We had a brainstorming session last week and put together a small business startup checklist. With more than 15 years of business experience around the table, please see our guide on how to start your own website, which includes the most basic checklist that adult business owners can follow. How you go about acquiring the things you need is entirely up to you, it’s all about trial and error.

So here it is, the exact things you need when you have a business idea and would like to make it grow with your own website.

  1. Domain – First you have to come up with a name for your adult business idea. You might think this is quite easy, but take your time, research the name online, see what results your domain will be competing against. It’s always a good idea to have the product you are selling in the domain, or the kinky niche that you focus on, but it’s not fundamental. Think about what kind of website it will be. If it’s entertainment a short and fun domain is always good, if it’s informational, you might want a domain that is a bit longer and had a few buzz words like help, advice, information. Once you have pinned the domain name, there are plenty of places you can get it registered: 123Reg and GoDaddy are popular. When you register your domain, the suffixes also needs a bit of thought, is your business US based and will only trade in the US? Is your business even more local, e.g. London? The most common suffixes are .com, but if you are running an informational website, it might be a good idea to also get .net.

  2. Hosting – Once you have your url, it’s time to host your website so it can actually go live on the big world wide web. Hosting usually costs peanuts but it frightens a lot of people because they think it’s quite a technical process. You will usually have the hosting option available through the domain registration website, which is all fine, but should you want an even cheaper deal, we found this hosting (https://hostinger.com) site to be the cheapest - and they are adult friendly. Of course you should do your own research and see which one seems the easiest for you to manage. If you still have trouble, simply message one of our service sellers, they do this all day everyday; so they will be able to sort it out for you in no time.

  3. Logo – You need to get this done quite early so there are no discrepancies at a later stage with design and communication. Logo designs are one of the simplest things to do these days, there are websites that will even enable you to do it for free (if you’re feeling creative), but if you would like something quite bespoke, definitely get in touch with a freelance graphic designer. When you have your logo done, do not forget to also have the logo on different background and on different formats. The formats you will need your logo in are, png (transparent background), eps (can create billboard and it will still be pixel perfect), and a high res jpeg for general use. Hint! Keep your freelance graphic designer’s contact details handy, because you never know when you’ll need an icon or your logo to be resized, and there is nothing worse than having a blurry or distorted logo on your website.

  4. Website – So this is probably what you have been waiting for, to really get stuck in and build your product and be fully in control of the design. Again, before you jump in an throw every idea you have, it’s worth getting the basic structure in a simple black and white sketch.

Once you have a layout, you will know whether you need to be looking for a template design that you can customize without the need for html, or whether it’s best to get a bespoke html designer to code your design ideas. If you are going to stick to the simple template, your easiest options are wix.com, or the elephant in the room, WordPress. Select your template, and start your website hierarchy structure. Not sure how? This simple graphic will hopefully be a good enough guide. Let me explain quickly. Your homepage is the most important page of your domain, you should, to start of, have main 4 other link outs from your homepage, the product you sell, the services that are dynamic i.e. blog, deals page, top sellers etc, the company overview like the About Us and the Contact page.

Once you have your website all designed and built according to your mock up, you are ready to start marketing your brilliant idea of product.

  1. Email Account – For this, you will need to go back to the place you registered your domain and set up your email. This is more important that you might think, a lot of people when they are starting out think that a Hotmail or a gmail account will suffice, but no no, your email has a big impact on business association and growth. Once you have your account make sure to link your contact form or add your email on your Contact Us page of your website.
  1. Blog – This is not a luxury, it’s a necessity if you are to attract clients online. If your website is running on wordpress, it would make to have a wordpress blog, if not, you might need a little html coding to ensure that your blog looks like your main website. Don’t forget to get a subdomain for i.e. kinkytoys.com/blog. Once this is all in place, create categories around your sexy products or kinky services, start with 3 generic categories and 1 purely to do with your company. . When you write in the very specific category, make sure to have enough range, example, in the best shoe stores you can really look at each of the products you offer and write why that product is best bought on your website and what else there is in the world on offer. This category will really make you think about the whole value proposition of your business and will get you thinking why you are unique from everyone else. For the blog you will also want to make sure that whatever you write is keyword optimized, if you are on wordpress the Yoast plugin will do the basics for you.

  2. Proofread – This might sound a bit basic, but remember you are a business so first impressions are very important. Also, you need to make sure that all your website pages are full of content and you have enough information for your visitors to start exploring what your website offers.

  3. On-site SEO – So you have the blog working to bring new traffic for various keywords and topics, but you also need to make sure when people search for your products or services your website appears. To do on-site SEO, there are a thousand of things you can do, but the most basic are page titles, tags and Meta descriptions. Also, looking into your url structure to make sure it’s something like this domain.com/categoryname/producttitle rather than index.php?id=1 also, check your website’s loading speed  to make sure it’s all running ok. Also make sure your product pages have enough tags, descriptions and even image alt-tags to ensure google indexes the products of services you offer and allows people to find you directly. There will be a lot more things you will need to do as your website grows, but lets walk before we can fly ;-)

  4. Social Media Pages – This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be social on all the platforms, it’s just to extend your SEO and to allow the people that find you through content to connect with you so your client base can start growing and you can start recording data. Even-though your social media community is small, all your pages, OnlyFans, Twitter, Instagram needs to look the part. So get your logo as the profile picture and choose images that reflect your product or services so people can connect your website to your social media accounts. Also don’t forget to add your social media links on your website so they can start appearing on the first page of google for your url.

  5. On-site marketing – Make sure that any traffic you get to your website you can capture. Insert plugins for registration forms, test with exit pop-ups to capture emails, allow your customers to create accounts so you can then market to them at a later stage.

So, here we have 10 things that you need when setting up your website. There are about another 10 things to hit off the list, but for the sake of sanity let us know if you would like to receive the next 10 things on the checklist in the comments box below. If you do, we will extend this article to include the next 10 things you need and then distribute the whole thing in a pdf format so you can follow in your own time.