So you have this great idea and it could potentially bring you a ton of profit. You know exactly what the product or service will be, you know how you want to brand it and you’re excited to get this started. 

Take a breath. 

There are a couple of things that every business should first go through to establish reliability and credibility. Let’s touch on them together. 

1. Create a website

We live in a digital age. Whether it’s super simple or overloaded with pages, you should absolutely have a website for your business. It should lead your users to a means of contacting you or purchasing a product/service. It might even have links to the business’s social media page, which is also very important. Once it’s up and running, you can find helpful tips for your next steps in our previous articles about driving traffic to your site and the power of data.

2. Create a custom email address

Picture this: you are on Xy Web Solution’s website and you decide to send them a message. Two days later, you get an email back from sexygal12345@gmail.com responding to that message. Personally, I would be afraid to even click on the email. 

Hopefully, your email address is not in sexygal’s realm. That said, it should not be johnsmith88@yahoo.com, either. A better solution is to create a custom email domain for your business. An email address like sales@xywebsolutions.com would invoke more credibility than the prior two. If you have your domain already and you want to get started we like recommending Google’s G Suite product.

NOTE: Gratuitous plug … use our contact form to ask for a G Suite promotional code and receive 20% off your first year.

3. Claim your business on Google

Head on over to https://www.google.com/business/. There, you will be asked about your business name, location and industry. You can choose whether or not to add a location, which would then appear on Google Maps. Once you go through all the steps, you will be redirected to your Google Business dashboard, where you can do all sorts of nifty things.