Copyright © 2002 Richard Seltzer All rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
First submit to the Open Directory
The Open Directory is a non-profit, volunteer-based effort started
by Netscape and now run by AOL. Go to http://dmoz.org/
add.html
and submit your site for free. You choose the category that you believe
fits you best, and provide a brief description of your entire site, together
with the URL of your home page. A volunteer editor will review your submission.
Many "partner" sites, including AOL Search, DirectHit, HotBot, Google,
Lycos, and Netscape Search use the Open Directory as part of their mix
of search services. It is very important to get included here.
How to get into LookSmart
Like the Open Directory, LookSmart is used by other important sites.
MSN, Excite, AltaVista, iwon, CNN, Juno, and others include information
from the LookSmart directory. Unlike the Open Directory, LookSmart charges
everyone for inclusion. With their Express Service, you pay $299 and they
review one URL from you within two business days. To submit by way of either
of these services, go to http://submit.looksmart.com/info.jhtml?synd=US&chan=lsaboutft
For example, at my Web site I have a list of every book I´ve read
for the last 41 years. It´s just a list. When I posted it, I doubted
that anyone would be interested. I posted it as a lark, for the fun of
it. But because of search engines, that Web page draws lots of traffic
to my site. I´ve gotten email from authors, agents, editors and others
who like the same books.
How can you apply this concept? Say you work for a school. Create a
Web page that lists every alum and the year of graduation and other public
info about them. Add URL at the search engines and you´ll get email
from some of them. As you begin to draw audience to your site with flypaper
of this kind, you might give these people reasons for coming back, becoming
a loyal audience -- part of a new on-line community -- for instance, offering
to add their email addresses and/or URLs to your list, and opening up discussion
areas devoted to their interests and needs.
However you decide to use flypaper, be open to the unanticipated value of saving, recording, and posting information of all kinds.
Get the most out of Google
Google is a very popular no-frills search site. The emphasis is on
search, not on fancy graphics; and here you won´t be confused by
a vast array of unrelated services, as at Yahoo. Also, when people search
at Yahoo and there are no close matches in the Yahoo directory, the search
defaults over to Google´s search index. Between Google direct and
Google by way of Yahoo, about a third of the page views at my site come
by way of Google. To submit for free, go to http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Here you should submit just one URL, and Google´s "webcrawler" will
try to find your other pages from there.
If you have a sitemap page, with links to every page at your site, for
best results, submit that page instead of your home page.
Be patient. It sometimes takes one to three months to get included
at Google.
How to get into DirectHit
DirectHit specializes in "popularity." For instance, among other factors,
their software tracks how often people choose a given page when presented
with that choice in a list of search matches. In addition to running their
own search site, they provide services to other search sites, helping them
to add "popularity" to their mix of ranking criteria. Go to http://www.directhit.com/util/addurl.html
and submit one page (if possible, submit a sitemap page with links to every
other page at your site.)
How to get into HotBot and Inktomi
Although few people have ever heard of it, Inktomi has one of the most
important search indexes. You can´t even do a search at their site
http://www.inktomi.com Rather they resell their index/service to other
sites which advertise and serve the general public. Also, you can´t
get into the Inktomi index from the Inktomi site. But if you submit your
site to one of Inktomi´s customers/partners, such as HotBot, you
will get into the index and hence will be findable from dozens of search
sites. You can submit to HotBot at http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp
How to submit to Northernlight
Northernlight has one of the largest Web indexes. In addition, this
search site also indexes its own private collection of articles which are
for sale. To submit your Web site, for free, go to http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
Submit
only one page. If you have a sitemap with links to every page at your site,
submit that page, instead of your homepage.
Search engines not to bother with
While there are hundreds of search engines and directories, only the
top half dozen to a dozen are likely to ever bring you significant traffic.
Also, many of the best known ones have ties to others, such that if you
submit to the one, you are all set for the other. For instance: Iwon and
MSN Search both use LookSmart for their directory and Inktomi for for their
index. If you submit to Hotbot, you´ll eventually get into their
Inktomi index. AOL Search isn´t really a search engine. They
uses the Open Directory Webcrawler uses the Excite index. And
Snap is owned by NCBi. You have to pay to be listed there.
Sites that let you pay for position
Some of the top, well-respected search engines have "express" submission
services whereby you pay to have your submission considered quickly. There
is no guarantee that you will be included; and once included, how you page
shows up in the listings depends on the query and search engine algorithms.
In other words, paying doesn´t get you any higher in the lists. The
indexes of other search engines are simply paid advertising, often based
on bidding for "key words". At those sites, search results often take you
to pages on which the words you are searching for do not appear at all
-- the advertiser just paid to show up high whenever the words in your
query showed up. For instance, http://www.overture.com
(formerly known as goto.com) only accepts paid submissions. If you have
money to burn, you can bid for keywords here. http://www.scourtheweb.com
uses the GoTo´s paid index. And http://www.findwhat.com
also has bidding for keywords.
Start with AltaVista -- they accept submissions of individual pages
To submit your pages for free at AltaVista, go to http://add-url.altavista.com/cgi-bin/newurl?
Scroll down the page to where you´ll find their "submission code."
This is letters and numbers in a wide variety of fonts and at odd angles
so machines cannot read them. You have to copy those letters into the form
(NB -- this is not case sensitive). Then fill in the form below that with
the URL for the page that you want to submit for free inclusion in the
main index. If you typed the code correctly (which isn´t easy given
the bizarre type styles), that page is submitted and you can submit four
more one at a time without enter a new code. To go beyond 5 you have to
start over again with the code. If you type the code wrong, you can try
again with a new one. They used to be very fast at updating their index.
Now they typically take 4-6 weeks. Be patient. You´ll want to enter
each and every one of your new pages separately as you create them, to
help generate traffic as soon as possible.
FYI -- the submission code is designed to block out automatic submission
services that had been spamming AltaVista and all the other free search
engines as well; and which had been so clogging the submission process
that real individuals and webmasters with important content had been frustrated
that it took so long to get their info in or that it never made it. The
new system is a clever innovation and a tremendous improvement.
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 particularly good about quickly adding material
to their indexes.
Once your page is in search engine indexes, 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 what I call "targeted flypaper" -- where you are trying to get in touch with one particular individual.
What is "Internet flypaper"?
When old friends who 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 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. Many search-engine users 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 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 getting so many email messages from old friends -- them finding me by looking for themselves.
Understanding this principle, you can create Web pages intended to attract particular individuals or groups of people. I call such pages "flypaper."
Text draws traffic, graphics don´t
When it comes to traffic, graphics don´t count.
Some people invest lots in creating flashy attractive home pages, with
special effects galore. But search engines can´t see those special
effects, and often can´t index those pages at all. Search engines
only see plain static text. And lots of traffic on the Internet comes by
way of search engines.
Many people make the mistake of equating a home page with the cover of a consumer magazines. Consumer magazines sometimes spend as much on their covers as they do on the whole rest of their contents, because the cover is so important to prompting consumers to pick up a copy at the news stand. But on the Internet, no one sees your home page until they get there. And spending lots to design a site or a page that looks pretty but can´t be indexed by search engines, is like designing a beautiful poster and hanging it in a locked closet.
Text rules - Top 10 tips for being found by search engines
These tips apply primarily to AltaVista http://www.altavista.com, but
most work for the other major search engines as well.
1) Check to see which if any of your pages are in the AltaVista index,
with the command host:yourdomainname.com e.g., host:samizdat.com
2) If you do have pages in the index, check to see how they appear
in the results list. Have you duplicated titles or descriptions? Do the
descriptions make sense?
3) By default, the description is the first couple lines of text on
your page. If you have a problems with the descriptions that appear in
search engine results, edit your page.
4) The title that appears as a link in a search result list is your
HTML title, which is in the header of your page (not the file name) between
. That is the most important part of your page for search-engine purposes.
If the words someone is searching for appear in the HTML title of a page
of yours, your page is likely to appear at the top of the results list.
5) "Experts" will encourage you to add "metatags" to your page for
the description and for key words. Don´t. Doing so is a waste of
time, and it gets you to shift your focus from what really matters: the
HTML titles and the first few lines of text on your pages.
6) Don´t try to imitate large corporate sites, which typically
use techniques that make their pages difficult for search engines to find
and to index. Large corporations largely depend on their brand name and
their advertising to drive traffic to their sites. You can drive traffic
to yours, through search engines, at no cost, if you create simple static
Web pages that clearly state what they are about.
7) Create a "sitemap page" -- a simple static Web page with links to
every page at your site. Submit that page to search engines, not your home
page. By so doing, you make it much easier for the search engine crawlers
to find all your pages.
8) Don´t expect your visitors to arrive by way of your home page.
Search engines will send them directly to the pages that match their queries,
regardless of where that is in your site. So make sure that every one of
your pages clearly explains the context and provides easy navigation to
the rest of your site.
9) Use AltaVista to check what Web pages outside of your site link
to pages at your site
+link:yourdomainname.com -host:yourdomainname.com, e.g., +link:samizdat.com
-host:samizdat.com Sites that link to you are potential allies. Check them
out. If you like what you see, email the webmasters and offer to post reciprocal
links.
10) While striving to make your pages attractive and user-friendly,
also keep them simple. You will make it difficult for search engines to
properly index your content if you require registration/password, put your
text in databases or in javascript, create dynamic pages (e.g. asp pages),
use frames, put text in tables, put text inside graphics, use Acrobat or
Postscript. Simple static HTML works best. As a rule of thumb, design for
the blind (who use text-to-voice converters), and label everything clearly.
Share and annotate documents at QuickTopic
QuickTopic http://www.quicktopic.com
offers
free forums, like Delphi, and also offers a very interesting alternative.
Post an article at their site and QuickTopic will automatically add "comment"
markers at the start of each paragraph. You can then add or remove comment
markers, until it feels right to you and you make it available for others
to see. Then visitors can click on those comment markers to see what others
have said and to add their own thoughts. These articles of yours can be
available for everyone or limited just to a handful of people who you invite.
What do you need forums for?
With forums, people don´t all have to connect at the same time
to carry on an online discussion. Time zones and busy schedules don´t
need to get in the way. People read and post messages when they like, and
their postings appear in context -- this one as an answer to that one,
etc. You can use forum-style software and services (also known as Web boards
and bulletin boards) to answer the questions of your visitors or as a part
of your customer service. You can also use them as a way to let your visitors
talk to one another about topics related to the focus of your site. Letting
them talk together can make your site more interesting, give people a reason
to return to your site, and generate useful content that can attract more
visitors. But don´t just open up a forum and walk away. It takes
work to make a forum successful -- setting a useful overall framework,
posting provocative comments, getting involved in the discussion yourself,
publicizing the discussion online, and moderating the discussion (dealing
with occasional instances of online misbehavior).
That style of chat is fine if the purpose is to let people exchange random transient chatter, such as flirtation or emotional commentary about favorite sports teams or entertainers or shows. But if you want to use chat for real business, you should use a static HTML application (like SiteScape at www.sitescape.com [the software] and www.webworkzone.com [the hosted service]), where participants can see everything that is said, regardless of when they connect; and where transcript are automatically saved.
Chat as a source of content that can drive traffic to your Web site
Save the complete raw transcript of the session and edit it to show
threads of discussion, and to add HTML coding, including hyperlinks to
other sites mentioned and hyperlinks to the email addresses of participants.
That´s easy to do using Word. I find that for a lively one-hour session
with about a dozen active participants, it takes me anywhere from two to
four hours to do the editing, depending on how continuous or fragmented
the discussion was. And the result is sometimes as long as 20 single-spaced
typed pages. To see what I mean, check www.samizdat.com/chat.html)
Post the transcript -- well labeled and organized -- at your Web site,
and submit the URL to search engines (for quick links to the submission
pages for the major search sites, see
http://www.samizdat.com/submit.html).
Those transcripts may very well turn out to be far more valuable to you that the live event. If the transcripts are indexed by search engines, people searching for words and phrases that appear in those transcripts may find your pages. Over the course of 1-2 years, a single transcript of mine usually attracts over a thousand visitors. Build a good backlog of content-rich transcripts, and should you see a significant boost in the number of new visitors to your site. Add new participants to your chat reminder list.
Send a brief email message over your chat reminder list, letting people know that the transcript is up, soliciting follow-up messages, and mentioning next week´s topic. As follow-up messages come in by email, post them (with permission of the writers) with the transcript.
Chat software wish list
-- Make it so all the user needs is a browser -- not plug-ins to download.
-- Use standard HTML Web technology, not IRC (Internet Relay Chat).
IRC preceded the Web and some chat software is based on that approach.
It´s fast, and can be great for quick conversations among a handful
of people. But it has one major drawback -- the firewalls that companies
use to protect their networks from hackers typically block IRC chat. Yes,
the people who run your company´s network could make an exception
and open up a channel for you; but that´s a lot of hassle to set
up for a spontaneous discussion. SiteScape Forum comes with two kinds of
chat -- one based on IRC and one HTML. I use
he HTML version all the time.
-- Make it possible to add threads to live chat -- so participants
can label their messages and indicate when they relate to other messages
that have already appeared. With SiteScape Forum, you can click on the
title of the message that you are replying to and thereby establish threads
that can be seen when the discussion is live and that also make it possible
to see a threaded version of the transcript afterward.
-- Provide both chat and forum capabilities in the same environment,
and make it easy to build threaded transcripts from chat and post them
into forum.
-- Make it easy to read all the input. (Today, there are two basic
modes of operation for Web-based chat. Some software requires you to keep
clicking on an icon to refresh your screen and see the latest input. If
you don´t click you don´t see anything new. Other software,
typically using Java, displays each messages as it is entered; but in an
active session the messages can fly by faster than you can read them. I
like to be able to control the pace at which messages appear.
-- SiteScape Forum normally refreshes automatically at fixed intervals,
but gives me the option to click Pause, and then Resume to set my own pace.
- Allow users to display earlier messages, not just the current ones.
The software boston.com lets me look back 30 messages. But I like to be
able to scroll back through everything that has been said in a given session.
-- Make it easy to save and edit transcripts. SiteScape Forum automatically
saves transcripts and makes them available organized in two ways -- one
by the time messages were posted and one by the threads, based on people
having clicked on the messages that they were replying to. In some cases,
the threaded version may be so readable that there is no need to edit the
transcript.
-- Make it easy for chat transcripts and forum content to be found.
As your discussion area grows and includes lots of good material, it will
soon be difficult to navigate just by way of menus and hyperlinked lists.
SiteScape Forum comes with a version of AltaVista Search built in.
-- Regularly post all material -- both forums and chat transcripts
-- in a form that makes them easily indexed by search engines, so you can
submit the URLs, and use this content to attract new visitors to your site.
This is harder than it may sound, but very important.
Design by protocol, not software
Let´s face it -- you´ll never find software that perfectly
meets your needs of today, much less what you´ll need in a few months.
Rather than agonize over the choice of software platform for chat, or spending
a fortune to have software custom designed, you should pick one that meets
your general needs, and take care of the details with rules of behavior
(protocol) that you ask visitors to abide by -- consistently.
For instance, you might think that you need special software to cope with large audiences. You´d like questions to go through a facilitator who would be helping your host, rather than appearing on the screen for everyone to see. You´d like to control the rhythm of the discussion. You´d like people to be able to virtually "raise their hands." Yes, you can get those features with high-priced chat platforms. But instead, you could use inexpensive or even free software and simply set a rule that people who want to be called upon should post messages consisting of only a question mark (?) and wait to be recognized by the host. If the audience winds up smaller than anticipated, then simply change the rules and let everyone participate freely and directly, peer-to-peer style.
In chat, expect the unexpected
With live events on the Internet, always expect the unexpected and
be prepared for it. For instance, if you have more than one computer connected
to the Internet, have two, not just one connected to the chat room when
you go live. In any case, have your chat room URL in your bookmarks/favorites
(the URLs are often far too long and complex to type in), and your username
and password handy so you can easily get back in if for any reason you
get disconnected. And keep a handy list of fixes for recurrent problems
(like hitting "reload" in your browser when the automatic screen refresh
shuts off) and share that list with your invited guests and regular participants.
How to plan your chat programs
Establish a regular program time, so people will remember and return.
When picking the time, remember time zones and work habits. Try to make
it possible for much of the world to connect.
I hold my chat programs from noon to 1 PM US Eastern time. That works for the West Coast and is feasible from Europe, but it´s midnight for folks in Malaysia (one person from there has tuned in despite the inconvenience). Also be sure in your Web-based promotion material to indicate the relation of your time zone to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), so people in other countries can easily calculate when to connect. Eastern Standard Time in the US is GMT -5, Central is GMT -6, Mountain GMT -7, Pacific GMT-8. Daylight Savings Time changes this by an hour (Eastern Daylight Time = GMT -4).
Pick a general subject area, and then schedule particular topics for
each week. These topics will probably be broad as you start, and become
more closely focused based on your experience and audience interaction.
Keep the schedule "tentative" -- be prepared to extend a topic for an additional
week and move the rest of the schedule up, based on how lively the discussion
becomes. I´ve found that it´s often in the second or third
week on the same topic that the
discussion really takes off.
How to publicize a chat program
Notify people who has expressed interest to you about topics that you
intend to cover that you are starting a regular chat program. The initial
note should explain the rationale, the audience, the format, the purpose.
Then each week follow up with reminder notes. Make such messages as brief
as possible. Distribute them to appropriate newsgroups and over appropriate
email distribution lists. And begin to build your own chat-reminder email
distribution list. Be creative and persistent -- you need an active audience
to make this effort worthwhile.
Also, get listed at all sites that list live events of your kind. For instance, connect to Yahoo! Net Events, http://events.yahoo.com, click on "add event" and fill out their form. (While there, you should check out some of the events that they list to see what else is happening and get a feel for how they are run.) It can take weeks before your listing is accepted at Yahoo!, so this only makes sense for regularly scheduled events, not for one-of-a-kind special occasions. (Have the hyperlink from Yahoo! connect to a page that lists your upcoming topics and transcripts of previous sessions, not to the chat room itself, if that room is only available to you for a fixed time each week.) Other chat listing services include: TalkCity http://www.talkcity.com, and Yack! http://www.yack.com
Keeping the threads of chat discussion straight
In a business chat, if you are addressing a posting to a particular
person, begin your message with that person´s name. That will make
it easier for that person to see what you have to say in the midst of all
the other messages. It will also help everyone else follow the threads
of discussion.
Important details for running successful chats
If you have the opportunity, build an "anteroom" Web page. Here you
would post all the information that you would like people to read before
entering your live scheduled chat -- introducing the purpose of the session,
yourself and other scheduled participants, and providing some brief words
about today´s focus, with hyperlinks to background reading.
You should enter the chat room about 15 minutes before the general public is admitted. That way you have a chance to identify and take care of any technical glitches (this is not yet a perfect world) and also to enter a few introductory messages. You can then calmly await your audience (instead of fighting to dial in and get connected to the site in time).
Plan to spend about 5-10 minutes for introductions and 5-10 minutes for wrap up. So for an hour´s chat session, you may have only 40 minutes of solid chat. But that front and back housekeeping is essential. Remember you are trying to give order to a medium that is essentially chaotic.
When people come on line, welcome them, addressing them by name, and try to draw them into the conversation, finding out their strengths and interests.
Encourage everyone to identify themselves with their real name and affiliation. (Remember, this is business chat, not a flirting session. These people may want to contact one another later). The software often allows you to enter several words as your continuing identifier. By example, encourage people to use their full name and email address or URL as their identifier, rather than a clever nickname.
At the end, solicit suggestions for future topics, solicit follow-up messages to be added to the transcript, ask everyone to provide email addresses and URLs.
Then get them all primed to return next week.
Quick input for slow typists
If you are going to hold a chat business chat session and you know
you there are questions you will want to pose or comments your want to
make, type them up in a Word document. Open that document when you are
live in chat. And copy and paste your text into the chat box when the time
is right. That´s likely to be much faster than typing your thoughts
from scratch. (You might also want to give this advice to invited guests
and regular participants of your chat program).
Possible business uses of chat
Chat is like a hammer -- its value depends on what you do with it.
You can create many different kinds of events and experiences, and build
many different kinds of business models based on chat-related software.
For example, you can set up:
*Open chat rooms -- live unscheduled chat sessions with random or self-selected
sets of participants
*Matchmaker chat rooms -- live unscheduled chat sessions where the
participants are automatically matched/grouped according to their tastes
and interests
*Celebrity events -- where a public audience gets an opportunity to
interact with a celebrity at a scheduled time. This could be open to all
and moderated, with selected questions going to the celebrity; or it could
be partitioned with a manageably small number of people paying to actively
participate and a larger audience in read-only mode.
* Team meetings -- where the participants in chat sessions and/or forums
are invited/selected by the leader, and only those on the member list or
those with
passwords can participate and the objective is to arrive at decisions
and move ahead with work on common projects. The chat sessions are scheduled
for
particular times, and follow-up discussion takes place in related forums.
* Distance education/training sessions -- where there are content experts
and students; once again the membership is limited, but the objective is
learning. The chat sessions are scheduled for particular times, and follow-up
discussion takes place in related forums.
* Product support and help desks -- unscheduled chat, with related
forums, where people with problems and questions connect to get immediate
answers,
either from an archive of previous questions and answers or from a
live expert.
* "Business chat" -- the way I use the term -- is a scheduled public
discussion where business people will share their experience and knowledge
with peers.
There is a host who sets the agenda and tries to move the discussion
forward in fruitful directions. People with special knowledge about the
subject are invited to connect and participate, but all are welcome to
join in and all have equal status. All can post at any time; all can ask;
and all can answer.
Professional vs. amateur chat programs
If you are interested in building an online community, keep in mind
that the discussion software is only one small piece of the solution. Thousands
of Web sites have set up chat rooms that are typically empty or filled
only with noise. It´s as if you were given a time slot on a public
access cable channel, and instead of planning, developing, and promoting
programming, you just set up a video camera in a mall so people who walk
by can make funny faces or obscene gestures and generally fool around.
You can use chat for many business purposes, but the success of these ventures depends in large part on people, not software. Lots of work needs to be done in setting up, promoting, and supporting scheduled chat events.
If you already have your own Web server with disk space and bandwidth to space these hours would represent the incremental cost of doing one weekly one-hour scheduled chat program. If your Web site is hosted on someone else´s server, keep in mind that there are sites like NBCi and Delphi, where you can hold chats and forums in free space. But if you want full-function discussion software, a professional look and feel, and pages that reflect your brand, expect to pay for that kind of hosting service.
The role of chat in an online business
Web-based chat software allows numerous people to exchange text messages
simultaneously in the same "session." It is often used for quick, casual,
anonymous one-liner conversation. As soon as you type your message, it´s
available for others in the same session to read. When a dozen or more
people actively participate at the same time, it gets very difficult to
read what is said and even more difficult to follow the multiple threads
of conversation. You need to read fast and type fast, but if you do, and
if the topic is up your alley, the experience can be exhilarating and stimulating
-- whether you are flirting or flaming or brainstorming.
On the other hand, chat has immediacy. And when a chat topic is scheduled for a particular time, you either connect or you miss it. Chat also can generate energy and enthusiasm and stimulate useful ideas because of the element of live interaction.
The best discussion software combines the immediacy/urgency of chat with the ability to save the discussions in threaded form, so those who participated can catch up on what they missed and what they need to reflect on further, and others who weren´t able to connect at that time can see what was said; and all can add their follow-up thoughts and continue the discussion in a more leisurely and reasoned environment.
What is the true cost of chat?
Based on my experiences, here´s a rough-cut first estimate of
what it would cost in person-hours to do this on a professional (rather
than amateur/volunteer) basis.
This presumes that the chat sessions are scheduled -- that a regular
time slot is available each week for discussion on a broad continuing subject,
and that specific focus topics typically run 3-4 sessions. When topics
continue for several weeks, the promotion effort is spread across that
time and word-of-mouth and word-of keystroke have time to build audience.
Technical setup -- a few minutes
Recruiting of content experts -- 2 to 4 hours
Pre-show promotion -- 4 to 8 hours
Orientation of invited guest/expert -- 2 hours
Pre-show preparation by host -- 1 hour
Show itself -- 1-1/2 hours
Editing transcript as HTML document -- 4 hours by hand, or use software
that generates threaded transcript automatically, as noted above
Follow-up communication (post-show promotion, re: transcripts, handling
follow-on discussion) -- 2 hours
Total = 14-1/2 to 22-1/2 hours
Keep in mind, too, that the skills needed to do these tasks are in
short supply. You can´t just ask anyone on your staff to suddenly
start doing this and expect the project to be successful. Also, several
different kinds of skills are necessary. In fact, it might take three or
four experienced, talented, and motivated people to make this work, including
a host who not only can type and think fast, and can relate well to people
online, but also who is passionate about the subject.
Use an email discussion service
Sites like Topica http://www.topica.com,
QuickTopic http://www.quicktopic.com,
Yahoo Groups http://groups.yahoo.com,
and Quickdot http://www.quickdot.com
provide free facilities that help you manage your own email discussion
group. With their automated list management, people can add and subtract
themselves, without you being involved. And the discussion content can
be made available on the Web (forum-style) in addition to being distributed
by email. These sites all provide abundant help and advice. If you pick
a good topic, and publicize what you are doing in the right places online,
you might be able to start a good discussion about a subject that closely
relates to your business, a dialogue that becomes the basis for an online
community of people with common interests who go out of their way to help
one another.
Making static pages interactive
Address an existing interest group Write an article targeted
at a specific interest group -- e.g., alums of a particular school or company
or Little League team or enthusiastic users of a particular product (such
as a videogame). Say provocative things in this article, and welcome feedback.
When you get feedback, ask for permission to post those messages with the
article, and then post them pronto. If possible, include a list of members
of this group and add email addresses and URLs as people let you know them.
For examples, check my article about Digital Equipment "DEC not Digital"
at http://www.samizdat.com/dec.html
and
my Internet Business Group Alumni Page at
http://www.samizdat.com/ibg.html
Community on a shoestring
You´ve probably heard that it is important to "build community"
online, but shied away from that kind of thing because you figured it would
require fancy software. Actually, you can build the rudiments of an online
community with nothing more than a provocative well-written article. Post
it at your site in the simplest plain static form. Include a request for
feedback, with your email address. Submit the page to the major search
engines. When you get replies -- whether they agree with you or not, so
long as they are cogent and coherent -- email back asking permission to
post them at your site. And add those that you get permission for to your
article; then go back and submit that page to the search engines again.
Seeing responses encourages more people to respond. And people whose responses
are posted often tell their friends. If you´d like to see an example,
check my "Why Bother to Save Halloween" at http://www.samizdat.com/hallow.html
Chat transcripts
Use chat as a way to build free content Most people think of
chat -- real-time, text-based discussion, where all the participants connect
at the same time -- as a way to hold meetings, a way to flirt and gossip,
or a way to deliver customer service. But if you set up a regular chat
program, invite expert guest speakers, and save and post the transcripts.
You chat program can become a major source of quality content for your
Web site. In my weekly chat sessions about Business on the Web that I´ve
held since the summer of 1996, I might only get half a dozen or a dozen
live participants. But over the course of a year, the average transcript
gets about 1000 visitors, because of the content, which is well indexed
at search engines.
Add popular reference books to your site
Go do http://solutions.xrefer.com/content/content_intro.jsp
xrefer
licenses content for use by Web sites, including reference books of all
kinds: one volume encyclopedias, language tools including dictionaries
and thesauri, and subject-specific reference works covering music, business
and finance, literature, politics, history, science, biographies, health/medicine,
and travel. They have arrangements with such content suppliers as Oxford
University Press, Penguin, Macmillan and Bloomsbury.
Are there services that provide content for Web sites?
iSyndicate, the number one content syndication business, declared bankruptcy.
Their assets were bought by YellowBrix, which continues to run the service
on a scaled-back basis. iSyndicate has arrangements with thousands of information
providers, who regularly (usually weekly) post articles on a wide range
of topics. Go to http://www.isyndicate.com
and see if any of the content which they offer meets the needs of your
site. Terms/prices are likely to change soon. Take a close look at what
they have to offer. It is likely to be far less expensive to license syndicated
content than to hire someone to write such articles exclusively for your
use.
Find out where and how to sell your content
If you are interested in reselling your content to other Web sites,
go to the Content Exchange http://www.conter-exchange.com,
register as a writer, and fill out their Talent Profile. Also, sign up
for their email discussion list Online-Writing. Then check the related
sites Cyberjournalist http://www.cyberjournalist.com
and Contentious http://www.contentious.com
There
you can get sales leads and share your experiences with others who are
trying to sell their content.
Finding pre-written content and finding freelancers
Go to www.content-exchange.com Click on "content finder" to learn about
the availability of syndicated content that might be a good fit for your
site. Prices for syndicated content are likely to be far less than for
articles written specifically for you. Then check "content finder" (in
the left column) to search for freelancers who specialize in the topics
of interest to you. Freelance writing is likely to be far less expensive
than having writers on staff.
Using Yaga to get paid for content
As an alternative, P2P mode for getting paid for your content, go to
Yaga, http://www.yaga.com and register. Then upload the content that you
are interested in selling: books (text files), music, video, etc. Currently,
Yaga charges users $9.95/month for unlimited downloads of all kinds of
files. 30% of the subscription money is shared among the content providers,
based on the number of downloads each gets. They may soon add a pay-per-download
option.
Learn a person´s name and address when all you have is the
phone number
If you have a phone number and nothing else to go by, don´t despair.
Go to http://www.anywho.com, a site run by AT&T. Click on the Reverse
Lookup tab. Just enter the phone number and you´ll see the name and
address of the person who owns it (unless it´s "unlisted").
AltaVista's strength
For years AltaVista was by far the best search engine. They used to
add new pages, for free, within
two days of submission, while other search engines typically took weeks
or even months. That meant they had the freshest
content. In addition, AltaVista provided you with a set of very precise
commands that couldn`t be matched anywhere else.
Over the last year, as AltaVista has struggled to become profitable,
they have destroyed their beautiful free submission process, trying to
force Web sites to pay for submission. Free submissions (which typically
come from the kinds of content-rich sites that I`m interested in) now seem
to take three months or more -- no better than the other search engines
and often worse.
But the powerful and precise commands remain. In particular, AltaVista
lets you exclude as well as include terms in your query. They let you use
minus signs and plus signs to indicate what you really don`t want and what
you do want. And for some specialized searches the exclusion is essential.
For instance, say you want to know what Web pages outside of your own site
have links to your pages. At Google, I can do a search for link:samizdat.com
or get the same results by going to their "Advanced" search and using their
"page specific search" to find pages that link to a particular page. But
my results are then littered with pages from my own site -- information
I don`t need and don`t want. At AltaVista, I can search for +link:samizdat.com
-host:samizdat.com
and get exactly what I want -- finding out who thinks enough of my
pages to have linked to me without my having contacted
them: a valuable list of well-wishers and potential partners.
Google's weakness
Some people love the results they get at Google, others are often disappointed.
To a large extent, both the pluses and the minuses derive from Google`s
ranking system, which (as the folks at Google explain http://www.google.com/technology/)
depends largely on the number of links to a particular page and the
relevance of the content on those linking pages to the content on the target
page, and the quality of the pages doing the linking. Google works great
for old established sites to which many other old established sites have
linked. (It works great for my site :-) www.samizdat.com ). But new sites,
regardless of the quality of their content, get short shrift. It takes
two to three months for the new pages to get into the Google index. Then
it takes time -- perhaps years -- for other "important" sites to discover
the
new site and link to it; and then months more for the new versions
of those pages with those new links to get into the Google index. So, if
I`m looking for content that is likely to have been on the Internet for
a year or more, Google is great. But if I`m looking for fresh content,
I`ll go elsewhere.
[This used to be the case. No Google crawls the Web extensively and
often. For instance, from my traffic stats, I can see that the Google crawler
looks at every page at my site about once every 2-3 days. That means the
content of the index is fresh, and it also means that there linking/popularity
model for ranking of matches to queries is far more effective than it was
in the past.]
Is the name you want available or trademarked?
Go to http://www.marksonline.com/
Click
on Trademark Search. Enter the name you are interested in. You will see
a list of trademark registrations and submission. And you can then click
to see the details. Remember that trademark protection applies only to
a specific industry. Different companies can register the same name to
cover computers in the one case and vacuum cleaners in the other.
Picking a domain name
The same site that let´s you do trademark searches --
http://www.marksonline.com/ -- also lets you search for domain names.
In many cases, you will want to sew up the company name, the product/service
name, and the domain name at the same time. You can also do domain name
searches at Network Solutions http://www.networksolutions.com and other
domain name registry sites.
Who else has registered trademarks the same as or close to yours?
Go to http://www.marksonline.com/.
Click on Trademark Search. Then enter your current trademarks and close
variations of those names. Chances are that other companies in other industries
have registered or have submitted applications for those names. You´ll
want to keep an eye on those companies, making sure that they are indeed
operating in different industries/markets than yours. In the world of Internet
business, boundaries are often blurred. You may well want to challenge
some of the applications you learn of, if you get early enough notice.
Keep in mind that this site is only cover US trademarks. And check their
resources to learn how trademark registration works.
For a category search, you should use a directory rather than a search engine -- e.g., Yahoo, Open Directory (http://dmoz.org), or LookSmart.
Browse through their cascading menus looking for the clues you need to prompt you and help home in on what you really want.
For answers to questions, go to AskJeeves. Simply type in your questions, in ordinary English. Then choose among the related options they show you in the first-level results.
For detailed info on a specific topic, use a full-text search engine, such as Google, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Excite, Hotbot, etc. Don´t just type in one or two words. Rather enter every word and phrase that you can think of that is directly related to your target topic. Enclose the phrases in quotation marks (some search engines, like AltaVista will then look for those particular words in that particular order). Pages on which all those words and phrases appear should come out on the top of your list of matches.
Get an answer to a common question
If what you are looking for is the answer to a question -- not just
Web pages on which certain terms appear, but pages with answers -- and
if the question is a common one -- such as "how can I register a trademark?"
-- go to AskJeeves http://www.askjeeves.com and just ask your question,
in ordinary English. The results page will prompt you with variants, may
point you straight to your answer, and will also point you to related Web
pages.
Web search - Top 10 tips for Web search
These tips are intended primarily for use at AltaVista http://www.altavista.com.
But most work as well with other search engines.
1) Type in all the words you can think of that are related to what
you want, with no punctuation. You may get lots of matches. Don´t
worry. Documents with all those words will be at the top, and pages with
only one at the bottom. So chances are good the ones you want are on top.
2) If you know the exact name of what you are looking for and it is
a series of words, enclose those words in quotation marks. That tells AltaVista
to match only documents where those words appear together in exactly that
order.
3) If you entered a series of words (not just one or two), and you
don´t see what you want in the results, then put plus signs (+) in
front of each term that must appear on a page if it is likely to be useful
to you. Try again.
4) If you´ve put plus signs in front of the most important terms
and still don´t see what you want, examine the top matches to see
what might be causing confusion. If they have terms in common, add those
words to your query with a minus sign in front, to exclude pages with them
from your matches. Try again.
5) If you type a word all in lower case, AltaVista will search for
both lower case and upper case. But if any letter is in upper case, it
looks for that and only that. This approach is very helpful when you want
to search for brand names, which often have unusual capitalization intended
to make them unique.
6) At AltaVista, all punctuation marks (period, comma, slash, underscore,
and hyphen) are treated the same because punctuation inside a word tends
to be an arbitrary element in a product name, and is often misremembered.
Hence you can search for one variant of a punctuated name and get matches
for all of them.
7) You can use an asterix (*) to stand for 1-5 missing letters, for
instance, an "s" for the plural form of a word, so by sticking an asterix
at the end of a query word, you can search for both singular and plural
at the same time.
8) You can also use an asterix (*) when you are uncertain of the spelling
of a word, for instance not knowing if a certain letter should be doubled.
But the asterix must appear after a minimum of three characters and can
stand for only up to five characters.
9) Use an asterix (*) to search for several variants of the same name
with a single query word.
10) If you type letters without accent marks, AltaVista looks for those
letters with or without accents. If you type them with accent marks, it
will only look for them with accents. This means you can search for French,
German, or Spanish words even if you have an English-only keyboard.
Books for the palm - Deliver articles and books formatted for handheld
devices
If you have content that could be repackaged as articles or books,
you should seriously consider making it available for palm devices and
PocketPCs, in addition to other formats.
Millions of enthusiastic palm and PocketPC owners/fans visit such sites as www.palmgear.com and www.handango.com looking for new software and content. And those sites will let you make your appropriately formatted articles and books available for sale at their sites. Customers use the PalmGear and Handango shopping carts, pay by credit card, and immediately download the content. You automatically get paid at regular intervals. Your only work is the one-time upload and listing of your articles/books. Don´t expect to get rich this way. But do expect to make contact with and learn from a whole new marketplace.
How to get ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers)
Book distributors and stores and buyers for libraries use a standard
book number (ISBN) to precisely identify what it is that they want to buy
or have for sale. Each and every variation of a book (hard cover, paperback,
CD, new edition, etc.) has its own individual number. These numbers are
artificially generated and tell you nothing about the content of the book
(in other words they have no relationship to such library classifications
systems as Dewey or the Library of Congress). All that matters to the buyers
and the keepers of the inventory is that each number uniquely identifies
a particular book in a particular form. They charge an outrageous price
for simply assigning arbitrary numbers ($225 for 10 numbers), and their
system makes no sense at all in the age of electronic books, when there
might be dozens of different format for each title and when a title might
be frequently updated. But you simply can´t do business with the
established book sellers (including online book stores, like Amazon) if
you don´t have ISBNs for your books. To apply (and pay) go to http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/us/application.html
Disadvantages of Acrobat
The underlying technology of the Web gives the use control over the
look-and-feel of pages, because people use different equipment, with different
capabilities, different connection speeds, and different screen sizes,
and because people have different tastes. Acrobat undermines that flexibility,
forcing everyone to view your files the way you created them to be seen,
and annoys many users, who otherwise might be fans of your content. Also,
search engines, which are the major source of traffic to most public Web
sites, are designed to index text. For the most part, they cannot and do
not index Acrobat files, which appear to them as images, instead of text.
So every time you post an article or book in Acrobat form instead of plain
static HTML, you reduce your potential traffic.
What is an Acrobat file and how can you generate one?
Acrobat provides a photo-like image of text/image files. If you have
created an article or book in Microsoft Word, you can go to the Acrobat
site http://www.adobe.com/products/tryadobe/main.html
and do a few trial conversion The resulting file will include your graphics
and all your text in exactly the format that you chose.
Sell your books (in any format) at Amazon.com
Amazon.com has a little known, but very effective consignment sales
program known as Advantage. You sign up at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/partners/direct/advantage-for-books.html/103-3638731-0515054
You provide details about the books that you want to sell, and, typically,
within a couple weeks, they place an order for a few copies. The books
they order get stored in their warehouse so they are available for quick
shipment ("usually ships in 24 hours" will appear with the product description
at the Amazon site). Amazon gets 55% of the sales price; you get 45%. You
get paid for books sold during a given month the following month. And listing
in the Amazon catalog is probably worth more to you in visibility and sales
than listing in Books in Print. They handle not just printed books, but
also books on CD ROM and even on diskette. But you will need to get ISBNs
(International Standard Book Numbers) for each variation of each of your
titles.
If you´d like to use email to expand the reach of your Web site and encourage people to keep coming back, your best approach is to start an opt-in newsletter with useful tips/advice/deals for your visitors. You could do that using free services from such folks as Yahoo (egroups), Topica, or Delphi.
Put notices explaining this new free service of yours at prominent places
on your Web site, with links to sign up. You might want to run the same
newsletter for all your property sites (to cut down on the work involved).
You could then use the newsletter as a vehicle for delivering your marketing
messages (in addition to some solid, useful non-commercial info).
Keep in mind that content use in your newsletter could and should be
added to your Web site.
And be sure to solicit tip-style contributions from your visitors (giving them very flattering credit/recognition for the tips that you use).
Get secure, encrypted email service for free
If you need to send secure email, with encryption and digital signatures,
check Hushmail at http://www.hushmail.com for a free service of that kind.
They offer free OpenPGP encrypted email, free 2 MBytes storage space, and
free digital signing. For just $3.33/month, you can boost your storage
to 32 MBbytes, and have the ability to send or receive attachments up to
3 Mbytes.
Use multiple email accounts to manage your messages
You can sign up for multiple free email accounts. That means that you
can structure your online experiences so email of particular kinds or from
particular senders goes to particular accounts, making it easier to manage
your mail, and keeping one or more relatively free of spam (unwanted, unsolicited
commercial messages).
Where to get free email
Many Internet portals offer free email as a way to get you to come
back to their sites repeatedly and view their ads. The ads are annoying,
the services typically cannot handle large messages (for instance, ones
that include graphics or audio or video files), and the services aren´t
100% reliable (don´t use them for important business messages, unless
you have no alternative). But you will find many occasions when such accounts
are helpful. Start with Hotmail http://www.hotmail.com
or Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com.
Your email is your life. But you don´t have to limit yourself
to one.
Increasingly, businesses reserve the right to check/monitor the email
you send and receive at work. Hence, it´s a good idea to have a free
Web-based account that you can access from home or work or anywhere and
that you can use for personal messages or to check out job opportunities
elsewhere. You´ll also want to be able to maintain continuity in
your personal email correspondence (and following up on those job leads)
if and when you leave your current employer.
Try Netzero, for limited-usage Internet access
With the dot-com crash at least seven major free-Internet-access services
disappeared. Only Juno and Netzero remain. And both of those do everything
in their power to convince/force you move to their paid service. Today,
Netzero is a bit less intrusive and annoying than Juno. But Netzero only
offers 10 free hours per month. But if that´s all you need -- for
instance to access your email with your laptop from hotel rooms while you
are on the road -- then that´s a good deal.
Why sign up for free Internet access?
Even if you already have Internet access, you probably should still
sign up for a free account. Your regular access may be limited to your
home or office (as is the case with cable modem and DSL) or may have few
dial up numbers. That would mean that on the road, even if you brought
your laptop, you wouldn´t be able to connect to the Internet; or
you might wind up incurring high charges for long distance phone calls
to your ISP´s dialup numbers. The two remaining free-access companies
-- Juno and Netzero -- let you dial up with a local call from virtually
anywhere in the US.
Add Freefind search boxes to your pages
FreeFind indexes sites of all sizes. (Some of their sites have in excess
of ten thousand pages.) The free version can handle up to 32 Mbytes or
about 3000 pages. If you like you can set up for daily re-indexing, or
on demand, or re-indexing on whatever schedule meets your needs. Just give
them the URL of your home page, and they will crawl your entire site, including
all your content in their index. Then you can add the code they give you
to whatever pages you´d like to have a search box. The whole process
takes less than ten minutes.
Try Expage if you just need a "home page"
If you only want to get a taste for Web publishing or if a "business
card" page would be enough for you, check Expage at http://www.expage.com
They are set up to help you create "homepages" rather than Web sites, but
you can create an unlimited number of home pages and link them together
so they look and feel like a single Web site.
Try Geocities
Geocities, now owned by Yahoo, offers 15 Mbytes of free Web space.
They seem to focus on the needs of beginners -- with page building tools,
templates, tutorials, and "PageWizards" to automatically build pages for
you. You also have access to online experts who can help answer your questions.
Here your pages will be part of a "community" of similar sites created
by people with similar interests -- most of which are personal, rather
than business in nature. Visitors to Yahoo and Geocities can find you by
navigating through a series of cascading menus (categories and sub-categories
and sub-sub-categories, etc.), as they do when searching through the Yahoo
directory.
Why not use free Web space?
Free Web space is good for getting Internet experience, doing early-stage
business experiments, and for personal needs. But when you are ready to
do real business, you are going to want your own, memorable domain name;
you are not going to want other people´s ads appearing on or with
your pages (without you being paid); and you will also want the flexibility
to design your site the way you want it. To shop for service providers,
check the comprehensive directory at http://www.thelist.com
How to send and receive large files
If you need to send and receive large files, sign up for Whalemail
at http://www.whalemail.com. Your
account there will handle messages up to 50 Mbytes. They bill themselves
as a "Web-based file transfer service" -- an alternative to CDs and ZIP
disks for moving files from one machine to another. They store your files
for up to 14 days. This service used to be free. Now they charge from $7.50/month
for 100 Mbytes capacity, up to $75/month for 1 Gigabyte.
Use the Web to share and backup your files
If you would like to securely store files on the Web, either as backup
(which can be scheduled automatically) or to share files with colleagues,
you should check SwapDrive http://www.swapdrive.com.
They now charge from $7.50 for 100 Mbytes capability, up to $75/month for
1 Gigabyte.
Use free translation, then post your site in multiple languages
You could use babelfish.altavista.com or www.intertran.net to automatically
translate your Web content from English to a variety of languages, and
then you could post separate versions of your content for each of those
languages. But beware. When automatic translation can be helpful, it is
far from perfect. You are liable to wind up with embarrassing howlers,
that could cost you far more in terms of image than you are likely to save
by not paying a translator. If you want to post text in a foreign language,
be sure to hire a professional translator to do that work for you.
What´s the best way to help visitors translate your content?
Rather than depend on automation, you should provide your visitors
with clear and simple instructions and explanations of how to use AltaVista´s
free translation service. Near the top of my home page, http://www.samizdat.com,
I have links to explanations in common languages: "How to translate this
page into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or German,Comment traduire
en français, Cómo traducir a los españoles,Come tradurre
in italiano, Como traduzir em portuguêses, Wie man ins Deutsche übersetzt."
Feel free to copy/reuse these documents on your site, editing them to make
them more appropriate for your needs.
Making sense of foreign Web pages in search results
When you do Web searches, some, if not all of the descriptions in your
list of matches may be in foreign languages that you do not understand.
Can you afford to ignore those results? Perhaps there you might find the
information you need or find an important business lead. If you do your
search at AltaVista, many of the results in your list will have a choice/link
"Translate" to the right of the URL. Click on that link and you will be
connected to Babelfish (a free service of AltaVista). The URL of the site
you are interested in will already be in the "Web page" box. Select the
language pair that you want (e.g., Translate from French to English) and
click on Translate. Very quickly, you should see the target Web page --
with all of its original graphics but with all the static text translated
as you requested. Words inside graphics or in Java won´t be translated;
and only the first couple screens of large pages are translated. But this
is an enormous help, and it´s very quick and easy to use.
Read email written in languages you don´t even recognize
You just received an email message that looks like gibberish. The letters
might be English letters, but the words make no sense. Maybe the return
email address gives you a clue of what language it is written in, by the
country code -- e.g., fi = Finland, se = Sweden... Do you just ignore and
delete the message? Yes, it might be an ad, but it also might be a query
from a potential customer. Go to http://www.intertran.net -- the "Internet
Translator", a free service that automatically translates to and from any
of these languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croation, Czech, Danish,
Dutch, English, European Spanish, Filipino (Tagalog), Finnish, French,
German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Latin American
Spanish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian,
Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh. Cut and paste the text of the email you received
into the translation box on the Web page, then use the drop-down menus
to
choose the language of the original and the language you want the text
translated into. If you aren´t sure what the language is, guess,
and guess again until the results make sense.
Speak in one language, and your business associates can read your
words in another
If you are a slow typist, consider getting "Dragon Naturally Speaking"
-- inexpensive voice recognition software that runs on your PC. After you
"train" the program to understand the peculiarities of your voice, you
can speak relatively naturally, and the program converts your voice to
text on your PC or on the Web. You can use it to write documents, or email,
or even to chat online. Combine this with the automatic translation capabilities
built into the free chat program at Multicity, and you can create some
very interesting effects. Imagine speaking in English and having the recipient
read your words in French or even in Japanese...
As technology advances, you´ll begin to use the latest high-tech capabilities -- all the neat audio and video and multi-media effects. But don´t lose sight of the main purpose -- connecting people to people. And remember that the interaction need not be limited to on-line activities -- once you get a good dialogue going, you may well want to set up related face-to-face meetings as well.
With the Internet, you are no longer limited to what is found within the boundaries of your company or your hometown. You can easily form contacts and build relationships with people of all ages, from all walks of life, from all cultures, from all parts of the world. Take advantage of this opportunity. Choose wisely. Act creatively.
Asking the right questions - Questions you should ask yourself when
developing an Internet business
There are three key questions you should ask yourself when developing
an Internet business.
1. Who is your target audience?
2. What kind of content and online experiences would attract such an
audience to a Web site?
3. What might you be able to do to make their experience a better one
and help serve their needs?
Once you get started, you should keep asking yourself those same questions
over and over again, continually interacting with your audience, helping
them to share with one another, learning from them, and adjusting to serve
their needs.
Building an online store - Accepting credit cards at Yahoo
Yahoo´s store building software automatically gives you a shopping
cart and makes it easy to add products so they are orderable. But they
aren´t in the merchant credit card business. For that you need to
sign up with another company (Yahoo recommends Paymentech) or figure out
how to use your current merchant card service to accept online orders.
As you sort out your options, keep in mind that there is no need to
have credit card orders automatically debited online. Setting up to do
so could be expensive or could force you to do business with a second credit
card company which will charge you additional monthly fees. But, unless
your volumes are likely to be high (in which case such fees might seem
trivial to you), it´s a simple matter to view your orders in Yahoo´s
Store Manager, print out the order pages, then enter the credit card information
by hand with the offline, phone-based entry device you already use.
Building an online store - Adding keywords to get more traffic
As a default, Yahoo puts the same keywords on all of the product pages
at your Yahoo store. You should put
different keywords on each page. To do that, use the "Regular" editor
from your Store Manager Page. Go to the page you want to change. Click
on Edit. Then at the top of the Edit screen, click on Override Variable.
Enter your words in the box labelled Keywords. Then click Update.
Building an online store - How to be found in Yahoo Shopping
Keep in mind that it takes 3-5 days form the opening of your store
for its proeduct info to get into the Yahoo shopping index. Also, their
search engines does not index the full text of your pages, but rather just
your product names, the first couple lines of each product description,
and keywords. Be very careful in writing these elements.
Building an online store - Join the shopping mall
Once you´ve built your store, you are going to want to drive
as much traffic as possible there. And the best traffic consists of people
who are in the mood to shop and who are right now searching for products
like yours. Hence it´s a good idea to join a "mall." So when you
sign up to build a store at Yahoo, you should opt to be part of their network.
They´ll take 3.5% of the revenue you get from transactions that originate
from Yahoo, but that´s business you otherwise probably wouldn´t
get.
Of course, you shouldn´t depend on traffic from Yahoo. You should
do everything you can to drive traffic to your site, including adding
a line with a link to your store in the "signature" you include on
all your email, and adding lots of links to your store from your main Web
site.
Building an online store - Start at Yahoo
Once you´ve gotten some experience selling online at auctions,
you should set up a store at Yahoo -- even if you
don´t plan to run it there for the long term. They give you a
ten-day free trial period, and even after that the hosting
fee is just $49.95 per month. That a small price to pay for getting
first-hand experience in ecommerce. Just go to http://store.yahoo.com
and sign up.
Building an online store - Use other people´s stores
Don´t just start your own online store. Also, use all available
online channels. Don´t worry about competition from sites that sell/distribute
your products. Sure, you wind up getting less of a percentage of the sale
price when the merchandise sells through them rather than directly through
you; but there are tens of millions of potential customers on the Internet,
and only very few of them are likely to ever come to your direct-sale store.
Use search engines and shopping bots to find other stores that already
sell products of your kind; and try to get them to sell yours as well.
Most online outlets will only bring you a small trickle of business. Put
enough of them together and maybe you can get a good stream going, or maybe
even a river.
Serving your audience - Building a business that can last
Imagine you were opening a neighborhood video store. How could you
differentiate yourself and build a lasting business?
-- Pick one kind of movie (in addition to the latest releases) and
build a great/complete collection, so, regardless of how small the store
might be physically, it has the very best selection anywhere around of
that particular kind of movie.
-- Put their inventory on the Web, so people could check which movies
the store stocks and which ones are available now before leaving home.
-- Give in-store customers ready/handy access to that same Web resource.
-- Allow regular customers ("members") to reserve the movies they want
(held for them for 6 hours, 12 hours, maybe even a day).
-- Allow "members" to request email alerts and even automatic reservations
for when a movie they want is returned and available.
-- Allow "members" to custom-order movies that the store does not currently
stock, for purchase and/or for rental.
-- Give "members" a first shot at the latest releases that they have
reserved in advance.
-- Set up movie and game "clubs", like the reading clubs run by libraries;
everyone watches the same movie or plays the same game and gets together
to talk about it, either physically at the store or online or both (with
the folks in the store seeing/hearing the online input, and the folks online
seeing/hearing the face-to-face input).
-- Have guest speakers (like some bookstore chains do): game designers
and people connected with movies (not necessarily "stars"; this could include
behind the scenes and business people, such as the key grip and the publicist
and the makeup person), both face-to-face and live over the Internet.
In general, give customers many reasons to come back, to want to be
"members", to build loyalty and a sense of community.
While the particulars would differ from one kind of business to another,
all retail businesses, both online and physical, and especially those that
sell/rent mass-produced brand merchandise, need to come up with features
and activities like these, designed to empower customers to make better
choices, to serve them better, to give them ways to interact with other
customers who have similar interests, to give them new kinds of value in
ways that they may have never expected.
Serving your audience - Focus your business on what matters
Online stores need to consider the total cost and the total time of
the shopping experience they create and manage. The fact that the store
ships goods within 24 or 48 hours of placement of an order doesn´t
mean a thing to the customer. What matters is the time that passes before
the goods arrive at their destination. Wishlists are great -- where friends
and family can see what you´d like to get and when they buy something
it gets removed from the list, eliminating the chance of duplication. But
such lists would be far more effective if they were shared among many stores.
Package tracking apps (at UPS and FedEx) are great; but it would be better
(reducing anxiety) if the sender and (on request) the recipient received
daily automatic email updates.
Basically, online stores need to remember that they aren´t just
in the business of "selling" -- they are in the business of helping people
find what they want, make purchase decisions, pay for the goods, and receive
them. Sometimes some people will windowshop one day, make up their mind
another day, and pay for the goods when their paycheck clears. Sometimes
they want/need the merchandise ASAP and would be happy to drive a few miles
to pick it up right away. Other times, the delivery date is not important
to them. Stores also could and should distinguish between business (no
nonsense) shoppers and social shoppers and strive to meet their very different
needs and preferences, and optimize the overall shopping experience for
all.
Whatever your business, your goal must be to serve customers, meeting
their needs and expectations -- not just to do the things that are easiest
to do or most profitable. When you go out of business, you make no profit
at all.
Html title - The most important part of your Web page
The HTML title -- the words in the header of a page between -- are
the most important words on the page. If the words in your HTML title match
a search engine query, chances are good that your page will appear at or
near the top of the list of matches. Also, the HTML title will appear on
search engine match lists are the highlighted and linked words. So don´t
throw away your best opportunity to be found. Have a unique HTML title
on each and every one of your pages, and make sure the words are clear
and informative. Don´t use the word "welcome" or the name of your
company. Use words that people are likely to search for.
Set priorities
A good boss will help you set priorities. You don´t need to do
everything today. Do this one important thing and do it well, and you´ll
be a hero. But when you work for yourself, unless you learn how to be a
good boss to yourself, the whole burden of everything that needs to be
done may weigh on you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, year round.
Prioritize your to-do lists. Try to set reasonable expectations for
yourself. Each day you should set yourself at least one task that you can
finish that day. Get that done and you´ll feel you´ve done
something significant. Anything else you might do would be a bonus.
How to establish a habit
Habits are important. They reduce our decision-making workload. For
yourself to do a task in similar circumstances -- in the same sequence
with other tasks and /or on the same day of the week at about the same
time of day -- three times in a row. The amount of mental energy you need
to expend to do it a fourth time should be miniscule next to what it was
the first few times. Basically, by doing this task repeatedly you have
worn down your mental resistance, reduced the friction.
Using a Palm to build good habits
If you have a Palm pilot, use the To-Do List function and the Datebook/Calendar.
But pay special attention to the alarm alerts you can add to your Datebook.
Carry your Palm with you everywhere. If your work involves appointments,
set alarms early enough to helpfully remind you where you should be when.
If you mostly work alone and "chunk" your day into say two hour segments,
set your Palm alarm to go off (beep) at each change time. In that mode,
your Palm can help you build good work habits and help you maintain the
rhythm that works best for you.
Create opportunities to work with others
At least one of the regular tasks you set for yourself should involve
working with others. For me, it´s my Thursday chat sessions and the
segment I do each Saturday on a radio show. For those tasks, I feel an
obligation to others, not just to myself. Try to link those social tasks
to other deadlines of yours. In my case, the chat helps stimulate me to
think about new subjects, to read particular books etc., and that then
provides content for the radio segment, which becomes the basis for an
article that I´ll post at my site..
Creative procrastination -- get energy from guilt
How can you maintain your focus and keep yourself motivated when you
work for yourself? At any given time, there are dozens of things you could
and should be doing. Make a list of them. Typically, the task that is most
important to get done is something you just don´t want to do, at
least now. Get to work on something else on your list.
All the time, in the back of your mind, you´re remembering the
thing you really need to do now. That gives you guilt-generated energy
to do your current task faster and better.
Divide and conquer
Whenever possible, when working on projects, divide what you hope to
accomplish over the course of a day into logical pieces. Set benchmarks
for yourself. Aim to get this part done by 10 AM, that part by noon, etc.
That way, when you work fast, you can reward yourself with breaks.
One of the biggest challenges in working alone for yourself is that you
are likely not to give yourself any breaks, and not to give yourself any
rewards or pats on the back either.
Find your natural work rhythm
Categorize the things that you need to do on a regular basis, and get
a feel for how often you get the urge to do such things. For instance,
you might include Web site updates, paying bills and keeping track of finances,
cleaning the house or yard, doing creative project work. For me, the cycle
is about a week. If I try to pay bills and balance my check book on a day
when I feel like working on a creative project, that´s like pushing
rocks uphill. Likewise, working on a creative project when my mind would
prefer the relaxing tedium of a repetitive task, is laborious and unproductive.
In other words, do the things you need to do when they feel natural to
you.
Once you find the rhythm, try to schedule; but be loose about it. For instance, say your rhythm is a week, and one of the chores is finances. Aim to do that on Saturday. Try to make that a habit. But if the mood for that isn´t there that day or something else comes up, don´t worry about it. Over the course of a week or two, you should cover what needs to be covered by just following your natural inclinations. And since you´re doing this stuff when you are in the right frame of mind, it goes faster, and you do better.
Reward yourself
Keep lists of accomplishments, not just to-do lists. You may have dozens
of things that you need to do on a regular basis. Keep a list of them,
including a category for "miscellaneous". When you turn your attention
to one thing and start working on it, continue working on it until you
arrive at some logical stopping point -- a point from which it will be
easy to start again and that feels like an "ending," so you can add it
to your list of accomplishments and feel good about having done it.
Such lists are a way to pat yourself on the back. It´s cumulative.
The longer your list of accomplishments gets, the more you´ll feel
good about adding to it, and even looking back at it.
Setting goals and making plans
In addition to to-do lists and accomplishment lists, make lists of
your goals and plans. But keep those loose and flexible. Don´t make
them like New Year´s resolutions -- objectives that you will never
accomplish and that that just make you feel guilty thinking about them.
Make the to-do and accomplishment lists first. Then by looking at the patterns,
put together some short-term goals and practical plans for moving in that
direction, and set schedules for getting done that match your natural work
rhythm and take into account all the other things you need to do.
What you hate to do can help you do what you have to do
You really have to get something done, but you keep avoiding it. Think
of another task that you need to do eventually and that´s even more
of a turn off for you. Put that really abominable task on the top of your
to-do list. Convince yourself that it´s important. The more you think
about that one, the more the one that really needs to be done now won´t
seem so bad after all. So you can do that one now to procrastinate about
doing the abominable one that´s now on the top of your list.
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, over 160 articles, and
52 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information
you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business,
helping you to become a player in this new business environment.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
online business success.
Reviews.
A
library for the price of a book.
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
| Internet Business Showcase: | ||
|
|
|