Online Manual - Introduction
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Introduction

The Illusion
The Internet. What a wonderful place where anyone with a few dollars and basic computer skills can start a business which will flourish. If you can get a home page on the World Wide Web, then you can reach millions and millions of people. Your business will get tons of publicity and your product or service will sell internationally. So you work hard learning how to write web pages. Then you work harder actually compiling the information and creating the pages. You spend time learning how to go about posting them on the Internet, whether it is through a local Internet Service Provider, or a large Service like America On-Line. Finally, your pages are on the WWW. You can see them up there, and all your friends and colleagues can see it as well. You then register your home pages with the search engines such as Yahoo and Web Crawler, and expect to see the hits counter on your page click by as if hooked to the second hand of your clock. In reality, you only see a few people trickle into your site, and you wonder what happened. You try a keyword search of your site, and it either never appears, or is far down the list of thousands of similar, or not so similar sites.


What Went Wrong?
First of all, you have been duped by all of the media hype and "lies" that circulate in the Internet community. Secondly, you do not have a good marketing strategy.

You were led to believe by all of the hype that you simply just need to get a site on the Internet, and that is it. There was a time when this strategy of blindly posting a home page on the Internet would have brought you lots of traffic. But now, the Internet is flooded. It is overloaded with home pages. With everyone from the CIA, to your state government, all the way down to your neighbor's vacation photos, all on the Internet. The number being added every day is staggering. With the larger providers such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and America On-Line helping people put up free home pages, the numbers will continue to keep growing. So you are literally one in a million. Marketing in this caldron of sites is tricky. Even with a good strategy, it is difficult to stand out among the noise that is the huge population of web sites.

The media has hyped up the Internet more than it is. They tend to focus on the big companies that are starting Internet sites. In most of these stories, they usually say how easy it is for anyone to get on the WWW and how the Internet is the New Market Place for the future. And true, it is easy to get on the Internet, but it takes a lot of hard work and planning to effectively market your site. You can not just place a sight up on the Internet and make a fortune, or advertise your business effectively. Throwing a home page up on the Internet today is equivalent of you posting a single ad on a street pole in NYC. Who is going to notice? Not many people.

There is quite a bit to learn about the Internet, and many people are jumping right in without much knowledge. This is the perfect setup for disappointment. Your best defense is to learn as much as you can about the Internet before you put any work into your site.

So, before you can begin to market your home pages, actually before you even create your home pages, you need to come up with an effective marketing plan. I am not going to get into detailed marketing theory, but I will try to point out what things you need to think about and how they are unique to the WWW.

I repeat - You need to formulate your marketing strategy BEFORE you create your web pages. Most of you reading this have probably already created your web pages, have published them on the Internet, and have registered with the search databases. This is OK. However, don't let what you have already created hold you back. After reading this manual through, you will most likely be changing you existing documents and adding even more. Constant changing of your documents to fit better with your readers and the Internet in general may be a weekly or monthly chore.


The Main Reason Your Site Does Not Get Many Hits
The main reason a home page fails to attract a large crowd is the simple fact that the business is using the home page as their sole means of marketing. In other words, most people out there create their home page(s), register them with the search engines, and sit back and wait.


The KEY CONCEPT to this entire manual is that of defining your home page as simply your "shop" or "store", and that you will use many other techniques to market your "shop" and to bring people into it.


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