Success Strategies for the Internet - Continued

The Internet is not the field of dreams - if you build it they will not come. It takes time to build awareness of your brand name into a reasonable number of Internet users. We will show you the "tricks of the trade". But even with these publicity tricks, you should not expect to see "instant results" If you are not prepared to spend from 9 months to a year working with your presence on the Internet you probably should not even bother starting.

Know Your Audience

You may want to consider the following guidelines when advertising on the Internet:

• Target a specific audience

• Make your information valuable

• Continually update the information

A "user friendly" easy-to-use interface that offers information of value to your target audience should be the overall goal of your Internet marketing plan. Remember, this is information your audience wants, not necessarily the information you want to give them. In most cases you will have to "sugar coat" your sales message in much the same fashion as if you were sponsoring a TV show. If the show, your Internet Information and/or services, is a hit, you're in!

Don't skimp on the information you offer. If you do you may not attract your audience or keep them. Rather, you should strive to create a presence on the Internet that is The resource for information in your field. You might publish, for example, technical manuals with searchable indexes , installation guides, and service notes on your products. This would allow you to provide a better service and technical sales support at a fraction of conventional costs - and remember your RoboRep is servicing your customers 24 hours a day 7 days a week. .

Or you might make available information that seems only tangentially related to your product/service, but is of great interest to Internet users in general or a much smaller subset of Internet users, particularly if they match the demographics of your target market.

Exploit Internet Technology

The Internet offers all businesses, large or small, reasonably priced access to global markets and high speed business communications. Profits from Internet sales are possible due to the low advertising costs, and the strategic recognition you will receive as as a global player with product/service expertise.

Advertising in newspapers and magazines or on television and radio is based upon the one --> to many model. The more people an advertisement can reach, the more expensive the advertisement. Advertising on the Internet dispenses with this model. By contrast your Internet advertising should be based upon the one --> one model - our old friend the RoboRep.

Think of the Internet not as a huge 37 million plus market but rather a horde of niche markets. If you need to address the entire horde fine. But even an IBM - not exactly a little outfit with limited appeal, has organized its site to be of easy use to the various niches within their huge market.

Your initial start up costs to produce your Internet Presence will be your biggest cost - Maintaining an Internet Presence is much cheaper than creating it. But unlike building a new factory or a space ship you don't have to do it all at once. In most cases your site will continue to grow as you add new information and/or services, much of the information you want to publish probably has a pretty good shelf life. If you maintain that information people will remember. Eventually you will develop a global catalog of information about your products and/or services which is constantly evolving.

For instance, earlier in this document we gave you highlights of two recent Internet surveys which provided information about the size and growth rate of the Internet and demographic information about Internet users. In the future when you return to this document that part of the document will always be upgraded to include more and/or more recent surveys.