When Create your own world of a profitable online business

If history can be reduced to one overriding principle, it'd be this: every new technology change society forever. The development of ironworking changed military and construction forever, enabling us to wage longer wars, to build taller buildings, and to develop tools to move beyond agriculture for the first time in history. The development of the printing press allowed ideas to be spread to the common man, pushing us toward democracy and putting a market value on ideas. And the development of corporate law allowed industries to develop to the point that ever-higher levels of industrial development and research were possible, completely transforming the world in the space of about 150 years. Today, the new technology is the Internet. And in the fifteen-odd years that the Internet has been available to the masses, it's created nearly as many opportunities for promotion, communication, and business as all the massive technological development throughout history. In this book, we will focus on one of the most profitable opportunities available to the prospective online businessman today--direct response website marketing. We'll talk about just what direct response site design is, and how to design your web pages in order to convert as many visitors as possible into satisfied customers. We will talk about the nuts and bolts of building a website, whether you want to do it yourself or whether you want to hire a professional coder to do it for you. We'll talk about what to include (and what not to include) on your website, and we'll give you the tools you need to write a sales letter for any product you choose to promote. And finally--and most importantly--we'll help you come up with some ideas to promote your website that'll bring in the traffic you need to make your business idea into a proven success. 5 Sounds good? Then let's get started by talking a little bit more about your chosen medium--the Internet. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTERNET Some of the revolutionary technologies we talked about at the start of this chapter--iron refining in particular--had their roots in military applications. It's a strange irony of human life-commented on by several philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche not least among them--that war, the most destructive of human drives, is the one that most often requires people to stretch thin resources far enough in order to develop new, world-altering technologies. And the Internet is far from the least of these military "success stories." The seeds of the Internet were first planted in America in the 1950s, during the height of the Cold War. In response to fears of Soviet domination of two critical technology races--the Space Race and the nuclear arms race--the United States government created ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to develop countermeasures to the perceived Soviet threat. One of ARPA's first major successes was to develop rules of communication--the ancestors of today's network protocols--that allowed all the United States’ radar systems to be linked together, which would enable them to communicate rapidly and retain infrastructure even in the event of an unexpected nuclear attack. Fortunately, that nuclear attack never came--and equally as fortunately, the scientists at ARPA began to realize the non-military potential for the linking of vast computer systems. The first plans for ARPAnet--the predecessor of the Internet--came about as part of an effort to make it easier for vital research- 6 based computers to communicate with one another, allowing scientists to coordinate their research efforts across vast geographical distances. After some years of work defining some of the basic principles on which the Internet works (a discussion of which is well outside the scope of this book), ARPAnet finally went live near the end of 1969, with four "nodes" active at four prominent universities. By 1971, the first emails could be sent across the network (and soon email was taking up some 75% of all network traffic--some things never change!), and by 1973, it was possible to send files from computer to computer through the FTP protocols that the Internet still uses today. Although computer processor speed, memory capacity, and general power advanced exponentially throughout the years, one of the most significant events in the development of the Internet came in 1978 when Western Union, the British Post Office, and a network company all came together to create the first truly international computer network. At around this time, the number of network nodes on ARPAnet were growing into the hundreds--making the project far more ambitious than the initial plan to simply connect a handful of powerful research computers. But the greatest step in the Internet's development came in 1983, when the simpler ARPAnet protocols for transferring information were supplanted by the TCP/IP protocol still used today--which transformed the ARPAnet into what we recognize today as the Internet. THE HISTORY OF THE COMMERCIAL INTERNET The basic idea of the Internet--allowing people to communicate and share data across vast geographical distances--was too good to keep away from the public 7 for long. And in 1985, the government recognized this by opening ARPAnet--now more properly known as the Internet--to commercial interests. Those commercial interests initially did little beyond allowing anyone who wanted to--rather than anyone with military clearance or academic credentials--to access the existing information networks that comprised the Internet. Companies like CompuServe and Prodigy offered anyone who was willing to pay for the privilege to use phone lines to "dial-up" computers connected to the larger Internet, which would then allow users at home to access the same database of information used by the academic computers--or at least a proprietary version of the same information. However, while computer technicians on ARPAnet or computer enthusiasts on the long-running Telnet might have been willing to learn the sometimes-arcane process of accessing information on the Internet, the majority of potential users tended to view the Internet in the same way as a casual library user might view an encyclopaedia--nice to look at sometimes, but ultimately not worth the trouble of owning. That was largely changed by the efforts of the fledgling Netscape company, whose Mosaic web browser (one of the earliest versions of the once-popular Netscape Navigator) made use of a new protocol for accessing information on the Internet: HTML. Before HTML, the process of sending information on the Internet was usually limited to sending large text files (that required a separate program to open) or to using a proprietary form of encoding information--proprietary forms that usually skimped on things like presentation, graphics, or other features that we take for granted on the Internet today. HTML, by contrast, allowed nearly anyone with a basic knowledge of computer programming (or anyone who was willing to learn a few simple formatting instructions, or "tags") to create web pages that looked nice, create images to illustrate product offers or scientific concepts, and to "link" people to other 8 websites. (If you're interested in learning more about HTML, stay tuned--in a later chapter, we'll discuss more about the ins and outs of HTML than you may ever have wanted to know about--and if you don't want to know about it at all, we'll discuss some ways to get your HTML coding done for you.) The advent of HTML allowed the Internet to grow exponentially. And grow exponentially it did--by the mid-1990s, the Internet had moved beyond a few simple "bulletin boards" and academic research compendia. Now, companies were starting to sell their products online--artists were distributing their work in vastly populated forums--even families were publishing their own "web pages" to announce family events to the world at large. The age of the Internet had truly arrived. SO WHY THE INTERNET? If you're reading this book at all, it's likely that you've already decided to use the Internet as a major distribution tool for your product (if not the exclusive distribution tool for your product.) But for anyone who hasn't yet made that decision--or for anyone who wants to know just why the Internet is so ideal for business purposes--we'll talk briefly about why the Internet is a perfect vehicle for virtually any good or service you might want to sell. As of 2007, over one billion people worldwide use the Internet. However good the offline marketing for your product is, that's too large of a potential market to ignore. More than that: if you promote your product by traditional means, the number of people you can reach is limited by the amount of money you can spend and the number of media outlets you can reasonably contact-meaning, most usually, the media in your city alone.