Dispensary ? Domain Name & Website 1st.

So, you’ve incorporated your business, found a location to operate from and you’re ready to open your doors, the question is, what do you do now?

The thing you’re really going to need is customers or I should say patients (You should never refer to them a customers). This can be the hardest part for most people. Many find as a big surprise once they open their doors, that business does not just come pouring in. In fact, many people do end up going out of business and the reason is simple – They don’t have enough money to cover their bills.

This leads to the main question that every business owner asks themselves and that is – How can I get more business? The medical marijuana industry is different then most. Because it’s so controversial, there may not be as many traditional avenues and resources that most business men and women have available to them; none the less, they are there.

The first thing that I would suggest for any medical marijuana business owner is logo and a website. This is true even for growers. While you may not want to put your address down if you’re a grower, you may want to have one for the purposes of branding. Branding is establishing an identity for your business.

One way to brand yourself is to get a professional logo designed that you can use to put on your website and the packaging on your product. This is the reason for names. Everyone knows a brand name. There is a difference between OG Kush and Sour Diesel. For a brief moment, even the U.S. Trademark office was allowing growers to register the names of the bud they were growing. That has temporarily stopped for a moment, one of the reasons is that it’s difficult to really prove that a particular strain is genetically different from another, but even growers have started to do this.

If you can get really good at growing a particular strain, you can establish a name for yourself. For dispensaries and delivery services, this will definitely be important. A logo is identifiable right away in an ad. You want everything to match with your business from the logo on your membership agreement to the colors on your website and even the lettering that you use. This is all part of your identity.

A great place to get logos designed is www.99Designs.com. Here you can get professional designers to compete by submitting designs for you that you vote on. You prepay depending on how much money you want to spend and then at the end of the week you take the design that wins. By voting on the submissions everyday, the designers can see which ones you liked and which you didn’t and they can go back and change the design and try again.

Next, you should be advertising. With newer states, you may not have publications that are industry specific yet but you should at least have an alternative newspaper that is published weekly with the different cultural events that are going on around town. These can be a great place to advertise.

Of course there are always the other major websites that promote locations like www.WeedMaps.com or www.Potlocator.com as a way for others to find you. You can also visit forums and other places on the internet where people have formed communities around a particular interest.

For sure, don’t go in there and just spam them with your businesses information all over the place, but you can leave your website link and contact information. This will actually help you by passing on “link juice” to your site, helping your websites ranking with the major search engines and it will also help by getting your name out there and driving traffic to your site. The way to post in forums is to introduce yourself politely and then to get involved in meaningful and relevant conversations. The same is true for social websites like Twitter and Facebook.

One last tip is to just get out there. I had one successful client that I helped get started who would literally go out with home made fliers and hand them out to people when he was just getting started and had nothing to do. Instead of just sitting at home and waiting for the phone to ring, make it a point to get out at least once a day to visit a doctors office, a dispensary or a smoke shop to hand out fliers and meet people. You’ll need to begin establishing relationships with this business.

Well, I hope this helped. Get out there and just do it with your business. It will take time to build like anything else but if you actively work at it you will be successful.
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