Net Services Can Help Your Firm Get Noticed

Just because your business is small doesn’t mean that it needs to be invisible.

There are plenty of Internet resources that can put your business on the map. Microsoft’s bCentral.com Web site is one of several small-business portals worth checking out. It offers information and resources for small-business marketing and management, with a wide variety of services including shipping, purchasing, human resources, insurance, financing and computing.

Microsoft doesn’t offer all the services directly. Its shipping service is handled by IShip.com and purchasing is done through Staples.com, but the bCentral portal is your gateway to all the services. The site, which is part of Microsoft’s MSN Network, even has a place for small businesses to conduct or participate in auctions as a way to purchase for less or turn excess inventory or equipment into cash. The travel section of the site is, of course, handled by Microsoft Expedia, one of the more popular Web-based travel reservation and information services.

What I find most interesting about bCentral is its marketing tools for e-businesses, with tools aimed at companies that have or want to create e-commerce sites.

To begin with, you can use the service to register a domain name. There’s nothing unusual about that. For years you could do that at https://www.networksolutions.com, but now Microsoft is offering this service in partnership with Network Solutions. If you want to reserve a domain name but aren’t ready to start hosting the actual site, bCentral can do that for you for $70 a year, 40% cheaper than the $119 that Network Solutions charges.

The advantage of this service is that you can register the domain name immediately and later find an ISP to host your site. If you already have an ISP, you can register a domain at Network Solutions for $70 but will need to have your ISP provide some technical information before you begin the process.

If you already have an e-commerce business or want to use the Web to promote your company’s Web site and services, bCentral offers a subscription-based business promotion service for $19.95 a month. The service will help your company get listed on search engines, advertise across the Web and send bulk e-mail to customers and prospective customers.

The search engine listing service makes sure that your site is listed on the major and minor search engines that Web users rely on to find sites. If you’re not listed with Yahoo, AltaVista, Google, Lycos and other major search engines, then people seeking information about your type of business are less likely to find you.

Being listed is no guarantee that you’ll get business or even visitors, but it’s a good place to start. Each search engine has its own procedure for listing sites and, at no cost, you can visit each search engine, learn its procedures and register yourself. Or, you can rely on bCentral or other listing services to do the job for you. BCentral promises to submit your site to 10 search engines per month and to submit your site to the top 10 search engines immediately when you sign up with the service. Other submission services include Submissions.com (which lists you for free on 10 sites and charges a monthly fee for more extensive services). You’ll find lots of other free and fee-based Web registration services if you search for “Web Site Registration” on Yahoo, LookSmart, Netscape and other search engines.

BCentral’s advertising service will get you 5,000 banner exchange impressions per month without having to place ads on your page for other Web sites. The bCentral Banner Exchange offers placement on more than 400,000 Web sites. Another option is to get free listings on bCentral’s Banner Exchange by agreeing to carry banners for other businesses on your site.

Finally, bCentral offers an e-mail service that you can use to inform customers about products, services and promotions. The service, called ListBot, is actually a sophisticated database and e-mail address gathering service that collects e-mail addresses of visitors to your Web site. The service is capable of asking demographic questions so you can learn a bit about the people joining your list.

Don’t confuse this type of bulk e-mail with “spam”--the unsolicited commercial e-mail that is so despised by Internet users. Unlike spam, any people you add to your list-bot must opt in by requesting to be included. They can also request to be taken off your list.

Other small business portals are operated by Yahoo (https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com), American Express (https://www.americanexpress.com/smallbusiness), Lycos (https://www.lycos.com/business) and Netscape (https://www.netscape.com/smallbusiness).

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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com.