Web Business Bootcamp
Hands-on Internet lessons for managers, entrepreneurs, and professionals
looking for online business success
by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com,
http://www.samizdat.com
online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
Copyright 2002 by Richard Seltzer
Originally published by Wiley. The rights have reverted to the author
Please post your reactions/comments/suggestions at Blogging about Books
http://www.samizdat.com/blog/?cat=10
Chapter 12 -- The future of business on the Internet [the last chapter]
This bootcamp focused what you can do now to learn how the Internet business
environment works and to take advantage of today's opportunities. But you
need to balance that perspective with a sense of what is likely to happen
over the next five to ten years, not just in terms of technology, but in
terms of markets.
Required assignment:
• build flypaper pages
Technology is predictable, but people are not.
Technology defines the realm of the possible, while marketing, habit, government
regulations, business practices, economic conditions, and human whim determine
what is actually adopted on a wide scale.
Technology gurus can state with a high degree of confidence that
the amount of information storable on silicon will roughly double every
year for the near future. Known as Moore's Law, that has been the case
since the technology was invented back in 1962. Also, memory usage tends
to double roughly once every 18 months, following "Parkinson's Law of Data,"
that data expands to fill the space available for storage. As these and
related principles play themselves out, computers keep getting faster and
capable of storing more and more data; and "standard" software programs
become greater memory hogs, requiring ever more powerful computers to run
them.
For more than 10 years, we've seen hardware capability and software
requirements advance in lock-step. Intel keeps making ever faster computer
chips, the storage companies make ever more powerful disk drives, and Microsoft
comes up with new versions of its software that require all this new processing
power and storage space. Your PC, which is quite adequate for word processing,
email, and all the other tasks that you typically perform, becomes obsolete
every two to three years, because you need to run the latest version of
the software so you'll be compatible with what your colleagues, partners,
suppliers, and customers use. Many business people are betting their
business plans that both those trends will continue for another ten years
or more. But will they?
You can assume that the hardware trend, based on technical feasibility
that has already been proven in labs, will hold true. But the market trend
of ever increasing demand for processing and storage capacity could easily
change. Alternative approaches -- such as a rival operating system (Linux),
increased use of Web-based distributed storage, and applications that run
on the Web rather than on PCs -- could break the pattern.
Similarly, the speed of Internet access has been increasing rapidly
and predictably. Back in the 1970s, people connected to the Internet with
960 baud modems. By the fall of 1994 when Netscape's first browser was
released, 14,000 baud (14K) modems were common. Today, most people who
dialup to connect to the Internet, use 56K modems; and increasing numbers
consumers have far higher speed DSL and cable modem connections from their
home, in the range of 1,000,000 baud (1 Mbit). By 2006, 100 Mbit access
could be commonplace in the US, and 1 gigabit (1,000,000,000) could be
available to some people. At that point, the speed that signals move over
the Internet is as fast as the speed that signals moved inside computers
not that long ago. Full-motion video becomes practical, as does the running
of computer applications remotely, rather than on your own PC; together
with a whole new set of interesting business models.
That kind of prediction is based on what can be done in labs today.
But will people continue to rapidly adopt this new technology? You need
to be prepared for such eventualities, but without banking on them, because
people and human institutions are highly unpredictable. Legal issues (affecting
the availability and price of interesting audio and video content), government
regulations affecting the level of competitiveness in the business of selling
high speed access, government regulation of content, taxation, the state
of the economy, and business practices (including pricing models), can
all have a major impact. (In the early days of the Web, the rapid growth
of usage in the US was fueled in large part by the fact that local telephone
service in the US was based on a fixed monthly fee, rather than metered;
and that early Internet Service Providers established a practice of charging
a fixed monthly fee for unlimited usage.)
For several years, we witnessed an insane rush to invest in dot-com
companies. That was followed by an equally insane rush to pull out of such
investments. If that downturn continues, will the capital be available
for the infrastructure changes necessary to make extremely high speed access
widely available? And will consumers have the cash to keep upgrading their
equipment and to pay for ever higher levels of Internet service?
As you went through the exercises in this book and became familiar
with a wide range of capabilities that you may not have been aware of before,
you may have been tempted to try similar business models yourself. Balance
that temptation with the expectation of rapid and unexpected change. The
very technology advances that seem to make a business a sure winner might
just as easily fuel an alternative that you can't anticipate today.
For instance, you might consider going into some variant of the Web
hosting business. With the cost of disk storage and of high-speed access
declining rapidly and predictably, you'd expect that business to have a
great future. And the services they provide could include remote storage
to supplement the storage on your PC and for backups and archiving; and
also the renting and running of applications, which today you buy outright
for your PC and which you might end up paying for on a per-use or subscription
basis. In other words, it looks like the world is headed toward a model
where computing and storage and applications can all take place remotely,
and the gadget on your desk need not be all-powerful. You might want to
bet on a distributed computing model, where the Internet becomes the computer
and where users turn to small, inexpensive "appliances" instead of full-blown
machines on their desks.
But at the same time, we see an equal and opposite trend. At some point,
the disk space on a home PC and the speed of connection of that PC to the
Internet becomes so great that it is tempting to run a Web site from your
home -- bypassing Web-hosting services.
Will that happen? Some technical folks have been running Web sites
from the PCs on their desktops for three years or more. Widespread adoption
will depend on how cable and other high-speed access companies set up their
service, and the business terms they adopt -- to either encourage or discourage
such practices. It will also depend on how quickly inexpensive and easy-to-use
software becomes available for personal Web hosting. Five years from now,
new PCs might ship with such software pre-installed and with the necessary
business arrangements built in (as today you can buy PCs with an Internet
access contract bundled into the price.) And you could have so much storage
available on your PC and such a high-speed connection that it could automatically
store for you a complete copy of all the content on the Internet that you
have any immediate interest in. Then "agent" programs of yours could automatically
fetch new material from the Web, to refresh the pages you use regularly
and even anticipate your needs, guessing what pages you might be
interested in and then alerting you that it's available. In other words,
instead of the Internet becoming your computer, your computer becomes the
Internet.
So what, if anything, can you bet on?
Expect that the Internet itself will become less visible as it becomes
so widely used and so pervasive that we take it for granted. It will become
embedded in appliances and cars, and gadgets of all kinds, just as computer
chips are today. You won't know it's there, or care. All you'll care about
is the functionality that's based on it.
Over the last decade, you have often heard of the "convergence" of
information, communication, and entertainment technologies. But increasingly,
users see greater divergence and diversity.
Don't expect one technology to deliver a knock-out punch to another.
Don't expect either the computer-on-the-Internet or Internet-on-the-desk
model to win. Rather, expect a world where full-blown all-powerful PCs
co-exist with inexpensive, limited, network computers and with a multitude
of very inexpensive specialized devices, many of which have wireless
connections to the Internet.
Soon, everyone will have gadgets and Web-based services galore, each
of which, taken individually, looks like a great time-saver, opening new
opportunities. But that's like having dozens of remote controls in your
living room. You'll need new services to help you deal with all the growing
diversity and to help all the underlying services and gadgets and PCs work
together smoothly. You'll need systems and agents that understand "who"
you are -- your needs, knowledge, tastes, and capabilities; the resources
you have access to, the prices you need to pay for the resources you want,
and your ability to pay and how you prefer to pay.
In other words, when assessing Internet business possibilities, you
should not extrapolate the trends of current data very far ahead. Pay attention
not just to the numbers, but to the human context in which you interpret
the numbers. Expect the context to change, sometimes radically; but even
in "normal" times expect it to change enough to distort your predictions.
When you do business on the Internet, you are operating in an accelerating
frame of reference, where static (Newtonian) principles of business may
not apply.
But one principle appears to be constant: the Internet is primarily
about people, rather than technology. While it does connect computers to
computers, documents to documents, and people to documents, its most revolutionary
capability is connecting people to people. It connects people together
quickly and efficiently and in ways never before possible, leading to new
kinds of relationships and new kinds of businesses.
Defining "Internet marketing"
In the physical world, there are many, very separate job functions, of
which marketing is one.
On the Web, everything that affects the visitor is marketing:
• the design/look/feel of your Web pages.
• the content on your pages.
• your interaction with visitors/potential customers (whether as live
events or as "customer service").
• all the experiences you provide at your site (including interactions
of visitors with one another.)
• plus all your activities and relationships with other companies and
individuals intended to attract traffic to your site
"Marketing" is where all these many elements should come together.
It isn't a separate function, so much as the function of coordinating all
others.
The Internet marketing plan is not an add-on. It should not be developed
in isolation or put together after other business decisions have been made.
It should be at the heart of the business plan.
Branding rules should not be developed and enforced separate from the
Internet marketing plan. Graphics and logo-oriented branding programs --
legacy programs from the old era of print-based marketing -- have no place
on the Web. Efforts to translate those rules into cyberspace often lead
to page design templates and practices that wind up blocking search engines,
and hence reduce the traffic to the site. Efforts focusing on attracting
and serving the audience should come first.
Likewise, the design of the site should not be determined by what is
possible with the latest technological gimmickry. Just because it can be
done and is technically impressive does not mean that it should be done.
The design must serve the needs of the audience. That includes, above all,
making sure that all the content can be fully indexed by search engines,
so the target audience can readily find the site.
Web visitors, except those who arrive randomly -- having clicked on
a banner ad in a semi-conscious daze or having clicked on a link by mistake
-- arrive with expectations. They may be looking for information or an
opportunity for social interaction or might want to shop. In any case,
they expect easy navigation within a site, clear explanations of what's
what so they don't
have to waste time, and quick satisfaction of their immediate expectation
or, at least, handy customer service contacts that can help them get it.
When I pick up a brochure, I expect nothing, and rare is the occasion
when I hesitate for more than a second before throwing it in the trash.
When I arrive at a Web site, I arrive with a purpose in mind. Yes,
I'm impatient. Yes, I can with a click go somewhere else. But because of
my expectation of satisfaction, I am willing to suspend disbelief for a
brief while and poke around to see if I have, in fact, made a mistake or
if what I want is really there.
Make sure that everything you do to attract visitors sets the right
expectations, and also make sure that the satisfaction is easy to find,
and that help is also easy to find. This task is extremely difficult. Your
job is to serve and to satisfy. The role of your Web site is not as a replacement
for printed marketing materials, rather the site should provide value to
the visitors who are paying you with their time and attention.
To be effective, the person in charge of "Internet marketing" needs
to be able to strongly influence all factors related to the visitor experience
and coordinate them. That person needs to be a ringmaster, with heightened
sensitivity to the interests, concerns, and expectations of the audience
and how to bring together the full resources of the company to meet them.
Do that right, and visitors will linger and explore; they will become engaged
in useful and pleasurable activities that they hadn't imagined; they will
return repeatedly and will spread the word. They will want to help you
succeed, because they value your service. And if you provide ways to help
them help you (through online discussion, affiliate programs, etc.), they
will become not just visitors, not just customers, but volunteer partners,
increasing the value of your business.
Sprint marketing: when it looks like time is more important than money
Internet startups that are playing the venture capital game can find themselves
in a position where time is more important than money. You need to show
immediate results -- in terms of hits, or members, or downloads. You may
be tempted to make the mistake that many dot-coms made in early 2000, spending
profusely on Super Bowl ads, other TV and radio ads, billboards, banner
ads -- anything and everything, regardless of cost and effectiveness.
But if you could proceed at a more deliberate pace, the Internet might
offer better ways for you to accomplish your goals.
Marketing consists of three major elements: the vehicle, the message,
and the substance. You need a way to reach your audience (the vehicle).
You need something to tell them (the message). And once you've got their
attention and motivated them to act, you need something that pleases and
satisfies them (the substance).
Traditional marketing presumes, with few exceptions, that the vehicle
already exists in a fixed and predictable form: print publications, radio,
TV, billboards. Direct mail is a bit different, because you can, if you
wish, build your own list. But in most cases, advertisers rent lists or
include their messages in the mailings of others. Telemarketing is
also different, because you can have your own people make the calls using
your own lists; but many, once again, engage the help of specialist firms,
both for lists and callers.
Traditional marketing, typically, neglects the substance. Marketers
presume that products and services are developed or chosen by other people
in the company. Their job is to get the message out, to bring the products
and services to the attention of the target audience. In some cases, their
campaign might include events, contests, and offers that have little or
nothing to do with the substance but have been created solely to draw attention
to the message and motivate the audience to act now.
People who are used to this traditional perspective at first might
think of the Web as another medium -- analogous to radio and TV and print.
They might also equate marketing over the Internet with the creation and
placement of banner ads, since that's the form of marketing most likely
to get their attention first. And just as they turn to ad agencies to help
them with ad creation and placement for radio, TV, and print, they turn
to the same agencies for help here.
Eventually, they become familiar with other pre-packaged Internet marketing
services: link exchanges, affiliate programs, opt-in email (AKA permission
email), and search engine optimization. They may even know specialists
they can turn to for help putting together games, contests, and gimmicky
offers. By then, they've learned a whole new set of buzz words and sound
like Internet marketing pros.
So given a large marketing/advertising budget, a short time frame,
and goals which probably do not include revenue, they put together a plan
that includes traditional and Internet-based ("new media") elements, craft
their messages, and start racing.
But this approach masks the differences between how the traditional
world works and what is possible with the Internet.
In many cases, the substance is what visitors find at a Web site --
not a physical product that can be purchased in traditional ways. The goal
is to get traffic to that site where visitors will find useful or entertaining
content or services or experiences. Unlike a traditional product or service,
a Web site can be changed immediately and repeatedly and can be made to
look and feel very different for different visitors. Yes, a Web site can
be a carrier or repository of marketing messages -- a place to post brochure-ware
or other content written for print. But it also can become a place where
visitors interact with one another and with your experts, where what they
have to say is added to the content of the site, and where the experience
of conversation is part of the substance that makes people want to come
back again and again.
And thanks to search engines, if the site contains useful and interesting
content in a simple form that can be retrieved by search engines, the content
itself can drive new visitors to a Web site.
T
he substance can become an important vehicle for attracting an audience,
without the need for separate messages and motivating gimmicks. The substance
is the message and the substance is also the medium or vehicle.
In other words, the focus of Internet marketing should be not the message,
but rather the substance: the complete experience offered by the Web site,
the value that you provide to visitors, not just words crafted to describe
it and make it sound interesting.
Also, while in the traditional world you often have little choice but
to use packaged services to deliver your message, on the Internet you can
far more easily build your own vehicles. Yes, links are important; but
links exchanged with handpicked sites that are complementary to your own
are far more valuable than random ones picked up through link exchange
programs. Likewise, you might want to build your own affiliate program
rather than piggyback on pre-packaged and shared programs. And you might
want to build your own electronic newsletters, with their own opt-in email
lists, rather than using ones
developed by others. Yes, all these activities take time and effort,
but by doing them yourself, you can tie them closely to the substance of
your site.
Likewise, it's important to be well indexed by search engines; but
that's not a matter of metatags and key words -- the factors that search
engine optimization companies typically focus on. Rather, the full text
of all the content at your site helps draw audience; so you are much better
off generating more content, and better content that is better matched
to the interests and needs of your target audience, rather than carefully
crafted key words.
On the Internet, substance is everything. It's not enough to get visitors
to click to your site once. When they get there, they need to find content,
services, and experiences that truly engage them, that they value. Ideally,
they'll want to return and will want to recommend that others go there
as well. If there is a serious disjunction between the messages that attract
visitors, and what they actually find at the site, these people won't come
back and may even actively discourage others from coming.
With sprint marketing, yes, after the first, very expensive, hundred
yards, you may lead the race, having induced large numbers of people to
come to your site once. But when you disappoint an Internet audience, the
price of getting them to return gets higher and higher; and when you satisfy
them, they'll come back on their own and bring their friends.
So if you have money to spend and a very tight schedule for showing
results, you'll probably have a much better chance of success if you invest
in the site itself -- in the substance rather than the Super Bowl.
Marathon marketing: using "flypaper" to draw traffic to your Web pages
To counterbalance high tech and high speed concepts of Internet business,
let's take a look at a low tech and slow approach that can bring unexpected
results. I call it "flypaper."
When old friends whom I hadn't been in touch with for 10-30 years started
sending me email -- about half a dozen of them each month -- at first I
was flattered. Isn't it amazing that all those people would be looking
for me?
Then it dawned on me -- why should they look for me?
With a few quick queries I soon established that they weren't looking
for me at all. They were looking for themselves. They had gone to search
engines and had entered their own name as the query. And since I have a
lot of content at my Web site -- including lots of my writing -- many of
my old friends are mentioned there. Searching for themselves, they chanced
on me; and wound up sending me email.
If I had wanted to find them, I could have spent a lot of time looking
and might never have succeeded. But because I had my own Web pages and,
by chance, those pages had the right kind of content, and that content
was indexed by search engines, the old friends found me instead.
The developers of search engines intended to allow people to find answers
to questions and to locate specific information that they need. But instead,
it turns out that many people look first for themselves -- satisfying their
curiosity about how often they, and others with the same name, are mentioned
and what's said about them. Next they look for particular things that are
near and dear to them -- often just out of curiosity, rather than need.
It was this behavior and the fact that I had my own personal Web pages
that led to me get so many email messages from old friends -- them finding
me by looking for themselves.
I soon realized that what I had done by accident, others could do deliberately
-- setting out "flypaper" rather than going hunting with a "fly swatter."
While hyperlinks are a way to point people away from your Web pages to
other resources on the Internet, "flypaper" provides a way to draw people
to your pages and encourage them to get in touch with you directly. You
connect with the people you want to by making their names and their subjects
of interest findable at your site.
You can create Web pages and organize the content on those pages specifically
for the purpose of drawing particular people and particular kinds of people
to your Web site and hence getting in touch with them.
So how could a business use the flypaper approach? If you want to connect
with a particular person, and your phone calls and email are going unanswered,
create a Web page that mentions that person and mentions topics that that
individual is interested in. Say, on that page, all the good things you've
been meaning to say about how you could both benefit from working together.
Be sure to put the person's name and the company's name in the HTML
title and in the first line of text, so the ranking algorithms at search
engines will put your page high in the list of matches when people search
for those words and phrases.
You needn't have hyperlinks from anywhere to your "flypaper" pages.
Just be sure to submit the individual URLs to search engines, especially
to AltaVista, which is good about quickly adding material to its index.
Once your page is indexed, the next time the target person does a search
for him or herself, your page is likely to appear at the top of the list.
When that happens, that person may get in touch with you, and suddenly
your position in the upcoming dialogue is greatly improved because they
contacted you instead of you contacting them. There are no guarantees,
but it's certainly worth a try; and the odds are getting better all the
time as more people use the Internet regularly.
That's "targeted flypaper" -- where you are trying to get in touch
with one particular individual.
You also could try general flypaper.
At my site, I have a list of every book I've read for the last 43 years.
. I posted it for the fun of it, doubting that anyone would be interested.
But I've gotten email from authors, agents, editors, and others who like
the same books and who have found that page through search engines.
When I suggested in Chapter Four that you start your experimental Web
site with lists -- such as lists of alumni -- I had this concept in mind.
Here are a few examples of bizarre, unexpected benefits I've gotten
from using flypaper:
The Lizard of Oz. Back in the early 1970s, my wife Barbara and
I self-published a book of mine called The Lizard of Oz. That was back
when a lot of people were experimenting with self-publishing and small
press publishing. All of sudden, thanks to photo-offset, it had become
cheap to print; and we made the mistake of thinking that printing was the
same as publishing. So we printed all these books and went around to small-press
bookfairs and met a lot of people and had a lot of fun and sold very few
books. You couldn't get distribution; you couldn't get them into book stores.
So this book of mine had been gathering dust in the basement for over
20 years. And along comes the Web and all of a sudden distribution is free.
So one of the first things I did when I got my own free little Web space
was to put up the full text of just about everything I had ever written.
Shortly after I put up The Lizard of Oz, I got email from a little
company in San Francisco that does interactive CD ROMs for kids -- a brand
new company. They couldn't afford the time or the money to have acquisition
editors look for material. So they were using AltaVista to search the Web
for stories that might be useful for their product line. They found my
book. They loved it. And two weeks later, we had a contract. They still
haven't come out with the CD ROM. I hope they do it soon. But it was a
very good contact, and one that I would have never made. I could have never
found them, because they were new and wouldn't have been listed anywhere.
But they found me. And because they found me, it was a very quick negotiation
-- I wasn't trying to sell the book to them; they were trying to convince
me to let them publish it.
Spit and Polish. I wrote a movie script a long time ago and
hadn't been able to sell it. I posted it at my site. I got email from a
producer in Iceland. We went back and forth, and I sent him the script.
He was interested. We didn't arrive at a deal, but the fact that he contacted
me was an eye-opener. Would you ever have imagined that there were producers
in Iceland? If you were trying to sell a script, would that have been on
your list of places to try?
Acting audition. I got email from someone who collects Gary
Trudeau books (the cartoonist who does Doonesbury). He saw that I had read
Trudeau's first book, which he had self-published back when he was an undergraduate
at Yale. I happened to have been at Yale at the time. I had picked it up
at the Co-op. It had been gathering dust on my shelf ever since.
I thought, "Okay. I'll sell the book. I don't have any real need for it.
I haven't looked at it in nearly thirty years."
He took a further look at my Web site and saw that my daughter Heather
is an actress. At the time, she was going to Sarah Lawrence, and was in
Los Angeles for the summer, staying with my sister, trying to get acting
jobs. It turned out the person who wanted the Trudeau book was Lee Aronsohn,
who, at various times, has been executive producer and writer of a number
of popular TV series, such as Cybill and Grace Under Fire. He suggested
that in exchange for the book, Heather could get an audition for a TV show.
As it turned out, she didn't get a part, but she got an audition with someone
who has won Emmies for casting. She got to meet the people. She got a sense
of how the business worked. This was an invaluable kind of experience for
her. And there is no way in the world that I would have ever come
up with that as a business model.
Without a Myth. I wrote a stage play thirty years ago.
It was never published on paper, never performed. I posted it on my Web
site, and a theater company in Spokane, Washington, found it. Now it will
finally be produced for the first time by High Impact Theater at the Met
Performing Arts Center in Spokane.
Harry Potter. I mentioned earlier that my 11-year-old son Tim
posted a page at my site with his ideas for a videogame based on the game
of quidditch in the Harry Potter books. (If you do a search at AltaVista
for quidditch videogame, his page comes out on top, because those words
appear prominently in the HTML title). He wanted to get in touch with the
developers at Electronic Arts, the company that had bought the rights to
do Harry Potter games, so he could share his ideas with them. But it was
impossible to identify them or get email addresses for them. Soon after
he posted his page, one of the developers -- in London -- contacted him
and said he'd share the suggestions with the rest of the team. Tim was
absolutely delighted that his ideas might make a difference.
The lesson here is -- don't limit yourself to your own imagination.
If you have an old work gathering dust, or work in progress, or an idea
that somebody might be interested in, post it on the Web, and get the page
well indexed, and see what kind of response you get. Don't expect immediate
results; but once you are on the Web, anything can happen.
Summary and concluding advice
What matters for business isn't technology in itself (unless you are in
the technology business). What matters is how people interact with one
another and how technology affects that. If you want your business to survive,
then you should
• make a better mousetrap (which means not the one that is technically
the best, but rather the one that people want most), and
• serve your customers well, no matter where they may be.
When Digital Equipment realized that 80% of their business came from
20% of their customers, they threw away the 80% to focus on the 20%. Then
six months or a year later they discovered that once again 80% came from
20%, so they cut back on the number of customers they would focus on again,
and then again. The idea was that if you focused on the 20%, you would
get more of their business. But it didn't work that way. Having seen what
the company had done with the other customers, many of these customers
felt they couldn't count on Digital to be there for them long-term. So
Digital not only lost the customers they deliberately dropped, they also
soured relations with the remaining ones.
At a recent conference, I heard a pitch for one-to-one marketing, which
was another variant of this same theme. The speaker advocated using sophisticated
data-mining techniques to learn more about your customers. That sounded
good. But the purpose wasn't to serve those customers better, but rather
to identify which customers were the most profitable to you, so you could
deliberately dump the rest. For instance, a bank might get rid of a class
of high-cost customers by raising fees.
Tactics like that can bring immediate short-term improvement in profits,
but long-term they can be the death of a company, because there's no way
for you to know today which of your customers from today are likely to
be the best and most profitable ones 3-5 years or even 10 years from now.
Some people misinterpret the power of the Internet and seek to automate
transactions, to keep the cost of transactions very low. But, in fact,
the main power of the Internet is in building relationships. The relationship
is the asset, and automated processes risk throwing away the relationship.
Dependence on distributors poses the same kind of risk. Yes, it often
makes good sense to sell through distributors; but then use the Internet
to provide information and highly responsive service to the end users --
build that relationship, earn their loyalty, or they'll simply chase after
the lowest price and forget you.
It doesn't take the latest and greatest technology to build an effective
Web site.
Don't start with the latest whiz-bang effects that your Webmaster or
some Web-design company come up with. Rather, ask the basic questions:
• what's your target audience?
• what content and experiences would draw them to your Web site?
• what additional services might they want and be willing to pay for?
Keep in mind that:
• Most people navigate the Internet by way of search engines. Hence,
content -- text -- can draw traffic to a Web site.
• Pictures which are directly related to products can help sell those
products, but graphics used for decoration simply slow the user down --
they don't attract anyone.
If you want targeted traffic at low cost, design your pages for search
engines. That means design your pages for the blind, because the webcrawlers
that fetch pages for search engine indexes operate just like the blind.
Keep your pages simple.
Don't be intimidated by the technology. Don't do things just because
technology makes it possible to do them. Do what makes sense for your business,
for serving your customers well.
So how should you use the Internet to improve your business today?
• Talk to your customers.
• Get to know your customers.
• Serve your customers as well as possible.
Keep your eyes on the customer.
Use Internet technology to reach new global customers.
Use the Internet to build closer relationships with customers,
to understand them better, and to serve them better.
Epigraph
-- A Glimpse of the Future
Preface
Acknowledgements
Author
Chapter 1. Welcome
to the land of the free
Chapter 2. The value
of anonymity: privacy and masquerade
Chapter 3. Make your
own Web pages on your PC
Chapter 4. Assemble
your pages to form a Web site
Chapter 5. Let people
know that you're there
Chapter 6. How to
improve your Web site
Chapter 7. Building
your audience with online interaction
Chapter 8. Building
relationships with customers: what you can learn from selling at auctions
Chapter 9. What to
do with an audience and what else to do with your content
Chapter 10. Going
global
Chapter 11. Experimenting
with futures
Chapter 12. The future
of business on the Internet
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