Find Business By Address

A question that arises often when I design a new website for a client is how to encourage potential customers to safely send their business.

My immediate advice is that you should never publish either personal or business e-mail address on a website. There are many e-mail harvesting programs on the Internet (often known as spam bots) that exploration sites looking for e-mail. Any found are added to the mailing lists and sold, if you're unlucky enough to have your address on one of these lists you'll quickly find you a deluge of spam.

Until you've actually had this happen to you it may simply look like a minor annoyance, but I can tell you from my own experience that it can quickly become a major problem for business and may become a serious waste of your time. Some years ago I left an e-mail address of the mine on a website very obscure and forgotten. Finally, I have been receiving about 30 spam messages per day, how I was forced to abandon using this e-mail. Fortunately for me this particular address was one I very rarely used, and so it was abandoned little loss. Had this been a business or personal I used every day, it would have been a headache for me.

The fact is that your e-mail business is an asset of your business, and must be protected. If you have been using it for a while, your customers and suppliers does have on file and use it to contact you. You may have signed email newsletters, registered websites and bought items online. If you are forced to stop using your address problems can be easily foreseen: some of your contacts will read the email informing you send change of address, and immediately make the necessary changes to their database of book Address; many will forget. You'll need to re-subscribe to mailing lists, and change your address on all sites you have saved. If you're smart, you must add an auto responder to your old email address, giving the new address. It will probably work when the message is sent by a real person: You will still need to check your old address on a regular basis to ensure that important messages are not missed. In short, there will be a lot of your precious time, and will be a real cost to your business and you never want to let it happen for you.

So how do you protect your business address? After all, you have to give, sometimes, otherwise it is pointless to have one! You want real customers to be able to contact you easily.

The first step, if you have not done it already, is to register a domain for your business. This is so cheap to make it worthwhile even if you do not have immediate plans to develop a website. One plant that usually comes with a domain name is the ability to implement e-mail forwarding. Many companies start using a free address like mybusiness@yahoo.co.uk or mybusiness@btinternet.com. An email forwarder means you can continue using your using your current address. You set up a forwarding address for your new domain, for example contact@mybusiness.com, which will forward all e-mails that are sent directly to your current address. You respond to the message received through this process just as you would any other email.

A great advantage of this is that it looks more professional. However, there are also other advantages: you can check the shipping address, while keeping your real address strictly private. Because email forwarders are easy to create, you can have several, you can book for specific uses. If you find that you get a lot of spam with a particular forwarder then delete it and start using another.

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