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Internet EducationThis page is designed to give you some basics on Internet business and covers topics in a summary format. The topics introduced in this Internet Education page will be covered in more detail in later pages. Location This information is
key to your Internet education. Let’s compare an offline business and an online
business. You have heard the saying
that the three things that a successful offline business needs are “location,
location, location”. Well, in the
online business world, location is the position of your website or your
selling location on search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) or on a highly visited
site such as eBay. If you rank in
the top few entries for your keyword on a search engine, you will get the
traffic to make your business successful. Do
not think that on the Internet the saying “build it and they will come”
applies. I can assure you that it
does not. If you list an item on
eBay that is popular, you will have people look at it and bid because people
know about eBay and millions of them use it every day. Part of your business plan for the Net must
address how
to get traffic to view your offerings. What is Traffic? An Internet business depends on traffic to survive.
Traffic is the term used on the Net to describe the number of visitors to
your website or to a website where you are advertising or selling a product.
Very simple --- no traffic, no shoppers, no revenue, frustration and failure. The “gold standard” for measuring traffic on the Internet is a site called Alexa.com. It monitors the Internet and counts "hits" (the number of times that a site is accessed). To further your Internet education, go to Alexa.com and select “Traffic Rankings” above the search box. Enter www.ebay.com and you will get your information. Exchanging Money on
the Net If
we are going to be entrepreneurs, we want to make money for our efforts.
We need a way to easily pay for things and get paid by our customers.
The old written check or money order can still be used, but the new way
is using credit cards or using a payment service called PayPal.
PayPal is owned by eBay and is a first class operation.
I have used PayPal for years, and I have had only good experiences with
it. PayPal
will accept credit cards from customers who do not have a PayPal account so you
do not have to set up a merchant account with the credit card companies.
This can save you money since a merchant account can be quite expensive for a small starting business. Another
great feature of PayPal is that it has a shopping cart feature that you can add to your
website for free. You can create
“Buy It Now” buttons for the various products that you want to sell and it
will interface right into PayPal. It
lets you have a very professional looking site with a shopping cart and the
payments are made through PayPal. I
use PayPal for all my financial transactions on the Net. If
you do not already have a PayPal account, I highly recommend that you open one.
Click the banner below to set up a free account.
Now that we have established the way to get the money into your account, let’s see what we have to do to get it there. Build a Mailing List In all the research that I have done about how to be successful on the Internet, the most common tool that the most successful individuals have is a large mailing list of customers or prospective customers. It is far easier to sell someone who has already done business with you and trusts you than to sell to a stranger. You
know from your off-line life that the businesses that you continually use are
the ones that did a good job and treated you right.
Once you gain confidence in them, you continue to go back to them.
The same is true on the Internet. I was fortunate enough to be able to take a class from Jim Cockrum, one of the most respected experts on eBay. Jim made the comment that if his office caught fire, the first thing he would save was the backup with his mailing list on it. From this point forward remember to capture the information about your customers or prospective customers. Build that all important list, and it will pay you dividends in the future. There are tools for building and maintaining mailing lists that we will address later in your education. These
are the basics. Let's move on.
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