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The World Wide Web as Information Source

Your Business Presence on the Internet

Blogs, Newsletters, Discussion Lists, RSS Feeds, Podcasting & Vlogs

The World Wide Web is not to be ignored by any business startup. It should be used to your advantage as soon as you decide to become an entrepreneur. You will be needing it to suck up information in every function of your business. Your business presence of the Web must be a priority. Even if you're not going to use a website for direct sales, it will be a key part of your promotion, branding and recognition. It will even be hard at work while you sleep.

If you are in business and do not have a Web presence, you will be automatically assigned second rank status. It is no longer possible to be in business successfully and not be there.

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The World Wide Web as Information Source

The Web is an enabler of entrepreneurs. Whether you are building a Web-based business or not, it would be folly to ignore the potential of the Web—as a source of information, advice and business tools.

You can use it to:

Look up information: market data, statistics, legal provisions, competitor activity, prospect profiles, annual reports & accounts... the list is endless. Even if you don't know where to look, you have the general and specialist search engines at your fingertips. These days there are engines that will give you Blog, picture and other sources as well as information contained on websites. If you're using a good browser you can have direct access to many different search sources right on your desktop. Of course you'll be familiar with the top search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN and company, but do you know about Sydney, Australia-based Lexxe? If not, give it a try: this third generation search engine uses natural language for searching and offers you clusters of terms associated with the one you looked up, so you can narrow your search.
Use on line encyclopedias. My favorite is the free wikipedia in different language versions and it has specialist derivatives. There are specialist one on every conceivable subject e.g. medical, mythology or music. There are information services like Answers.com, dozens of different thesauruses, dictionaries, translation services (don't use them for your published stuff, but they're fine for searches). There are many millions of sources. If you want to define something, here's a quick solution: enter "define" in the Google search box, then a colon, then a space, and then the word or expression you want defined.
Download e-books in pdf form. E-books can be free often with ads, or paid-for. Of course their standards vary widely, but more and more you'll find the general and specialist on line bookstores also carry e-books. Other pdf files can usefully be downloaded; examples include complex data in chart form, lists or technical articles. If you are thinking of writing an printed book for promoting your business, do try BookSmart from Blurb where you can download free software and design your own book, then buy any number of copies from one upwards.
Subscribe to email newsletters of many types. They include promotional ones that often include very useable data, specialist organizations and trade bodies. Some require subscription fees or membership.
Get free guidance or technical support (the Tech Guy is an example—see below) from sites, either those seeking to sign you up as a client, or those that offer genuinely free services.
Find advisory services, on subject like business startup, for example! These may be from people like me, banks, trade bodies, universities and many other sources.
Obtain funding or sponsored services from foundations, voluntary bodies, research institutes or government bodies.
Read and download manuals. You can frequently obtain such manuals whether your have purchased the product or not and they can be invaluable in evaluating the product features that you seek.
Locate books that will give you a head start. You can set most search engines to search for books as well as websites when you do a search. Or to get straight to titles, why not bookmark my partner, Powells Bookstore.
Read blogs on your subject matter or business sector. Specialist blog search engines include are many; start with Technorati.
Find free alternatives to products you cannot yet afford. If you type 'free products' in Lexxe, you'll find plenty of routes to what you seek. An excellent free product is a automatic Web-based data backup program called Mozy—I use it and Jessica Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal says it is, "faster, safer and often less expensive than other storage methods". It is now available for both PC and Mac. Click on the link and download; it will cost you nothing, unless you have huge amounts of data, images or music,and then you can have huge capacity for a small monthly fee! If you would like, you can download WorkSavvy's Guide to Free Web-based & Open Source Business Tools.
Evaluate and then download for free Open Source software (for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms). Top of any list should be Open Office (better than MS Office and there are 40 million copies in use, albeit vs. 400m. of MS Office) for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, drawing and more; Mozilla Firefox the best and safest Web browser (or Camino specially for Mac); Mozilla Thunderbird, the best and safest email client software. These two take you where the Internet is faster, safer, more efficient, more fun. Where spam, spyware and pop-ups are ancient history. For many more offerings, download WorkSavvy's Guide to Free Web-based & Open Source Business Tools.
Online Web Applications: You should really look into Ajax for Everyone from Ajax 13 or Thinkfree Office Online. These are free office software application packages that work from a Firefox and other browsers (with enhancements to come) on any operating system and any device (including the new handhelds) no matter where you are or what computer you're using. They don't have all the bell and whistles, but for most jobs they are excellent (and if you do need sophistication, then Open Office is for you). The Web Application lives on the web, so there's no software to load and the latest version is always available. Google for example has made public their new free on line spreadsheet (to rival MS Excel) and well as Writely. Now Business Week reports that Microsoft plans to make some of the technology from Works available on line for free, too. These applications are just for starters; there's lots more out there and more being created all the time. There is also Think Free, which you can run online (about $30 a year) or, you'd rather, purchase for desktop use (about $50). Even better, try Zoho for their office suite, productivity tools and utilities, most of which are free for single users. For many more offerings, download WorkSavvy's Guide to Free Web-based & Open Source Business Tools.
Build a list of potential sources of business finance (take a look at Savvy Business Finance).
use it for Internet telephony (VoIP). There are those ready to forcast that this will be the boiggest pasrt of the telephone sector eventually, even though there some shortcomings right now. For small business, take a look at fonality, m5net, Digium, or Packet8, for instance. My favorite, though is Jajah. Unlike those above, Jajah does not offer a real business solution, but it beat Skype and similar because you there is no software to download nor headsets necessary. Take a look!

The World Wide Web for Procurement

Procurement of things you may want to buy: The Web is an unparalleled showcase of products and services to consider. Many offers are available on free trials, which will often give you a better sense of their utility to you and other means of evaluation. In searching for software, there is of course freeware and shareware as well as proprietary products, but there also is a very fast increasing volume of open source software which is free. You'll be amazed at the amount of stuff you can get.

One key area of buying via the Web is sure to be software. Two application areas you will especially want to check out are business plan software and marketing software.

Procurement of things companies may want to buy from you: Many customers for B2B products are doing their own procurement via the Internet. So if you are supplying industry, make sure that you are aware of those companies that are publishing the specifications of the things they want to buy.

Your Business Presence on the Internet

Top priority! Do it now. Get a presence on the Internet. Don't wait till you're ready, it will be too late. Your own website on the Internet presence is vital even if it is not your chosen distribution channel. I would even recommend it, even if you don't get it right the first time. Of course, it would be better if you did, but the sooner you can point people to it, seek links and have the search engines send their spiders to find you, the better. Your website is your reputation builder, night shift, worldwide ambassador and the way your 3.5 x 2 inch visiting card can be expanded. Your business stationery should show your URL; you should mention it at every possible occasion; your email signature should show it. Your website is your silent partner—well, that is unless you have MP3 music files on it, and that I do not recommend unless you are in the music business.

There are ten basic ways that the website will work best for you:

To do it now is not only important to get yourself 'out there' and in a position to start selling, but also will ensure that you ask yourself tough questions and respond honestly. What do you want to say? How can you best say it? Is your story believable?
Do it yourself. By all means take short cuts, if you don't want to learn how to build a site. Short cuts include using templates or site building tools, especially those offered by quality hosting companies (or a managed Internet presence—see the offer by InMotion Hosting, the best in the business (WorkSavvy! is hosted by them); you can have it for only $299). Or you can use the Open Source Web editor, Nvu (pronounced n-view) available for free—for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu stands for "new view". You can get Nvu Portable / KompoZer Portable which is Nvu packaged with a PortableApps.com launcher as a portable app. You can place it on your USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive or a CD and use it on any computer, without leaving any personal information behind. Or you can use a free version of the Serif Web editor. the development of web-based applications is accelerating and it is not surprise to find Google with an excellent offering. In Google Apps, take a look at Page Creator. If none of these ideas suit you get a website designed (but preparing a good brief will be almost as hard as building a site), then be sure that it can work with a Content Management System (an example is the Open Source Plone CMS), so that you can update text, images, products and so on—yourself. Another Open Source option is the Mambo CMS. But take a look at Eric Wolfram's guide to Free Web Site Content Management Software for fuller information about the possibilities. There are many free Apps that you can add to your website and good place to look for them is at . They are also known as 'widgets' and 'gadgets'.
Concentrate on Content. You will hear all kinds of advice from many quarters about ways to optimize your website for search engines. Indeed many suggestions will help, but there's nothing more important than relevant content (relevant to the subject of the site and the key words you want to use); the content needs to be regularly updated (not just a new price here and there); make it informative; use lots of links to other sources. There are two reasons for this advice; first you need to delight and interest your visitors, and second, the spiders that will crawl your site from the search engines are based on ever cleverer algorithms that check content for such features. Make a big effort to get links to your site from others; this counts hugely with the spiders. Google likes inbound links a lot, but it looks for trustworthy sites, so make sure you define privacy policy, offer detailed contact info and go for consistency over time (structure, growth, content and popularity).
Create for Clients, not Geeks. Make the site useable, navigable and avoid Flash intros that take an age to load, music that will slow the site down and all the latest cleverness. Give the customer what is being looked for. Make it easy to read (no dark colored backgrounds, for instance). Short sentences are good, tables are good, numbered lists are good, bullet points are good.
Map for Muppets, or Navigation for Novices. Once yo have reeled in your visitors, make sure that they can get around the site easily. Make it as simple as you can and then stay consistent so that they become familiar with how to navigate and find what they're looking for. To avoid over much detail cluttering the site, you can always use downloads in say Word or pdf documents.
Update for Undivided Interest. Your site must be regularly updated. It will be immediately apparent to visitors if it's old-hat and the SE spiders (they like their food to be fresh!) will let you drop down the ratings if they are not able to detect new stuff. Anyway, you'll always have new things to add or improvements you can make to content or design.
Feed the Spiders. Don't believe that the job of website management is complete, once your site is first live on line. Far too many people wonder what the Web fuss is all about: they put up their site and wait for enquiries to flow in and nothing happens. Just remember how many millions of competing websites there are out there. Now there's millions of blogs too. Apart from the free edition of Web CEO, there is a more fully featured version for Small Business at $189. Concentrate on feeding the hungriest spiders. Nearly half the search market is held by Google, a quarter by Yahoo! and a tenth by MSN Search—go for the big ones! Start by inviting them to your table: here's the link to submit to Google (and check out their own advice), Yahoo!, MSN Search and there's another to add: the Open Directory Project; here you will need to 'drill down' the subject list until you are down far enough in specialization to see at the top 'submit URL, but there are clear and helpful instructions, anyway. The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans and provides the core directory services for Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit and hundreds of others. You will want to go other search engines to submit (by hand is best; for instance there is the new Navisso that does not use feeds from other engines and relies on its own spider (the link takes you to add URL).
The Minimum of Metatags. Metatags are bits of html code (makes it possible for your browser to 'read' the website) that are not seen by the visitor and hold some vital information about the page. They cover things like who wrote it and what software they used, but more important, it's where there are descriptions of the site, the keywords that are used (of course it's no good if these keywords don't appear in headings and text of the actual site, too).
Two Tools for tomorrow. If not today, one day soon you will need two bits of software for your website. One is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) Web editor and the other is a basic image editing program. Happily you can get both in Open Source Software for free. The editor is Nvu, as mentioned above and the other is the Gimp for photo and image editing. Both run in Linux, Mac and Windows environments.
Choose your Web hosting company with extreme care. Avoid the price cutters and check very carefully what their tech support is like. Only select one that has phone support so that you can get immediate help. Ask other users for a reference. I can say that InMotion Hosting (who host WorkSavvy!) is in a category all of its own; this employee-owned firm gives exemplary service that goes way beyond the industry standard.
Go to Google Webmaster Central and find all sorts of things to enhance your site And, for fun or utility, add a Google Gadget like this one

And four No, Nos! (i) don't use free Web hosting—a URL such as www.freeWebhosting.com/mysite.index.html does not make a good impression; (ii) do not use Hotmail, Yahoo!, or GMail for your email—for two reasons the mailbox may well overflow and it's preferable to have an address at your site, e.g., me@mysite.com; (iii) don't register your URL with a registrar that is a reseller; go to a first level registration company licensed by ICANN so you get proper support; (iv) don't be put off if you can't get the URL you'd really like—if your business is called Fast Cars Inc and 'fastcars.com' is not available, try 'fast-cars.com' and do not give in and buy the name you want from a cybersquatter since they may ask a four figure price or more and there's no need to pay it.

If you would like a fuller version of this section, then write to me (will @ worksavvy.ws) and I'll send you the article, Ten Tips for websites That Work. The foregoing is advice from a user, not a Web designer (though I build my own sites). There are scads of experts out there wanting to help you (especially those that want to sell you something). One source I recommend without hesitation is Ben Hunt's Web Design from Scratch. I agree with most of what he says (he says use html coding, well—I don't!). A visit here will save you ages whether you are doing it yourself or using a professional designer. If you are some way down the track and beginning to get to know HTML, make use of w3schools from the World Wide Web Consortium (directed by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of WWW).

Blogs, Newsletters, Discussion Lists, RSS Feeds, Podcasting & Vlogs

In addition to websites, you now have a glittering array of Web-based tools at your disposal.

Blogs are those on line journals in which you can share you ideas in a very immediate way, and you can post articles from any computer. So if your business has you traveling, you can keep this lively medium of communication going on the run. You have absolutely no coding to learn, because the blog platform does all the work for you. Andy Wibbels (author of Blog Wild!: a Guide for Small Business Blogging) describes a blog as, "an easily, instantly, and frequently updated website, focused around a topic, industry or personality." The business benefit of blogs, apart from being easy to set up and run, are that they offer fresh regular contact with prospects, have an informal tone to which the customer can relate, can give useful information and links, as well as giving readers the opportunity of responding right there on line. So you can reach out to your customers and enrich their understanding of your business, you can test-drive new ideas, re-inforce your website with success stories and, as with the website, you can go global and work at night!

Email newsletters are very powerful. They give you the opportunity of regular mailing to clients and prospects. of course they must have value in themselves, rather than being constant product sells; don't over-advertise. Your website and blog can carry opt-in sign-ups, so that it is the prospect or client that actively wants to hear from you. The newsletter can carry articles written by people outside the company to build credibility, have links to offers, products, downloads, other websites in ways that further build your business as authoritative. Here too, you don't need great skill to produce them. I have been using a firm called Constant Contact, but another you might want to check out is Mail Chimp. Both offer free trials, so you can make a newsletter for free and gauge just how well it can work for you.

Discussion lists, like blogs, offer you the chance of simple two-way communication with prospects and clients. I have been using Yahoo Groups, which on the whole has worked well and there have been some recent improvements. Another list host is Google. If you set up your own list and moderate it, you have control of the functioning of the group. The advantage here is that people interested in your business can also communicate among themselves. This will show trust in what you company is about. Take a look at the small business and entrepreneurship groups or those for your sector of activity and they might give you ideas.

RSS Feeds are small files containing a website's or blog's latest updates and headlines which are updated every time the site itself is updated. Feeds allow your updates to be received by subscribers through a spam-free, virus-proof delivery system that bypasses their inbox. I'm not expert here, but I intend to offer them here at WorkSavvy! in due course. The book by Andy Webbels mentioned above has a section on them.

Podcasts are to sound and video what feeds are to text. You'd need to download a podcast receiver like Juice to start listening. Juice lets users select and download shows and music and play whenever they want on their iPods, portable digital media players, or computers automatically. I have to say that I was originally reticent about this medium for business, but I am progressively warming to the idea. Worth watching and adding to your Web activity, probably.

Vlogs are to video what Blogs are to text. These need to be short and to the point and, of course, users need to have a broadband connection to the Internet to benefit. Take a look at YouTube to see what I'm talking about. YouTube only started in 2005 by three early employees of PayPal and its community is developing fast. You can use YouTube to insert a video into your Blog.

Books: a good way to shortcuts

Small Websites Great Results by Doug Addison. "For a truly great website that produces the results you want you have to have the right focus for your website, the right design, and the right navigation format to produce a positive customer experience. Doug Addison not only helps you do this but also includes many tips and techniques for content and functionality that users love and as a result turn your visitors into customers." (review by Harold McFarland).

Design-It-Yourself websites: a Step-by-Step Guide by Avi Itzkovitvch and Adam Till. The book makes it possible for professionals with no design background to create websites customized to their company’s unique needs easily and inexpensively.

Firefox and Thunderbird Garage if you do go the open source software route, there's no better way of ensuring you get the best out of both, since this book was written by people who worked on the software development. Let your Web browser do what you want, the way you want it to.

Links: Informative and Practical websites

If you want help on e-marketing, you may want to contact Quirk. Based in Cape Town and London, they work worldwide and are very direct and responsive people. Rob Stokes, the boss says it all, "Quirk is here to equip you with the knowledge, products and services to help you build your brand and market your business on the Internet. We are an agency that really cares about the quality of service we give our customers and this will show in your dealings with us. We are also not the type of business that seeks a quick buck - we're a fresh, innovative e-marketing company that truly believes in establishing long term relationships with our clients." Go and see for yourself. You can sign up for a practical (not wordy) newsletter that does not overfill your inbox; you can get an audit of your website—just fill in a simple questionnaire. You can also download Search Status (for Firefox/Mozilla), a little gizmo that installs on your browser and gives you Google Page Rank and Alexa Popularity Ranking for every site you visit. Tell Rob I sent you!

An alternative and in a different style is Eric Wolfram's SEO, SEM and Google Adwords Optimization Service. He says, "many people have asked me to help them optimize their web site for Google over the years. The valuable experience I gained helping them is what I can share with you." He can do you a free backlink report for starters.

JIAN has a whole set of powerful and proven business-building software tools. Well worth looking into and while you're on the site, look at all kinds of helpful free stuff too—for example a Non-Disclosure Agreement for you use, extensive lists of Angels and VCs (US) and a newsletter to which you can subscribe.

established by Michael Cermak is a great source of help on all computing problems; If you're looking for free technical support, you've found it! This site is run completely by volunteers and paid for completely by donations and sponsors.

And another: Support.com. They aim to offer the micropreneur the same sort of tech help that you would expecto find in a big company, but their service is online and with a fixed rate tarrif for various jobs.

And here's a free conference call product. That's why it's called FreeConferenceCall.com, not surprisingly.

Stamps.com is a very handy service for the small business (in the US), where you can get all your postal services on line, so you do not have to visit the post office.

Use the Web Email Cloaker (free from Acme)—it's devastatingly simple to use for making your own email address (or others) a simple utility for Webmasters to beat the spam-spiders by cloaking email contact information in obfuscated or complex JavaScript code, while having it visible to site visitors (WorkSavvy! uses it). Another one is at XInbox (with both Windows and Mac versions, or also for Mac, Apple do one themselves).

Useful links on Yahoo! for site owners and Webmasters looking for information on content guidelines, search community, Webmaster support and feedback, site promotion, and search marketing.

Axandra is the place to go for website promotion and search engine optimization software tools. Their free weekly search engine facts newsletter is an excellent, simple source for information and ideas on everything to do with SEs. Here's a neat idea: you can use their free tool Link Popularity Check. Or another one is the Keyword Discovery Tool. If you want to check your site links, then there's a handy free tool available from Xenu.

Notwithstanding my 'DIY' comments above, if you do want to use a Web-designer, I say go to Ufnasoft. I think that you will like the site and the Web services and package deals offered by Younas Aamir. Using his services you will be able to get a site up and running quickly and effectively, for a very good price. His Silver package includes domain registration, 5 pages, contact form, a year of hosting, a content management system so that you can do your own updates, using a pre-designed template will only cost you $299. He offers custom design and other Web services, too. Tell him I sent you!

An essential tool both for your website and for optimizing for search engines is NicheBOT.com that finds the right keywords to use in your website promotion for better search engine optimization, then simultaneously tracks the search engine ranking for all of your keyword phrases. Niche Bot that includes Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, a Thesaurus, does Keyword Analysis and Google Rankings, Overture Keyword Selector Tool. It's free and you can try any number of words or phrases to see how frequently they are searched for. When I used it for the key words on this website, I was shocked into many revisions! I had overlooked some important keywords. An alternative is the Google Keyword Tool. You can check many words/phases at a time here; you can also do checks by country or all countries and then see what the best words are for specific sites that you'd like to emulate.

Here is a handy tool for you to use right away, coutesy of my partner MarketLeap:

Enter your URL here:

(www.yourdomain.com)

Optional comparison URL:

Your ACCESS CODE:
	Please enter the ACCESS CODE here:

	More Search Engine Marketing Tools
(Results collected LIVE from the Internet)

As well as a link popularity check, you can test search engine saturation and do keyword verification at MarketLeap, where you will find all kinds of tips and articles on search engine marketing, as well.

If you want to find out anything to do with Search Engine Optimization or Marketing, then visit the Search Directory by searchnewz.

For exporters from the US, here is a great free service from the Government: AESDirect for filing your Shippers' Export Declaration (SED) to the Automated Export System (AES).

Software Opportunity: More and more software is becoming available in a Web-based format. Web-based software is also called Software as a Service (SaaS). Gartner, the consultants, forecast that the market will be worth $1 billion within 5 years. What does this mean? Rather than the software 'living' on your own computer, it 'lives' on the Web. Access to the application is through a web browser generally IE or Firefox). It is not necessary to update and maintain each and every user’s desktop in the organization - the web application only needs to be installed on one web server machine, of if you are a single user, then you just open your browser and make free (in almost all cases, single users are free). Users can gain quick and timely access to the web application, anytime, and from anywhere in the world. If you are a single user, many of the companies provide the software free; with broadband access to the Web access speeds are generally about the same as opening a software application on your computer. There are several Web-based Applications mentioned by WorkSavvy! (e.g., Ajax above, or Writely for word processing now owned by Google and from which you can publish straight to the Web) and many software companies are developing Web-based products; an example is my alliance partner, Burke Franklin of JAN, who is developing a Web-based version of his popular Bizplan Builder.

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William Keyser • WorkSavvy LLC • will @ worksavvy.ws