Common Sense Business # 18

By Stan Rosenzweig

Act on these four low-cost "musts" and your brand will be taken seriously by more customers in the modern world.

First, make sure your own web domain name and email addresses fully reflect your brand identity. To see the wrong way, browse through ads in this publication and others and you'll find ads without email addresses, or with addresses so abbreviated they would stump even top CIA cryptographers. Please, folks, it doesn't have to fit on a license plate. Get a new long name for $8 per year and proudly spell it out.

And stop using free email addresses for business correspondence. Even though the U.S. dollar is getting cheaper than Charmin, nobody likes sending their devalued bucks to someone named "business384@yahoo.com." They like buying from a well branded address.

Secondly, get your spelled out, domain name on your website. The number of business web sites is growing at a rate only exceeded by sales of McDonalds burgers ("billions and billions sold"). Still, amazing as it seems, most small businesses still have no site. There's a ton of business searching for your website. Need verification? Google your competitors. See what I mean? Update your site or you are going to lose business. Hosting small sites cost as little as $4 per month, so there's no excuse.

Third, graduate from your father's Yellow Pages to web directories. When you need a new office printer, where do you look? Online. So do customers.

Here's how to maximize your online directory image for free. Look up your company name, or your business category (car service, brain surgeon, etc.) on Yahoo, then Google, to see what shoppers see.

Now click the "local" tabs at Yahoo and Google and look up your local business category. Is the listing for your business interesting enough for someone to want to call you? No problem. Yahoo and Google let you edit everything on the local search sites… FREE! Yahoo and Google have combined Neilsen ratings of 71% share of searches, so burnishing your listing is time well spent.

Fourth, get a toll free number. What? You don't get calls from out of town? Who cares? We're talking about image and toll free numbers provide an image that belie the fact that they, too, are free. You'll pay for the calls, but you shouldn't pay more than two or three cents a minute same as when people call you on the cell. The cost is so small, why not have two or three toll frees for different departments?