(Note: Written in 1996. While some of the material is dated, most of the material is still very useful and its been proven to work!)
The Internet is a network of computer networks, loosely interlinked at various points around the world. Information divided into small "packets" of data flows through this weblike structure, hopping from one computer to the next on its way to far-off destinations. No single computer controls this traffic. Each packet carries with it an address, read by routers along the way as it streams down the line.
The Internet began as a small network project called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) in 1969. The purpose of the project was to create a link between Department of Defense researchers in different parts of the country. This project arouse from a Cold War-era scheme designed by the U.S. military to withstand localized destruction and still function.
From the beginning, the ARPANET was designed not to have a central "hub" that might be vulnerable to attack. The network formed in a web-like fashion, with each computer being able to send data to its peers via several routes. Even if one or two computers on the network were wiped out, the others could still communicate with each other through the remaining undamaged routes.
The Internet lurched forward during the 1980s when the National Science Foundation built a new, faster backbone network, based on Internet Protocol to connect colleges and research institutions with five new supercomputing centers around the U.S.
By October 1995, parts of the National Science Foundation, still financed by the U.S. government, were sold off or reorganized as private companies. The present Internet is a loose collection of huge networks run largely by giant phone companies such as MCI and Sprint, connected at several major points with many smaller regional networks.
The Internet reached mass growth in the early 1990's; growth rates began to take off on an exponential curve. New popular search tools, such as Gopher and Archie, helped to fuel the growth, but these were eclipsed by the development of the World Wide Web in 1991 by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. The World Wide Web took off in 1993 with the release of Mosaic, the first graphical Web browsing program. For the first time, Mosaic allowed "point-and-click" Internet navigation. Users could now put together Web pages, collections of text and graphics, for viewing by anyone else on the Internet. When a mouse was used to click special words or pictures, called hyperlinks, the browser would automatically load up a different page and the term "surfing the net" was born. Mosaic, and its successor Netscape Navigator, brought the Internet out of the technical realm and into the hands of average people.
The Internet itself does not actually do anything. The Internet is not a place, or a destination. The Internet simply transmits data from computers connected to its many branch. This means the Internet has many faces depending upon what you want to do with it. Five broad representative categories of programs, each designed to use the Internet for a specific task, can be found in most Internet-connected computers.
A program designed to view pages on the Web and to switch you from one document to another at the click of a mouse or press of a key. Most browsers now provide the capability to view Web pages with graphics and tiled backgrounds, copy and print material from the Web, and access other Internet protocols such as e-mail, Gopher, news, and file transfers.
Most E-mail programs have a few things in common: They all collect e-mail in a sort of "inbox" or folder, they let the user reply to or forward messages, and receive messages can be stored in different ways.
The Internet protocol that allows the viewing, downloading, and uploading of files on remote computers.
Are the bulletin boards of the Internet; places where users can converse about nearly any subject imaginable. Unlike mailing lists, which deliver postings to your e-mail box, newsgroups have to be visited in order for you to see postings.
Dial-in accounts that give your computer full Internet access, including graphics on the World Wide Web, while you are connected to a host computer. With these accounts, you run e-mail, news, Ftp, Gopher, or chat clients on your computer, not on the host into which you dial.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is the fastest growing segment, and the most accepted place for commercial activities, on the Internet. The WWW is a client-server interface that started when Dr. Tim Berners-Lee created a program on which to record his academic conclusions. The program Dr. Berners-Lee developed, let him cross-reference his research papers using a single highlighted word, known as a hyperlink, as a gateway to an attached document that substantiated or supported that particular claim.
This ability to link documents, caught the attention of Dr. Berners-Lee's employer, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). Dr. Berners-Lee and CERN decided that the natural extension of this idea would include a number of hyperlinked documents. The first Web site was created by a team of physicists at CERN assisted by Dr. Berners-Lee in 1991.
The World Wide Web should not be confused with the Internet. While the Internet is the physical network of interconnected computers, the WWW is simply the digitized information that can be accessed by the Internet. The WWW can only be accessed using a Web browser in conjunction with any Internet connection. Web browsers understand the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a rudimentary set of commands that indicate how a Web page should be formatted on the computer screen.
Each piece of information contained on the WWW is stored as a file of data, known as a Web page, at a centralized storage device. Each Web page is identified by its Uniform Resource Locator (URL). You can recognize this type of address by one of the following prefixes:
http:// (indicates a World Wide Web protocol address)
ftp:// (indicates an ftp address accessed via the World Wide Web)
telnet:// (indicates a telnet address accessed via the World Wide Web)
gopher:// (indicates a gopher address accessed via the World Wide Web)
mailto: (indicates an e-mail address accessed via the World Wide Web)
Only a few years ago, fewer than 1,000 businesses had a home page on the Web. Today, businesses of all sizes are opening a storefront on the Internet, lured by the potential of millions surfing the net. And when the Internet becomes accessible through cable TV, A consumer market of hundreds of millions of potential customers will open up.
Doing business online is definitely one of the most exciting opportunities today. With so much hype about the World Wide Web, many Internet users make the mistake of thinking that if you have a great site, thousands of visitors will magically materialize.
Cold reality sets in when your Web site has been operating for months and you are only receiving a handful of visitors per day - and traffic isn't increasing.
The reality is that it is not a "no-brainer" to make money on the Internet. There are unbridled opportunities, but like any legitimate business, they'll take study, work, and effort to realize.
Merchants selling goods such as Wines, Sandals, Chocolates, Autos, Fruits, Hot Sauce, Books, Computer Products, Music, Videos and CD Rom's are making money. Also selling on the Internet is Golf, Groceries, Health Care, Mental Health, Franchise Businesses, Recycled Jeans, Tennis, Sex, Information, and more.
While the percentage of online successes is smaller than the real world, their are still some companies making money right now as a result of their Internet endeavors. Their experiences are good guides to anyone considering marketing their products or services over the Internet.
Three months after the site launched, she received $2 million from Sequel Venture Partners and now has 30 employees with plans to hire 50 more.
Nextmonet.com went online selling art work from $700 to $2500 and has never had any sales returned.
It has stuff for teens like fashion, dating advice, diaries, sports scores, email, and a funky design that enjoys 2 million page views per month and growing.
They started Hit Box with $400 on their credit card, and are now on their way to becoming millionaires after two investors bought a small piece of the business for $30 million.
Trreloot debuted in May 1998 and began turning a profit in three months. In August 1999, Treeloot had 3.5 million unique visitors and is looking at doing over $10 million in gross revenues.
The Cyberary built its traffic through word of mouth advertising combined with strategic positioning on search engines. This niche site continued to grow by announcing themselves to newsgroups, mailing lists, and selected web sites, and is now generating over a million hits.
Wanner Engineering says the online catalog it maintains at the thomas Register was largely responsible for a $50 million order from General Motors.
To build the site to its current traffic levels, the Register invested in 20 hardware servers, increased its editorial and production staff by 20 percent, allocated $2 million to Internet Marketing and hired a director of Internet marketing named Julianne Gary.
When Garry joined the company in December of 1996, the site attracted only about a million hits a month, driven mostly by ads in the print directories. A redesign was in the works.
The new look was unvelied at a Chicago trade show and promoted through newsgroups, press releases, direct e-mail campaigns, and partnerships. The site saw an immediate increase in traffic, rocketing to 5.8 million hits in April 1997.
A link on the Netscape Net search page added more fuel in May. By July, about 43 percent of the site's 10.5 million monthly hits were coming from Netscape.
"Our cusomers are male and extremely computer-literate people who use the net as part of their jobs", says Suzie Eastman, co-owner. Eastman says the company boasts about 1,000 regular repeat customers, who often call up to surprise wives or girlfriends with beautiful, long lasting tropical bouquets.
This past Mother's Day, Kauai Exotix shipped so many orders fedearl express had to dispatch two trucks for the pickup.
The company offers a complete shopping mall online, as well as links to everything from the Blue Angels to Masonic lodges throughout the world. The web site generates almost 80,000 visitors a week.
ImproveNet gets a lead fee and commission for each job a contractor wins. In its firsy year, ImproveNet sent contractors more than $200 million worth of business.
These days, more than 1,000 daily visitors send money, anywhere from $10 to $299 for fonts.
The first six months of business, the company was esstatic if they received any orders. A slow but growing trickle whet their appetite for more. In January 1995, the monthly volume hit $200,000 and by October 1995, ISN grossed $1.2 million for the month. ISN's lesson is that concentrating on a specific niche brings superior results.
To attract customers to its site, Internet Shopping Network advertises on America Online, Compuserve, and Prodigy.
Their secrets of success: Aggressive, Targeted marketing:
1. The site offers a listing of 165,000 titles, with detailed information on each.
2.CD Now's marketing model, dubbed "intercasting", follows customers specific
actions as they browse the site.
Actually "Intercast" is a $60,000 Sparc 20 workstation connected to various disk drives and two battery backups. Every flash of a tiny red light on the disk drives indicates that someone is in the store and shopping. While customers are entertaining themselves by reading about a certain artist, they will get an offer for a promotion, a sale price, or a recommendation of another artist.
With "Intercasting", CD Now can group customers based on what they have bought, how often they buy, what kind of music they seem to like, and where they spend their time in the store (this important concept of Psychographic Segmentation is covered later).
And if CD Now has a promotion, they let their customers know about the promotion through e-mail or on-site ads... users happily spread the word electronically. So much so that Jason Olim, president of CD Now , says, "my growth is all word-of-mouth".
In addition, the company provides links to several other environmental sites on the Web. This is a good example of a company building its image and offering value-added information to visitors.
Bean invites you to enter a contest that could make some dog a celebrity on next year's catalog. You can also view information covering approximately 900 State and National parks.
To attract attention to her home page, she posts information on the newsgroups devoted to Aromatherapy, alternative health care, etc. She also makes sure she's included in on-line directories that list Aromatherapy and Holistic Health.
You can browse through dental news, classified ads, an 800-number dental directory, and articles by dental management consultants. Their is also a list of other dental-themed Web sites from Thailand to Finland. And you can also pick up information on how to handle insurance claims and the daily running of a dental office.
So far, over 1,500 dentists from all over the world, including Puerto Rico, Egypt, and Italy, and the Netherlands, have checked out the site.
Amazon hardly does any advertising yet the company is on its way to ringing up more than $5 million in sales in 1996 - better than most Barnes & Noble Inc. superstores. Shunning the elaborate graphics that clutter so many Web sites, Amazon loads up its customers with information. The result - Amazon has caught fire as word-of-mouth on the Web spreads about Amazon's database of 1.1 million titles (five times the largest superstore's inventory), that can be searched by subject or by name. And if you tell Amazon about your favorite authors and topics, they will send you a constant stream of recommendations via e-mail.
In addition, letting buyers e-mail Amazon offers "a tremendous amount of feedback from your customers and the semi-anonymity that allows people to say what they really think", says Jeffrey Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.
After Shifting through e-mail gripes, Amazon added additional shipping options, booktitles that won literary awards, and simplified searching options. "Lots of people are putting their catalogs on the Web, but not many of them are using it to provide added value", says Michael Sullivan Trainor, who studies Internet commerce for market researcher International Data Corp.
M/S Database Marketing attracts traffic to their site through Usenet newsgroups and targeted e-mail messages. They also compile a list of consumers to take part in online focus groups. The sessions will include a cross section of people from around the country and provide clients with immediate critical information.
Customers and browsers are welcome to search online for special books relating to computers and technology.
Their monthly costs include $30 for the server space, $20 for the Internet provider, and $50 to be listed in a web-based mall. Theirs is a fairly simple site. Customers phone, fax, or mail in their orders. Cellular Unique expects to at least double their 1995 revenues in 1996.
According to Hot Hot Hot, about 1% of the 30,000 surfers who visit their site each month, actually place orders, "Which is as good as direct mail response rates". To publicize their presence on the Internet, Hot Hot Hot sent electronic mail to newsgroups, including a mailing list for chili lovers. Within a half-hour of the site's debut in 1994, they received their first order. And as usually happens on the Internet, more customers were attracted by word-of-mouth.
Soon, 15,000 people were checking each day, perusing electronic catalogs featuring such sauces as Dave's Temporary Insanity and Ring of Fire - Extra Hot. Today they get customers from Switzerland, Brazil, New Zealand, and other faraway spots.
Launched in February 1995, Shrink-Link attracted 450 paid users, and rang up $9,000 in revenues its first month in business.
Visitors to the Shrink-Link homepage click on the hyperlinked words, and compose a query. Then your transported to another page that lets you type in a 200-word question about your fears, anxieties, marital troubles, sexual problems, or anything else on your mind. Once you finish, you fill in an online order with credit card information and submit. The query is routed and within 24 hours you receive a response for a $20 charge.
According to Daniel Litwin of Shrink-Link, they have been successful because mental health advice is a service that can be delivered online even more effectively than face-to-face or by phone. And the $20 fee is a lot cheaper than an hour of psychotherapy at $100 or more.
It tells online customers why and where to buy products. People can then click to a store's home page for directories and more descriptions of the store's offerings.
To capitalize on Tacoma, Washington's large population of cyberspace junkies, Relax the Back includes the web address in advertising and informs store visitors about the site. So far, they have received e-mail from Hawaii and Australia and walk-in travel 30 miles from Seattle.
This award-winning site draws 60 orders daily. Customers can browse 45 products and securely transmit credit card orders online.
The Mission Viejo, California real estate company launched its Web site on December 1995 and is getting 2,500 hits per day.
Average hits is 2,000,000 per day!!
The tennis server sponsorship allowed them to take their message to 40,000 Tennis Server visitors each month. They also e-mail messages in the Tennis Server newsletter to over 11,000 customers who had expressed an interest.
They charge users a $3 to $7 subscription per month, plus extra fees for some stories. And they were able to generate $250,000 within the first few months online.
Although they put a lot of information about their bikes online, they don't try to sell over the net. Their emphasis is on selling parts and collectibles.
Sales Manager Ed Dombrowski, reports that orders have come from as far away as Sinapore and countries of the former Soviet Bloc.
They are a good example of a successful Web site that uses the Catalog Formula to make money selling other people's products on the Web.
The bookstore processes all the orders it receives from the site. They get orders through the site directly, e-mail, and over the phone. Future Fantasy accepts checks or credit cards, but recommends that customers not send credit card information through the Internet or via e-mail. Instead, they advise people to fax their credit card information or send it by conventional mail.
Future Fantasy Bookstore now receives nearly 30% of its business through the Internet. In fact, the only continent they have not sold to is Antarctica.
Launched in January 1995 , Auto-By-Tel generated more than 50,000 requests for information in its first nine months in operation, resulting in more than $300 million worth of new car sales.
The secret of their success is Auto-By-Tel's low prices and "no hassle, no haggle" purchasing system. Once a shopper submits their request online, its forwarded to a participating dealer who contacts the potential customer with a wholesale price within 48 hours. You can also reach Auto-By-Tel through AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, and Microsoft Network.
To lure people back to their site, they post nutritional information and recipes on the fruits they sell and even offer a grove tour.
Business is especially brisk on such holidays as Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, where online orders account for as much as 40 percent of the company's sales. And although these Internet orders still make up a small part of the company's annual sales, it's not a bad investment on the $40 invested each month to rent space from a cybermall operator.
The Chocolate Factory has managed to get the word out without much advertising. They sent notices to Yahoo, Lycos, Webcrawler, Infoseek, and other Internet directories and search engines. They also offer a secure order form.
The secret to Virtual Vineyards success is that it does not just sell wine. They entice wine buffs into an informative, interactive world;
1. a tasting chart accompanies each wine for every listed winery. The chart features
sliding indicators denoting intensity, dryness, body, acidity, tanning, oak flavors, and
complexity.
2. a "Remember This Wine" button shoppers can click on to simplify the ordering
process.
3. a glossary of terms, and articles from Wine & Spirts magazine.
4. recipes for meals to go with the wines complete the offering.
Olsen says they market their Web site primarily through public relations. They are also purchased links through America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve. The site is also registered with search tools like Yahoo and Lycos.
The Web site is easy to navigate, includes complete product information, and one of its big attractions is its secure, easy-to-use online order form.
Part e-zine, and part part-meta list that features lists of the most interesting sites, is getting 100,000 hits per month and lots of publicity.
Philip Singerman, owner of Gourmet Today, says the Internet is a natural place for a catalog because you can change catalogs instantaneously, add and subtract items by availability, and offer seasonal and even daily specials.
And Scott Purcell, the owner of HLC Internet, believes the power of the Internet has nothing to do with selling products, It is all about communicating with employees, customers, investors, and suppliers.
Rather than trying to complete with local video stores, Jeff and Penny targeted the instructional market, based on the growing popularity of home schooling. They offer premium customer service, no-hassle returns, 30-day guarantees, and an online/off-line ordering service that has generated enough income to let Penny quit her day job.
Reg Net is another site that is producing a needed service and making some money. What RegNet does is help shareware authors handle online registration. It makes money by adding a fee to the price the general public pays to download the software. The service has managed to attract more than 150 titles to the site with very little active marketing.
Front Porch Computers, 1-800-go-porch, 706-695-1990 fax. Over 35,000 different computer hw/sw, business equipment/electronics items. Visa/master card/amex accepted! International customers welcome! We ship worldwide.
And with an estimated 500,000 hits daily, Golfweb ranks as a heavily trafficked Internet site.
Thanks to AOL's huge subscriber base and heavy Mother's Day hyping, Moms Online is now logging an average of 10,000 visitors per day. DeBaun gets a cut of AOL's hourly usage rate and is also making money from a Mothers Online catalog that peddles everything from recycled crayons to Great Mother's Belly Cream. A Mom's online book is also in the works.
Peapod customers get custom software they can load on their PCs. The software lets them browse the aisles of a virtual supermarket, clicking on individual items pictured on the shelves to get prices and nutrition information, and to place an order. The cost: $4.95 monthly fee, plus $6.95 per order and a charge equal to 5% of the shopping bill.
Raymond Burke, a consumer behavior specialist at Harvard Business School, estimates that electronic shoppers will account for as much as 3% of all U.S. grocery sales within three years.
Pete Zeigler, the company's owner, says he has received orders from South Africa, Malaysia, and Japan.
This site launched in July 1995, getting 70,000 hits a month, landed its first sponsorship and expect five to six additional sponsors to eventually follow suit.
To create his directory, Murray spent three months sending out direct mail pieces to B & B innkeepers. When the site launched in March 1995 it had more than 500 paid listings. This year, 65% of the original innkeepers have renewed even though rates tripled.
What is the secret to his success? Murray, whose name pops up frequently in travel newsgoups and mailing lists, said he basically endeared himself to the industry. And he also spends more than 30% of his tiny budget on Marketing. He bombards innkeepers with friendly letters every three months to build relationships.
Internet Travel Network now handles 150 to 300 bookings a day, up from 30 to 40 a day during the winter.
Launched in March 1995, this Pittsburgh based company during its first 12 months of online operations brought in $5,000,000 solely from its web site, with a profit of $20,000 per month. And they accomplished all this without a single graphic on their web page.
Sony and US Robotics were among the charter sponsors, lured by the Zine's specialized content and the ability for ad placements within articles and fun columns with names such as "Ask MS. PDA". Jerney spends $1,000 a month to produce the entertaining Zine, but is receiving between $2,000 and $10,000 a month from four to eight advertisers.
The site, which debuted in September 1995, has won an instant fan following and is getting up to 20,000 hits a day. Seavey attributes the success of the site to the fact that visitors are attracted to the Heather character. Many of the site's visitors desperately need tips for Valentine's Day , anniversary presents, and that "others are just lonely".
The attention Heather is generating is helping attract clients to Seavey's fledgling interactive product design and consulting business, Highway Interactive, http://www.hi-way.com. And Heather has received offers to do Mother's Day guest spots on AOL and CompuServe.
Onsale plays to the Internet's strengths of real-time communication and community interaction. Unlike most of the roughly 100,000 commercial sites on the World Wide Web, Onsale lets users see and respond to one each others bids seconds after they are posted.
Onsale attracts over 750,000 visitors to its web site each week. About 36,000 of them actually bid or buy computer goods, giving Onsale a weekly take of $700,000 in revenue. To ensure that bidders have sufficient funds, Onsale verifies users' credit-card numbers before they bid. In its first year of business, Onsale expects to post revenue of $35 million with gross profit margins of up to 15%. A third of that gross profit is used to pay marketing costs, the remaining 10% is net profit.
They wrote the following in "The Net", September, 1996, page 10:
" I have reserved mastermusician.com with InterNic, upon advise from your magazine, for when we go to a full commercial site. We have already had over $5,000 in sales in the last three weeks from our Internet site alone, mainly because I learned to register our site with all the major search engines (Yahoo, Web Crawler,etc) from reading The Net".
The addition of online ordering and searchable databases to the site has allowed Document Center owner Clandia Boch to leapfrog many of her competitors.
Inquiry.com includes the full text of 130,000 indexed and searchable articles from 23 publications, from Application Development to Windows Magazine.
Inquiry.com , launched in January 1996, has been growing at a steady clip; the user base has been expanding 50 percent each month. Inquiry.com charges vendors $25 every time a visitor requests product information. While the site is not profitable yet, revenues are doubling each month, and Inquiry.com expects to be in the black by the first quarter of 1997.
Travelers can get information they need to make decisions about where they want to go, and they can buy tickets directly from Travelocity. Soon they will be able to make hotel and car reservations as well.
The site was developed as a joint venture between Sabre Interactive, a $1.6 billion business making travel reservations in 76 countries around the world, and Worldview Corp. They have had about 700 articles in the press and about 50 TV spots.
It took about six months to develop, at a cost of upwards of a million dollars. But they are getting 20 million hits a month !
Launched on March 15, 1996, at a cost of less than $1,000, Rusty Zipper is a user-friendly site that allows shoppers to select the era and gender they are interested in and view a list of items with small thumbnail pictures, ten at a time. Most of the items are priced between $10 and $30, which is less than most non-virtual shops.
What has been most surprising about the venture is the styles and types of clothing that are generating the most interest. For Example: They cannot keep enough photo-print polyester disco shirts in stock.
Rusty Zipper currently uses Netscape's Commerce Server which uses SSL encryption, a very safe way to transmit credit card information. However, Rusty Zipper found that few people are familiar with Netscape's Secured transmission functions, and that people are more comfortable with e-mailing their credit card information. They have also established an 800 number that people can call 24-hours-a-day to leave order information.
Rusty Zipper is receiving an average of 150 hits per day, and visitors from 18 different countries and orders from all corners of the world. Rusty Zipper expects that by the end of 1996, they will have sold $20,000 to $25,000 of monthly one-of-a-kind clothes and cleared $10,000 in profits.
The development took about 100 hours in one month, at a cost of about $15,000. They are receiving an average of 800 hits per day, but at times, like Christmas, they get 10,000 visitors a day.
Launched in 1995, at a cost of just under $5,000, Eurosports goal was to find new customers. They are receiving 2000-3000 hits per week. Most of the hits come from search engines where users search on "soccer" or the names of famous soccer players.
The site paid for the initial investment in 8 months, and factoring in labor, it is getting to be profitable now.
While sales are a small percentage of Eurosports total sales, other sales come indirectly from visitors that request a print catalog from the site. The site is considered more of a marketing tool, a name generator.
SmartGames Inc., offers over $500,000 in cash prizes to customers who score well on its Smart Games Challenge CD-ROM game. So far this strategy has helped to generate $1 million in sales of the CD.
Happy Puppy started 18 months ago when three developers marketed their games by putting demo versions on a Web site. The strategy payed off, quickly mushroomed, and Happy Puppy has become a mecca for advertisers pushing everything from games to MTV to Sunny Delight.
Happy Puppy's ad sales have been growing by 35 percent a month since May 1996 and they expect to be in the black by October 1996.
Founder Bo Peabody says the precisely tailored "content" has attracted some 90,000 registered Tripod members and a slew of advertisers. Advertisers account for 95 percent of revenues ($500,000), and Peabody expects ad revenues to climb to $650,000 in the last quarter of 1996 - enough to put Tripod, Inc in the black.
The first order arrived in February 1996 from Japan. The $69 in shipping costs nearly rivaled the $87 order. But the owners stuck with it. Today, Salami.com is generating $8,000 a month in sales; a fraction of the $6 million volume at the supermarket, but monthly Web costs are only $1,800, mostly in fees to an Internet service provider.
The owners credit much of the Web success to First-class customer service. When shoppers place orders, Salami.com immediately E-mails back confirmations. If an item is out of stock, customers are notified by telephone. Each box is carefully packed with styrofoam and ice pads, and sometimes the owners even ship in gifts of balsamic vinegar and Italian cookies with personalized notes.
The beauty parlor's success comes from an e-mail auto-response service, or "mailbot", to entice new clients into the 37 locations worldwide. Thousands of prospects every month use the service to get specialty hair care tips delivered straight to their e-mail. The mailbot also adds prospects names to an e-mailing list for salon products and updates.
They have a multi-facted marketing scheme to attract visitors and keep them coming back. First, they advertise on a monthly basis in the leading wholesale and retail journals for the value-prized retail industry. They also publish regular articles in magazines promoting and educating readers on the Internet. Second, they are registered on two dozen of the leading Internet search engines such as Yahoo, Lycos, WebCrwaler, etc. They are also active in the community. For example, they recently published an article in AOL's popular "Your Business Newsletter" referencing the website. Third, their web address appears on all promotional pieces, stationary, business cards, etc.
The greeting card industry was dominated by a handful of major players such as Hallmark Cards and American Greetings. The partners knew they could use the Internet to help alternative cardmakers crack the traditional retail market. To secure content for their new company, Greet Street Inc., the entrepreneurs attended industry trade shows. They told these small card companies they shouldn't get shut out of the cyberworld as they did the retail world. Greet Steet now has exclusive agreements with 40 publishers, whose niche cards target everyone from gays to sports fanatics to environmentalists.
In 1995, the service was launched on AOL. A web site followed several months later. Visitors can use the fast-search function to pinpoint any of the 2,500 cards on the site. Crds are divided by category and typically cost $1.75 eack. Greet Steet's revenues for 1996 will be about $700,000.
Green Steet's biggest challenge is delivering a true electronic advantage. Among its many cutting-egde features is something called "perfect memory". Another winning feature is what Levitan calls "site Morphing". Greet Street has developed strategic relaionships with popular sites on the Internet. If a user links to Greet Street from a sport site, he will immediately see a sportsrelated card on the home page. Someone who connects from NetNoir, an Afro-centric site, will see cards targeted to a black audience. The founders are also developing a new line of interactive greeting cards called "E-greetings".
All these value-added features are helping to distinguish Greet Street from the herd and to catapult sales. "We fully expect to be a $100 million company within five year," says Levitan.
In a typical month, Career Magazine gets about 400,000 hits from job hunters; employers have made more than 90,000 hits in the resume area. And most importantly, the site is generating more than $20,000 per month.
PoinCast in only nine months, has signed up 1.7 million subscribers who pay nothing for the service. More significant, it has been able to lift its average ad rate to $42,000 a morth, more than double the Web average.
Daniels champions marketing via e-mail, partly because it works for him. The entrepreneur, who didn't jump onto the Net until February of 1996, advertises his manuals in four on-line newsletters. Interested consumers purchase it by e-mailing him. He also sends a complementary subscription of his own newsletter, BizWeb E-Gazette, via e-mail to people requesting it. On the newsletter, Daniels sells classified ads to other companies - usually 20 to 25 of them each week.In just his first four months, Daniels's solo company, JDD Publishing has sold over 500 manuals and the BizWeb E-Gazette has netted over 10,000 subscribers.
Today Jumbo offers more than 74,000 files and attracts more than 50,000 visitors daily. Dick Firestone, the owner, says Jumbo is popular because it dosen't charge users for the service. "It's free", he exclaims, "Everybody loves free!"
Companies generally pay Jumbo between $9,000 and $13,000 for a month of advertising depending on the length of the contract.
Last year, PhotoDisc offered visitors a free image to download in exchange for filling out a survey about themselves. From the more than 10,000 responses, the company was able to collect valuable information, including the types of images customers liked most and the ones they felt were missing from the catalog.
Their secrets of Success: When you look at the site you know what they are selling, and they have a very functional database for handling their massive selection of items. Many marketers refer to this massive selection of products and services as "Their Back End", which is where much of their profits come from.
In trying to determine what are the secrets of Successful Businesses on the Internet, I used the known Successful Businesses as my model to arrive at the following secrets:
. the names say what their sites do, or they reflect the names of the companies
. the names are short and simple
Sure, it costs a $100 fee for two years registration (the third year is $50 to renew), but when it comes to making money on the Internet, the name of your Web site is a key tool in your profit arsenal. A domain name gives you recognition and recollection and it makes your business much easier to find on the Internet.
My research of 55 profit-making companies shows that 84 percent of them offer hard-to-find products or services.
According to Daniel Janal, author of "101 Businesses You Can Start on the Internet", the most successful web-based companies sell hard-to-find products or services. This specialization (niche marketing) means you have less competition and therefore an increased chance of success.
And I found it quite interesting that of the 55 profit-making companies studied, 29 percent of them used the catalog formula: They make money on the Internet selling other people's product's. By having a web catalog, you don't have to develop any of your own products. All you have to do is select them and tell about them in a knowledgeable way.
My research of 55 profit-making companies shows that 84 percent of them provide useful information for free. Studies show that the most successful Web sites attract buyers by offering information of interest or value to them - free of charge. Website Promoters Resource Center, {http://www.wprc.com}, offers a variety of free resources and for fee services to help increase Web site traffic.
My research of 55 profit-making companies shows that 82 percent of them have been online for six months or longer. According to Dr. Paul Reynolds of Babson College, it takes a medium period of nine months before entrepreneurs who have opened businesses to find out whether or not they will make it on the Internet.
Reynolds, embarking on a two year study to find out what it takes to make that first startup work, studied 1,1160 would-be entrepreneurs for at least two years, analyzing how they put together their businesses and what factors influenced their success. Reynolds also discovered that the most likely entrepreneurs lived in the Northeast or the West.
My research of 55 profit-making companies shows that an amazing 100 percent of them have Web sites sprinkled liberally with hyperlinks.
Links are the highlighted passages of text that moves browsers from place to place on the Web and your site should incorporate them. By including links to other related sites, you can make your site a focal point for people who are interested in your products or services. And even more importantly, a recent survey of Internet users indicated that the single most appealing factor about a Web site is the number of links it offers to other sites.
My research of 55 profit-making companies shows that 80 percent of them offer content over graphics.
Visitors "surfing the net" come in, look, and move on. There is nothing worse than losing visitors to slow-moving graphics. ( According to GVU's 4th WWW user survey, the most widely cited problem was that it takes too long to view/download pages).
My research of 55 profit-making companies shows, as expected, that 100 percent of them advertise and promote their Web sites via Target Marketing.
Target Marketing means "identifying, locating, and contacting the exact people who need or want your product or service - and are ready to buy it".
Some of the techniques used by these successful businesses on the Internet are as follows:
A. Computer Bulletin Boards
America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe with millions of subscribers , are used by some of the most successful businesses on the Internet. A few even pay to have "keywords" related to their products or services.
B. Search Engines and Directories
Probably 100 percent of all successful businesses on the Internet take advantage of getting listed on search engines and directories. Usually it doesn't cost anything except time. But if you look further at these successful businesses, you'll find that 11 percent of them have made sales outside of the United States. And the fact that you can advertise and promote your Web site for in free in Canada, Japan, Africa, and other countries, may be time well spent listing your site in these search engines and directories.
C. Newsgroups and ListServ
Look at the Internet, not as a huge market of 24 million users, but as thousands of little markets. You can find these little markets through the use of Usenets, also called Newsgroups.
There are over 12,000 Usenets and new ones created each week. Essentially their are two different ways to contribute to a Usenet: The Newsgroups - you go to them and read. The Mailng Lists - also called ListServ, you subscribe to them and receive in your mailbox.
You can segment your markets by targeting the Newsgroups and Mailing Lists that are relevant to your product. Used carefully, Newsgroups and Mailing Lists can be the best place to launch a Web site due to the tremendous word-of-mouth advertising.
D. Web Based Malls
A web based shopping mall is a collection of home pages/ stores grouped around a theme. There are now malls for virtually every conceivable interest and taste.
E. Word-of-Mouth
Probably the most powerful form of promotion available. CD Now, Amazon.Com, Hot Hot Hot, and Virtual Vineyards, are some of the most successful businesses on the Internet; all give credit to word-of-mouth promotion as the main reason for their success.
For a long time, it puzzled me as to how word-of-mouth promotion occurred. Search engines and directories, being a more passive method of promotion, since they are used only when people online are looking for a specific product or service, did not seem to hold the key.
Then it occurred to me that the major bulletin boards, like AOL, Prodigy, And CompuServe, with their huge following, might be the answer. Again that did not seem likely because their is no central location to spread the word.
The One night, I thought I found the answer: Of course, Newsgroups and Mailing lists! But how? They had to have a group of twelve or so people on the Internet who spread the word to the rest of the Internet community. No, that could not be it! But how?
How does word-of-mouth spread on the Internet? And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning. The answer was in my research! The answer was that successful businesses were the ones who spread the word. They did it by giving out information to major newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, and major computer magazines, etc. They also used press releases (See Harley Davidson's site for a great example of a press release).
Even with today's best search engines, the Web is still overwhelmingly what marketers call a "pull" medium. A pull medium depends on users to know what they want and to go out and find it.
To reach a broader audience, companies need to add capabilities to "push" information about new products. Solutions can range from asking users to put their names on electric mailing lists, to targeting online ads to certain users.
Software companies are developing a variety of ways to track users' travels on the Web (see Cd Now), to create profiles of their interests. The profiles can be used as a basis for pitching specific products.
Borrowing from the models of radio and television, dozens of companies are experimenting with what they are calling "webcasting", a way to push information out across the Net, rather than waiting for consumers to find it. It involves dispatching collections of ordinary Web pages, news updates, and increasingly live sound and video geared to a particular audience and even a particular person.
Already Webcasting is starting to click for PointCast Inc. Since May 1996, some 1 million customers have downloaded PointCast's startup software, a screen saver that automatically dials up PointCast's server to receive and display news, sports, and scrolling weather reports and stock prices as specified by each PC owner. Just as on a TV channel, the service is paid for by the advertisers whose message also flash on the screens.
An auto-responder is an automated computer generated response to a request for information via e-mail. This response may consist of a sales letter, price list, or any information that would be useful to a potential customer. This service can be a very powerful tool if you intend to market a product or service on the Internet.
How can an auto-responder help your business?
A. your business will benefit from the immediate response to potential customers
who are "hot" for more information.
B. You save valuable time by eliminating the need to reply to every request manually.
C. 24-hour availability means customers inquiries are answered even when you
are not available.
D. Worldwide availability via the Internet.
E. Easy to use and familiar to any email user.
F. Much less expensive than phoning or faxing back information.
For an example of how to write an Autoresponder message that gets results, go to Autoresponder
Spend considerable time searching for sites that have related information on them. Then contact them to add a link to your web site. The plan is to get as many sites as possible to put a link to your page.
Visitors "surfing the net" come in, look, and move on. You need to grab their attention quickly. You have about two or three seconds to entice the reader to stop, look at your ad, and read your headline. The headline is by far the most important line in the ad.
The most powerful headline you can write contains your biggest reader benefit. What is it that makes your product unique and different? This is called your "Unique Selling Proposition", and can be an effective headline.
When placing ads and messages with different services and providers, make certain to code your ads so that you know where the responses are coming from.
Keep records on responses and sales to help make future Marketing decisions.
Beyond freebies, the look, feel, and quality of your content is critical. This requires time spent on layout and design. The successful businesses on the Internet have fun, and easy-to-navigate Web sites.
Update information in your Web site so that people will have a reason to come back. A web site can look stale after only a few weeks of neglect. Avoid the appearance of neglect by time proofing your web site: Do not put in "last changed" dates unless you plan to change things with regularity; Review links to other sites to make sure they did not become "dead links".
One of the best ways to show off the timeliness of your Web site is a "What's New" area. Here users get an overview of the freshest content. In addition, they will see that the site has been updated consistently throughout its lifetime, which will give the impression that the site is healthy and evolving.
Providing the best customer service goes a long way towards establishing a reputation online. The most successful businesses on the Internet include 30-day guarantees, 24-hour responses to inquiries or orders, secure order forms, and offer multiple routes of feedback, such as e-mail, fax, 800 lines, etc.
According to surveys conducted by Jupiter Communications, a New York Market Research firm, and others, the number one feature Web surfers look for when they shop is convenience.
Note: Why you Should Accept Credit Cards
Credit card industry experts tell us that 55% to 60% of all Internet, Phone, and Mail order sales are done by credit card. Why? Consumers feel safer using their credit cards. Internet, phone, and mail order consumers know that if they do not receive the product or service they ordered, they can contact the credit card company and refuse to pay.
"Internet Commerce Services, 1996" Secure Pay
"18 of the profit-making Web sites I have studied have two items in common. They're mandatory if you're serious about your profits. A successful commercial site must have an interactive order form and the ability to process credit card orders. My research on profit-making Web sites shows that you should expect as much as 70 percent of your sales to be submitted from your Web site order form, as opposed to other means of payment"
"Netguide, October 1996, page 36, Steve Kelly, a researcher, speaker, and marketing analyst"
" Credit cards are the transactional life-blood of today's customer-merchant relationships, so it's no wonder that 90 percent of the people who shop online use credit cards for their purchases."
"Internet World, August 1996, page 36, David Angell, Senior author/ director at net.Genesis"
You need to capture information about the number and types of people visiting your site .You could run contests and games and ask for their names, addresses, and e-mail addresses. This information is valuable because you could turn to advertisers, or potential sponsors, to say how many people are visiting your site and what are the demographics of that group.
While some users enjoy seeing "visitor counters" at the bottom of Web pages, a counter can work against you if you've had few visits to your web site. Probably not a good idea to have a counter.
One of the most effective ways to promote your business and products is through the use of a signature file. A signature file is simply a tag line at the end of your e-mail message and Usenet posting that identifies you and what you represent.
Have a look at how people use this on the Internet and then find your own creative way to communicate your commercial message.
We humans are a doubting lot. We instantly put up a wall of skepticism when someone is trying to sell us something. To part with hard-earned money, you need to believe the product or service will deliver what it promises.
One way to cut down resistance is by the use of testimonials. They add credibility. Ideally, the testimonials are from ordinary people who are just like you and me. We are much more likely to believe them because they have nothing to gain or lose if we buy or do not buy. And the more testimonials, the more our wall of skepticism begins to weaken.
My research of 55 profit-making companies shows that only 7 percent of them use testimonials. One of the best is Auto-By-Tels: "Endorsements", "What Auto-By-Tel Users Are Saying".
Demographics of Who's on the Internet
Henry Ford made history with his decision to mass produce his Model T Ford at a low price for the mass market. Ford quipped, "The public can have any color it wants, as long as it's black".
Focusing on selling at the lowest possible price rather than on product variety, Ford sold millions of the Model T's. However, other manufacturers, especially General Motors Corporation, believed consumers wanted more choices and the market was becoming a segmented market. So General Motors began producing cars in different price levels, different sizes, and offering different brands, styles and colors. The result - GM's sales took off ! Ford's sales fell!
General Motors recognized that in affluent economies there are few completely homogenous markets; that is, markets of people wanting identical products of identical prices and quantities. In fact, markets for most products and services are heterogeneous; that is, they consist of diverse people with diverse needs.
These large, fragmented markets require a diversity of marketing mixes to satisfy their needs. The firm that offers a single marketing mix to everyone wastes its efforts. These fragmented markets actually contain many smaller submarkets (segments) of different needs best served with a unique marketing mix.
Since a firm's resources are usually too limited to serve every customer need, market-oriented firms select target markets from the larger number of market segments. The firms then develop unique marketing mixes to match these target markets.
Most firms segment their markets by demographic factors such as consumer age groups, income level, occupation, sex, and other descriptive characteristics of populations. Demographic statistics of the Internet are widely available. I summarize some of these findings:
Age
19 yrs and under 7%
20-39 44%
40-59 46%
60 plus 3%
Sex
male 70%
female 30%
Education
grammar school 1.7%
high school 6.3%
some college 22.2%
college graduate 34.8%
masters degree 19.5%
doctorate 7.4%
professional degree 4.8%
technical/vocational 2.5%
Martial Status
married 50.3%
single 40.0%
divorced 5.7%
Occupation
Computer 31.4%
Educational 23.7%
Professional 21.9%
Management 12.2%
Other 10 .9%
Geographic locations where users live
North America 86.4%
Europe 9.8%
Australia 1.8%
Preliminary findings of FeMINA's Survey of 1150 women surveyed found:
62% were between the ages of 18-35
64% had either some college or bachelors degree
34% made between $20,000- $40,000
Used alone, Demographic factors often don't measure precise differences in product and brand purchasing. It is the buyer's attitudes and interests toward consumption that influences buying preferences and not the buyer's age, income level, or other demographic characteristics.
Measuring buyers' attitudes, preferences, and activities is known as Psychographic Segmentation. Consumers are asked to respond to numerous statements about their activities, interests, and opinions (AIO statements) that reflect consumer lifestyles. Next you look for patterns of responses that are used to group consumers into lifestyle profiles such as "leisure-oriented", "retirees", "traditional housewives", or "feminists and moderates".
Based on survey findings, the Psychographic makeup of Internet users could look something like the following:
Usage
The most common use of the Web is browsing 76.0%
entertainment 63.6%
work 51.8%
shopping 11.1%
other 10.8%
Preliminary findings of FeMINA's survey of 1150 women surveyed found:
33% said their main reason for going online was for research
30% said email
13% said community
23% specified other reasons
1% said shopping
What They Do
go out to movies more than non-users
are more likely to vote than non-users
are avid readers of newspapers and magazines and watchers of TV
Getting Connection to the Net
25 % access the Web using 14.4 Kbps modems
39 % access the Web using 28.8 Kbps modems
48.5 % of people access the Web through local service providers
9.2 % of people access the Web via major commercial online services
such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy
Results from a survey of Internet users by the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center at the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology Survey.
Main Problems With Using The Web
The most widely cited problem was that it takes too long to view/download web pages.
Perceived weakness in web security - 60% site security concerns as the primary reason
for not buying merchandise!
Purchases
2.5 million (27% of www users) have purchased something over the Internet.
Approximately one third of American consumers plan to access the Internet in 1996 and therefore, expect online shopping to grow significantly.
Computer software is the most popular item bought over the Internet.
84% who surf the Web, believe they are likely to purchase one item over the Internet in 1996.
What They Buy
Research Survey Results of $125 million spent online:
PC Hardware/Software 55%
Informational Materials 30%
Airline(and other) 10%
Misc 5%
Some Facts About Online Shopping
The most-cited perceived benefit of online shopping:
24-hour availability (86%)
Access from any Web-ready PC (83%)
Less Travel (77%)
Time Savings (73%)
Privacy (47%)
The most popular items being purchased over the Web:
Software, publications, computer hardware, entertainment, and online information
People's Concerns About Shopping On The Internet:
Credit Card Fraud (see security)
Lack of data privacy
Unsolicited mailing lists
Merchants Legitimacy (see testimonials)
Lack of sales assistance
No cash payment option
Lack of Social Interaction
Misc:
People also do not like to have to pay time-fees to their Internet service in order to shop. Entrepreneurs and students account for close to half of heavy Internet users.
Forty-six percent of users said it was highly likely that they would buy less via mail-order if they started shopping online.
- Survey results based on 300 telephone Surveys with a random sample of U.S. consumers with daily access to a PC, over 400 online surveys, and four focus groups.
Results collected from a survey by MasterCard International for the National Retail Federation.
How To Drive Traffic To Your Web Site
When you launch a web site, one of the first steps you should take is to let the right people know you exist. Promoting your site online is the most targeted and least expensive way to build traffic. Since the audience is already on the Internet, you know they can access your site. And most online promotions can be done for free.
What follows are descriptions of key sites where you can possibly promote your web site:
Drectories are sites where people can go to search for information on particular subjects. They consolidate web sites into indexed directories, or categories. The best known is Yahoo.
Search engines let you search for web sites using one or more keywords or topic names. Some search engines check every word of your web page. Therefore, when composing your web page, put as many keywords and phrases as possible, in your page title and the top of your page. Probably the best strategy is to list your site according to topic or subject, with as many search engines and directories as possible since you don't know where sales will come from.
You can have the greatest looking Web site, with a great product or service, however, if no one knows about it, your Internet success will be fruitless.
In order to receive lots of traffic you need to promote your Web site in as many places as possible. You should take advantage of every search engine and directory as possible to maximize traffic to your Web site.
Let's say for example, that your company sells golf balls. You want everyone that is interested in golf balls on the Internet to know about your site. When this person logs on the Internet to find golf ball related sites, he or she will usually go to one or more of the search engines or directories. Your Web site should come up whenever someone searches for your type of business.
If your site is not on that list, they do not visit. The more links that exist to your Web site, the more people will visit. The people that visit your site will most likely return again and tell others as well.
So if you want to see an immediate increase in "hits", you must, at the very least, be listed on the Top 100 Search Engines and Directories
Database of 633 Free Place to promote your site:
The Top Ten
General Listings
Regional Listings
Topical Listings
Promote and list with those sites having high ratings ( 102-135 four stars; 68-100 three
stars) and not available at A1's Searchable Directory.
Kirkpatrick Secret Site
The Best of the Best. Lots of great resourcers!
Commercial Sites Who Will Promote Your Site
Just like the consumer malls you're familiar with, an Internet Electronic Shopping Mall is a collection of home pages/stores group around a theme. There are now malls for virtually every conceivable interest and taste (target marketing).
Unfortunately, there are promotionally minded Mall owners and then their are those who do little promoting. The promotionally minded Mall owners have extensive promotional campaigns to increase visitor traffic, including:
. card deck advertising
. articles in magazines
. getting the advertisers within their malls to promote their individual sites. This means
many visitors a day because all of the merchants sites are "interconnected"
The most complete list of Malls on the Internet can be found at "Mouse Tracks: The Hall of Malls"
Two Duke graduate students began the USENET IN 1979 to create a bulletin board-like atmosphere that would be conductive to discussions on various topics. Originally these topics centered on computers, programming, hardware, and software. Currently there are about 20,000 of these discussion groups, each devoted to a specific interest. You could not get a more qualified group of prospects. Newsgroups are grouped and named by topic and sub-topic. The main topics include:
alt- alternative topic discussions
biz- business related topics
comp-computer related topics
news-news network discussions
misc- includes anything not applicable to the main topics
rec- hobbies, recreational activities, sports, and the arts
sci- scientific topics
soc- social issues to include politics, cultural issues, religion, and minority rights.
talk- primarily debate-oriented subjects
However you cannot blatantly advertise to Usenet newsgroups. First, you need to familiarize yourself with as many Usenet newsgroups specializing in the areas of interest you wish to target. You will want to monitor these discussions for at least several weeks to get a feel for the group and whatever issues or interests are important to them. The fastest and easiest way to do this is to download their (FAQ) files "Frequently Asked Questions", as Usenet members expect new participants to read these files before becoming involved in any of these discussions.
y monitoring the different Usenet newsgroups, you can become an expert in your area of interest. You can then start uploading or posting "How To Files" on the boards that you are now a resident expert on. Doing this is considered a highly regarded gesture when it comes to online etiquette.
When you post to these "How To Files" containing the pertinent information that you have put together, it is acceptable to include a "Sig", which is a four line signature that could include your name, phone number, e-mail address, or URL, at the conclusion of your article for the reader to obtain further information.
Whatever the subject matter of your website, there's at least one and maybe dozens of newsgroups to forward a brief announcement. The group for group announcements of new web sites is comp.infosytems.www.announce.
Lists of Newsgroups:
Forum One, allows you to find targeted news groups or mailing lists through which you may be able to market your product or service.
Deja News
Newsgroup Index
There are numerous e-mail lists that carry content similar to that in newsgroups called "Listserv". Think of Listserv as ongoing discussions conducted in e-mail. If you subscribe to a listserve, your e-mail address is added to the list. The listserve has its own e-mail address. Anything sent to the listserve is automatically relayed to everyone on the list. If you post a query, or a response to a query, to the listserve, everyone on the listserve sees it and has an opportunity to respond.
The great thing about this type of advertising is that you are not required to have an Internet account. All you need is an e-mail address. Typically, you must sign up by sending a Subscribe message to the list address. Some lists require you to be a subscriber before you can post, others are open to any appropriate postings.
Here is a brief summary of some of the direct mail advertisers:
Targeted Emailers (email sent to specific groups)
1. Postmaster Direct -Postmasterdirect
2. Business Links - {targetem@bizlinknet.com -free info. via an autoresponder} Minimum order is to 4,000($200) email addresses unless a category is less than 4,000. All targeted email orders include a free autoresponder and a one time 5 line ad to their entire database of almost 400,000 addresses. For more info: Phone - 319/359-9527 or email - sales@BusinessLink.net
3. IncBase Digital Corp. (fastinfo@in2nett.com)
Specialize in creating customized e-mail databases gathered from commercial
websites specific to an industry, customer type, supplier, or other target group.
Target groups can be selected by SIC codes or by general industry descriptions.
For more info: Phone - 604/323-1906
Traditional media such as magazines, newsletters, and newspapers can be useful for directing consumers to your web site. They have the ability to reach a large number of people quickly but tends to be expensive.
Publish your URL in every promotion you do for your business: stamp label or print your URL on your catalogs, letterheads, business cards, and brochures. Another approach is through press releases. Web sites are currently a hot editorial topic in many publications. As you build your site, keep sending out new press releases. Launches of new sites may go unreported but heavily trafficked sites are getting lots of press attention.
And when you are getting lots of hits, you can get advertisers to pay you to promote on your site.