either via e-mail or direct mail) that identifies new information on your web site. Another way is to offer coupons or discounts that are only available from your web site.

Obviously there is a very wide range of cost based on the size of the web site and the volume of information transferred or business transacted. Also, the initial creation of the site can vary greatly, based on complexity and who creates the site. However, for a small business site that doesn't provide e-commerce, the approximate ongoing costs are as follows:

Domain registration: $20 per year
Web site hosting: $108 per year ($9 per month)

In general, the cost per customer attracted is lower with an effective web site than with other forms of advertising or mass marketing.

A "web address" is a domain name plus a subdomain name that identifies the specified web page(s). For example:

www.someone.com/yourcompanyname
or
www.yourcompanyname.someone.com

is a web address. "Yourcompanyname" is only a directory located within the registered domain "www.someone.com." You don't own any rights to a web address; only the registered owner of the domain name does. Also, you can't have e-mail addressed to you at yourcompanyname (you@yourcompanyname.com).

Your name on the Internet (yourcompanyname) should be your own property. The only way to protect your name is to register your own domain name as yourcompanyname.com (or .net, or .org, as appropriate).