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Web News & Tips - Issue #242 Web News & Tips Published by MateMedia, Inc. Your Partner on the Web Providing quality Web services at affordable prices since 1995 MateMedia provides the following services: * Small Business Web Hosting (Shared & Managed Dedicated Servers) * Web Design & Development - Custom Web Applications * Database Development & Hosting * Website Maintenance & Webmaster Services * Search Engine Promotion (Optimization & Submission) * E-Commerce - Shopping Carts - Sample Shopping Cart * Domain Name Registration * Domain Name Affiliate Program * Web Hosting Affiliate Program * FREE Website when you order a web hosting account! For more information about our services email sales@matemediainc.com or call us at 877-309-7521 - Read what our clients have to say about us IN THIS ISSUE: Host your website with MateMedia and get a free merchandise shop Become a MateMedia Domain Name Affiliate Become a MateMedia Web Hosting Affiliate Free Webmaster Tools Free Scripts for Your Website 10 Critical Things to Know If You're Marketing on the Internet Web News A Step by Step Guide to Getting Started on the Web Recommend this newsletter to a friend Advertise in Web News & Tips 10 Critical Things to Know If You're Marketing on the Internet By Susan Dunn 1. Who are you marketing to? Someone who would open an email with "president of South Korea" for the subject line, that began ... "Dear Friend, My name is JANG DOO- HWAN, The brother of Mr. Chun DOO-HWAN, former President of South Korea who seized power..." You recognize those emails from a mile away, but they wouldn't still be sending them if someone wasn't opening them and responding to them. What they're seeking is the tens of thousands of people who enter the Internet for the first time every day. 2. Whatever your market, it's far from saturated on the Internet. In no other medium is there such movement. If you repeat a snail mailing within 6 months to the same addresses, what percenage of names do you think would be new? How many people tune in to "Law and Order" for the very first time each week? 3. It presents unique marketing challenges. If you have a product or service that "hasn't taken off yet," you must figure out whether more time and the constant stream of new people would make a difference, or whether it's just terminally a bad idea. 4. This means you can repeat yourself, but this also means you must repeat yourself. If a train left the station at ... Okay, say you have an eZine that's doubling every six months, and the average open-rate is 30 percent. If you get lazy and repeat the first issue at the end of the first year, how many of your subscribers could your predict would be seeing it for the first time? 5. Every day someone toddles onto your website who's never heard of PayPal ... ...who doesn’t know to scroll down, or how to reset the text size for their browser, who’s afraid to put their credit card on the Internet, and who wonders why that print is blue, i.e., it isn't just your site that's new, it's the Internet that's new to them. 6. We can count on the fact that every day there will be more non-US individuals surfing the web, and more individuals whose first language is not English. Keep this in mind as you write copy, talk about holidays, and make references to statistics. We are used to saying “the divorce rate is 50%.” We mean “in the US,” and it’s generally understood to mean “in the US,” but those days are disappearing fast. 7. It's multicultural and global. Start checking on how US-centric you are, i.e., Thanksgiving Day is October 13th ... in Canada. Labor Day is May 1 ... in Mexico. New Year's Day is lunar, late-January to mid-February ... in China. And for those people of those cultures who reside in the US and other countries. 8. While we're hunkering down for winter in the US, it's spring in New Zealand, and each has a very different energy. That teleclass you schedule at 8 pm CST, US, won't be attended by a lot of folks in the UK because it’s the middle of the night over there. 9. Remember co-evolution. Don't be alarmed at the changes. Yes, the spam got out of hand, and yes, "they" came up with spam filters, and yes "they" found a way around them, and yes "they" called it something else and came up with something different. Staying ahead of the pack has always been necessary to stay competitive. Same game, different playground. 10. So, whether you’re anticipating Thanksgiving Day or Eid al Fitr this month (November), or both, qué le vaya bien. Increase your rank in the search engines! Check out our new search engine optimization plans Become a MateMedia Small Business Web Hosting Affiliate Web News It's going to be a busy holiday season, as research indicates that shoppers will take to the Net, buying and spending more than they did in previous years. Jupiter Research (a unit of this site's corporate parent) expects 2003's online holiday sales to be led by new shoppers, resulting in a 21 percent increase over 2002. According to the firm's holiday shopping report, nearly 40 percent of surfers plan to do some or all of their holiday gift-buying online, ringing up an average of $265 per person. The future of digital content is a memory card about the size of a postage stamp, according to research conducted by Aberdeen Group for the Internet Home Alliance. The Boston-based research firm and cross-industry network of companies — which boasts a roster of members ranging from Cisco and Microsoft to Sears and Whirlpool — finds that consumer adoption of memory cards will continue to grow and that SD (Secure Digital) memory cards are becoming the leading format for storing and transporting digital content. The postage-stamp size SD Memory Cards hold from 8MB to 4GB (expected by end of 2004) of data and are ideally suited for transferring and storing images, video, music and other types of digital data. According to Panasonic, a founding member of the IHA and a member of the SD Association, a 512MB SD Card can store up to 7,000 JPG images, up to three hours of MPEG4 Video and up to 11 hours of digital music. Who says married people don't have more fun? According to New York City-based Nielsen// NetRatings, they certainly spend more money online than their single counterparts. Internet audience survey firm Nielsen//NetRatings analysts indicated that while the e-commerce industry continues to boom, married Web surfers have been found to make more online purchases than single surfers. The news came on the cusp of the holiday shopping season, traditionally a popular time for e-commerce purchases. Not surprisingly, analysts also noted that while married surfers spend much of their time online visiting family-oriented sites, single surfers seek to benefit from the social convenience of the Web. A study from AMI-Partners reveals that U.S. small businesses added 382,000 new employees and spent $86 billion on IT products and services over the past 12 months. Overall, U.S. small businesses expanded their workforce by more than five percent. Spending on IT products and services grew by 11 percent. Hotspots of IT spending activities include Internet Infrastructure, Web services, wireless networking, data storage, and security. Fifty percent — nearly 3.5 million small businesses — reported moderate to strong revenue growth over the past 12 months. Yet a weak economy has taken its toll on small businesses with 25 percent — approximately 1.9 million small businesses — experiencing declining revenues over the same time frame. Copyright 2000-2003 MateMedia, Inc. |