Is MySpace the best place to setup a website for a online business?

Time was, every business needed a website of their own, but nowadays as a professional web developer, I'm starting to wonder whether a website is necessary at all.

For a long while, eBay has offered the facility to set up a shop and sell to people who, basically, are on the web to buy. No special skills required.

Yahoo! Stores have been very popular too.

When mySpace arrived, it offered something else, the ability for everyone to create a personal page. Something that reflected their interests and through which they could keep in touch with their friends. Possibly its biggest draw, though, is its ability to provide streamed music. Consequently, it's a big deal among music lovers and musicians.

Facebook, however, is becoming more popular and provides a rather more ordered, less 'MTV' environment. Once you've set yourself up in Facebook, you can set up a Facebook page for your business.

Think of these sites like opening up a shop in a town. If you set yourself up in Facebook, you may miss people who spend their time on eBay, and those in mySpace. If you're a small business, you could do well in one. But as you grow, you'll need to be present in all of them.

There are three elements to online business success. The first is that you have to have a presence online. Whether that's an eBay shop, a Facebook Page, a mySpace page, or your own site, there has to be something somewhere for people to find out what you do and buy something.

The second element is traffic. You need people to visit whatever presence you create, and how you generate that traffic is partly determined by what you choose. For instance, with Facebook you might embark on a strategy of gathering lots of friends and giving them stuff of value. With eBay you'll have listing strategies. With your own page, you'll need to get into search engine optimisation and linking strategies.

The third element is conversion. Do your pages convert people into buyers, and if not, can you do something about that. Can you test one thing against another, a button design, for instance, or a headline?

Websites can be expensive to set up (think in hundreds or thousands), and a Facebook Page is free. However you don't really 'own' what you put up in anything other than your own site.

So my advice is this. Use something like eBay or Facebook to test your business online. If you make some money, put it into a website, then get your presence onto the other sites too. You can pass traffic around .. from your site request people friend and fan you in Facebook, and when they've done that you can announce, for instance, a sale to your Facebook fans and get them back to your website.

As you can see, online business is no longer just about having a website, it's a much more fuzzy presence in all sorts of popular places around the web, all feeding into pages that convert visitors into paying customers.

It's a glorious thing. Welcome to my world.