To promote your business beyond the reach of traditional media or to supplement your traditional advertisements. It can also be used as a value added feature. A web site can reach far more people at a much lower cost than any other form of advertising...if it is positioned properly. It can offer delivery modes that are not available or simply too expensive with traditional methods. For example full catalogues, video, music, interactivity. Finally, it can be used to add value to your customers experience.
If you wish to learn how to program for the Internet, fine. However, if you wish to save money it won't work. The cost for the software, and hours invested for you to learn how to design your own page would not be worth it. Plus, you would still have to pay an Internet provider to host your page. Hire someone to do a proper job.
You could hire someone to provide you with a simple home page for as little as $50 a year. Plenty of amateur page designers are out there. Typically they throw together a very simple site based on a form. They post it on their own web site. This type of advertising is about as effective as placing a poster on someone's refrigerator. Unless someone actually goes into that persons home no one will notice your home page. The Internet is not television, people have to actively search for the information. Unless they know the name of your business, they won't find it.
Searches by topic have almost become impossible. In April of 1996 the word SCUBA generated 60,000 responses. By January 1997, the same search generated 160,000 searches and at the start of 2000 nearly six hundred thousand responses! It doesn't matter what the topic is, the amount of information is growing so fast that a single business has precious little chance of making their web page ever show up in this mess.
Again, the problem becomes very simple. Unless the person knows what they are looking for, they can't find it. If they know about your business already, chances are they are not new customers. So how do you attract new customers who are completely unaware of your business?
There is no difference. Dive-Into-the-Net is simply providing another pathway to your site. It is an attractive, informative path that leads to your web site in addition to its general placement on the Internet.
That is akin to saying that stores in shopping malls are at a disadvantage because their competitors are across the hall. Shopping centres have killed the downtown cores because of the convenience and variety and numbers they offer. There is a distinct advantage to businesses cooperating for new business rather than competing for existing markets. What Dive-Into-the-Net offers is a way for numerous businesses to harness their advertising dollars together to achieve far more than they could individually. An excellent example of cooperative advertising is the campaigns for milk. No single dairy farmer could possibly afford the cost of the commercials to promote milk sales.
As the pages for each region develop they become progressively more attractive to the potential customer. With each new business that appears on a given page, the customer has more to choose from, and has an easier time planning an excursion to that area, so the potential business for you increases. With individual web pages, the customer base becomes divided among numerous internet sites.
© M. Colautti 1996-1999, 2000</>
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