LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. HideAPod.com
2. I Started Something
3. Marie-Eve Janvier

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : Wood Wireless

You need to see my site

In the movie Field of Dreams a farmer gets convinced by a mysterious voice saying “If you build it, they will come.”, that he is supposed to construct a baseball diamond in his corn field. This catch-phrase ruled the dotcom boom and it worked. Unfortunately, web entrepreneurs cannot cope with it anymore. You need to do more.
People come to your site if they can find it. Whether they stay there or not after they land, it's a story discussed in other posts on this site.

I am sure that the basics on getting some attention online are quite well known and pretty vaguely mastered. I shall write them down without going into depths as every web entrepreneur works toward fulfilling them to the best of his knowledge and abilities for as long as its online business shall be.

• Know your purpose. Master your goals. Have a roadmap and don't try to start Google-size but get there.
  
• Write and design for your target audience. Some industry best-practices work for everybody.
  
• Expect to change your knowledge about your audience. Apply what you learn from your traffic metrics and adapt.
  
• Follow design guidelines and don't overkill. There are more than 11 billion webpages out there, try not to scare me off.
  
• Use every marketing technique (online and offline) available to get the word out.
• It helps to own a domain name. (you can park it or taste it while you start up)
  

And the list can go on, feel free to add to it and let me know.
Here are a few items not everybody follow up with routinely and that need a little paragraph on the side.

• Optimize your site for Search Engines.
  
• 80 percent of website traffic comes from a search engine query, states McAfee in “The State of Search Engine Safety". I don't know about you but I would use all the techniques to make search engines love my site.
• Use site submissions, search engine optimization and search engine marketing and don't expect immediate results and don't expect to rank high on results either. You need to earn that but "if you work it, it will come". This entire topic is an art in itself.
• Link to others and exchange links. Don't hold back on linking away (you can start by linking to this site .. no ? well .. I tried ). Try building up the links and having a few links back to you a day on some other sites or directories. This pays up.
• Link and endorse your clients. Make them feel important (they are by the way) by linking to them (if they have a web presence) and giving them a small presentation. Your business feels more established and they will link back to you helping you grow as well.
• Use reviews of your products and testimonials. Word of Mouth online ? Yes, third party sells work.
• Use professional digital images to illustrate. A good picture is worth a thousand words. Let the user see the product it buys, provide video or links to reviews.
• Answer the people. If you receive emails or comments, don't leave them there forever, answer them and get an honest opinion back.
  
• Let's be honest, not everybody is cut to spend hours programming and building websites or even marketing and optimizing them. Weigh the value of your time and consider hiring a pro. Who's that ? A friend of a friend ? Well, measure up your goals, dreams, ambitions and you will know how expensive you should go.

Blogs can be both entertaining and informative and it's free to get out there. News and honest opinions help the community and help your traffic as well. Needless to say that every comment is welcome and enriches your view and your ways.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. DuggBack
2. Web Design From Scratch
3. Filmator

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : Free Directory

LinX BoX

This Friday’s (published this monday) Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Earthcam - Most interesting Webcams of 2006
2. How Stuff Works
3. Visible Earth

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Web 2.0 business models

Web 2.0 is a hot topic, is this and that and all together as one. A technological and social shift defined by a manifesto that was published by Tim O’Reily that offers examples on how web technologies enable the change and makes a prediction on the obsolescence of traditional software development. Google is currently working on a Web based OS, it’ll come and probably the web will be called web 3.0 by the time applications will all run on the network rather than on PC, showing user created content and being improved by users and developers together rather than software companies. For some related thinking read my “Web 2.0 for rookies” article.

Web 2.0 has siblings, like “Enterprise 2.0”. "We're using Enterprise 2.0 as short hand for blogs and wikis behind the firewall. But that's entirely too limiting," said Andrew McAfee, associate professor of Harvard Business School, "We have not yet seen all the neat things that will go on inside enterprises.". Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg concludes that "Web 1.0 was all about getting things online. Web 2.0 is going the next step and making it work," with sites, he said, that are "created by the people, for the people every day.". Web 2.0 and it’s implications for enterprises is still on debate.

The truth is that if you need information while you study at some university, you’ll find it on the university site. And yet the student community events are on somebody’s blog or a student community site or even on MySpace and you need to visit that. Add healthcare questions and math club meetings or student discount store and you end up having a dozen sites to visit before you are ready to start the day knowing enough to be efficient about it. Now just imagine what a ”community site” would do in this situation where users add the required content if it’s missing, along with a story on how to go about the subject. A forum is good but the business model is not forum like, it’s integrating a variety of services that meet community needs. That triggers a Web 2.0 business model.

The new web companies move on a totally different path than the dotcom business model. The model is to capitalize on user-generated content. Digg, Facebook, Photobucket, Zillow, PickPal and YouTube, to name a few, are open houses that facilitate work from anywhere and are basically cheap to start-up compared to the dotcom million dollar launch model that provides closed portals (providing a huge amount of information but incapable to grow with each visitor).

"Web 2.0 is really the acceleration of transformation," Andrew McAfee said "It's not that users got smarter or more social. It's that technologists figured out what consumers wanted."

Social networking: Bringing it all together is one of the Web 2.0 business models generating a cascading effect based on user generated content and user interaction. Metcalfe's law comes into play here: “the total value of the service is roughly proportional to the square of the number of customers' utilizing the service”. If a user using Freewebs cannot connect to another using Facebook, it will switch. But what users can do, is syndicate their content. And for the users that can syndicate their content (MySpace users can not), tightly integrated API’s are available enabling marsh-ups.

Pay per use: Developing the compelling value innovative solution is another business model that applies to this wave of web companies. The service is free but for the killer feature you need to pay. It’s the software as a service model and the revenue comes from a critical mass of users willing to pay a reasonable price that supports it all. It also pays itself from partnerships. Those services are also publicised by users on social networking sites and the technology provided is reusable and expandable with users help. Flickr is a perfect example for this category.

In both these models, the product the company brings to the web is technology and this is used to generate the business value. In both cases the user generates its content (photos on Flickr, articles on Blogspot …) and they all interact. None of these companies have a “product” per-se, they don’t sell a CD or a book or a car, and yet they act like hubs and the revenue comes from partnerships, advertising, content … and the list can go on, I just leave it up to you to add to it.