One of the primary mainstay's of BeOnTheNet's
service platforms will be the "Context Neighborhood"; putting
"home pages" up on the Internet can be, for many companies on the Internet,
a waste of money. In fact, the way we see it, "home pages" is almost as
trite and overworked as "home cooking". An Internet presence makes sense
for a company if it is included in their overall marketing and service
strategy.
The "key to success" is how they can use it to attract and keep-on-attracting their current and potential customers. For most companies, the secret is valuable and frequently changing content. Think of the sites you, yourself, keep coming back to. Why do you do it? Certainly not to read the ads or the "puff". But rather because the site offers you information and/or services that are not readily available elsewhere.
For most small companies, maintaining this interesting and changing content can be an "onerous" and expensive burden. There is their "soft-cost" of producing the information in-house and their hard costs of buying the content and placing and maintaining it on the Internet. Enter BeOnTheNet's Production Partner.
The Production Partner is the Producer and General Manager of a "Context Neighborhood" site. On this site he implements his vision of a Context Neighborhood. Its his own franchise, if you will, which he can operate within very broad guidelines. He takes care of keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. It may be that the Production Partner is knowledgeable in a specific area or has arranged for content providers to provide information. This might be easier than you think.
Virtually every type of business has its trade publications, publishers, authors etc. Working out a deal to present a chapter of a book on your Internet site is a win-win situation for both parties the author/publisher gets increased exposure for their book/publication while the Production Partner gets valuable content for the relatively minor cost of formatting it into web pages.
Every day I see requests for articles to be published in various newsletters, web-sites, etc. All the requesters are offering is a byline and a Link to a small biographical page which contains information about the author. Every Industry has its experts and opinion makers waiting and wanting to be heard.
Solicit information and Content from your Context Neighborhood clients. Allow each one to publish for free an article once a quarter. What does he get out of it? Publicity! You place in his article a link to his pages or a mailbot which sends out whatever information he chooses. If someone has his own site offer him a reciprocal link to it.
Your task as the Production Partner will soon become one of choosing the best material. Use your imagination.
You can use your Context Neighborhood site to sell itself. If its appropriate run contests to build traffic. The prizes need not be expensive. Last year, some web-site operators who where looking to build a skiers site for a particular area out west, offered a pair of lift tickets - total value $80.00. To participate in the contest web-surfers had to fill out an innocuous survey. The web-site operators than used the results of the survey to demonstrate to potential clients the type of people who were visiting their site. They got a lot of mileage and "sales appeal" out of that pair of lift tickets. You may even be able to get prizes from your Context Neighborhood clients - make sure that the information about the contest contains a plug for the prize supplier and a link to their pages.
Perhaps you have an idea for a "Context Neighborhood"
(see our prototype "Chamber of Commerce" which is both a "Context
Neighborhood" and a "Geographical Neighborhood" ).
Here's how it would work. You buy the site, we work with you on your business
and marketing plan for your site. We provide the technical tools and know-how
to get your prototype site up and running. We provide all the monthly maintenance
of the site at discounted prices. We work with you in establishing the
"price-points" of your service - but the final "price-point" decision is
yours. You charge what you like for the total service. You are our customer.
Here's what you get and what other software is available:
Let's define some terms so that the rest of this discussion
makes some sense.
Just what constitutes a Home Page?
Theoretically there is no limit as to how big a home page can be. From a practical point of view we believe that you are pushing your luck if a home page takes more than 20 seconds to down load to a users PC Browser with a 14.4KB modem connection. Many other factors come into play as well.
For billing purposes we define a dynamic "home page" as one with up to 2000 characters of text, three "Gifs" under 10k each and no more than 4 links - three internal within the site and one external link. However, these are guidelines.
For instance it is fairly normal for a site to have a
favorite links page. Typically these link pages don't have too much text
but might contain 20 links. That makes the page a little longer to setup
and longer to test on a monthly basis but we would still consider it one
page. However, you could accrue extra work charges on a monthly basis if
your "favorite links" kept testing bad because we might have to add change
or delete more than four links from that page a month. If we modified 14
links on that page we might charge you for the extras at $3.00 per link.
However if your site contained 50 pages and we only had to replace 25 links
even though they were pretty much located on one page we would consider
this part of our normal maintenance charge.
What is a Static home page?
We find that most sites are pretty evenly split between
dynamic and static pages. For instance if your site contains a resume page
for each of your staff, that information isn't going to change very often.
We would consider it a static page if it only had one or two internal links
which brought the viewer back to the calling page or your sites main index
page. Therefore we would not test this page on a monthly basis nor would
we bill you for maintaining it. If you want a change in it periodically
we will make the changes at an hourly charge.
What is a Mailbot?
A Mailbot is also known as an autoresponder. Your clients place "request buttons" on their web pages which will, within minutes, automatically send out any document to the requester. At the same time it is forwarding to your client the requester's E-mail address which they can use for future marketing programs.
This is a very powerful and valuable tool. There are web-sites which specialize in providing mailbot services, usually at a cost of $10.00 per month for each mailbot. They also charge you $25.00 to set it up. You get the right to run an unlimited number of mailbots on your Context Neighborhood! We charge you $10.00 (Less your Discount) for adding or removing a Mailbot. You send us an ascii text file, as supplied by your client and we put it up. That's it - no monthly charges.
We suggest that you use the number of mailbots you allow
your client to use as a demarcation item between various membership levels
within your Context Neighborhood.
What is the difference between full E-Mail Service and E-Mail Aliasing?
To gain access to the Internet your clients will need to buy that service from a service provider (ISP). A full service provider such as Netcom provides them with "POP3" E-Mail services. They would have an E-Mail address such as "jsmith@ix.netcom.com". If they change providers, because they got a better deal or service elsewhere their E-Mail address would change too.
For an individual user this might not be a problem. But remember, as a business people on the Internet they want to encourage their clients to communicate with them via E-Mail. Its faster and cheaper for everyone - therefore their stationary would contain the E-Mail addresses for them and their staff. Beginning to see the problem? They would have to change their stationary as well as notifying everyone of their new address. But wait, it gets worse.
Suppose "jsmith@ix.netcom.com" is an employee? He now goes to work for a competitor and his E-Mail follows him! Whereas if your client were in a "Context Neighborhood" with the Domain name Lawyers.com they could set the address as "jsmith@lawyers.com" and forward that mail to "jsmith@ix.netcom.com" using the aliasing feature. Then if they change providers you simply change the alias. If jsmith leaves your client can alias that mail to his replacement "mjones@ix.netcom.com" No muss - no fuss!
You can see the value of aliasing. Your client gets a further value with full E-Mail service. In the aliasing scenario every one had an individual account with the provider netcom.com. Their mailboxes actually resided on Netcom's machines.
Your Client probably does not need individual accounts for everyone - If they had a staff of six at $20.00 per month per account they now have a additional bill of $120.00 per month from their ISP. Perhaps 2 accounts would serve them - after all, how much time is their staff going to spend on the Internet other than the use of E-Mail? With full E-Mail Service they can set up six E-Mail addresses at Lawyers.com. Since each of staff member would have their own mailbox in the Lawyers.com Context Neighborhood they simply access their mail there with their own passwords whenever they want. Yet, your client can control the mailboxes for all of their staff. and save $80.00 per month!
The Virtual Subhost Member
Your client has his own domain name but his website is
located within your server. - The size of his website
should be restricted to 10 megabytes or less. He has 20 Mailbots and Full
E-Mail Service for 20 people and five dynamic home pages ( One Page can
be a form) and unlimited number of static pages and Anonymous FTP
Service ( We charge you $100.00 per month each, not discounted plus a charge
for extra dynamic pages, ($10.00) for changing mailbots and FTP Files)
The Basic Server Members
Client has his own 35 Megabyte Server - which you link
to your Context Neighborhood see full description of this
server's capabilities at http://www.beonthenet.com/servers/basic_server.html
. This basic server can be a Do-It-Yourself server or
a Full Maintenance Server where we do all of the Maintenance on a monthly
basis. Your charge would be 15% less than our listed prices.
The Full Server Members
Client has his own 100 Megabyte Server - which you link
to your Context Neighborhood see full description of this
server's capabilities at http://www.beonthenet.com/servers/prices_basicserver.html
. This full server can be a Do-It-Yourself server
or a Full Maintenance Server where we do all of the Maintenance on a monthly
basis. Your charge would be 15% less than our listed prices.
E-Commerce Solutions - Any Server from a Virtual Host
Member and up with it's own domain name can be equipped with an electronic
Commerce Solution. Using one of several National Brand Ecommerce Solutions.
For instance your customers can have:
Development and setup fees for all of these Websites
is additional. No two websites are alike and the amount of consulting,
training, and hand holding of a client can vary all over the lot.
In general, a basic Corporate Public Relations site ( see examples at:
http://www.beonthenet.com/samples/
) will cost from $1200 - $3000 to develop, copy writing and extensive
graphics development charges would be additional. Itemized Charges would
be:
