Copyright ©1997, 1998 Richard Seltzer
This is the third chapter of a book entitled The Social Web. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this item for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other 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.
In the Introduction, we described the workings of "flypaper" -- people using full-text search engines will find you based on the content of your pages, and if their own names happen to be mentioned on your pages the odds improve greatly, because many people look for their own names and the names of people they know well. Hence, text content is essential, and the more text the better -- so long as it is relevant to your interests -- and the more names of people the better -- especially if they are the names of people who you want to see your pages.
Yes, quality is important once visitors come to your pages, for them to be satisfied that you provided them with what they were looking for. But quantity is also very important, and large lists with lots of names seem particularly effective.
Lists
If you are connected with a school, include lists of students, faculty, alumni/alumnae, benefactors, and members of clubs and teams. Encourage those who find themselves there to send their email addresses, URLs, and updates on their lives/careers -- with the understanding that such information may be added to the Web site for the benefit of the entire school community.
Assemble lists of videotapes, movies seen, music CDs, baseball cards, books -- whatever you enjoy. Be sure to include the names of the authors, performers, etc. List all the collectibles you own and are proud of or would be willing to sell. Also list all the collectibles you are looking for (and perhaps what you might be willing to pay for them).
Then begin to annotate these lists with your own comments and also comments emailed to you by those who have seen your pages. If you enjoy writing, over time, expand these notes to full-fledged reviews and diary-like narratives of your experiences. Consider
Links
Whenever possible, include hyperlinks in your content. If you are simply building a list of people, like alumni, ask those people to send you email with their email addresses and the URLs of their personal Web pages and add that information to your page in hyper-link form (as described in Chapter 2).
If you know of Web sites or pages with information related to the topics of your content, add hyperlinks to those.
If you have favorite Web sites, make a separate list of those URLs, preferably with a few words about what's special about each of them.
And whenever you hyper-link to a Web site, send email to the folks who run it, letting them know what you are doing and why and telling about your site, in hopes that they might link back to your pages.
If you are particularly interested in a certain class of entertainment product -- like books or music CDs -- check to see if major sites selling those goods have "associates" programs, that provide rewards for referrals that lead to sales. Check their terms carefully. Determine if the products they have for sale are the very kinds of products that you would naturally recommend to friends and/or that you'd want to get for yourself. If so, sign up and follow their procedures for making hyperlinks from your pages to theirs.
For instance, a lot of the material at my site relates to books -- including my list of everything I've read over the last 39 years, plus lists of favorites. So I signed up as an Amazon.com associate and added hyperlinks from the titles of my favorite books to the specific pages at Amazon where those titles are for sale, and with a special identifier added to the URL, so that it's clear which customers go there from my site. Depending on the discount that applies on a particular book, I get a referral fee of from 5% to 15% of the price, paid quarterly. And I get detailed reports every week about the traffic that goes from my pages to theirs -- who looks at what and who buys what. When I want to buy books for myself, I just add the titles with hyperlinks to my page of "what I plan to read next" and make the purchases by clicking from that page to Amazon, going back and forth, adding books to my shopping cart, until I'm ready to complete the transaction. By so doing, I get the books at 5-15% off Amazon's already-discounted price. And when my son gets his summer reading list from school, I post that list with Amazon hyperlinks to buy the books for him, and invite others to use the page as well. (This is a natural way to raise funds for a school or community organization -- no hassle, no inventory.)
CD Now runs a similar program to encourage referral sales of music CDs, but pays in product discounts/credit, rather than cash. And keep your eyes open -- this a natural business model for companies with products to sell, and opens interesting opportunities for people who have their own Web pages and are consumers and fans of those products.
Use search engines to find pages to link to
You don't need to be an Internet expert to assemble interesting lists of links. You just need to spend a little time at a search site, like AltaVista.
For instance, say you are interested in books. At AltaVista, click the arrow next to "Web" and select "Usenet," another term meaning "newsgroups." Then in the query box, type newsgroups:books That means that you are asking for a list of all items that have been recently posted to newsgroups that have the word "books" in their name. Check the names of the newsgroups and the kinds of items that run in each. If you see that one -- like alt.books or rec.arts.books -- has lots of items that you and visitors to your site would be interested in, then make a hyper-link from one of your pages to that newsgroup. Remember that while the format for the address of a Web page is http://www.samizdat.com; the format to access newsgroups from a Web browser is news:rec.arts.books (just a colon, no slashes). If, perchance, you are mainly interested in books by John Updike, you can make an AltaVista newsgroup query -- +news:books +updike and get a list of all items in book-related newsgroups that mention Updike. Then use your mouse to copy the URL for that results page. And on the Web page you are creating, say "Click here to see the latest list of all newsgroup items that talk about Updike" and paste that search list URL as the hyper-link to be associated with those words. With a couple minutes work, you have created a useful resource for anyone interested in Updike. All a visitor to your page has to do is click on that link and immediately they get connected to AltaVista and automatically launch the same search that you did, but providing up-to-date results. If you yourself frequently post comments in newsgroups, you can do an AltaVista search for from: followed by either your email address or your name in quotation marks. That will produce a list of all the newsgroup items you have posted in the last month or so. And as described above, you can copy the URL of that results page and use it to make a hyper-link from your page -- for instance, "click here for a list of everything I've written in newsgroups lately."
Of course, you can equally well search the Web and make links of those results. For instance, +updike +rabbit would produce a list of Web pages that mention Updike's Rabbit books. The more familiar you are with the search engine and the more creative you are in building queries, the greater the service you can provide -- for free -- to the visitors at your site.
If you decide to add hyperlinks to particular newsgroups or to special searches within newsgroups, you should also do a search to find out what other Web pages have links to that same group. For instance, link:news:alt.books provides a list of all Web pages that have hyperlinks to the newsgroup with the name beginning alt.books. You might want to make a hyper-link out of that search result. Or you might want to look at those pages, and if there are some that are interesting to you and would be interesting to your readers, link to those pages and send email to the folks who run them.
When you first considered creating Web pages, you probably thought that it would be difficult to come up with much content. But once you get started, you'll be amazed at how much you have to say and want to say. Even if you limit yourself to plain text, which takes up far less space than pictures, you soon may find yourself banging up against the limits of your free space and contemplating paying for more. At that point, when you have over a hundred different documents, you may find that it's getting a little difficult for you and your visitors to find what they want at your site, even when they know that it's there. When that moment arrives, you can begin to use AltaVista as a free index of your site. Just make sure that every one of you pages is indexed at AltaVista (using ADD URL). Then a search for host:yourdomainname (if you went to the expense and trouble of buying your own domain name, or url: followed by the address of the directory where your Web pages reside, will provide a list of every page at your site. And a search beginning with +host:yourdomainname or +url:yourdirectoryaddress will be limited to your site. So a search of +host:samizdat.com +updike will give me a list of all the pages at my site that mention Updike. You can explain this procedure for your visitors, or you can make it easier for them by making a hyper-link to the results list of a search for +host:yourdomainname or +url:yourdirectoryaddress.
Newsletters
If you would like to build and keep an audience, then you might want to start an email newsletter that focuses on the same topic(s) as your site Web. A newsletter could consist of pointers to interesting Internet tidbits you've found around the Internet (including what's new at your own site), plus reviews and observations by you, plus letters to the editor. Keep it simple. Keep it short. Post the full text at your Web site (with hyperlinks to the resources you are pointing to). And send it only to people who you know well or who have asked for it. Post very brief, non-commercial notes about it in related newsgroups to encourage people to request it or to read it at your site. Including letters to the editor encourages people to react, and the content provided by your readers can soon become a very important piece of both your newsletter and your Web site.
If you want to get some practice first, start posting your thoughts and observations in newsgroups. That will give you a quick feel for how people react to your writing. And it will give you an opportunity to adjust your style. The best results usually come not from polished essays, but rather from provocative and open-ended statements. If you know the answers to all of life's questions, contact a publisher or a psychiatrist. If you are interested in sharing your insights and starting up a discussion with like-minded folk, post your thoughts in newsgroups and eventually start your own newsletter.
Since January 1994, I have written and published a free electronic newsletter, Internet-on-a-Disk, which points people to the best sites for electronic texts on the Internet and discusses Internet trends. In a typical issue, the Letters to the Editor is about a third of the text. I post the full text of every issue at http://www.samizdat.com/#ioad; and it is re-posted on numerous Web sites and is forwarded over a number of public mailing lists, and is frequently cited as one of the best resources for education and for the blind (who can "read" electronic texts with computer devices that provide voice output). As the Internet evolves, so does the newsletter, with increasing coverage of the Worldwide Web and the "curious technology" which is fueling this phenomenon. It's been the testing ground for many of the ideas expressed in this book.
Find a need and fill it -- pro bono work for community organizations
The above-mentioned techniques can also work well if you want to devote your Web site or a part of it to information for and about a local community service organizations or charity, perhaps your church or your daughter's Little League team.
Enter brochures, programs, booklets, newsletters, meeting schedules, contact information, etc. Provide a place for members to share experiences and information with one another. Keep your page design simple (plain text) to make it easy to create the pages in the first place and to keep them updated. Remember that sooner or later your enthusiasm will wane and time will be tight. The easier it is to maintain the site, the more likely that you or someone else will be able to keep it up, consistently and predictably.
My wife and I took this approach with Prescription Parents, a support group for parents of children born with cleft lip/cleft palate. We posted the basic organization information, several booklets, and pointers to related organizations. Each month visitors download nearly 1000 copies of articles. If these documents weren't available on the Web, the people, most of whom are concerned about their children's health and want information as soon as possible, would have had to request the publications by postal mail (if they were lucky enough to find the right address), and would then have had to wait a week or two to get them. (Keep in mind that it costs us nothing when folks retrieve these articles online, while otherwise it would cost us time and money to reprint them and send them to these same requesters.)
Every month, several of those visitors have unique specific questions that they send us by email, and we do our best to answer. Since ours is a local Boston-area organization and the Web reaches the world, our replies are sometimes pointers to related organizations.
All in all, at no cost, and for a minimum investment of time, we're able to extend the benefits of our organization to a much broader audience.
If your town isn't on the Web yet, consider joining forces with several of your neighbors and making a free Web site for the town that rivals the usefulness of town sites that cost millions of dollars a year to operate. Each of you gets free Web space with an Internet service provider or a Web hosting provider. (They need not all be in the same place.) Each of you takes on the responsibility for covering a specific part of the town, such as a school or a church or town service. You agree on a common look and feel for your pages, and you provide hyperlinks back and forth to one another. You'll be amazed at what you can accomplish with this simple, modular approach.
Recognition
I keep pounding away at the value of simple plain-text Web pages. As a rule of thumb, I say that on the Web a picture should be worth 10,000 words, not just 1,000. It needs to say something not just the first time someone sees it, but also when a visitor returns. It needs to perform a function, because it takes up so much space and takes so long for visitors to download.
But what about all the photos that people are putting in their personal Web pages. Who will ever see them? Who cares? What's the point?
The answer dawned on me a few years ago, when my son Timmy, who was five years old at the time, brought home a particularly good picture he had made at nursery school. My wife was ecstatic -- so proud of him that she immediately hung it on the kitchen wall, and he was delighted to receive such recognition.
What was happening? She posted it where it can be seen by and shared with others. And by so doing she expressed pride and joy in what he had done and affirmed his worth and importance and the value of what he had done. That same model can work on the Internet.
Shortly after that, my teenage son Michael wrote a particularly good science fiction story for a school assignment. He's a bit jaded now when it comes to posting things on the kitchen wall, so I posted it on the Web instead. Over the last month, an average of 2-3 people a day have taken a look at it, and now he's busy working on sequels and coming up with ideas for how to get feedback from readers.
Yes, the Internet can be used for publishing -- simply putting text in electronic form and making it easy for people to retrieve it. But remember that regardless of whether anyone pays for the information, publishing is a two-way proposition. The reader obtains the information, and the creator gets the satisfaction and recognition of having his or her creation posted where others can see it and read it.
Consider the example of Hillside Elementary in Minnesota. In the spring of 1994, Hillside was one of the first elementary schools on the Web. One of their first projects was setting a sixth grade class loose to use the Internet for research and then publishing their papers on the Web. At the time, I was particularly impressed that instead of footnotes the students included hypertext links to their on-line sources. That looked like an excellent example of how research papers could and should be written in the future. Now, however, I realize the importance of the fact that the papers were made available over the Web and that all the students had their own individual home pages, complete with pictures of themselves or pictures that they had drawn and whatever they wanted to say about themselves. They were given recognition on a global scale. Anyone anywhere in the world with access to the Web could see them and their creations. The success of their site would not be measured in "hits" per day, but rather the motivating power of knowing that what you do can be seen by people you've never met, by people on the other side of the world. In this context, sheer numbers mean nothing, and the potential to be seen and read is everything.
We should keep in mind that people are motivated at least as much by the need for recognition and self-esteem as by economics. There are good reasons for hanging photos and plaques to commemorate winning teams and academic achievers, just as businesses post the names and/or photos of the employee of the week, as well as for rewarding people with important-sounding titles and printing them on business cards. And there are valid reasons for having individual home pages that are not directly related to costs and revenue -- that provide recognition and motivation, and can help build relationships and loyalty.
Photos of individuals, which in a direct marketing/business sense are relatively useless (what information do they convey to the reader?), can be very important to the self-esteem of the person shown -- regardless of how many people may choose to look at them. This became clear to me when I saw the Special Olympics site which volunteers from Yale University posted in the summer of 1995. Under "Yale Special Olympics Contacts" they provided pictures and profiles of many volunteers, including the janitor who served as "chair of Yale's Sanitation and Recycling Committee for the 1995 Special Olympics World Summer Games". Those pictures were buried deep in the hierarchy of directories. They were not intended to attract readers to the site, but rather to publicly express appreciation.
You can use text, photos, audio and even video on the Web to recognize and motivate individuals. And you can also set up a systematic program that uses this kind of recognition to help build a sense of community, and to recognize and reward sub-communities -- like teams and extra-curricular groups. These forms of on-line recognition become particularly important as Web sites vie with tens of thousands of others for the attention and loyalty of users.
Consider the possibility of a school using Web space to recognize:
When everybody does it, does it have less value? Like the photos of teams and plaques of achievers hanging in the corridors of schools, even if only the students and a handful of visitors will see them, still they are a source of pride and motivation, and the number of other schools with similar photos in no way diminishes their value. And the community of people who feel they belong to that Web site will look and return and show what they find to others, regardless of how many other new communities are created.
Also, remember that these "recognition" pages can also have tangible benefits. Faculty and students are the greatest assets that a school has, and pages that provide photos and biographies of them and pointers to their articles, etc. can serve as marketing tools for the school. This approach becomes particularly important as colleges use the Internet to compete for the attention of the best applicants, and as high schools use the Internet to enhance their image and improve the chances of their students being accepted at the best colleges. It becomes even more important as these schools realize that there are educational benefits as well as profits that could come from Internet-based distance learning. As they extend the reach of their school beyond the traditional campus -- offering courses on-line over the Internet, or programs in which some or even most of the interaction with teachers and other students happens on-line, they will have to pay ever more attention to their on-line image and marketing.
And, of course, the faculty members and students can use their Web space to market themselves as individuals, as they seek jobs or grants or acceptance at their next school.
Many colleges have Web space devoted to faculty and student personal pages. And graduate schools often encourage doctoral students to post their biographies/resumes on the Web. Soon personal Web pages for all faculty and all students are likely to be common practice -- not just in colleges, but also in many K-12 schools.
It's easy to imagine a time when standard application forms (for high school, college, and employment) ask for your email address and the address of your personal home page.
So when a school uses Web pages for recognition and motivation, it is also preparing its students and faculty to compete in this new arena which is likely to be very important for their careers.
What's at my own Web site
The content at my own site is intimately connected with who I am, what I have done, and what I am interested in.
There you will find:
The rest of The Social Web by Richard Seltzer
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.
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.
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
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