Going online has never been easier for small businesses with services such as Yahoo! Small businesses, homestead and Google Apps.

To begin with, what does it mean for a business to go online To the lamest of laymen, having a website, means something that only those biggies and organizations can do with. But having a web presence for an individual goes miles beyond simply having an e-mail address. Setting up a blog or website for you and your business is getting easier and more accessible with every passing hour.

Website: simply putting a location for your business to grow via internet. It can double up as an office that is open perennially. With some ingenuity, you make your WebPages perform most of the tasks of a physical office with minimum supervision. Web design is a major point that comes into picture. While simple html is quite enough for most designing needs, many an entrepreneur may not be familiar with it. Most services today provide a simple user interface that allows you to click, drag and drop the features you want on your page and the back-end features of the provider take care of the rest.

Blogs, short for web logs, are being increasingly used for business networking. A blog can be owned and run by one or many people to easily upload content on to your web page. Most blog services are free. It provides for interaction through comments, forums etc and takes business networking to the next level. Let us take for example blog that review different products from electronics to automobiles. Each new review is in the form of a new post. Readers can leave

their comments for each post. With the latest post on the top of the page and all previous posts following chronology, a free blog in fact does as good a job if not better than a paid website in this case. Whats more, you can advertise relevant ads and services on your page and get paid per click or per view. Blogs have been very fruitfully used by farmers in the west to discuss various issues from the right seeds to use to the weather. Rather than go by trial and error your self, one can simply learn from experiences of others in the same line of work. In fact, several big players in the industry are turning to such blogs for home grown knowledge and saving money on research and surveys.

Yahoo! Small businesses, voted Product of the year by PC World magazine lets anyone set up a website, i.e. domain registration and web hosting for under 10$ /year. You are provided with software that makes it very simple to design a webpage, hence saving the costs of hiring a web-designer. You can add premium services like custom made online stores and specialized site statistics. Homestead provides similar services but free trial periods of up to 30 days.

Google Apps is a package of desktop solutions provided by Google in their bid to make a niche in the desktop market. It is currently aimed at small and medium sized businesses with plans to follow up with premium services for big players. The package includes applications like Google calendar, docs, spreadsheets etc and gmail accounts on your domain name for all employees/members. The service is off course like most other offerings by the company, free. This could do wonders for your small business, cutting costs and hence adding to productivity and also increasing staff efficiency and co-ordination. While this would mean already having a registered and hosted domain, we would suggest using the Google labs software called Google PageMaker to make web pages free of cost on the Google pages domain. These would be simple information based pages that would not be able to use the above mentioned applications.

Lets take a look at the costs and benefits. A website, at a few dollars/month can do the kind of round-the-clock and dynamic advertising that no flyer can. Also, websites can be made interactive with customers being able to fill up forms, place orders etc, all this when you are sound asleep at home. This brings us to the concept of uptime. Most servers pledge 99.99% uptime, roughly 24*7. So the product is in the market, so to speak, all the time. Add to this, the professional look that goes with a contact e-mail addresses for the owner and employees, if any, at your domain name. Applications like Calendars shared by the staff and online spreadsheets that multiple users can edit can do wonders for productivity.

If youre still wondering the benefits of going online, here is a checklist:

1. If you own an online store or other online business

2. Even a local flower shop can gain business if it has online presence. It could be a novelty in your line of work attracting attention and hence remuneration.

3. It could be the first step towards expansion and maybe even going international.

4. Even if short term benefits are not obvious, it can turn out to be a small and well placed investment in the long-haul. In a world of uber-networking and where every facet of life increasingly has an online representation, having presence maybe the best investment you ever make.