Recently, I received a couple of tweets from Market America UnFranchise® owners asking about the proper ways to direct a custom website URL to their Market America web portal. For those unfamiliar with this practice, it is called setting up a redirect.
Basically you take a website URL. Ex: www.mybusinessname.com and set it to redirect people who visit that particular website to a new address – say your Market America web portal.
You’re probably wondering why anyone would want to do this — to have two website URL’s. For business owners, custom website URL’s are a great way to develop a cohesive branding strategy. For example, if my website address is www.mybusinessname.com, I can then develop this idea further, setting up a separate Facebook business page and a Twitter account to the effect of Facebook.com/mybusinessname and @mybusinessname for Twitter.
Together, I can begin to market my web portal to different audiences – on the web, on Facebook, and on Twitter. Then, anytime that I’m working with a prospect, I can simply give them my website URL of www.mybusinessname, which will redirect them to my Market America web portal.
No need to worry if they’ll forget to add your portal name to the end of the website domain. Instead, they’ll be taken to your portal by visiting your custom URL which you’ve setup as a redirect. Pretty convenient no?
A few things to keep in mind — any custom URL you setup cannot mask your website domain. What this means is that you cannot setup www.yourbusinessname,com and have it redirect to your web portal and show as www.yourbusinessname.com in the URL bar (seen in red below) while showing your Market America web portal. It still needs to show as www.marketamerica.com. I’ve included an example of what a masked URL looks like below.
Now that you’re aware of setting up a URL redirect, here are a few places you should consider publicizing your new website URL to help build awareness around your business:
- Business cards
- Facebook business page
- Twitter profile
- In your tweets or status updates
- Approved hand-outs
- Email signature.
As Market America UnFranchise owners, it is important to remember that any business promotion needs to be sure to follow all guidelines set forth by the corporate office. These policies are outlined in Chapters 19 and 20 of the Career Manual, which you can download from your UnFranchise.com account. UnFranchise >> Downloads
Take a moment to download a copy and review our current policies.
Have additional specific questions about the current Internet policy? Contact our compliance department at internetcompliance@marketamerica.com. If you have other questions, feel free to tweet them to me @ckroks.
Sincerely,
Christian Karasiewicz (@ckroks)
Social Media Manager
Market America, Inc.