I am Warren Frederick Seltzer and my website will be http://www.fredseltzer.com. You can email me at warrens@actcom.net.il or soon at fred@fredseltzer.com, as soon as I get it up. I make business websites, usually, a business website will have a database.
This is an on-line document at http://www.fredseltzer.com/Survey.html.
So if you're reading a paper copy you can go online there and the links will work. The links will not work on the piece of paper!
Here is a website that might actually tell you how to be a millionaire on the web, may as well have a look: http://webkew.blogspot.com/2005/04/welcome-to-webkew.html. It's a tutorial on internet commerce. I've looked it over and it seems competent and it covers stuff I'm not writing about here.
On the web, of course. There are a few main ways to make money on the web. If you aren't selling things directly and accepting payment, then usually the website is a service provider that sells advertising. Otherwise, the website is just an ad for a regular business that makes money the old fashioned way.
| Method | Explanation | Sample Web Site |
|---|---|---|
| Advice | Put up a website telling people how to make money on the web. This is a fairly popular pastime and you will not be the first. The other variation is to just give a blow by blow account of new ideas, deals and business trends. | The Next Net 25 |
| Sell Things | Put up a store on the web where people can buy things. Like books, jewelry, judaica. | Amazon |
| Provide an information service to the user | An encyclopedia, a search engine, language translation, latest bank rates, maps, driving directions, a newspaper. | Answers |
| Provide a computer service or download source | Scan your computer for trouble, download pirated movies, download free software, test your internet connection. | download.com |
| Blogging | Put up a daily diary or opinion site that lets people add their own retorts. But see below. | Brad DeLong |
| Community | These sites are services that help people connect to each other, discussion forums, share pictures of your cat. I suppose internet dating might go in this category. | Friendster |
| Internet Infrastructure | Techies who provide the connection between your shoestore and the bank, so you can make payment. Web sites that let you create your own website. | Comsign |
| Begging | You have one of the above types, and add a button that lets people just donate money. Apparently enough people actually do this to make it worth a try. | jibble |
| Advertising | You have one of the above types, and add link to some other site that actually makes money. The most famous system is Adsense. | Business 2.0 |
I've left out discussion of pure vanity sites, where people put up pictures of their cats. You don't make money that way unless you have very unusual cats! I've also omitted discussing the big sites like General Motors home page. They have to have one but they don't sell many cars there, if any. Likewise, government websites. I suppose the tax authority makes money but that's not open to you.
Internet commerce is big. There are very big websites, like Amazon and Google, that make tons of money. You aren't going to start out big. But you can learn from them. Notice a few things. There is a natural monopoly here based on user satisfaction. Amazon was not the first bookstore on the web but is the biggest because people like it, trust it, and word of mouth (and the internet) spreads. Google rocketed to the top by providing a truly best-in-class search service. While each has competition, each of these stay on top based on hard work and exploiting the natural monopoly effect. The world doesn't need more than one good search engine if it's good enough. The world doesn't need more than one bookstore if it has the book you want at the best price or a good enough price. Notice -- the WORLD. These are global businesses. How many different stores does the internet need to sell judaica? I have no idea if Rotem.net is the best or the biggest but I can see right away that it's a pretty boring web site. Good photos and easy to use. But somebody might come along with a website that is more sentimental. As I write this it's just before Purim and the rotem site has no spiel to sell purim things. In a global market, any fault can be enough. Also, they are rotem.net. There's an entirely different business at rotem.com. How much business do they lose this way?
You aren't going to make your own search engine unless you're already a computer scientist. What you can do is provide a sales outlet for your homemade things. You can be a great writer and bring people back to read your latest words. Once they come back, you can sell them something.
The primary trick is getting people to go to your website. There are numerous websites out there that tell you how to do this. One way is by putting your website link in messages all over the web. This works but you can offend people if you don't know the etiquette. A more automated way is to try to come up first when people search for things on google. Let's say you sell sox online. This is better than trying to sell shoes because people don't have to try them on. When I search for sox in google, you want to come up first or as high as you can. The tricks to make this happen are called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Of course, you can google for that. Here's a place to start Matt Cutts. Recently, the Kinderstart company noticed that it wasn't coming up high enough on google searches, and was losing business as a result. So they are suing Google!
There are web sites that sell you information on how to win or cheat at Search Engine Optimization. Maybe they make money for themselves. But google knows all the tricks and will drop you off the list if they think you're trying to scam them. Nevertheless, when I google for it, google found "Hiposition", a website that tries to defeat googles search system! SEO is a field all unto itself.
Blogging is all the rage. If you're a good enough writer, you can get people to keep on coming back to your web site. This means you can make money just by selling ad space on your website. And you can make money by selling things directly to those same people. Maybe you can write a new couple of paragraphs every day or so about sox, and people will be so fascinated that they keep on coming back to read and then eventually buy stuff. Better yet, write about things people really care about, and sell ads and sox on your website. The internet is a great system for text, for reading and writing, and if you are good at this, you can monetize it. Here's an interesting article on blogging. A guy named Darren Rowse has a website about making money blogging. You go to problogger.com and he'll tell you all about adsense and other ways to make money. He apparently makes his money from ads.
After text, comes pictures. The internet is good for pictures but they are slower than text. Simply, pictures use more bits than text and it takes longer for all the bits to get to your home computer. There's a new site, though, that lets everybody put in pictures so everybody else can look at them, it's called flickr. They make money by displaying ads from Yahoo. They probably have other angles too, I'm not a member.
Adsense is a field all it's own. If your website is selling sox, put adsense onto your website. Google's computers will fill in advertisements that make sense to people looking at your website. Like ads for shoes. Or ads for the one place in the world that specializes in pink shoelaces for ice skates. Whatever. Then they also look at what people search for from your site from your google search bar. When people click on the ad, you get a little money into your account. Here's the basic adsense website. All you have to do is get scads of people onto your website. Some percentage will click on the ad and generate money for you. Of course, there is now a website that sells hi-toned consulting about adsense, obviously for the corporate market. Maybe you should sell adsense advice on the web. Then there's this guy! who's selling adsense with a classic get-rich-quick pitch that is really cheesy. But he might be making more money than any of us, who knows?
Here's another adsense tutorial website from the group 999tutorials.
There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that there are a lot of free tutorials, free software, free blog websites and books that will teach you everything you need to know. The bad news is that there is simply too much help out there. You can spend years on it. Here is an overview I've written for you, the small business person who knows how to use the internet to surf the web and use email. If you don't know how to surf the web, learn someplace else.
There are a few things you have to understand, numbers, bits, text, pictures, and connections. I'll cover some of that.
First off, you have to understand why a 2-digit year just didn't work, why they needed a 4-digit year system. This is the same reason that you can't run a telephone system with a 3-digit phone number and your TZ wouldn't work with just a 3-digit personal id number. You need to have enough digits to specify what's what. The same with the internet and the alphabet. Computers use a simple scheme like 'A' is 1, 'B' is 2, and so on. Inside the computer it's all numbers. But sometimes a number is more like an address, like your phone number, and sometimes a number is more like a name, as on your TZ. So to spell "CAT" the computer needs just 3 simple numbers, one for each letter. To show a picture, each dot on the screen has to have about 3 or 4 numbers. So each dot uses as much as the whole word "CAT". But the screen has maybe a million dots. And for moving pictures you need dozens of pictures per second. So the number of numbers that are involved gets big. In order for the computer to show you the text "CAT" on the screen or the computer it has to draw a big array of dots in a grid. That's all the "Computer Science" you'll need to know and there isn't a quiz.
Bits are just computer digits that make up computer numbers. Web pages are made up of text and pictures, together with display instructions about how they should look. Sometimes there is sound. That's about it. Oh, one thing. Lots of bits means it takes longer to send the bits from one place to another, and it takes more space to hold all the bits inside the computer. All that adds up to time and money. It takes time (and money) to send the bits and it costs money to store the bits.
Presumably you use a computer to use the internet. The websites you visit are on another computer called a server. You can put your own website on your own computer in your home or office. This would mean that you have to keep it on 24 hours a day, buy a special computer, buy a special internet connection, and learn how to manage the computer. There's an easier way. Companies that do "Web Hosting" will put your website on their machine for a few dollars a month. Starting at about $10 per month with no upper limit. You can use your computer to make the content, send it up over the net to your website, and people will get to it there.
The job of actually making the website can be easy, if all you have is a one-page text like this Survey document. Or you can hire people (hint!) to do it for you. There are different experts for different parts of an internet commmerce website. At the least, you need a back-end programmer to make the "Server-side" stuff work, to store the database if you're actually selling things or keeping data for people, and a front-end designer to make the "Client-side" look pretty on the screen and be easy to figure out. One person can do both, but the bigger web sites are done by a team because there are different talents involved.
If all you want to do is blog, you can start for free at Blogger.com. They have an automatic system for doing everything. You just have to write the brilliant blog that brings in the people. Some blogs are like diaries, some are like newspapers. You decide.
What if you want to do it yourself? The first thing is to learn HTML. Well, there is plain text and there is formatted text. HTML is always written in plain text instructions. Some very simple examples will explain the general idea:
| HTML | How it shows up |
|---|---|
| Do it <b>right</b>. | Do it right. |
| I really <i>mean</i> it. | I really mean it. |
There are a lot of web sites that teach you about the web itself. If you want to start to learn HTML try Lissa Explains it All. Lissa wrote this web tutorial when she was 11 years old. And it's absolutely charming. I think Lissa is married by now but the website is still useful. What did you do when you were 11? For something more professional, try W3 Schools, which is very good and has a built-in lab. Neither of these sites will teach you enough about databases or programming for a full e-commerce web site. But with a professional e-commerce solution you can use what you learn here to customize, make it different and better. Also take a look at 999tutorials, a website that teaches about the web and how to make your own website. The 999tutorials website itself sells advertising space, mostly using Google Adsense.
For general style advice look at Jakob Nielsen's Website, especially his Alertbox columns on style. The style ideas are pretty advanced; but even so you'll get the point even if you can't do what he suggests.
Here's a story from Money magazine about a twenty-something who's making it big selling chairs from home in his spare time. I find these stories depressing, because he's richer than I am. His site is poofchairs.com. I guess he really sells those bean bag chairs for hundreds of dollars.
Web store selling is like catalog sales, you have to advertise, explain, and process the business end of the sale. And you have to make sure you don't forget to ship the product! This Economist article about competition implies that the volume is about 10 billion dollars a month in the peak season. The article is about competition, and about the old pre-internet retailers coming to dominate retailing. Nowadays, Amazon also re-sells the products of regular stores. This is interesting because you would think that it would be most efficient to sell direct from the manufacturers, which is what Amazon does with books. And what Wal-Mart does in it's stores.
In fact, web selling was supposed to be all about getting rid of the middle man, letting the home user log on directly to the manufacturer. But it doesn't always work out that way. I know if you try to buy a car on-line in the US you eventually get connected to the nearest auto dealer to close the sale. People like to shop at websites they know they can trust with their credit card information. Familiar names like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target help sell.
The basic tasks in setting up an online store are 1) making the website, 2) getting the customers to your site, 3) setting up the online shopping cart, 4) arranging to accept credit card payments online, and 5) shipping. Will talk about the last two here.
The banks are very careful institutions, and you have to connect your website to approved software in order to accept credit card payments over the web. You can look at Planet Payment to see what they offer in terms of multi-currency software so you can accept customers from outside the US. The Israeli company Comsign does credit card payment processing but only the Hebrew portion of their website seems to work. Another company is Instabill that's in the same business. Two of the things that make credit card payments complex are fraud and returns. Fraud happens when a merchant pretends to sell to a stolen credit card number, or when a thief uses your web store with a stolen card number. When a customer returns a product, the merchant is obligated to process the return through the credit card payment system. Neither of these problems are obstacles but you have to deal with them. I found a nice tutorial on the web on credit card payment processing in ecommerce digest, that should speed you along. Take a look at the rest of ecommmerce-digest.com while you're there. They sell an "E-book" for $37.50 that might teach you all you need to know. Or not. I haven't read it.
Shipping is complex because there are many shippers and each has many zones and complicated rules. Usually, the web store has to submit the shipping information to the shipper during the on-line sale to find out how much the shipment will cost. If you're not shipping stuff you make yourself, it's different; You arrange with the manufacturer to "Drop-ship" directly from the manufacturer to the customer. This is much simpler to operate but you might not want to tell the manufacturer who the customers are.
There are scads of companies and contractors (like me) who will build you an on-line store for a modest fee. You can sign up with Yahoo and they say they'll do it all for you on-line; You just fill out a form and use their site designer tool. Your store could have a hard time standing out from the crowd. On the other hand, if you're selling things people just have to have, being ordinary can be a virtue. There are a lot helper sites out there on the web. Here's the Wineweb web wine store that will help you sell on their store. But only if you make wines yourself!
W3 Schools has a page on hosting e-commerce web sites that takes a somewhat different approach than I do. Do what's right for you.
As an outlier, take a look at the cdbaby web site. Derek Sivers is a musician who didn't like the way the music business was set up so he decided to build his own web store from scratch, learning programming and everything along the way, the result is CD Baby. Now only Amazon sells more CD's online than CD Baby. On the other hand Derek's been working on the web site for over 7 years and continues to innovate his web store. Note carefully Derek's technique. He writes and gets interviewed. He makes sure people know he's a musician and not just "Big Business". Google for 'Derek Sivers interview' and see the interviews. Musicians like him, they like his better than average split on the sale of each CD, and that he's a 'Maverick'.
Another business blogger like Derek is Joel Spolsky. Joel has a engaging and well written blog that brings in business, he writes more than Derek Sivers does. Joel sells software that his company makes. I urge all of you to go over to this essay by Joel and have a read. He's relevant, engaging and interesting. If you notice carefully, he flatters his readers, converting readers in to customers for his software. He provides useful information and opinions. Also, Joel does one more thing very well, he recruits smart workers for his company. Since Joel sells to software engineers and also hires software engineers, he can let his readers know over and over again how truly great it is to work for his company.
Both Derek Sivers and Joel Spolsky: