Using the right Internet Business Tools for your venture is essential.
This seems so obvious it feels a bit silly saying it, but so often statements like "such and such a program is useless" are bandied around the internet when in fact the person really means "I am using this program the wrong way entirely".
In the offline world it is fairly obvious that selling hotdogs at a local football match is different from selling caviar at a 5 star restaurant. Online similar differences apply just as much, you need to know your customers, know their preferences and their abilities and market accordingly.
The following list of internet business tools will give you some idea of how many different ways there are to take your products onto the internt.
Web sites - the "Real Estate" of the Internet
This is the cornerstone of any internet business, it's a shop front, contact point, sales counter, mail department, goods and services catalogue, customer relations department and everything else all rolled into one presence in cyberspace.
search engines - the yellow pages of the internet
Potential customers must be able to find a web site easily, and most will turn to the search engines to locate suppliers. Achieving a good ranking on the major search engines is essential.Email - the basic communications tool
Around 70 billion emails are sent around the globe every day, a huge volume of (almost) free communications for every conceivable purpose. When used and managed properly it can be a usefull addition to any business, however the high percentage of uninvited junk mail can detract from it's usefullness.
Ad trackers - monitoring and measuring results.
One of the advantages of marketing on the internet is that every advertisement, every email, every connection can be easily monitored for effectiveness. Who reads your advertisement? when do they read it ? how long do they spend reading it? where do they live? what browsers do they use? what response do they make ??? Ad-trackers can make all this information available, allowing businesses to quickly discard ineffective methods and refine customer relations at all levels.
Autoresponders - the salesmen of the internet
Few people will buy anything on first contact, most will respond only after several contacts, so following up initial enquiries is essential. Autoresponders can be used to store letters and information to send to interested shoppers at intervals over a period of time, buildng trust and credibility.
Affiliate programs - a chain store in every home
Hundreds of thousands of items are sold over the internet using affiliate programs to reward people who advertise and sell other peoples products. From well known sites such as Amazon and SFI to individual authors of books and software, nearly everyone selling on the internet will pay a commission for sales of their product.
Specialised sites such as Clickbank and CommissionJuntion make it possible for anyone to market their product easily on the internet using affiliate programs.
mailing lists - building a neighbourhood for your store
In the world of bricks and mortor location is king, which is why businesses pay top dollars for good real estate. There is no location in cyberspace of course, the equivalent is to build your own neighbourhood by building and maintaining lists of interested potential customers.
safelists - swapping email ads with others
Marketplaces are busy places anywhere, thronging with people looking to buy or sell, and the internet is just the same. Safelists are simply lists of people who have agreed to accept emails from other merchants, on condition they will reciprocate the offer. Some of these lists contain tens of thousands of addresses, while others might only have a few hundred.
hit exchanges - reciprocal web page advertising
Like safelists, these programs facillitate communication between internet businesses, through the simple process of reciprocal viewing of websites. Again these exchanges vary in size and quality tremendously, from hundreds of thousands of members to just a few hundred. There are even programs such as TrafficHoopla which specialise in monitoring the thousands of exchanges and safelists on the internet.FFA pages - junk mail that sells
Free advertising - surely that is every businesses dream! On the internet there is no shortage of places to advertise for free and one of the oldest is the Free For All ad page. Anyone who wants to advertise on these pages is invited to place a one-line ad with a link to their website on the site. The ads scroll down the page, as one is placed on the top of the page, one falls off the bottom of the page to make room . Depending on how many people place ads, an ad might stay on the page for a day, or an hour, or a few minutes.
Sounds complicated ? Click here to see one in action!
ezines - interesting articles to carry your ads
Interested in one legged hockey teams? Or maybe minature submarines? No? Well how about ....? If you have an interest in anything, you can bet there will be a website on the subject and most likely a regular mailout as well - an Ezine. The magazines of the internet, Ezines are produced by a huge variety of individuals and interest groups and can be a very effective means of targeting markets for specialised products.
Learning the trade
Fortunately there are some excellent resources available on the internet to help everyone. This is a very new experience, even for the "old hands" and the internet is changing all the time as new technology and new programs evolve. One of the best general business information sites is Michael Russell's MPAM or Massive Passive Advertising Machine, while the "bible" of web page building is still the book written by Ken Evoy, Make Your Site Sell
