Social Glu Communications

It’s a new year and if you’re like me, you’re launching a new business! That’s right, Social Glu is making its first foray into web app building and as you might imagine, it’s plenty hopping busy around here.

While I can’t yet say what the app is, I thought I’d share with you some of the free or low-cost tools that can help you, too, launch your very own shiny new business. Since my focus is on the marketing and communications side of things, that’s primarily what this list includes. Of course, there’s a bunch of other stuff to do too like business licences and tax dudes and dev environments, but we’ll save those for another post (or two).

• Name: The first thing you’ll need is a name for your product and or business. It’s getting harder and harder to find an available name (especially one that has vowels!) I happen to love naming things and find the best way to come up with them is good old-fashioned brainstorming, a notebook, some friends and maybe a drink or two to get the creative juices flowing. However, if you are stuck, there are sites out there to help like Company Name Generator (which also runs a quick check on if the URL is available), Dot-o-mator (“Web 2.0″-sounding names!) and Crazy Namer (it’s true…they are pretty crazy.)

• Website: Once you’ve thought of some good names, it’s time to see if they are available. Domain registration sites like GoDaddy, Network Solutions and Pear let you check availability quickly and for free, and their hosting fees are relatively inexpensive. Google being Google, they too offer domain hosting. You might have to be creative with the URL name (adding “app” at the end of your product name for example) but in general, it’s probably best to stick with a .com domain if you can. Other domain names like .biz and .net are fine and usually more readily available, but for now, .com still seems to be the respected industry standard.

  My advice is to buy any available domain you’re even considering, as it is better to own it then not. When you do purchase a domain, consider buying it for two years rather than one — it’s not much more expensive and one less thing you’ll have to worry about just as your new business is taking off.

• Social media stuff: There is enough here to warrant another post, but en brief you should at least grab the names on Twitter, Facebook, and maybe Google Circles for your business once you’ve got a name. Sure, you’ll probably just have placeholder content there for a while, but it beats not having it available when you’re ready to start marketing.

As with the website URL, you may have to be creative with your Twitter handle since many have been taken. So if your business is called Boxes, Inc. and you find that @boxes is already taken on Twitter by a kitty with taco in its mouth (really!), try @BoxesNews or @BoxesApp or even @helloBoxes. Just keep in mind that the handle should be short and not spell any dirty words by accident.

Other places to consider depending on the nature of your business are Flickr (photo-sharing), YouTube and/or Vimeo (video-sharing), and tumblr (a sort of “blogging lite” platform).

• Logo design: A good logo is important. It takes a while to land on one that feels right, and once you’ve launched with it, it’s tricky to change. Here is where I would advise going to the professionals. There are lots of freelance designers out there who can create some great logo options for you. Ask around, or try your social networks for recommendations. You can also post jobs on sites like Guru or Elance (they even have a logo designers section). And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention 99designs, although I much prefer working one-on-one with someone.

• Color palette: Choosing colors is, for some folks, like picking candy from a candy store. That’s why sites like Colour Lovers and Color Picker are so popular. These sites allow you to choose colors that work well together and create a custom palette, which you can then use on all your web and print properties.

• Fonts: Looking for a nice font for your website? Try Typekit, where you can choose from thousands of different fonts. My favorite feature is that you can test them out right on their site to see if your company name or titles or whathaveyou are going to look good in, say, Museo Slab.

• Images: When I’ve created business websites in the past, I’ve tried to use pictures of real customers, employees or product shots whenever possible. For my blogs, I generally rely on Flickr and the kind folks who use Creative Commons to license their photos, which you can find by using Flickr’s “advanced search” feature and setting your filters to display “Photos only” and “Creative Commons licensed only”.
  If you’re creating a website with the specific intention of selling something, you’ll probably need to either take photos yourself or purchase some. There are lots of stock photography places out there, but two of the ones I’ve used are iStock and Shutterstock. These sites let you search by keyword, subject, layout and even color, which makes it much easier when you’re trying to find a good banner image for your new site JumpingGreenFrogs.com.

  As a bonus, here’s a link to instructions on how to change your Favicon, the little image that shows up on the browser tab for your website. Not sure your newly-created logo is going to look good that little? Test it out and create a Favicon-ready image on favicon.cc.

• Landing page: A new favorite discovery for me is Seattle-based Kickoff Labs. For a small cost, you can build your own light-weight, social-share enabled landing page. Their templates can customized with your own images, color and logo, making it easy to get a site up and running. The best part is that you can put this up even before your product, and interested folks can sign up to be notified when you do launch. And how will you notify them, you may be wondering? I’m glad you asked!

• Email marketing: Building a list of potential customers is a smart thing to do even early on. For free, fantastic and dare I say fun email marketing, MailChimp is your go-to monkey. Full disclosure: I have worked with them on various projects in the past, but I wouldn’t recommend them if I didn’t think they are swell. And Kickoff Labs integrates with them, so as you build your pre-launch list, you can start growing your email marketing list as well.

So that’s a little bit about what we’ve been doing to welcome in the New Year in addition to celebrating with our family and friends. I hope you find this helpful, and that your New Year holds some new things you’re excited about as well.

Now, back to that app that we’re building…

Image: whistlepunch via Flickr