The World Wide Web is a great place to work. No one has seen the limits of what you can do here. You can reach customers that you never could have reached in any other way. The world may not be your oyster yet, but the Web can bring you one step closer. If you're in business, there's really no good excuse for not having a Web presence. It just takes a simple text editor and an account. (This entire web site was written from the ground up with a great little text editor called EditPad that cost a total of one postcard to the author (www.jgsoft.com). Here are some suggestions for setting up your web presence:

When you set up your web site, do it professionally. You're better off to not put up a web site if it's going to make you look like you don't know what you're doing. If your site looks stupid, your visitors will assume you are stupid too. You can run your web site on your computer and tweak it until it is looking very good. Then upload it to your server (most likely to a company who will host your site for you).

Rule number one about your web presence is: If you're going to do it, do it right! Doing it wrong will harm you more than help you.

Obtain a domain name. A domain name allows you to use a web address like "www.superdietitian.com" instead of "www.networkhost.com/nutrition/superdietitian/index.htm." The easier your web address is to remember, the better. A domain name also makes you look far more professional.

Be logical. If you're providing services over the Internet, make sure you implement them smoothly and logically. If you confuse the surfer, they'll disappear faster than you can say "Click on this here button for a lengthy explanation of what I think you should have done."

Use navigation aids. These aids are images (like Buttons or Bars) or words placed on every page for the convenience of the surfer. These navigation aids make it easier for anyone on your web site to jump immediately to other pages on your web site. Implemented properly, navigation aids make finding information easy and yes... even fun. An even more important reason for putting navigation links on every page is that sooner or later, the search engines will analyze your site. You could have a link on every major search engine pointing to a very popular page on your web site that concerns, say, weight loss. And if you have no navigation links on that page, your visitors will have no way to see the other pages on your web site! Oh no! This is a simple and guaranteed way to lose business.

Provide useful information. This is the component that makes you different from the hundreds of other web sites that your competitors are going to construct. Make it bigger, or better, or funnier, or flashier. Graft your own personality into it. Make if worth visiting and surfing.

Select your niche. If you want to be everything to everyone, you may have bitten off more than you can chew. If this is your goal, you'll throw yourself into the thrust and cut of competition with some of the biggest and best-funded nutrition-related organizations on the Web. A better bet might be to specialize in a specific area or to tackle each new area one-at-a-time and build. If you focus on things your customers want, you should be able to deliver a class act.

Avoid "Me Too Syndrome." Whether you choose to specialize or not, make sure you're offering something that isn't exactly like the stuff your visitors can get from a thousand other web sites. If the nature of what you're offering is in large part redundant by its very nature, package it differently. Package it better. Make it easier to access. Make it more objective. Bring in other experts. Include photographs and other images. Make your site a joy to visit.

Provide incentives for visitors to return to your site. Calculators (BMI, "desirable" weight, training heart rate, etc.) can add interest to your web site. Review a listing of over 11,500 on-line nutrition-related calculators at www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG/RefCalculators.html. These web-based calculators can serve as the basis for referring others to your site. Other incentives include your presentation of a recipe-of-the-day (or week), a recipe makeover section, or dieting tip of the day. Your software should be very helpful on these topics. You can also write articles regarding nutrition, promote contests, and provide links to other sites of interest to your visitors (be careful with this one). If you're going to post a recipe every day, consider publishing the collection after it reaches critical mass. (Hey, if you're going to do all this work anyway, why not use it every way you can?)

Provide contact information. A potential customer may be two questions away from doing business with you. But if she can't contact you, she'll remain, unfortunately... two questions away from doing business with you. Don't make visitors work too hard to contact you. Do everything you can to make it easy for them to talk to you. Have an email link on every page... they should be able to just click on your email icon. And when they do, their email client should open with it's address line already addressed to you. You can even determine the subject line of each email depending on which page it comes from if you like.

Be able to collect required information. Almost always, your "deliverable" is some sort of report. But to prepare the report, you must obtain some information from the client. Determine how this is going to be accomplished and implement it on your web site. Paying for a phone call may be convenient, but it will be expensive (unless you're able to close a sale with every call). Using email will work, but you may have to go back and forth a few times to get everything straight. Using a web-based form will work well if you configure it to email you the results of questionnaires that you post on your site.

Be able to accept payments. If you're going to do business on the Web, you're going to have to be able to accept your customer's payments. Check and money orders are okay, but they are very, very, slow. An out-of-town check can take a few days to get to you and then take a week or more to clear the bank. Most clients are going to want their reports delivered to them within 24 hours if not sooner. If you already have a merchant account and can accept credit cards, you can make a simple form on a secure page on your server to store the credit card information. But the easiest way to get this going quickly may be to find a web host who provides these services and takes a percentage of each transaction.

Provide free software downloads. Locate freeware or shareware of interest to your visitors. Contact the authors and obtain permission to offer these to your visitors. Have them "register" (give you information that you ask for, like name, email address, etc.) for the free download. One great incentive is a free monthly download containing the nutrient information for 18,589 food items from the USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 13. This software provides users the ability to view, rank, and query the data. It also lets users perform food name searches. You can offer a new free download each month. There are six editions: Basic Nutrients, Vitamins, Minerals, Amino Acids, Fatty Acids, and Additional Nutrients. As your visitors download each new edition, their software magically expands to provide information for the new nutrients. After six downloads (and six visits to your web site), they can access the nutrient data for over 90 nutrients for 18,589 food items. CyberSoft, Inc., makes this software available without charge to nutrition and fitness professionals. For details, visit our download page for NutriBase SR17 Navigator. Contact us for permission to offer this on your web site.

Provide free Assessment Reports in exchange for personal information. Offer to provide a seven-page Assessment Report to visitors who fill out your Assessment Questionnaire. Your questionnaire will collect contact information (name, email, phone, address, etc.) and log-on information (age, gender, height, weight, etc.). Your nutrition software should read this information, then add the contact information to its client contact manager, then log the visitor onto your nutrition software package as a new user. From here, it should be a matter of clicking on the client's name, then clicking on a button to produce a multi-page Assessment Report. Your software should let you create a customized "template" that controls the content and layout of your Assessment report. And you should be able to deliver this report back to the visitor as a text file (in the body of an email, perhaps), as a word processor document (as an attachment to an email), or as a web page (that you can post on your web site for say, 48 hours). If you get your customer from the Web, you should be able to deliver it to her via the Web. With a 100 hits a day, that's 700 hits a week, 3,000 hits a month...

Offer an email newsletter. As you collect names and email addresses, you will build a pool of possible customers on which you can target your marketing efforts. If you used the Assessment Report approach to gathering prospect, you can target them with extreme precision because you know whether the client is a runner, a bodybuilder, or a five foot tall person who weighs 418 pounds. Each of these prospects should get a different newsletter form you. Tailor your messages to your diverse audience. Use the email newsletter to generate interest, then provide links back to your web site to finish each article. This keeps your emails small and encourages traffic to your web site. And while they're there, hit 'em with something new.

Choose a "web-friendly" nutrition software package. Since most of your work will be processed through a high-end nutrition software package, make sure your software will integrate smoothly with your on-line efforts. Make certain you select a nutrition software package that will output any report into text (for email delivery), as a word processor file (for delivery as an email attachment), or as a web page (for posting directly to your web site). Some nutrition packages can produce very fancy (but rigidly formatted) reports that are pretty, but unsuitable for electronic transmission via email or as a new page on your web site.

Sign up to receive free email newsletters. Get online and subscribe to your choice of a multitude of free email newsletters. You can get free newsletters that give you advise on marketing your web site, improve your search engine positioning, increase traffic, improve the appearance and functionality of your web site, etc. You can sign up for newsletters that give you nutritional advise, tell you how to lose weight, how to eat better, or how cope with diabetes, hypertension, or any other ailment you can conceive of. When you sign up, use a unique email address like "news@mycomany.com." Then set a filter on your email client to put all such email into a mailbox called "newsletters." This keeps all your newsletter in one place for you to look at when time allows. Get newsletters from your competitors to see what they are doing to market themselves. Emulate the best of the best. It isn't difficult to locate newsletters. Go to a search engine (like www.google.com). Type in something like "free newsletter." Hit search. Then get ready to search through 1.5 million hits. (Actually, you're be better off to conduct multiple searches on more narrowly focused topics like "free hypertension newsletter.") There's a lot of information and ideas out there if you have the time to sift through it.

Learning to work the web is an ongoing, seat-of-the-pants experience. But it's a whole lot of fun and it has a way of keeping you excited. You'll constantly see new ways to improve or add on to your site. Every time you surf the web, you'll see ideas you may want to incorporate in your own site. You will get ideas for things you'll want to do. The Web is a wonderful way to promote your business, but it's certainly not the only way to promote your business.