How to set up your free professional email address in Bluehost and Siteground (Simple Tutorial)

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July 25  

Setting up a professional email account is an important step to take when you launch your online business. And yet, it's a bit confusing and you might think it's going to cost you extra! In this post I'll walk you through my favorite way of setting up professional email addresses using both Bluehost and Siteground.

As a cherry on top, we will also integrate these new email addresses into Outlook so we don't need to use the (not-so-good) default webmail clients. Ready? Let's go!

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What is a professional email address?

Before we set these email addresses up, what exactly is an email address?

A professional email address is how you want your readers, viewers, and customers to find you and communicate with you over business matters.

Unlike your personal email addresses, you can't just click a few buttons to create an email address for your online business. We will cover the entire process in this tutorial.

What is a professional Email Address Format?

We are all used to using a @gmail.com email address for most of our communication.

But when we launch our online business, the personal email address format just won't cut it anymore.

Instead of @gmail.com or @hotmail.com at the end of our email addresses, you will start to use your own domain name for your professional email addresses.

So if your website is at http://unbeatabletech.com/ you will use an email address like John@testing.homeofbacon.com instead of johnatincomemesh@gmail.com.

It's as simple as that! But just to make it super easy for you to create your own addresses, here are some great ideas (and bad ones) to help you create good email addresses.

Professional Email Address Ideas

I'll end these emails with @ - just add your domain address to the end to see how they feel.

Great Email Ideas

  • Your Name@
  • Hello@
  • Support@
  • Marketing@
  • Sales@
  • Affiliates@
  • Refunds@
  • Hi@
  • News@
  • Deals@
  • Info@
  • No-reply@

Terrible Email Ideas

  • Your Name+1121@
  • LatestDealz@
  • JohnAndSuzi4ever@
  • BuyMyProducts@

Conclusion: Is it professional to have numbers in your email address?

I obviously had a bit of fun with this list, but at the end of the day, you want to make sure you keep your professional email addresses short, memorable, and relevant to what you are doing.


Even if you are a one man show, it makes sense to create a few email addresses for different purposes. It will help you organize your workflow and be more efficient.


And please... no numbers in your email address. Pretty please.

In general, if your email address doesn't end in the domain name of your site, you have a bit of work ahead of you to get with the times!

Why should you set up a free business email address?

Having your own professional email address for your online business is important for a few reasons.

  • It looks more professional and trustworthy to your audience and can increase your conversions
  • Most email marketing providers like Mailerlite and Convertkit won't let you send marketing emails without having one
  • It's nice to separate business from personal stuff

A lot of people get stuck trying to create their own email marketing accounts because of this step. But not you (after completing this tutorial!)

In this tutorial we will use Bluehost as the email hosting provider, because I personally use them, and they have a very nice and beginner-friendly user interface. And you can get great performance on your sites with a small budget!

Can I use GMail for my professional Email Address?

Absolutely - many people use GSuite for their businesses. Especially if you are used to using Gmail for your personal email, it's a natural evolution to GSuite.

However, setting up GSuite takes several steps and adjustments to some of your server settings, and it will also add an additional monthly fee to your new business. For those reasons, we will stick with our web host's built-in email hosting for this tutorial.

What Is GMail's Professional Email Pricing?

Free Professional Email Address - GSuite Pricing

GSuite has 3 main pricing plans: Basic, Business, and Enterprise.

For most small businesses, I think the Basic plan is plenty. The main thing you are going to miss on the basic plan is the limits on storage.

If you are the type of person who likes to store everything in the cloud, you can fill up the 30GB allowance pretty quickly.

For the rest of the tutorial we are going to dive into the step-by-step process to set up a professional email using my favorite web host, Bluehost.

How to set up your business email address using Bluehost


Free Professional Email Address Step 1 Bluehost

Step 1: Log into your Bluehost account and head over to the Email and Office Section

Step 2: Select the domain name that you want to create an free professional email address, and click Manage.

Step 3: Click the create button to make your new address!

Step 4: Configure your new email address. You're going to want to

  1. Select the domain name for the email (the website linked to the account)
  2. Pick your username (the stuff before the @ sign)
  3. Choose a strong password (no HELLO123 please!)
  4. Allocate space to the account. If you are on an unlimited plan by Bluehost, you can make this unlimited - otherwise just pick an amount that makes sense

Once you are happy, click the blue Create button at the bottom of the page.

Congratulations - you are so pro now!

Awesome, if you've followed along you now have a free professional email address to go along with your Bluehost-powered website!

You can access the email now directly through Bluehost's interface by clicking the "Check Email" link next to the email:

You will have a few different options of how to manage your email through Bluehost's partners:

Personally I'm not a huge fan of any of these interfaces, so for the rest of the tutorial I'll show you how to set everything up in Outlook for PC - but the steps will also work for Mail 10 on PC.

Connecting your new email into Outlook to organize your emails nicely

We are in luck - Microsoft Outlook (and Mail) are both able to automatically configure your new email addresses, so there are only a few steps here:

Step 1: Open Outlook

Step 2: Go to File, Account Information, and Click Account Settings

Step 4: In the Account Settings pop up, click New under the email tab to add a new email address.

Step 5: Simply write in your email address and click Connect

Step 6: Sometimes this will work perfectly and you will be done, but in this case I got an error message 🙁 That's ok! Let's keep on by clicking Change Account Settings

Step 7: Select IMAP to set up your email address settings

Step 8: Enter your Email Password

Step 9: Sweet Success! You can also get the Outlook Mobile app on your phone to sync everything up (personally I use the default iOS mail app but they both work great)

You're ready to rock with your free professional email setup!

If you've followed along, you should now be able to access your new email account from your Outlook dashboard.

You can both send and receive emails from here, and you should feel just a little bit fancier in the process.

Now go build your business! And leave a comment if this was helpful 🙂

Video Transcript


Video Transcript

About the Author

John Whitford is an entrepreneur who has built over 12 profitable online blogs and businesses. He's also the founder of Unbeatable Tech, a data-driven digital marketing company that specializes in sales funnel implementation for both his own businesses and clients alike. John loves to be a beach bum while brainstorming new ideas for marketing strategies, but he's always excited to take on another project!

John

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