Finding Things on the World Wide Web

When you want to find products or information on the Internet the usual approach is to go to your favorite Search Engine (Yahoo, Google, MSN, Dogpile) and type in the words that describe what you want. The more precise you are with your search term the more accurate the results will be.

If you’re not sure what you want you can enter broad terms and see what comes up. A search for “Christmas Gift” will give you literally millions of results, which you can sort through until you find what you want. Entering the term “Christmas Gift for boys” will give you a much shorter list of results. Each time you narrow your search you will get fewer results. Narrow your search term by adding modifiers and you can get very short lists of matching websites or possibly even a “no match found for your search term”.

Turn this around and you can often find unique ways to sell the things you make or do to people who are looking for exactly what you have to offer. The more successful on-line businesses have been using this approach for years now and many new companies were started using this approach.

To use an analogy; if the Internet is a newspaper there are articles about lots of different things that appeal to a lot of people. If I’m looking for a used car to buy I don’t want the TV listings or horoscope getting in the way of my looking at the classifieds. I just want the section that has information about used cars.

As a business, you can start by making your website “relevant” only to a very specific searcher. It will probably reduce the number of “hits” or visitors your site gets but the ones you do get are the one most likely looking for exactly what you have to offer. The ones you got rid of by being very specific are the ones who didn’t want what you have. It’s a winning situation for you both; your website isn’t clogged by unwanted traffic and you’re not annoying the people who don’t want your stuff.

There is a time to make your appeal to a general public. I targeted the search term “Christmas Presents” last year. By “targeted” I mean I designed my website to attract the attention of the Search Engines in that particular search term. It was a good thing for us to do and we had a lot of new visitors looking at our products.

There were about 25,000,000 competing websites so the targeting process started in May. That way we got maximum exposure in November by being shown in the unpaid search engine results. We needed about 10 days to make and ship the goods so we couldn’t afford to wait until December to get the orders for the holiday.

This lead-time is important to remember. It doesn’t do you much good to wait until 2 days before the event to order something from the Internet. Not unless what you’re ordering are “sorry I missed your birthday” presents. When you do find what you want, make sure the business can deliver in your time frame.

Unpaid search engine results are the ones that come up without being paid for by a company. These are usually surrounded by the expensive ads of the “Sponsor Results”. Those ads may not have anything to do with what you want to see. If a company wants you to see their products, they can pay for their ad to be shown when you go searching.

Mike Myklin is an author, a lecturer, and an e-commerce owner. If you have questions about the Internet and e-commerce, you can send them to him and he will try to answer them in his column. You can also read this article on-line at http://www.myklin.com/.

E-commerce on the World Wide Web

E-commerce seems to be the new buzzword even though the dot-com industry has peaked and crashed. The stability of the survivors has been eyeballed by just about every business that avoided the rush. If you think about it, do you consider a business to be legitimate if they don’t have a website for you to see?

Not just established businesses are going on-line. As easy as it is to register a domain and get a “home page” going there are millions of people doing the same thing. They are offering just about everything under the sun in a medium that promises quick exposure to the buying public.
Got an idea for a company? There are countless offers to help from huge access providers like Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and many others. Don’t know much about designing a webpage? Not a problem as far as they’re concerned. All of them offer quick and easy to tools for you to use. If you can start a computer and get to the Internet chances are you can build a great looking site by using one of the free templates they’ll offer you. You won’t even need to understand html code.

Then what? You’ve got a great looking website. How do people find out what you’re offering? Word of mouth only works so far and then the site just sits there, with you paying the monthly fees for hosting, without so much as a whisper of a hint at a sale.

Here’s where you find out that having a website is not enough. Yes, people are looking for exactly what you’re offering but they aren’t seeing yours. You may have had a quick burst of interest for a few weeks before all the attention went away. What happened?

The Internet happened, that’s all. For all the power claimed for the Internet, it can be the most frustrating, irrational, and obnoxious creation since teenagers. There are ways to get your message out there but it will take time, energy, education and a fair amount of luck for your efforts to bear fruit. Don’t feel bad, though. Established companies have the same problems you do.

There are two ways to get noticed on the Internet. 1) Pay For Advertising, or, 2) Design better websites. Most people (and companies) flounder around with the second option until somebody gives up in disgust and just pays to get the results they want.

The big problem with designing better websites is that you are trying to second-guess someone else (the Search Engines) who (for the most part) won’t tell you what will give you the results you want. You can get good results but it does take time and concentration to make it happen. Plus, you can have millions of competing websites that are trying to do the same thing.
If you see advertising that “guarantees” you a specific result in Search Engine Results – BEWARE. There are several ways for someone to promise this but no one can guarantee you a specific result for anything besides your own unique name, which you can get without paying for it to happen. Take a healthy, heaping dose of skepticism and good sense to the Internet just as you would anywhere else.

(Next week – Search Terms and the Search Engines.)
Mike Myklin is an author, a lecturer, and an e-commerce owner. If you have questions about the Internet and e-commerce, you can send them to him and he will try to answer them in his column. You can also read this article on-line at http://www.myklin.com/.

What To Do With the World Wide Web

With the Internet in most people’s lives do you wonder just what uses we all find for it? The answer is just about as varied as the people you talk to.

Business, research, entertainment, communication; the ways in which you can spend your time are endless. The computer has finally beaten television as the # 1 way to spend leisure hours for millions of Americans. A recent government survey found that 3 out of 4 homes had a computer; that 80% of these had Internet access, and of these, 38% had high-speed connections.

Increasing numbers of people look to the Internet as a way to make some money. Domains are very inexpensive to buy and we all hear the messages about “The Power of the Web”. Is it really possible to make money using the Internet?

For more and more people the answer has been a resounding, yes. If you can avoid the scams and dead-end schemes, there are many ways to make a few extra dollars or even a living. A healthy dose of skepticism is always a good thing to use when looking at the “work at home” offers.

An example from my own business; every week I get several e-mails from people who claim their product (a “how to book”) will change the way I do business on the Internet. For the low, low price of only $19.95 they will share “insider’s secrets” that let them make thousands of dollars each month from the comfort of their own home.

Yeah. Right. You bet. Want to make a bet these books don’t include the instructions for me to write a how-to book and then SPAM the world until someone buys it? Sometimes they offer to let me have “resell rights” to their own books.

Another very popular approach is to have you accept a free Internet business for no charge. You can just send people to your website and when they buy your products, you get a check.
Okay, what’s the catch? You’ll find out you can also “buy” a place in a chain of people and get others to do the same thing. When they sell stuff at their site you get a percentage as their sponsor. This is usually set up as a monthly membership fee and you don’t get your percentage unless you pay for your membership.

Let’s repeat our warning: take a healthy, heaping dose of skepticism and good sense to the Internet just as you would anywhere else. There are legitimate ways to make money and they closely resemble things you see around you.
I will share the # 1 money making idea for an Internet business with you for no charge whatsoever.

Here it is.

You must create or find a product or service that someone else thinks is valuable and is willing to buy from you. That’s it; everything else is research and development.
This week’s definition – “Hits”, a person looking at one page of a website is 1 hit. If 2 separate pages are viewed that’s 2 hits, 3 pages = 3 hits and so on.
Good Luck!
(Next week – E-commerce and what to look out for.)

Mike Myklin is an author, a lecturer, and an e-commerce owner. If you have questions about the Internet and e-commerce you can send them to him and he will try to answer them in his column. You can also read this article on-line at http://www.myklin.com/.

Niche Marketing

The summer is here and, unless you're in the resort business, sales have dropped. It's a common problem for anyone who depends on the buying public to pay our bills.

Not to fear. We'll all see new traffic arriving in a few weeks and for many of us this is the only breathing spell we'll get this year. When website traffic heads for the cellar it's a great time to start looking at your next market.

What's a niche market? An opportunity to sell specialized goods to a specific consumer. The market tends to be low demand or seasonal.

Well, if it's a small market do you want to bother with it? Of course you do! If the market can provide you with a profit does it matter that you can't send your kids to college on what you make from it?

www.Myklin.com has several different income streams that are generated by niche markets. Each one doesn't break our backs carrying the money to the bank but each is profitable in their own time. Collectively, the income adds up.

Here's the power of the Internet working to benefit us. By finding and servicing a small market you can add income streams when everyone else's are dropping.

A Website Is Not Enough

It would be wonderfull if we could create the perfect website once and then just let it be. Unfortunately, the web won't let you do that. Search Engines are looking for fresh relevant content to offer their users. A website that doesn't change gets left behind.

For this reason, www.maintained-website-services.com spends a lot of time adding new relevant content to your web pages. It's the #1 activity for our staff!

You can find articles about the many aspects of running a website at our parent site, www.myklin.com .

Maintaining Websites

Why Use A Maintained Website Service?

When you're starting out in your own business there is a tendency to want to do it all by yourself. It's human nature to "be the boss" and pay attention to all the details.

But, there are only so many hours in a day and minutes in an hour! If you can make the world's best widget that's what you should be concentrating on doing.

Internet marketing is somewhere between being an art and a science. The basics sound simple (and really it's not that complicated) but the application can be very time consuming.

Think about this analogy for a moment.
If you grew up in the maze of a huge city you would know how to get from one place to another. You could make a great living by taking visitors from one place to another so they wouldn't get lost or waste their money going in the wrong direction.
To do this you would need a taxi cab. Would you try to build that vehicle yourself? Of course not; there's plenty of good companies that sell them to you ready to use.

On the Internet, we're the taxi cab company that you can use to get your products to your customers. You don't need to recreate the taxi cab - just use our services to move your products.

Analogies only go so far. In the real world what matters is the bottom line. Can you use www.maintained-website-services.com to make money or are the costs too high?

Our fees can be as low as:

• $25 per month for a website that has your domain name,
• we pay to register this domain for you,
• we register this domain in your name, not ours,
• we design the website for you, and
• we will make scheduled changes for you.

You'll pay the same amount of money just to have a hosted domain in many places. It's not hard to do the math and see why we're such a great bottom line asset to your business.

We have other services for existing businesses, as well. It's hard to beat the service of:

www.myklin.com

Maintained Website Services

Maintained Website Services
For many beginners on the Internet, the Search Engines should be the way to get visitors to the new websites. Unlike paid inclusion techniques you don't have to pay to get your site in front of the thousands of searchers looking for your products. With designing for "organic results" your site can rise in the rankings and be shown to people who want your products.

After 2 years of getting page 1 unpaid Search Engine Results for ourselves, www.myklin.com now offers to do this for you. Even if you have millions of other websites competing for the same search terms it is very possible for your business to get the same attention by using our maintained website services.

We have competed for some hot terms simply to prove our techniques work. With almost 8,000,000 competing websites we are inside the top 10 natural results. We can show you this at www.maintained-website-services.com as well as much more information that will make a difference to your business.