There is every reason today to build a website for your transcription business and no reason not to. Take your business Global! With the many resources available online for choosing templates, simple web design instruction, and easy to learn search engine submissions, you simply must have a website.

And why limit yourself to just your geographical location when prospective clients all over the globe are as easy to access as signing on to the Web? If you haven't already done it, get moving, build a website and get more clients!

Build a Professional Website
Here are some tips to help you build a website that's professional and effective:

• Don't, and I repeat DO NOT design a cutesy website with little animated teddy bears or singing flowers. These scream "Amateur!" from the rooftops! Build a website that says, "I'm a professional and I am serious about my business!"


• Include a little bio page about yourself and why prospective clients should choose you for their transcription projects. Give a brief history about your work experience or even a page with client testimonials.


• Be detailed about your services and rates, if you want to advertise them on your site. You may feel more comfortable having potential clients contact you by email or phone for a quote. That's up to you.


• Provide your full contact information as you did on your business cards and in your brochure. You want people to know that the site is owned by a REAL person.


• Do not, and again I repeat DO NOT try and create a professional business website on one of those "free website" places on the 'Net. You will not benefit from them and it could be a total waste of your time, let alone it could adversely affect your credibility before you've even had a chance to establish it.

So what's wrong with those free websites?
Oh, there's plenty wrong if you're trying to maintain a level of professionalism. Let's go through the list of negatives:

• Free subdomain names: You won't get a real domain name that looks like this http://www.yourdomain.com. You will get something that looks like this:
  http://thefreedomainhost.com/thenameoftheirserver.html/yourname.biz.
  Now if that's not long and confusing, I don't know what is! What would your clients think?


• You get "Free" hosting. But now let's take a look at just how "free" that hosting really is:


• You get banner ads across the top of every page of your site. The ads have nothing at all to do with your business. Do you think your potential clients came to your site because they were interested in dog food or the latest hip-hop songs to hit the charts?


• And how about pop-up ads? So annoying, aren't they? I don't think you want to subject your clients to those.


• And what happens if that "free" website company decides it can't give away its services anymore but they don't let you know. That's right. They may shut you down for nonpayment and now you've lost your website, which probably wasn't getting much traffic anyway, because...


• Most free sites aren't found by the search engines anyway. And why not? Remember that long, convoluted domain name? Most search engines pretty much ignore those, no matter how much you try to optimize the keywords.

So really, how free is all of that anyway? Not very, because it cost you time to build it. Time is money. So you're actually paying for a "free" site but getting nothing in return for the work.

The absolute best way to guarantee that the work you put into your website will pay off - pay for it. There are some great website hosts out there that don't cost a fortune and still have great site templates that are extremely easy to use.And if you know enough HTML to build a site offline in FrontPage, Dreamweaver or another html editor, most of the paid hosting sites have FTP availability so you can upload your own HTML files. So create your domain name. That's what your URL will be - http://www.yourdomain.com Simple, short, easy to remember and the search engines like them a lot better than - well, that other long thing. And get your domain name registered, which you should be able to do through almost any hosting service. Build a website using their templates or do it yourself with an html editor. Upload and voila - you're on the Web!