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YouTube was recently purchased by Google for
$1.65 Billion. News website Digg.com went for
$60 Million. MySpace.com sold to Rupert Murdoch's
News Corp for $580 million. The second wave of
an internet explosion is definitely upon us and
we're going to party like its 1999. What does
it mean for business? What can we learn from these
explosive new websites and how can we apply their
strategies for our business?
We developed a keynote presentation for the Direct
Marketing Association Summit meeting held in September,
2006, in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida titled "Web
2.0 - The Ten Websites defining the new internet."
We will summarize the first five websites and
web trends in this article, and we will follow
up with five additional websites in our next edition
of Ten Golden News.
What is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 is a phrase credited to Tim
O'Reilly. His website defines Web 2.0 as "the
second-generation of Internet-based services that
let people collaborate and share information online
in new ways - such as social networking sites, wikis,
and communication tools." The phrase is now
commonly used to identify websites that are defining
the new internet.
Website #1: Pay Pal - Trend: eCommerce Explosion
The first website defining the new internet is
PayPal. In July 2002, eBay purchased PayPal and
this deal created major shift in thinking for
most internet users from "I'm not sure if
I trust the internet for purchases" to "I
see that there is a safe way to buy online, and
I now recognize the leading and safe way to do
it." This shift in thinking opened the door
to over $150 Billion of online commerce each year
and increased trust in online credit card transactions.
Some others significant sites making ecommerce
'real' include eBay (with 211.9 million registered
users and $44.3 billion in goods sold in 2005),
Yahoo Stores who made it easy for small businesses
to set up and market an ecommerce website, and
a new player to watch out for: Google Checkout.
Google has launched technology that will allow
consumers to safeguard emails and passwords and
integrate seamlessly with Google advertising and
analysis.
How to apply this trend for business
eBay offers business a fertile testing ground
for offer testing and can be a great marketplace
to sell outdated stock and various merchandise.
eBay stores and Yahoo stores offer small businesses
an easy, secure method to set up an ecommerce
website. If you haven't bought or sold anything
online before, I recommend that you make a few
purchases and sales on eBay to get familiar with
the online ecommerce business and the most active
online ecommerce community.
Website #2 - MySpace.com - Trend: User Generated
Content
In the first few years of the century, websites
such as Friendster.com
and Ryze.com
gained popularity as social networking websites.
They allowed users to create personal profiles,
network with each other and communicate through
the automated system. A Venice Beach California
website called MySpace.com
provided its users with the ability to create
virtual websites. Personal 'spaces' featuring
pictures, links, favorite music and links to their
friends spaces. The site became popular with bands
and teens and it took off! MySpace was rated outside
the top 100,0000 sites in 2004 by internet rating
site Alexa.com it has become the number 6 ranked
Alexa site based on unique visitors and pages
viewed by early in 2006.
The major trend driving this growth is 'user
generated content' - web pages created by users
not by website owners. Other sites growing with
this trend include YouTube.com
a site offering users the opportunity to upload
and view video content for free, it is ranked
number 10 by Alexa and has over 30 million pages
viewed per day!
CraigsList.com is a site featuring mostly
free listings of rentals and job opportunities,
it ranked number 30 on Alexa, FaceBook.com,
a version of MySpace targeting university students
has 7 million users, Flickr
a photo sharing site is number 39 on Alexa, Digg.com
allows its 1,000,000 visitors a day to vote for
top news stories and has been called 'the new
New York Times'. Two new sites to watch for in
the space include Revver.com which runs ads at
the ends of videos and shares revenue with the
videos producer and Brightcove.com.
How to apply this trend for business
A few methods to apply this opportunity to your
business include creating corporate sites like
a recent movie entry http://www.MySpace/SnakesOnAPlane
and a new 'space' for the AIDS charity (RED) http://www.MySpace.com.com/joinred
. Creating interesting videos will build 'viral'word-of-mouth
marketing opportunities, a hot recent example
includes the Dove Evolution campaign which shows
an ordinary model transformed into a billboard
beauty http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
this video has been downloaded 1.7 millions times!
Another example of using video for business comes
from a new partnership between Google and the
National Hockey League to provide game video at
http://video.google.com/nhl.html
. You can also Digg stories on Digg.com
and create employment listings on CraigsList.com.
WebSite #3 - Blogger - Trend: Blogging and
Vlogging
Blogs (short for web-logs) were originally internet
journal websites updated daily by members of the
media and teenagers. Technology providers like
Blogger
(purchased by Google) TypePad
and MovableType
evolved to make blogging almost as easy as emailing
and today there are millions of blogs.
In early 2004 the Howard Dean for President Campaign
hit its peak, and much of the credit for the early
success of the campaign went to the internet marketing
activities utilized by the campaign organizers.
The Dean team used blogs to monitor the reaction
to Dean speeches and strategies. In addition,
the team used internet marketing to raise unprecedented
amounts of funds for the campaign over the internet.
In September of 2004, blogs once again made the
news. Television news anchor Dan Rather reported
a story about President George Bush's military
service. Very quickly, bloggers went to work proving
the Rather story was not true and the anchor along
with several members of the news team were out
of a job.
How to apply this trend for business
Blogs have evolved to become effective business
tools. A CEO blog is a method for a company to
communicate with interested parties such as customers
and investors. The blog itself is a powerful search
engine website. The search engines love lots of
words on the page, new content frequently updated
and many links to the website. Blogs have all
of these features and bloggers frequently link
to each other in the 'blogosphere', helping blogs
perform in Google and other searches.
With many visitors and lots of free traffic from
search results, a number of tactics have evolved
to allow bloggers to make money from the visitors
to their sites. Google, Yahoo and many other search
engines offer 'contextual' search ads. These ads
are generated by the words on web page, advertisers
bid on ad positions featuring defined keyword
phrases in the same way they bid on ads searched
in the search engines. When these ads are clicked
on the search engine splits revenue with site
owners. Visit the Ten Golden Rules blog for more
internet marketing tips.
Website #4 About.com - Trend: Sites Built
for Search
Almost every major category search today returns
a result for a large information style website
such as About.com,
HowStuffWorks.com
or Wikipedia.org.
We identify this trend as 'sites built for the
search engines.'
The search engines determine which sites are
shown on page 1 of a search result by analyzing
over 100 different elements in their algorithms
(Here's a link to the page where Google describes
their trademarked approach: http://www.google.com/technology).
Websites are rewarded for a combination of relevant
text appearing on the site, important sites linking
to their pages and lots of content regularly updated
on the site. These massive websites developed
to answer every question with unique pages of
content perform exceptionally well in searches
and deliver millions of free clicks to the sites.
The New York Times acquired About.com
from Primedia for $410 million in early 2005,
today About.com reaches an audience of 22 million
unique visitors each month and generates significant
revenues through contextual advertising (Google
style ads triggered by the text on the page) and
banner advertising. Some others players in this
space include Wikipedia.org which describes itself
as 'the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit'
and HowStuffWorks.com
describe itself as "the leading source of
credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations
of how the world actually works."
How to Apply this trend for business
You can optimize your website to take advantage
of free search engine traffic.
Step 1, identify keywords phrase that people
are searching for when looking for your products
and services. Use a great free tool available
at: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/?mkt=us
click on the Keyword Tool and enter a term you
think people use to search for you. The tool displays
how many people search this term and other terms
including the words you entered. Select three
different highly searched terms for each page
on your website and use them 2-3 times on the
copy on the page and in the title meta tag.
Step 2, build links to your site. Request links
from highly ranked, relevant websites. Suppliers
and complimentary partners make great link sources.
Also, identify main directories such as Yahoo.com
and MSN Business Directory and specialty directories
in your industry. Are you on any boards or a member
of Chambers or Associations? If so request a link
with your name listing.
#5 DailyCandy.com - Trend: Online Subscription
Model
Daily
Candy was founded in the middle of the dot-bomb,
Dana Levy a former writer at New York Magazine
started emailing approximately 700 addresses including
her personal list of friends and editors. According
to their website, Daily
Candy, is 'a free daily e-mail newsletter
and website, is the ultimate insider's guide to
what's hot, new, and undiscovered - from fashion
and style to gadgets and travel.' The real magic
is in the list - now over 1.2 million names.
Daily Candy is projected to generate over $10,000,000
this year and the company is valued in excess
of $150,000,000. A number of sites such as eDiets,
BeliefNet,
BabyCenter.com,
Astrology.com utilize email marketing as a core
component of their marketing mix, or as their
main money generator. Many internet companies
can monetize email names and in some cases the
list has become more important than the original
products and services the company promoted.
How to Apply this trend for business
Build your list! On our site we offer a number
of free offers in exchange for your email address,
in fact, many of you are receiving this newsletter
because you opted in for one of these offers.
We offer a Free download of the Ten Golden Rules
of Internet Marketing presentation, we wrote the
forward to an ecommerce book and we offer a free
down load of the entire book The eMarketing Guide
to Promote Your Products and Services on Internet
and we offer a FREE subscription to the Ten Golden
Rules eNewsletter!
Another powerful tactic to list building is co-registration
or 'co-reg' in internet lingo. A number of websites
offer registrations on their website, they in
turn offer these registration slots to advertisers
on a per name acquisition costs. Have you signed
up for a Hotmail account recently or signed up
for a free diet profile at eDiets or a bible reading
of the day at Beliefnet? These registrations include
'opt-in' sign ups for everything from free newsletters
to magazine subscriptions, and each of them generates
hundreds of thousands of names for their advertising
partners.
Are you looking for a new multi-million dollar
business idea?
One of our clients is purchasing over 500,000
'opt-in' names each month for between $.25 and
$.40 per name. All of the subscribers have clicked
on a box asking to receive a free eNewsletter
or free offers. Within 1-2 months our client has
paid for the names with revenue from advertising
in their daily eNewsletter and emails to the list,
after this time period the names generate pure
profit and this has created a new multi-million
dollar business on top of their previous business
model! If you would like to learn how this approach
might apply to your business please call us at
Ten Golden Rules 561-620-9121.
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