An online business is just like any offline business. You need a space or a shop to operate your business. You need to pay rental fees, electricity and water bills in order to run the business. Similar to offline business, there are some essential necessities that you cannot do without in your own online business.

Domain Name

The Domain Name is the address of your website. This is your brand name and your service users and customers will identify you by your domain name.

For example, if you run a pet store, you would like something your customers can remember in some capacity.

In addition, it also needs to describe your business in some way that can prove to help people instantly recognize what it is that you actually do, without having to look at your site, in this case it would be beneficial to consider what you actually do for your customers.

So when you are choosing a domain name, you should spend some time and effort in researching for a domain name that is suitable or optimal for your service or product that you are providing.

It may be also good to include keywords in your domain name.

Sometimes, the domain name that you desire may already be purchased by someone else and you will have to offer a higher price to buy the domain name. If that is the case, and if you are willing to pay for that domain name, then go ahead and make the purchase if you think its worth the money.

If not, search for another domain name or extension that the domain name is available in, these alternatives are not the most optimal, but it would allow you to get a name that is very similar to what you want, modern domain names may also describe your business in greater detail, or may be relevant to your business. something like .art, or .tech may be more relevant to you if you run businesses that are relevant to this.

You may be able to get a free domain name from some websites, but their extensions usually do not end with .com due to the popularity of .com domain names.

We highly recommend you to get your domain names at http://www.getyourdomainnames.com/

Web Hosting

Web hosting is another basic necessity in any online business. Your website needs to be hosted on a web host!

Not having a web host for your site is like a shop with no physical place to set up up store. This is like shop’s physical space. However, many newbies are unwilling to invest into web hosting.

You need to own the web hosting account in order to truly own the website.

If you do not own web hosting, any website that you claim to have can be taken away from you easily since you have no control over it.

The service provider should be trustworthy so as to prevent that from ever happening, it would be devastating for you to wake up and find that your site is completely inoperable, you could be losing money for every second that your site doesn’t show up due to a bad host or slow servers.

Bluehost is one of the best web hosting providers that we highly recommend, you can get it from this link: http://professionalhosting.com/

Autoresponder

The autoresponder has become a very important tool in every internet marketers’ arsenal. However, many newbies dread the idea of investing in an autoresponder, especially since they incur a monthly fee for their services to be provided to you.

Yes, there are free ones out there but they are not good or professional enough. They can shut down whenever they want and they tend to contain a lot of advertisements.

They usually also have some form of limitation for the list size, or there is a direct limit on the number of available emails on a daily, weekly or monthly limit. Some popular autoresponders have their own free or trial accounts for new customers to try out, but those have limits too.

If you are looking to build your online business for long term, then you do not want to be at the mercy of a free autoresponder service running away with your list, and possibly using your list to generate profits of their own, in your stead.

We recommend that you get Aweber. We also use this autoresponder service and you can get it here: http://autorespond.com/

Even though some of the tools can be obtained free of charge, it is best that you possess ownership them in order to truly own the business. If your website is built on a sub domain and you do not own the hosting and domain name, the website does not truly belong to you.

Think of these tools as investments rather than just as additional costs. These are the very basic tools that allow you to build your online business and to make money online, without them you have no capacity to conduct business in the desired capacity that you prefer.