Those of us trying to do business on Internet are constantly bombarded with information, statistics, and marketing advice. Go to your target market. Claim your niche with your "unique selling position." Promote your brand. Develop a web "community." Publish a Zine. Provide worthwhile content. All of it, good advice. But these marketing gurus leave out a very important and indisputable fact. People want to be entertained! And they don't want to have to work to enjoy their web experience. The success of television, a completely passive activity, attests to that. So, what should be done? How do we keep our audience long enough so that we can tell our story and promote our product?

Streaming media provides a vital answer. It has a 70 percent click-through rate for content, a 60 percent click-through rate for advertiser information, and a 49 percent "buy" rate for online merchandise. Those statistics, provided by Carton-Donofrio Interactive, are proof of success of streaming media when it is used in a creative and content rich environment.

What is streaming exactly? Streaming promises quick access to crucial audio and video content without aggravating wait for files to download. Downloading requires that files be sent to user's PC in their entirety before they can be played; MP3 audio is a perfect example of this. The files then remain on user's machine until they are deleted. Streaming continuously sends these same files, which have already been digitized, to user's PC while user is listening or watching. When stream is ended, no data is left behind on user's machine.

How can we use this exciting technology to create "stickiness?" The possibilities are endless:

In fact, a site with poor navigation is a site which will not see a large number of repeat visitors. Today internet and web are just to massive for anyone to spend any significant amount of time trying to figure out how to find out something from your site. Most people (myself included) will simply surf elsewhere very quickly rather than hunt around for what we need.

One feature common to any well designed web site (at least any web site of any size) is a site map. This document is similar in concept to a table of contents in a book. It's purpose is to give your visitors an overview of contents and organization of your site.

All right, so you've got a search engine on your site, you've got a navigation system which is good and you've cross linked everything so your visitors can get around as needed. So why do you need a site map in addition to all of this? The answer is simple:

- Sometimes your visitors want to get a view of your whole site's organization and design in order to efficiently explore what you've got.

- It is a way to show off all of information that you have made available to them.

- Site maps are good pages to submit to search engines, as they include links to every page on your web site.

Some critical things to keep in mind about site maps:

- Keep your site maps up-to-date and accurate. If your site map is not useful, then you may actually wind up chasing away people instead of attracting them.

- Remember you want to include as much of your site as possible on one page, but you do not want to increase load time to point where no one will want to wait for it.

- Make sure your site map links to all of pages within your site.

- Link to your site map from every single page on your web site.