Building a online web presence

One important thing you need to do if you're setting up a business is building a good web presence. Now the first thing you're going to need is a website. So, there are lots of ways of getting websites. And we can put you in touch with people who can do this for you, but they'll charge you a fee for doing it, or you can go to one of the sites where you can build websites. This could be something like GoDaddy, 1&1, Wix, companies like that. You'll see these advertised on TV.

Now the more you pay, the more rights you have on your website, the bigger the website can be. But don't be scared of doing a website yourself. They are quite straightforward. The key thing will be, is making sure you've got a good domain name. So, you want to make sure you use a domain name, it's nice and easy, it's easy to remember, but also, it's relevant to what your business is. When you're building this up, then have a domain name, but you also use your email. One key thing people do wrong is they might well have their business at abctraining@hotmail.com. You're better off having an email of info@abctraining.co.uk. It's much more professional. You don't really want to have Hotmail, Gmail accounts and things like that to represent your business.

So, your website and your email all tie up nicely. Within the website itself, make sure that you've got a site which has got all the information on. You can look at all the information on our courses. You can start adding on all the online courses. And the other key thing is using our brand. And now you can download from the dashboard, the approved centre logo, definitely have that on there.

One of the reasons you come with us is because of the things we offer to your students to make sure that your website actually shows that students working with you do get ProTrainings qualifications. They do get downloadable student manuals, materials, CPD certified, Evidence-Based Learning, for e-learning courses, and all the other benefits that you know about, so access to videos, things like that. So, when you're building your website, make sure you use our brand. What often happens, is we'll get a phone call, we refer people to different instructors, then we get a call back from that person, "Well, I went to that website, but it doesn't mention you." Now that might be a very big account of ours. So, yes, your brand is important, but also use our brand to support it because it links us two together, and it makes us work together much better.

The other thing you can do with it uses the widgets which we covered in other videos to put video content. Now video content is really important when you're having web pages. So, you can have our video of the week for paediatric or EFAW on your relevant page with that subject. Online booking, you can use that. Again, a widget on the system makes it nice and easy. With the websites, you also need to increase your social media and get that linked in to your websites. You can put little feeds of your Twitter or your Facebook on your website, so the sites are different, and there's lots of new content on there. Maybe you have a blog, or maybe you built a blog into the website. So, a lot of these companies will allow you to have a blog feature on your web. So, you put lots of news on there. So now you got your social media, your website, your blog, and people can get hold of you.

Other key things to make yourself look a bit more professional try and have a landline number or a 0845 type number rather than your mobile number. If you going to mobile number on a website, it does look like you're just a one-man band. Even if you are, just make yourself look that bit bigger.

Now the other thing, and we've put some handouts in the instructor area, downloads area, of how to make your business register with Google. Now we can't tell you in a short video like this how to get you at the top of Google. Now a lot of these vault companies, websites you buy, they will have features that allow submissions to search engines. It's worth doing that because then Google and other search engines will know who you are.

Search engine optimization's a massive, massive subject. But you can find lots of information now, by just googling it. There are loads of people, go on YouTube, and they want to just produce a video on how to do something, and tell the world how good they are, and that's the key way of learning. We've built up a lot of the side of our business by watching video and learning. There are paid back forms you can go but virtually all of these other things are completely free. So, if you're not sure how to do something, then google it.

Now at ProTrainings, we'd love to be able to help every individual instructor, but with over a thousand of you, it's very difficult for us to help every individual business. So definitely look at how you can get your website out there.

Another key thing you can do is make sure your business is registered with Google. So, what we've done here, is we've just put ProTrainings European, it's a Google search engine, and once you've done that, this is the page that would appear for us. So, we've got the main page at the top here where they can access our website. We got the login area, we got courses, about us, basic first aid and other areas and contact us page. And over on the right-hand side here, you'll see a map of where we are, some other information, access to our website.

Now, this is the information you want to be live. And we put how to do this in the download area. It is very, very straightforward, and it means that you can put your business on the map of Google, and this helps a lot particularly when you're working with regional businesses. With us, we try and get coverage throughout the whole of Europe and this is quite hard, but with yours, you'd be looking at a business within a small geographical area. If you have not got your business registered on Google, then no one's really going to be able to find you. So, it's really important that you register your business on Google.

There are lots of other things you can register your website with. There are lots of free websites that promote you locally. Some of them will charge. Well, it's up to you whether you want to make that charge, but definitely get your business listed for free. Anything that allows you to put your name out there is always a really, really good thing.

Now other ways you can promote and increase your business, increase your website traffic, is using paid advertising, but be very careful with this that you don't end up spending an awful lot of money. If you do use paid advertisers, something like Facebook advertising, Google Ads, or LinkedIn adverts, they're very good, in what they do, but you may well find, if you just put the search word the "first aid", and "the UK", and you put £100 budget on it, your money will go in minutes and you won't get anything. Because it will just come up and your advert will show, on top, especially if you don't put a limit on it, it will show at the top of Google and it will just run out your money.

So, when you use Google adverts or anything like that, make sure it's regional for the town you work in. Set a daily limit. Set an end to it. Otherwise what you may well find is if you just put your credit card number in and you don't set a maximum pay per click for the adverts, you don't set a maximum daily limit or a maximum monthly limit and you don't put an end to it, you might well find every single penny of your credit card limit is used up with Google in a very, very short space of time. So be really, really careful with that. But selected marketing can work very, very well.