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1. Prospect and Lead Generation
This method of making money on the web involves piquing your prospects interest and giving them a reason to ask for more information about your product or service. You then follow up by e-mail, phone, or in person.

That's exactly what we are doing with this web site. We provide you with information on building an effective web site. We tell you how effective sites work and why they work this way. In fact we try and tell you everything you could possibly need to know to build a killer site. This means you can do it by yourself or if you don't want to go all that work (I can't imagine why not!) you can contact us and find out more about how we can help you.

This method of making money on the web is particularly well suited to service businesses or businesses that sell custom products or high ticket items. Whenever the customer spends a great deal of time making the decision to buy, your web site is there to provide a wealth of information about your product or service. You should provide any information that will support the sale or the decision making process. Make your site the best resource available on the product or service you offer and you WILL grab the lions share of leads and prospects in your market.

2. E-commerce
E-commerce is what is generating most of the myths and mysteries of the web. It's almost too good to be true, right? A global market for your products and services. People from Boston to Borneo surfing into your site and spending money. All this and your brand spankin' new web site cost a fraction of what a bricks and mortar store would cost. What's the catch?

Well there is no catch. That's really how it works. OK, so it's far from simple to do all this and it's still a major investment BUT you CAN extend your market from a local one to a global one by having an effective web site. As long as you can deliver your products and services outside of your local area, then the world is your oyster. The flip side of having the whole world as your market is that you also have the whole world as your competition. Competition is fierce on the internet. Many of the biggest e-commerce companies (Amazon.com) have not made any money yet. These companies are trading profits for market share. Once they have firmly established their market share and become household names (building brand awareness and image) their profits will become a reality.

This brings up an important point. How deep are your pockets? Are you prepared to lose millions of dollars over several years just to grab a large part of the market? Major corporations are prepared to do this. This makes it difficult to break into the online book business! But if you are selling anything beside commodities (books, CD's, airline tickets, etc.) there is still lots of room for many more innovative (and very profitable) e-commerce sites.

3. Advertising and Referral Revenue
You've seen the banners. Every once in a while you may have even clicked on one. Whoever had that banner on their site is making money from it. It may not be a lot of money but it is some revenue. There are very few web sites that have the amount of traffic needed to support the site owner on her private island in the Pacific. For example, at current ad rates (approximately $35 CPM in mid '99) you would need to have over a half million page views per month to generate $10,000 gross revenue per month. That sounds good but unless you have many millions of page views per month, ad reps don't even want to represent your site to the major advertisers. So you have to go out and sell the ads yourself. Selling ads is usually a long way from your own private island!

To attract that kind of traffic you must have outstanding content on your site. Compelling information, news, entertainment, or an online community can generate large amounts of traffic. But that compelling information is expensive! Even the mighty Time-Warner found this out when their Pathfinder site could not pay for all the content they were generating out of their advertising revenue. So what do they do? With less compelling content, they will receive even fewer visitors and page views. It's a catch-22 in which only the most highly trafficked sites can make money with this business model. Does that mean you should not use it? Not necessarily. It can be one of several sources of income for your site. It still might not fit in with your goal of making money because unless your site is a portal or directory, you probably want visitors to your site to stay at your site. Is it worth 3 cents to possibly send them away to another site? Not if you can make more money by keeping them at your site. Consider carefully how banner advertising can help you (revenue) and hinder you (take visitors away from your site.) You may find that even though you are getting paid for running other companies ad banners, the rewards don't make up for the business you lose by sending people away from your site.

The other half of this revenue model is referral income. This type of revenue generation is what is taking place when you see a book referred to on a web site as well as a link to go buy that book at Amazon.com. These programs are often called affiliate programs. You usually don't see blatant ad's with referrals. You also don't run as big a risk of your visitors leaving your site as with banner ads. And if they do leave your site, it is to buy a book(or whatever) that you recommended and is closely focussed on the same topic as your web site. At least they will be thankful for the referral! The difference in revenue with referrals is that you only get paid when someone actually buys the product or service that you recommend. This can still be highly lucrative if you pick products or services that fit well with your target audience. Your visitors are now friends that you are making a personal recommendation to. Not nearly as intrusive as a big banner with animation and flashing text, right? Referral income on its own is probably not enough to put you on your own private island either, but it is a method of generating consistent income from products/services that are highly aligned with the purpose of your web site.>>

Intro
1) Build Brand Awareness
2) Make Money
3) Save Money
4) Customer Service and Support

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