Website Consultant vs. Outsourcing

Congratulations! You have decided you want an online business......now what? Finding and locating both a web designer and a web developer are only a small part of your total website. What about URLs and hosting and online marketing and SEO and promotion and .....whew! There are many parts to building an online business and each one requires its own budget. That is where a lot of people run out of steam. They may have enough money to get the website built, but then none left over for the exorbitant fees of a search engine optimization company. And what good is a website that no one can ever find?

Recently, there has evolved an intermediary position called an Internet Business Consultant. It is what I do, so I can only define it as my services, not necessarily everyone who claims that title. What is an Internet Business Consultant? In my case, it is someone who tries to save you money without sacrificing your website. How can adding on an additional fee save you money? So glad you asked :)

First is defining the setup of your website. How much do you know about hosting websites? Do you know if you need 20MB or 200MB of space? How much bandwidth do you need to support your users? Should your hosting plan include MSSQL, MySQL, or none of the above? I have seen a lot of people pay $20+/month to host a website that could be hosted on a $5/month plan, simply because they let the hosting provider guide them into the larger plan. An Internet consultant can help you deduce your actual needs so you aren't paying more than necessary.

Next is development of the website itself. Did you know there is a way to get a cheap website
without sacrificing professionalism? Rather than paying for a custom site, checking out existing templates can drastically reduce your costs. The actual web programming options vary on what your website will do. For simple brochure sites (ones that just act as a brochure for your company without any online dynamic catalogs or ecommerce) usually you can pay a one time fee to a developer for the initial setup and then upkeep it yourself so you don't have any ongoing costs. Internet consultants can teach you how to do that and help find reputable developers and designers.

Once the website is up, you need to get it out there. There are many components to this: things like SEO, keyword research, competitive analysises (which help you deduce your competition's marketing plan), social media, etc. The good news is, you can do it all yourself if you are on a tight budget. The bad news is, there is so much information online about these tactics it will take you months or years to learn what to do by yourself.

In comes the Internet Business Consultant, who is usually (at least in my case), also an SEO consultant and marketing consultant and whatever-else-is-needed consultant. They can help put together a plan of action for you to carry out yourself. Often I write up step by step instructions and recommendations for individual websites and then let their owners take it from there. This is successful for many reasons. First is budget. A lot of the methods above don't require special skills but do require time. If you are paying someone by the hour, it adds up quickly. But if you can do the grunt work for your own website, but with clear direction on what you are doing, it keeps the budget manageable.

Second is the content that comes out. Am I an expert on the replacement parts for a 1967 Corvette? Nope. I can fake it if I had to write some content, but there is a learning curve so I would be charging you for the hours I spent researching the topic as well as writing about it. But if I taught you, the owner of the website about 1967 Corvette replacement parts, how to write your own good and optimized content, it would be much faster. You already have the knowledge and terminology down. Your passion for the topic trumps what mine ever would be. To me, the owner writing their own content makes it more believable and impactful than an outsider spending a few hours learning about things they have never seen.

This is also true for Social Media. If I join all of these car forums as a representative from your site, I will never have the same level of success as someone who lives and breathes cars. But I can teach you how to use all of these forms of Social Media to promote yourself. I can help research where you should be, what types of interactions you should aim for, how often, etc. Social Media is about relationships moreso than outright promotion, so the person most passionate about the topic will always come across as most sincere and valuable to a community.

Can I actually do the work on all of the above for you? Absolutely. I am a computer programmer with lots of online marketing and SEO experience. But it will cost you. By hiring an Internet Business Consultant instead and doing most of the work yourself, you can get your website up and running on a budget that leaves you with plenty left over. This makes it the ideal choice for startups and entrepreneurs just looking to begin their online presence.

Let me know hwo I can help you!