The Pendulum Swings Both WaysWritten by Elena Fawkner
The first quarter of 2001 has been a shocker for many, if not most, online businesses, particularly those that rely heavily on third party paid advertising on their websites and in their ezines. It doesn't seem to matter who you are - Wall Street Journal or one-person webfront operation.Hot on heels of spiralling stock indexes and dot-com failures, many people are just plain leery of anything that has an "Internet" label. As a result, many online business owners are shutting up shop, figuring that returns just aren't worth investment of time and money. But wait. Let's take a deep breath and look at what's really going on here. You should be encouraged. THE GOLDRUSH In beginning Internet was new frontier. With all those metaphors being bandied about all over place - talk of gold rushes, pioneers, gold nuggets just lying there for taking - "go west young man (or woman)", echoed in our ears, "stake your claim to your share of Internet riches". And so every man and his dog and every woman and her cat slapped up a website and started publishing an ezine. After a while, our pioneer started making actual money charging for advertising on her website and in her ezine and selling latest information product and business was plentiful. THE PLATEAU After a while, things started to level off. No longer experiencing heady rush of exponential growth on a weekly basis, things started to level out. Business remained solid, however, and our pioneer, now thinking of himself as a capital E "Entrepreneur" figured, OK, this is end of first big growth phase. It's time to start consolidating. And so our entrepreneur started investing in already-formed relationships, concentrating on existing customers, developing his "List" of contacts and joint venturing like crazy to try and sustain momentum. THE SHAKE-OUT But then things started to go wrong in promised land. All of a sudden most promising, courageous and innovative Internet businesses started to, well, bomb. All of a sudden, venture capitalists were demanding business plans that actually required business to turn a profit. No longer was it enough to be on cutting edge of an emerging new economy. Now all of a sudden bankers started talking about "returns on investment", "time value of money", and (shudder), "profit"!
| | Are You Guilty Of Being An "Information Overload" Junkie?Written by Mary Holzrichter
If you're like me, perhaps you've been on internet for less than a year. For those first few months, you pretty much just surf around absolutely dumbfounded by all information available in cyberspace. Wow! After a while, you actually feel yourself becoming addicted, and you can feel yourself being transformed into (Oh, no!) a "Mouse Potato".Since you love this internet thing so much, you decide you may as well earn some money while maneuvering that mouse. What a great idea! My own home business! You join as many freelance "work at home" job sites as possible, sending out your resume to all of them, and hoping that you'll land that perfect administrative-type job. Well, it appears that those jobs are few and far between. For every job opening, there are literally thousands of applicants. Unless you're a transcriptionist, have website design or techie skills of some sort, they are next to impossible to land. So, it's on to a new quest! By now you are definitely determined to make money on internet. So you go into a manic search for perfect affiliate program. After an exhaustive length of time and a few bad judgments, you settle on one or two that you feel are right for you and that you believe in. Onward! In meantime, you have it in your head that you need a website. When promoting your affiliate program, you suddenly start noticing thousands of ads for information on internet marketing. Many of ads are for marketing newsletters. Oh, my, look at all this information. So you start signing up for just about every newsletter. Hm-mmm! How to design a website, how to work search engines, how to get your ad to 600,000+ per day, how to write effective ads, how not to write ads, how to make your website sticky, how to publish your own newsletter, how to be one of 5% who make it through first year, how to not be one of 95% who don't make it through first year, how to use autoresponders to run your follow-ups, how to keep from having your ISP shut down by people yelling "SPAM" at you, how to handle customer relations, how to do viral marketing, how to brand your business, how to go about campaign marketing, how to produce website traffic, and list goes on and on. And I ended up spending most of my time reading them. Sure, I learned a lot, but I don't even have a website yet! Uh-Oh! Now look what has happened! You've got mountains of printed out information on every imaginable subject, your bookmarks are overloaded, your email folders are bulging, AND you find you're not using any of it because you've got SO much, you've forgotten about any of it specifically. I won't even mention all those "had-to-have" eBooks. The heaps of paper are piled so high that it has become an insurmountable task to go through them, and bookmarks have strange titles which don't ring a bell, some of emailed newsletters are still setting where you put them to read more in-depth later, and you get to point where you wonder,
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