Making Money with an Internet Business

Dialing into the World with Telnet

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:28:46 +0000

Electronic mail and Usenet are both focused on offering discussion forums through various means, but there’s a world of additional information available through the Internet, too.
There are a number of ways to access the far-flung databases in cyberspace, but the most popular, and easiest, is probably something called telnet, for telephone network.
The program works by connecting you to a remote computer and then sending to that computer everything you type on your screen; once you’re logged on, everything from the remote machine appears on your local display. With telnet, you can dial into thousands of computers connected to the Internet—even those overseas—without ever worrying about remembering phone numbers or racking up long-distance phone bills. Electronic mail addresses require you to know names of users and the full names and domains of their computers, but for telnet, you only need to know the computer name.
Sitting in California, for example, you can use telnet to connect directly to the United States Library of Congress Information System (LOCIS) and search its card catalog. You can also try connecting to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania to search for business information or the holdings catalog at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Once you have an Internet account, you can also telnet directly to a variety of commercial networks such as CompuServe and Dialog. You’ll still need to open an account on these services before you can access the information stored there, however.

Spreading the News with Newsgroups

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:27:50 +0000

The next step up in Internet information dissemination is Usenet newsgroups. If mailing lists are like a post office that can automatically make copies of your message and distribute it worldwide, Usenet is the public library, where each site covers a discussion on a specific topic.
Currently, there are over 7,000 Usenet newsgroups with far-ranging discussions on a dizzying array of topics ranging from HyperCard programming on the Macintosh to magazine writing, the best places to eat in the San Francisco area to the moral implications and ramifications of abortion in U.S. society.
As with mailing lists, the two primary types of Usenet newsgroups are moderated and unmoderated. Most groups are unmoderated, and anything anyone submits, or “posts,” in Internet lingo, to the group is quickly distributed to all sites on the network and available to everyone who participates in that particular discussion group.
Moderated groups have all submissions automatically sent to an individual or committee that screens the articles for appropriateness, and if acceptable, posts them to the group. Delays of many days are common with moderated newsgroups, but when a small Usenet group can have 5,000 participants, you might find yourself quickly seeking shelter from the barrage of information.
As with mailing lists, you also have to subscribe to Usenet newsgroups, but the good news is that the entire process takes place on your local Internet service provider computer rather than through electronic mail on a remote computer.
Now for the catch: A wide variety of programs are available for reading Usenet news, and they are dramatically different from each other. With the proliferation of Mac and PC computers on the Internet, graphically-based readers are also becoming available, further complicating things. Worse yet, different Internet access providers offer a different subset of the Usenet readers. For example, Dave prefers a program called tin for reading Usenet news, and although it’s available on Netcom, it isn’t available on the computer he uses at Purdue University, so he uses another program called rn for Purdue-related newsgroups. Rosalind, by contrast, relies on WinNET Mail, a Windows-based news reader.
As a result of the plethora of Usenet interfaces, we debated (through electronic mail!) which would be the best reader to use for the examples in this site. Our conclusion was that tin offered the best balance between common accessibility and sophisticated interface.
Don’t be surprised, however, if things aren’t immediately obvious. Like all Usenet software, tin takes a while to master. Worse, it’s difficult to figure out what Usenet groups are available, and few of the programs offer any capabilities to help. Your best bet is to ask your Internet access provider for a listing of the groups available including descriptions (if that puzzles them, ask whether they have a file on the system called / usr/lib/ news/ newsgroups). It’s a huge file, and we used a simple utility to show just the groups that have the phrase biz within their names.

Business Benefits of Mailing Lists

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:26:13 +0000

There are two main business benefits to Internet mailing lists—access to experts and access to potential customers. Almost all mailing lists seem to be populated with a surprising and often eclectic variety of users, ranging from the top experts in the area to neophytes monitoring the discussion, hoping to learn about the subject.
When compared to the time and expense involved in attending a professional conference or workshop, joining an Internet mailing list can be an amazingly efficient alternative. Because all these experts are accessible electronically, you can bounce ideas off them any time without incurring exorbitant fees. But beware that your competitors might be quite interested in your fledgling ideas, too!
The other advantage to mailing lists is that you can use them to disseminate product- and service-related information to your target community without any associated expenses. Beware of violations of the spirit of mailing lists and other netiquette/awx pas . Also remember that you can create your own mailing lists that might focus exclusively on new product announcements from your company—a list to which you can add customers when they first purchase a product from your firm.
Internet discussion and mailing lists can be a direct marketer’s dream—if used judiciously. Unlike the bulletin boards on CompuServe and other commercial services, you don’t have to wait until your prospective customers drop by and happen to glance at your company’s information; they get your message automatically as subscribers to the list.
Of course, this can be a double-edged sword. If you misjudge your market or word your press release in too promotional a way, you run the risk of alienating your entire target market in one fell swoop, and, on the Internet, apologies often aren’t accepted.

Around the World with E-Mail

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:24:26 +0000

Twenty-five years ago, English teachers were decrying the death of the art of letter writing and its replacement by the telephone call. The good news is that the dire predictions appear to have been premature and that the art of interpersonal communications is enjoying a virtual renaissance thanks to electronic mail, perhaps the single most popular facet of the Internet. Based on statistics released by the National Science Foundation, over 4,000 e-mail messages are sent each second on the Internet. The oft-quoted 20,000,000 users number is based on their e-mail connectivity to the network; these days, it’s getting to the point where just about everyone is hooked up to the network in some fashion or other. Today, more than 145 countries are connected, and it’s a sure bet that once we meet up with extraterrestrial residents, they’ll be hooked in, too. Through Internet gateways, users from CompuServe, MCI Mail, GEnie, and other commercial networks are also “on the Net.”
For businesses, being able to connect with lots of people is a boon, but for many companies the greatest advantage to Internet e-mail is its low cost. Not only do you save on postage and printing compared to postal mailings, but by paying a monthly fee to an Internet access provider, you can send and receive all the e-mail you want without paying extra for messages or the time you spend online composing them. That’s a refreshing change from commercial networks where you pay by the hour or the byte. In fact, if you send a message to a colleague on CompuServe, the recipient must pay to receive your e-mail if it’s sent from the Internet.
The third advantage is universality. Through the Internet, you can send e-mail to people who use CompuServe, America Online, MCI Mail, AppleLink, eWorld, AT&T EasyLink, and other commercial networks even if you don’t have an account on that system. You can also swap mail with colleagues and friends connected to government, military, and university e-mail systems and even local computer bulletin boards. This means that you don’t have to pay fees to a dozen individual computer networks just to reach their subscribers or to log on and off each one every time you wanted to send a message to one of its users. Thanks to the Internet, sending mail electronically is faster and easier than carting a batch of company fliers to the post office.

A Virtual Storefront

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:22:47 +0000

The logistics of setting up a storefront in the local strip mall or office building are fairly straightforward, but doing business on the information highway is nowhere near as easy. Indeed, few companies fully understand the various tools and services they could offer, the tradeoffs involved, and the best way to ensure profitable results from their investment. Part of the reason this is more difficult is because unlike in the real world, in cyberspace, you can’t see where you’re going.
If you’re driving down Interstate 95 to attend a meeting in downtown Fort Lauderdale, for example, you can look for—and hope to find—the sign that indicates the desired exit ramp. Even if you get hopelessly lost, you can always pull off the highway, pull in at a gas station, and ask for directions.
Cruise the Internet in search of a program stored on a university computer system, by contrast, and you can spend hours poking about, vainly attempting to summon the exact commands needed without so much as a virtual gas station in sight. Unlike centralized commercial online services such as CompuServe and Prodigy, there’s no toll-free technical support department you can call for help when you get lost on the Internet.
What if you want to put your business on the Internet and access millions of potential customers? If it’s a struggle for you to find information on the Internet, imagine the trouble your customers will have trying to locate your Internet “store.” How will your customers know that you’re even online? Complicating the picture further, the Internet provides a dizzying array of information services that you can offer customers and potential customers, ranging from a simple file and information archives to electronic catalogs to elaborate multimedia documents. Remember that your customers will need to know in advance not only what Internet services you offer but how you offer them. If they send e-mail to an in-formation archive, for example, they may hit a dead end—and go looking for an¬other company that offers more accessible information. These are only a few of the problems involved in doing business on the Internet. Despite the Internet’s massive human and informational resources and its enormous potential as a worldwide marketplace, the Internet is still, to a large extent, an uncharted frontier. Imagine New York City without street signs, the Kalahari Desert without a map, and hieroglyphics without the Rosetta stone, and you’re starting to get an idea of what navigating the Internet can be like if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Don’t despair! There are a growing number of Internet tools and navigational software programs now becoming available that will make it much easier to find the information you’re seeking and where you’re going. If you pack the right tools and learn how to use them, you’ll be cruising the information highway in no time. At the same time, it’s hard to know which Internet services to offer until you know the lay of the land, so climb aboard and let us be your travel guides for this introduction to the Internet and its capabilities.
The rest of this post will focus on the tools and services available through the Internet. When possible, we’ll show you the “nuts and bolts” of what we’re doing; however, the key is not so much to master all the tools but to try to understand how you can use them to enhance your business and offer information to your customers.