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Beginner’s Guide To Dot Com Riches
Introduction
Page 1 of 7
Internet Marketing - Strategies and techniques
applied on the Internet to support the organization's overall
online marketing objectives. Goals may include driving targeted
traffic to a Website and features on the Website to create a
desired call to action. Internet marketing may include keyword
and meta tag strategies, newsgroup and mailing list postings,
banner advertising, reciprocal links, online promotions, content
positioning, online image development, email strategies and
other interactive features.
Momentum builds
for Internet marketing as businesses stretch their reach toward
an avalanche of web surfers. Just a decade ago, the Internet was
merely a conversation topic within small tech circles. Today,
the Internet hosts businesses from merchandise to service, many
which operate solely through their web storefront.
Forrester Research projects
online worldwide commerce – including business-to-business and
business-to-consumer transactions – to reach $6.8 trillion by
the close of 2004, with North America capturing $3.5 trillion,
more than half of the worldwide wealth.
While this customer landscape
expands from the malls and downtown onto their glowing computer
monitors, Internet corporations climb to meet demand. Shopping
portals emerge as the easiest and most comprehensive online
catalogs, streamlining thousands of merchants into one simple
grid. Shopping and marketing evolve, giving merchants national,
even worldwide, visibility easier than ever before. Customers
shop at home purchasing from large, well-known merchants or
small, niche shops in the same manner. Packages are traceable at
every stop, then conveniently delivered to their door. The
Internet redefines communications, billing and the age old
motto: location, location, location.
Headlines trace this marketing
revolution from its amateur beginnings to Wall Street. Yahoo!
acquired 22 companies since its inception including, most
recently, Overture, Inktomi and HotJobs. Similarly, what began
as a hobby grew into a mammoth IPO in August of 2004 when Google
(NASDAQ: GOOG) announced its offer of 19,605,052 shares of Class
A common stock at $85 per share. Froogle, its shopping portal,
remains in beta. Ebay, from humble beginnings, dominated the
innovative live auction platform, acquiring PayPal in October of
2002. MSN Shopping boasts more Fortune 500 retailers than any
other shopping portal, hosting RedEnvelope, Dell, Circuit City,
Neiman Marcus, Blue Nile and JC Penny.
Moving forward, we’ll watch
Google’s acquisition in Keyhole.com unfold, as search technology
migrates deeper into military capability providing commercial
use by everyday citizens.
As customers steadily migrate
to and accept online shopping within their normal conduct,
offline commerce increases as well. Research shows many
consumers conduct product research online, make purchase
decisions by navigating through online storefronts, then making
their actual purchase offline. Companies that have an online
store show significant offline sales growth once on the Internet
as well.
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Introduction Page 2
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