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Articles on Internet Matters:

Types of Internet Business Models

A business model is basically an abstraction of what an enterprise is and how the enterprise delivers a product or service, showing how the enterprise creates wealth. The Internet can help countries create and capture profits in new ways by adding extra value to existing products and services or by providing the foundation for new products and services. The list below describes some of the most important business models that have emerged. All in one way or another add value: They provide with a new product or service; they provide additional information or service along with a traditional product or service; or they provide a product or service at much lower cost than traditional means.

Virtual Storefront: Sells physical products directly to consumers or to individual businesses. E.g. Amazon.com

Information Broker: Provides product, pricing, and availability information to individuals and businesses. Generates revenue from advertising or from directly buyers to sellers. E.g. Edmunds.com

Transaction Broker: Saves users money and time by processing online sales transactions, generating a fee each time a transaction occurs. Also provides information on rates and terms. E.g. E*TRADE.com

Online Marketplace: Provides a digital environment where buyers and sellers can meet, search for products, display products, and establish prices for those products. E.g. eBay.com

Content Provider: Creates revenue by providing digital content, such as digital news, music, photos, or video, over the Web. The customer may pay to access the content, or revenue may be generated by selling advertising space.

Online Service Provider: Provides online service for individuals and businesses. Generates revenue from subscription or transaction fees, from advertising, or from collecting marketing information from users.

Virtual Community: Provides online meeting place where people with similar interests can communicate and find useful information.

Portal: Provides initial point of entry to the Web along with specialized content and other services.

Some of these new business models take advantage of the internet's rich communication capabilities. eBay is an online auction forum, using e-mail and other interactive features of the Web. People can make online bids for almost every item available from a sandwich to a car. The system accepts the bids for items entered, evaluates the bids, and notifies the highest bidder. Business-to-business auctions are proliferating as well. Online bidding, also known as dynamic pricing, is expected to grow rapidly because buyers and sellers can interact easily through the internet to determine what an item is worth at any particular moment. The internet has created online communities, where people with similar interests can exchange ideas from many different locations. Some of these virtual communities are providing the foundation for new businesses. A major source of revenue for these communities is providing ways for corporate clients to target customers, including the placement of banner ads and pop-up ads on their Web sites. Even traditional retailings businesses are enhancing their Web sites with chat, message boards, and community-building features as a means of encouraging customers to spend more time, return more frequently, and hopefully make more purchases online. Many retail Web sites have seen their sales increase after they added these features. The Webs information sources are so vast and rich that special business models called portals have emerged to help individuals and organizations to locate information more efficiently. Yahoo is an example. Yahoo and other portals and Web content sites often combine content and applications from many different sources and service providers. Other internet business models use syndicators as well to provide additional value. These syndicators have emerged as another variant of the online content provider business model. The Web makes it much easier for companies to aggregate, repackage, and distribute information and information-based services.

Mohammad Taha Jawed
04 Feb 2007

Born on January the 14th 1987 Living in Karachi,Pakistan

Getting Your Emails Through To Your Subscribers

SPAM filters are becoming a serious problem for legitimate email marketers. In 2006, 40% of all email sent throughout the world was considered spam. As a result, filters are stepping up their efforts to block this unwanted mail and many of your commercial emails may be inadvertently filtered as well; there are more emails being bounced today than ever before.

Getting email through to your subscribers is critical, especially if email plays a key role in your business. You need to count on reaching your readers.

Avoiding the adverse affects of spam filters is not difficult. It merely involves following some simple guidelines to ensure the maximum results from your email campaigns.

- Use a double opt-in mailing list. This is when you send a confirmation email in order to get the reader's permission to add them to your mailing database. This ensures that you do in fact have the subscriber's permission, which will prevent unjust accusations of sending unsolicited emails.

- On the sign up page, tell subscribers to whitelist your domain or add it to their address book. You should also include this in the welcome email you send to new subscribers.

- Send your email as plain text instead of HTML since the latter tends to get blocked a lot more by the filters.

- Avoid using various trigger words or phrases that are flagged by filters as being spam. It's not that you can't use them; it's just that you should use them sparingly. The filters will block your email if it contains too many trigger words. You can find a list of typical trigger words to avoid in your email's subject line and body at www.andreaoneill.com/spamtriggers.html.

- Before you send your email out to your entire list of readers, perform a dry run on some free email accounts such as hotmail, yahoo, and gmail. You can play around with the filter settings on each account and see if your email makes it through. Another good idea is to run your email through a content checker that will determine if it is at high risk of being flagged as spam. There are a number of free content checkers available on the Internet, just do a search on Google.

- Finally, the most important thing to do is follow the CAN-SPAM laws regarding commercial email. This includes items such as containing an unsubscribe link in every email and including the mailing address of the company or person sending the email. The CAN-SPAM act can be found at www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm.

It is difficult to tell how long spam will continue to cause problems for legitimate email marketers. Hopefully one day the problem will subside, but until then you will need to follow the items highlighted above to increase the chances of your email being delivered successfully. By following these guidelines, you will not need to worry about getting your email through to your readers; you can spend more time on the email campaign itself, which is far more important.

Sean Kenaston
06 Mar 2007

Sean Kenaston is an Associate Editor at Ratings Hub - the first and only ad and affiliate link free site that provides 100% user-based reviews of various Internet marketing products and services. It's the only place on the Internet offering completely unbiased feedback on products used by every type of marketer, from beginner to guru and everyone in between. Visit http://www.ratingshub.no-nonsense-marketing.com

Keeping Track Of Your Link Exchanges

All of us want to increase traffic to our web sites. It helps our search engine rankings, and provides us with potential new customers. One of the best, and certainly least expensive, ways to do that is by exchanging links with sites similar to our own. However, you don’t have to accumulate very many links before it becomes difficult to keep track of them all. Many of them have similar sounding (or identical!) names, descriptions and even URL’s. Let me suggest a simple way to keep track of them so you don’t embarrass yourself and annoy others by requesting to exchange links with someone more than once.

Create a simple spread sheet with four columns and no more that 51 rows; one row for titling your columns, and 50 for listing links. Search engines do not like link pages with more than 50 links, so if you make your spread sheet only capable of holding 50 items, you won’t exceed that arbitrary level. Each link page on your site will be a separate sheet in your spread sheet file. You can rename the tabs along the bottom to match the page titles on your web site if that helps you keep track.

Your four columns will be “Title,” “Description,” “Page/Location,” and “URL.” Take the first link page on your site and just type in the info. Copy and paste may or may not work as some software insists on copying the hyperlink info as well and makes necessary stuff like wrapping text difficult or impossible. The page/location column is used to code which link page you have the placed the reciprocal link onto, and where up and down the page. For instance, the first link on your page one is coded 1.01. The 12th link on page 2 is coded 2.12. The 18th link on page 3 is coded 3.18, and so on. Once you have done that, have your software alphabetize the page. The links will then be arranged in alphabetical order so you can easily find whatever you are looking for. Additions to not-yet-completed pages can just be added to the bottom, and then re-alphabetized. Try it!

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Sandi Moses
08 Mar 2007

Sandi Moses has been involved in internet marketing since November, 2003. Visit her site at http://www.123iwork4me.com.
familymoses@att.net