Running A Real Business?

I do networking events, which means lots of people give me their business cards. It took a few years, but I’ve gotten over the fact that small businesses and especially home-based ones do not put a mailing address on their cards anymore. I’m told that no one mails anything anymore (except maybe Google, but that’s for another time) so why put it on the card.

Now I see cards with the business owner’s name, company name, maybe a tagline, phone number (cell), web site (I saw one card that had a product and business web site), Facebook account and email address. What gets me is that these business owners had the money or know-how to get a domain name and a web site, but they are using a yahoo, gmail or even an ATT.net email account.

Come on, use an email address that matches your domain! Doing otherwise makes you look real cheap and small time!

If you’re that cheap and small time that must mean you will charge me next to nothing and maybe not do the job properly. Maybe you’re not professional enough!

Do not give me the I can’t afford the email service. Can you afford about $15.00 per year?  I got a domain for a client and project I’m working on. We are sending out emails to about 30,000 people. I got the domain from GoDaddy for about $15.00. The people I’m working with already had an email address, one was a gmail account and they did not want a new account that they had to check. So I went to Godaddy and created 3 email accounts for free and then forwarded those accounts to the people’s regular email account. It took about 15 minutes, and again, it was free. The only cost was to purchase the domain. People see and use an email address that is part of the domain and see the company as very professional and not cheap and it goes to their gmail account.

If your web people or your domain provider is charging for domain email addresses then check out GoDaddy. But do grow up, run your business like a real business with a real email address and stop being so cheap and small minded.

Until next week,