INTERNET BUSINESS STRATEGIES 

In order to do business successfully on the Internet, you have to consider the following. 

    You need an e-mail address.
    You need to promote your business.
    You need a good name for your website, URL. 
    You need a website. 
    Get people to visit your website
    Invite people to reply by e-mail, fax or telephone. 
    Register with search engines. 
    Get statistics about visits to your website. 
    Get an evaluation of the efficiency of your website. 
    Improve your website. 
    Prepare for e-commerce taxes. 

I    E-Mail 
     To conduct electronic business successfully the first thing you need is an e-mail address. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will offer you one for free or for a modest fee. However, the e-mail address that you want my already be taken. You need an address that is unique worldwide. So it may take some searching and compromising to find one for you.

Occasionally, you may want to change your provider of e-mail services. For instance, you may not like the advertisements that go with a free address. If you are a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) you can get an e-mail alias. This means that you can keep that address when you change providers. It also means that your e-mail will be routed through the IEEE server, for example, which offers an extra firewall against viruses. 

II.   Promotion 
      As with all business and commerce you will have to promote your e-business and e-commerce. You can use all conventional means, ways and media. However, certain aspects are specific and you have to consider them.

Some users and authorities take a dim view of so-called scamming, i.e. flooding users with unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) messages. There are already laws prohibiting such activities and others are in the works. Click here for more information. 

The use of equipment that automatically calls a series of telephone numbers and leaves recorded messages is also considered annoying. 

III    Universal Resource Locator, URL
        The URL is the address of your website. It consists of <name>.<domain>. Typical domains are ".com" for commerce, ".edu" for education, ".org" for organization, ".mil" for military, ".gov" for government, and ".net" for network. These are all U.S. domains. The United States also has the country code ".us" that is used occasionally. Every other country has a country name such as ".ca" for Canada and ".uk" for United Kingdom. The country code for Moldova, ".MD" is popular among medical doctors! Note that there are no general rules about the allocation of domains. It is up to the registration agency to accept or decline a name. The world is running out of popular ".com" names and they can be traded at millions of dollars. As with e-mail addresses, your URL must be unique worldwide. Bertil C. Lindberg can assist you in obtaining a URL.

IV.    Website 
        The next step is to create a website and put contents on its pages. When you surf the web you will see all kinds of webpages, one fancier than the other. Do not fall for the temptation to make fancy webpages. You are not out to win a webpage award. You want to sell your products and services. Make sure that advertisements for the products and services of others do not overwhelm the promotion of your own products and services.

Avoid using dark backgrounds - in particular black - for text, which will then be hard to read. Do not use a small font that is difficult to read. Backgrounds and pictures will also slow down the downloading of pages. Your potential customers and clients may give up before they get to the promotion of your goods. Keep your webpages simple! 

Make sure that the contents of your website can be displayed and printed without scrolling left or right. You may have noticed that text to the right of a site does not print. You do not want this to happen to your site. 

Websites are written in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), in one of its versions, or in similar languages like the Extended Markup Language (XML). You want to write your website in a language that most browsers can read, like the basic HTML. A browser is a computer program that reads the contents of websites. The Microsoft Internet Explorer and the Netscape Communicator are examples.

There are HTML editors like the Microsoft FrontPage and Netscape's Composer that automatically write in HTML. Thus, you do not have to learn HTML, even though it is recommended. Knowing some HTML lets you edit your webpage content. There are simple books like the 10 Minute Guide to HTML.

You want your customers and clients to be able to register and to communicate with you to order your products and services, and to pay for them by credit cards, etc. - all from the website. For that you need one or several fill-in forms on your website. You can arrange to have the filled in information sent by e-mail to any e-mail address of your choice. You can read about how to create them in manuals and help-files. Also ask your ISP regarding fill-in forms. 

If you select a free or low fee website and/or e-mail server, the ISP may restrict the sizes of your e-mail and the number of website hits. Make sure that you agree to the ISP's rules.

You can also have your own e-mail and website servers. To start you only need something like a Microsoft NT or 2000 Server. 

V.    Increasing Hits and Traffic
        It is essential that your potential customers and clients visit your website to be exposed to your promotional efforts. There are several ways to increase the traffic to your website.

    (1)    Use a Title of your site that conveys what you offer. Search engines look for Titles and direct surfers to your site depending on the text in the Title.
    (2)    Use META KEYWORDS in the head of your HTML text. For example:
<meta name="keywords" content="cat food, organic, your name">
This is another kind of text that search engines look for. However, do not overdo your META-files. Some search engines are programmed to reject webpages that are considered being designed to manipulate search results.
    (3)    Add a META Description Tag to describe your site for the search engines. Sample: <meta name="description" contents="The best place to find organic cat food">
    (4)    Register your website with search engines. You can do this individually with each engine, or you can use services that do it for you. With several thousand search engines in use worldwide, registering with all of them is a chore. 

            Yahoo! has an extensive website that tells you how to suggest a website to them. Go to http://howto.yahoo.com/chapters/10/a.html and click on Suggesting a Site. 

VI.    Customer Relations Management (CRM) 
         You have the option to encourage people to correspond with you by e-mail. To get replies by e-mail you need to post your e-mail address on your website, and/or have forms for replies, comments, ordering, etc. You should encourage people to give you their e-mail address.

People will also reply by telephone and fax. If you expect any reasonable number of phone calls you will need a Call Center. A more up-to-date name is Contact Center. Because customers and clients will contact you by voice, fax and e-mail, you will need a Contact Center, that handles all kinds of contacts. Information about the caller, including history, e-mails, faxes, etc. should be displayed to your customer representative at the same time that he/she takes a call.   

VII.   Register with Search Engines 
          Listing with some ten of the top search engines should give you good enough service. Among the top engines are All the Web (Fast), AltaVista, AOL, Excite, Go.com, Google, HotBot, Lycos, Microsoft's MSN, Netscape, NorthernLight, WhatYouSeek and Yahoo!. Note that rankings differ with the ranking criteria used. 

To reach them try websites that offer listings, such as Open Directory, Webcrawler, etc. You can also list directly with each search engine. 

VIII.   Hit Statistics 
           You need to know how successful your website is, i.e. the number of people that visit it and what they are looking at. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer  hit counters. Ask your ISP how to install a counter. They are all different. 

A hit counter typically displays the number of previous visitors. If you do not want your visitors to know that number, there are programs that send the information to you only. Other programs give you the number of hits for each page of your site. 

Several programs that track hits are available. They will report the number of hits per page, the referring search engine, the domain name of the visitors, etc. Among such programs are HitBox and WebPosition. 

IX.    Evaluate the Efficiency of Your Website 
         You should evaluate the efficiency of your website. This can be measured in the number of hits, as stated in Section VIII. above. The amount of purchases, the listings by search engines, etc. are also part of the efficiency. Continuously make sure that your site does not have any dead links, that browsers will find it, that download times are reasonable, etc. There are services that evaluate the efficiency of your website, some for free. Try ProBooster, ProBoostGold and WebPosition. 

X.    Improve your website 
       Use all the information you have collected to improve on your website. Bertil C. Lindberg can assist you in making this endeavor successful. 

XI.    Prepare for E-Commerce Taxes 
        Governments are always looking for things that can be taxed. E-commerce is no exemption. However, there are also strong oppositions to taxing e-commerce. Some jurisdictions are levying taxes on e-commerce, others are not. Some are payable by sellers, others by users and third parties. Click here for more information. 

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Last revised July 20, 2003.
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