- A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTERNET .............................................................. 5
- THE HISTORY OF THE COMMERCIAL INTERNET ................................................ 6
- BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DIRECT RESPONSE..................................................... 13
- Basic Rule #1: No External Links............................................................... 14
- Basic Rule #2: Small User Base, High Conversion Rate ................................. 15
- Basic Rule #3: KISS................................................................................ 16
- THE FIRST STEP: SITE MAP AND DESIGN...................................................... 17
- SITE DESIGN AND THE THREE CLICKS RULE.................................................. 20
- COMMERCE SYSTEM .................................................................................. 21
- BELLS AND WHISTLES ............................................................................... 22
- HOW WEB PAGES WORK ............................................................................ 24
- KEY HTML TAGS........................................................................................ 25
- TAGS IN DIFFERENT BROWSERS.................................................................. 28
- CSS ........................................................................................................ 29
- PLAIN TEXT HTML VS. AUTHORING TOOLS .................................................... 30
- WHAT TO LOOK FOR .................................................................................. 32
- WHERE TO FIND CODERS ........................................................................... 35
- WHAT TO SPEND....................................................................................... 37
- CODER COLLABORATIONS .......................................................................... 38
- THE BASICS OF COLLABORATION ............................................................. 38
- Additional CHARGES: HOW TO HANDLE THEM ............................................. 42
- SALES LETTER FORMAT ........................................................................... 46
- FORMATTING ISSUES FOR WEBSITES........................................................ 49
- MANAGING COMMERCE .............................................................................. 53
ONLINE COMMERCE AND OFFLINE BANKING ............................................... 53
SHIPPING ISSUES .................................................................................. 55
SOFTWARE PIRACY AND FIGHTING IT........................................................ 57
PROMOTING YOUR SITE ............................................................................. 60
BASICS OF DIRECT RESPONSE WEBSITE PROMOTION.................................. 60
DIRECT ADVERTISING............................................................................. 61
INDIRECT ADVERTISING.......................................................................... 63
AFFILIATE MARKETING ............................................................................ 65
EXPANDING AND IMPROVING YOUR SITE ................................................... 67
EXPANDING YOUR PRODUCT LINE........................................................
1.
WHY WEBSITES?
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.
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.
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
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
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.