You have heard the rumors! You need a website, you want to run ads, and drive more business!
Now you want your website to get live but have no idea where to start. How expensive will it be? Can you do it or do you need to hire someone for a cost which might become a burden on your overall budget? And how to navigate the different aspects of running the website and run digital marketing as you want to focus on core business.
Here’s the good news!
– You can launch your website within days
– With the right strategy, AI can help solve most of your issues. The only challenge is “what questions to ask”.
This article gives you an understanding on what’s involved in launching your website.
A domain is like your house’s address, but on the internet. It helps people find your website, just like how a house address helps people find where you live. For example, “google.com” is the address for Google’s website!
The cost of domain is dependent on TLD (top level domain). TLD, or Top-Level Domain, is like the ending part of a website address. It tells us a little more about the website. For example, .com is for companies, .co can be for businesses, and .co.nz is for businesses in New Zealand. It’s like saying what country or type of place your house (website) is in!
However, in general, you will the cost of domain somewhere around the ballpark figure of INR 1,000 or ~12 USD. It has to be renewed annually.
Hosting:
Hosting is like the land where you build your house (website) on the internet. Just like you need a space to put your house, your website needs a space to live, and hosting gives it that space so people can visit it anytime!
There are different types of hosting, like sharing a big yard with other houses or having your own yard just for your house. Shared hosting is when your website shares a space (like a yard) with other websites, while private hosting is like having your own yard, where only your website lives. Having your own space means you can do more without worrying about others!
For entrepreneurs and SMEs, shared hosting is the way to go in the beginning as it’s cost effective and usage is also limited. After a certain threshold is breached, you can move hosting from shared to private.
In terms of cost, buying hosting from reputable provider will set you back around INR 3,000 or ~ 35 USD on a annual basis.
There are lot of providers through where you can buy domain and hosting, some of the well-known names are Godaddy, Namecheap.
A website builder is like a box of building blocks for the website. It helps you put together all the pieces, like words, pictures, and colors, to make your website look just the way you want. You don’t need to know how to build everything—you just pick what you like and put it together!
Some of the well-known website builders are WordPress, Shopify (usually for e-commerce websites), Wix, Webflow, Squarespace, Joomla etc. However, if you will notice, majority of SMEs and entrepreneurs prefer WordPress as it’s a free website builder. There are also free themes, and free plugins available to set up a basic website.
Shopify pricing begins from INR 1,499 per month (~18 USD).
Webflow pricing begins from $14 per month (custom domain).
Website can also be built on other platforms like Laravel and others, however it is not our recommendation for an entrepreneur or SMEs as you will be dependent on developer to even make small changes.
This section is about WordPress themes.
Imagine a website theme like a coloring book. Every page in the book has a different outline of pictures and designs. The theme of a website is like deciding what the coloring book looks like overall—whether it’s about animals, superheroes, or princesses. It’s what makes all the pages on the website look similar and fit together nicely, just like all the pages in a coloring book have the same style.
Even though WordPress is free, you might have to spend on theme, and certain plugins to achieve the functionality as desired based on your business requirements. However that cost is minimal as compared to recurring costs of other platforms, along with ease of use and hence the reason of WordPress being deployed in majority of websites on the internet.
Most often, you will be able to find a theme on respective marketplaces for less than $50-60. And unlike domain and hosting, theme is one-time expense unless you redesign the website.
Just like in a coloring book, where you choose how everything looks, website design involves picking colors, shapes, and styles that fit together nicely.
When you put all these elements together—colors, fonts, icons, and buttons—it creates a cohesive and engaging experience. Just like a well-designed picture book that flows from page to page, a good website design helps visitors feel at home, guiding them smoothly through the content while making it visually fun and easy to navigate.
Typically, you need to hire a designer for the website. However if you have opted for WordPress and bought a premium theme, a lot of design elements are already present within the particular theme.
Website content encompasses all the information and media presented on a website, designed to engage, inform, and serve the needs of its audience. It includes various forms of content that work together to achieve specific goals, such as driving traffic, enhancing user experience, and improving search engine rankings
In summary, effective website content is not just about filling pages with information; it’s about strategically curating and presenting diverse forms of content to create a seamless, engaging, and informative experience for the user, ultimately driving the site’s goals and objectives.
Ideally, most SMEs/entrepreneurs deploy in-house resources for the website content as it’s a part of the brand quality. However, these days, you can build content with the help of generative ai which will cover in the last section of this article.
Everyone understands social media, so we will skip the explanation. Only thing noteworthy is that each channel is different- there are some text-oriented, some image and others are video channels.
However, the key learning for an SME or entrepreneur is to select 1 or 2 platforms instead of all the social platforms. In the initial stages, it’s advantageous for a brand to focus on platform where customers are likely to connect and engage. This also does not dilute their focus on managing too many aspects of digital marketing.
Social media can be managed internally or through outside agency. The cost is usually dependent on the type of format required (image, video, short-video aka reels) and total activity (usually # of posts per month).
There are website tools and there are website tools. We will mention a few so that even if you deploy an agency to take care of your requirements, you are cognizant of these critical tools which will help in the management of website as well as digital marketing:
1. Google Tag Manager (GTM): Everytime you have to deploy a code to track something on website, that tool will have javascript code which you will have to share with developer and get it implemented. Google Tag Manager bypasses that trouble. If you get GTM installed, most tool implementations can happen from Google Tag Manager and brings all codes under one place.
2. Google Search Console: The point of a website is that is starts showing up in Google Results, and it is accessible to the customer. At the most basic level, Google Search Console will show how many pages are indexed, crawl rate, page errors, and any issues. For a brand-new website, Search Console can be used to submit pages for indexing (if not already).
3. Google Analytics: How many people are visiting your website? What countries are they coming from? Which pages are they visiting? Are they finishing goals or dropping off before doing certain action? Google Analytics will show the stats for these questions, and much more.
4. SEO Tools: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps a website rank better in the search results. For an SME/entrepreneur, what matters is that keywords are ranking in the top results. Who are the competitors, and what are they ranking for. As such, tools like ahrefs, SEMrush, and other deployments tools like Rankmath, YoastSEO play a key role.
5. User Behaviour Tools: If a user visits your website, where are they interacting? Are they being pulled towards certain sections. If user is interacting with certain elements of a page, then those insights can help in analyze and make modifications for better conversion rate. Tools like Microsoft Clarity, and Hotjar can then be used temporarily to understand the user behavior on website.
All tools (except SEO tools) are free of cost.
The website is deployed with your brand name, its hosted through the provider, it has been designed as per your needs. What’s the point of all this? To drive business through sales. How to do that? We touched briefly on previous section through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is one of the channels for driving business. Another mode of driving business is social channels. However both of these channels typically take time to scale up anywhere between 3 months to 12 months or more depending on market factors. There are also paid advertising alternative which can help in driving sales. Two of these are popular as of now:
Google Ads: It is used to run ads on Google Search Results page, Google discover, Youtube and partner publishers.
Meta Ads: It is used to run Ads on Facebook, Instagram and partner publishers.
Both of the above can be started with small budget. For instance, you can start Google Ads with as low as $10 a day. There is no cost of tools, only cost of ad clicks & impressions based on the advertising platform chosen.
AI is picking up pace in certain areas whereas gradually evolving in others. One place where AI is certainly contributing at a max is content. You can ask AI to write content for you, or outline any article which you are thinking about.
Another way AI is contributing is writing titles and descriptions for your pages which can help with SEO.
In case you are a hands-on entrepreneur, you can also use AI to write html/css for your website.
There are way too many AI tools to list them all but here is a list of few popular ones:
Popular Gen AI: ChatGPT, Micrososoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Midjourney, Leonardo AI
Want to launch your website? Or run ads on Google/Meta?
There’s a saying “if you never ask, you will never know”. Why not ask Us? Just fill the contact us form and we will schedule a free consultation. No commitments.