A Website? Why?
By Jennifer Stewart
Write101.com


You hear a great deal about the Internet these days - that it's
revolutionised communication ... commerce ... education ...

Life-As-We-Know-It ...

Is this just hype?

You be the judge:

An Internet Tale

After spending over twenty years at the Chalk-face - as a high
school teacher, the novelty had worn off somewhat - so I did what so
many others are doing now, I started looking for ways I could
achieve that most desirable of lifestyles and be my own boss.
Home Based Businesses (HBB) are the fastest growing segment of
the economy with thousands of people launching out on their own
every week. But there are pitfalls in setting up your own business:
capital equipment can consume huge quantities of your precious
resources; advertising costs can be horrendous - but since they're
the only way you can tell people about your product or service, you
have no choice; printing costs eat into more of your money; then you
have to pay for postage, long distance phone calls and faxes to
suppliers and customers ... And we haven't got to the problems that
can arise when suppliers let you down, when there are problems
with transport ... aargh!

If I sound as if I've 'been there and done that' ... it's because I have.
My first business was marketing a series of courses I'd written. I had
the courses printed; I set up a free-call number and a reply-paid
postal system; I advertised in all the major newspapers in three
states; I paid to have the courses mailed to those who ordered them
... and I soon discovered that I was just covering costs ... but only
just. This certainly wasn't the door to economic freedom I'd
visualised (OK, let's be honest ... it wasn't the freedom I'd fantasised
about. Where were the big cheques every week? Where was the
huge customer base that was supposed to be clamouring for me to
write more and more courses for them? Mere figments of my
imagination!)

Enter: the Internet!

But then I discovered the Internet - and suddenly there was no need
to print hard copies of my course - I could email the whole course to
students anywhere in the world! And it didn't cost me any more to
send courses to a hundred people than it did to send one course to
one person. Suddenly my running costs were reduced and I was
able to halve the price of my courses.

I could change the course as I saw the need, adding newer
examples to keep it up to date, deleting sections I wasn't happy
with, rewriting whole sections. Plus, I now had the most amazing
advertising vehicle for my course - a website!

I was able to put up examples of my writing, I could show people
what was in the course, I could point out the importance of being
able to write well. I could do anything! And this was all because of
the Internet.

Mind you, it took me some time to work out how to actually build a
website - I made some terrible mistakes and wasted an incredible
amount of time - time that I could have been using to build my
business. (My first efforts are outlined in an article I wrote, The Saga
of the alt tags http://www.write101.com/saga.htm .)

That was in 1998 and my business has expanded to include
professional writing services - something I'd never thought about
doing. It grew because people I met through the Internet asked my
advice about their own writing and then asked me to write for them - I
now have clients from every continent (except Antarctica!).

That's what happens with business opportunities - they just sort of
arrive out of nowhere and you have to be ready to recognise them
and grab them before they get away!

The Internet has to provide the greatest opportunity of all - in its
capacity to change the way we do business and communicate, and
in the rapidity with which all this has happened. In 1996, there were
an estimated 40 million Internet users worldwide, but according to a
study released at the end of March this year, by market researcher
the Angus Reid Group - http://www.angusreid.com/ - global internet
usage is well on its way to reaching 1 billion users by 2005. More
than 300 million people have already logged on and nearly 150
million more are planning to this year.

Consider the following:

· A world where e-mailboxes outnumber TV sets and telephone
lines is probably only two years away.

According to statistics compiled by Messaging Online in April this
year - http://www.messagingonline.com/ - the total number of
e-mailboxes in the world has soared 83.5% in the past year to 569
million. For comparison, the CIA says there are almost one billion
TVs in the world, and according to the ITU there are less than 800
million phone lines. This means email has in 12 years done what it
took 50 years for the TV and 125 years for the telephone to do.

· Online advertising revenues are expected to grow to $28 billion
worldwide by 2005, according to new Jupiter research
released in June at the Global Online Advertising Forum in Cannes,
France. Jupiter says that nearly 6% of all global
advertising revenue will be spent online by 2005 and that growth will
partly be driven by the rise of the online population worldwide, which
will more than double within the next five years.

· Because of the swift time-to-market and the strong return on
investment of e-mail, a new Jupiter report estimates
that commercial e-mail spending will grow from $164 million in 1999
to $7.3 billion in 2005 - an estimated forty-fold
increase in e-mail volume.

· The online population growth in Northern Europe, Asia and
Latin America will lead to a global melting pot in a few
years, eMarketer predicts. By 2005, most of the Internet's growth
will be in Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific
region.

· eMarketer also predicts that wireless devices will link millions
of new users to the web in the next few years. According to the
European Commission, Europe has one of the highest cell phone penetration rates in the
world, with Finland leading the pack at 64.4%
(Statistics from Masha E. Geller's MediaPost:
http://www.mediapost.com/ )

Convinced?

Why You Need a Website
Within the next five years, it's estimated that websites will be as
common as phones are today - and look how we've come to rely on
them!

As well as using your website to facilitate your business, as I did,
there are countless other uses:

· Keep in touch with family - so many families these days are
spread across the country and around the world. We miss out on all
those precious moments - new babies, first steps, graduations,
birthdays, weddings ... having your own website means you can
post pictures of your family, you can even put up videos and
recordings so everyone in the family can keep up to date.

· Have you retired? Use the Internet to plan that great Retirement
Odyssey; put up maps of your travels so friends can follow your trip;
post your travel diary - keep the best travel memories fresh for all
time.

· Set up a site around your hobby, sport or craft - show off your
work or collections.

· Are you a member of a charity organisation? Build a website to
keep in touch with members and benefactors. Use it to arrange fund
raisers.

· We all know that children these days seem to be born
computer literate - give your children the opportunity to explore their
talents and to build their skills by giving them their very own website.
If the Internet is going to play such a dominant role in our lives, your
kids need to be thoroughly skilled in all its uses.

Developers have seen the writing on the wall and many are now
building housing estates with Internet access a standard inclusion in
new homes - it's the way of the future and we can learn to use it or
get left behind.

NB If the spelling of words such as "organisation" in this article
worried you, please read this:

http://www.write101.com/aus.htm>


~ * ~
Jennifer Stewart offers home study writing courses and professional
writing services from her site: http://www.write101.com/ . Discover
how easy it is to use the Internet:
http://www.write101.com/internet/internet/ and subscribe to free,
weekly Writing Tips: mailto:WritingTips-subscribe@onelist.com
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