Earn Huge Online

A report by Yankee Group, a Boston-based market research company, stated that at the end of 2004 around 34% of small and medium sized businesses in North America were selling goods and services on the Internet and another 25% is planning to do so within the next 12 months. Online sales in the United States represented 8.4 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product in 2004. By 2008, the percentage had increased to 60% online. This figure is increasingly rising. This means, if your company is not paying serious attention to this vital channel of sales and marketing, you are simply missing the boat.

In its basic form a website is a bundle of pages full of texts, graphics and other electronic files published on the Internet for people to view. How you organize your website depends totally on your online goals. Websites are built for various purposes. You can use a website as a sales point, a marketing channel, a corporate image building tool, a branding channel, an information center, a CRM center, a product launching center, and for a number of other reasons. When you plan to build a website, you should base your online strategy keeping in mind two things: your online objectives and your potential audience.

Some of the most common types of corporate websites are:

Information providing sites
Most of today’s sites fall in this category. The simplest of them are actually mere reflections of offline corporate brochures.

Promoting company
The idea behind some of information-driven sites is to give maximum information related to the company. A holding company, for example, may prefer to have a site like this. These sites usually include: company history, company related news, mission statement, profiles of key executives, a good FAQ section, etc. Graphics are used in these sites only to accentuate the text information. However, the sites may include video and FLASH presentations as well.

Promoting products or services
A pharmaceutical company may develop a website surrounding the product to promote its recently launched medicine. The sole purpose of this type of site is to create awareness of specific products or services.

Creating brand awareness
A manufacturing company that sells its products exclusively through distributing channels may develop a website to provide ultimate information on the products and create brand. These sites complement the company’s offline promotional efforts and are always built in consistence with other commercials.

E-commerce sites
Online sales are done through e-commerce sites. The main characteristics of an e-commerce site include:

1. Detailed product or service information with pictures and sometimes with multimedia presentations, drawings, charts, etc.
2. Shopping cart – so that the buyer can select one or several items to purchase.
3. Payment gateway – so that the buyer can make payments for the products or services purchased.

Corporate portals
A website that offers a broad range of resources and services such as email, forums, company pertinent news and articles, members only area, etc., is generally called a portal. Portals are intended to be the gateway for their respective audience.

B2B exchange
A business to business exchange is an online platform where buyers and sellers come to communicate, collaborate and make business transactions. The main objective of a B2B exchange is to create a venue, filled with features that allow members to efficiently conduct business processes through the Internet. A private B2B exchange is a corporate portal with a marketplace. It is designed to provide services to the company’s own buyers, sellers and workforce.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A PhD in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at nowshade@rusbiz.com ezine.rusbiz.com

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 2:46 pm and is filed under make money online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.