7. Ability to do business 24 hours How else you can continue making sales, while your stuffs are sleeping! The biggest advantages of online shops are that they are open 24 hours a day year round. Thanks to Internet off time, when your shop is generally closed, sales in some cases can be more than your regular business hours!

8. Low start up costs

Building a web site does not require big investments. There are many low cost tools available today, which can help you create sites from very scratch. Many business portals allow you to build web sites from templates. For less than 100$/month you can have a full-fledged corporate e-business site with all e-commerce features!

9 You physical presence could be in any location The World Wide Web allows you to do business from any part of world. Your physical location, except for few cases is not that important since you conduct your business online. 10. Go global Thanks to Internet you can instantly become a global player. In fact, you don’t have to invest large sums of money to do this. There are literally hundreds of vertical and horizontal e-marketplaces available on net. These marketplaces allow you for a nominal fee to get access to a large audience of prospective customers from all over world. According to AMR Research more than 1,3$ trillion of good and services will flow through B2B marketplaces. Who does not want a piece of this pie!

The right determinant of e-business success is same like any off line business. You have to have a great idea, you have to have a business plan, there should be a value proposition for prospective clients and you should have belief in it and your ability!

Getting online is becoming cheaper and easier thanks to emergence of new technologies but marketing on Internet is becoming more expensive.

Take your business online now, before marketing costs become way too expensive for small companies.

Other Directories

Other small but notable directories that you should consider are joeAnt, GoGuides and Gimpsy. Don’t expect large traffics from these directories; however, they will help enhance your link popularity. Link popularity is a concept which means- how many sites have links pointed towards your website. Link popularity is important because your website’s rank in search results depends on it in a big way.

Search Engines

Search engines use special programs to crawl Internet and index web pages. These robot programs are called “Bot” or “Spider”. Spiders crawl up Internet using links. That’s why it is so important to have back links to your website. When you make a search, search engines show you results that are retrieved from servers, where all indexed web pages are cached. Only when you click on a link from search result you see real web page.

The most important search engines are Google, Altavista, AllTheWeb, Teoma, Lycos and MSN, HotBot, AOL Search, etc. Google

No doubt that Google is best search engine available on Internet today. According to Google, they have indexed over 3.5 billion pages up to now! More Internet surfers are prone to use Google because it has great search enhancing functions, and you can always expect relevant and quality search results.

You can submit your link using Google’s Add URL page located at http://www.google.com/addURL.html. However, if you have links pointing towards your site on other websites, you can be sure that Google’s spider, Googlebot will eventually come and index you site. Contrary to popular believe once your site is indexed, there is not need to resubmit your pages to Google, even if you updated pages. If, although it is not necessary, you submit your website to Google, submit only index page, it will find rest of pages using links anyway. Altavista

Once powerful, Altavista started to loose grounds to other search engines in a big way. Submitting to Altavista is fairly simple! From home page click on “Submit a Site” located at bottom of page. There are two choices for you: either you can choose “Basic Submit” service, which is free or for an immediate inclusion, you can choose “Express Inclusion” service.

To prevent automatic submission of URLs, on submission page Altavista added submission code that has to be inserted manually along with URL. The Express Inclusion service costs US $39 for first URL for six months. AllTheWeb

This search engine is becoming quite popular lately. It has a very large database. AllTheWeb has very sophisticated search functions like searches for pages linked to a given page, searches within URLs or page titles, and searches limited by page size. It provides search results and technology to Lycos and Ebay. Submission to AllTheWeb is quite easy. Use following link page to submit your URL: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_URL.php If you need an express inclusion, you have to use “Lycos InSite“ service of Terra-Lycos. The rate is US $35 for a full year inclusion.

Teoma

If you care about Teoma, a much hyped search engine, which is actually an additional search engine of Ask Jeeves, you can use its paid inclusion program located at http://ask.ineedhits.com/sitesubmit.asp?id=30270. It charges US $30 per year for first URL and US $18 for additional each.

Inktomi

You may not heard about Inktomi, but many popular search engines use results from Inktomi such as AOL, Excite, Go.com, HotBot, IWon, Overture to name a few. For secondary search result even MSN uses it! Yahoo! recently bought Inktomi. Which means that very soon even Yahoo! might give priority to search results coming from it. Inktomi provides a paid inclusion service. Inktomi sells its inclusion service exclusively through its reseller partners. You can find them over here: http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/submit.html The fee is US $39 per URL for a year and US$25 for subsequent URLs.