Internet Business

The official category is electronic commerce.

A link to more good subject headings. These include information for people who want to find information on internet marketing and advertising as well.

Bonus: Great government report about size, growth and other stats about the internet sales.

Become a Web Page Marketing Master

Curious to see what keywords people type in when they're searching for electronic goods?  Who visits target.com and how long they stayed? How many pages people click inside Amazon.com?

Are the visitors to Crate and Barrel.com young or old, male or female, high or low income?

We have two great databases that will show you the keywords used to arrive at a web page, number of unique visitors to a specific webpage, and demographics of people (age, income, gender, etc) visiting a web site.

They are Compete Pro  and SRDS (use IE or Chrome with SRDS).

Note: Inside SRDS you want to select digital media.  Click on the website name and if demographics are available, then you'll see something like this in SRDS:

This is for ATV Rider:



Compete Pro looks like this (this was a search for chegg.com):
Note: if the above doesn't work try this:

Try direct log in of www.compete.com

LOGIN: competesrds@texasst.com 
Please e-mail me at ca20@txstate.edu for the password

Paying More or Less on The Internet

Great article about how retail web sites charge you more based on where you are and how much they know about you!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Subject Headings

Lots of ways to make sure your business site turns up on a Google search.

Search engine optimization isn't really used as a term, but try.

Internet Marketing
Internet Advertising

Quick example of a SEO book:

Ultimate guide To search engine optimization

Like we said, search engine optimization not used officially, but I did a keyword search for you here.

Why MySpace Failed

Here's a good BusinessWeek article about why MySpace lost to Facebook. Lotsa of interesting rules that apply to social sites: perception that the wrong crowd had taken over, lack of crowd sourcing applications, and nervous advertisers.

Private Forms of Currency: The Bitcoin

One of the hallmarks of the future will be currency uncertainty. Whether that takes the form of inflation, deflation, devaluation, revaluation or a combination of these is unclear.

However, people are experimenting with new forms of currency (and they aren't state issued/fiat).

Take the example of Bitcoin.This is an e-commerce currency that is privately created and supposedly designed to guard against the shenanigans that befall fiat currency (inflation, etc...).

As this article points out, freeware Linux was thought to be unworkable as well.

Book Review: F'd Companies

This book chronicles the worst, silliest and least thought out ideas of the dotcom era. The writer is profane and harsh, but it makes for entertaining reading.

It also makes for very educational reading if you are starting a company or testing out business ideas. That goes double for companies doing business on the internet.

There are lots of bad ideas in these business plans to curdle the soul - lack of competitive advantage, high shipping costs (relevant for internet retailers), failure to improve on value for the consumer, and many more shortcomings so glaring you need polarized sunglasses to read this book.

A List of Data Miners

Who are the big data mining companies on the internet? This news article profiles the major internet data collectors, how they do it, what they use it for, and how much they know about you.

Pretty crazy what they can piece together about you, especially using tricks like finding your aliases, etc...

The article includes opt out information but it seems a little quixotic.

Our database ABI Inform is a good place to read more on this topic from journals, newspapers and magazines.

Groupon Article

Have you ever turned down $6 billion? Groupon did when Google offered to buy the company.

Groupon will print you for a coupon for a local business - if enough people online show interest as well.

Groupon incorporates some of the key lessons of internet business: long tail marketing, greater efficiency in uniting sellers and buyers and social networking. I want you to think about that if you're starting an Internet company.

Here's a nice Analysis of Groupon in The New Yorker.

The article criticizes Groupon a bit for not being truly unique (there are already competitor sites) and for that greatest of sins in today's world: employing thousands of ad salespeople (hey, there's a job for you after graduation).

However, they do praise Groupon a bit for clever organization, adcopy and name recognition.

Tracking the Most Popular Viral Ads (and More)

Here's something interesting - a website that tracks the most popular viral ads, movie trailers, and webisodes....

Also interesting: a big viral hit does not necessarily translate into bigger sales....

Update: Despite a few naysayers, it appears that Old Spice sales (one of the most popular viral ads) have spiked recently. Of course, it's correlation not causation, but highly likely to be related to the campaign's popularity.

Still, popular ad campaigns don't always increase sales.

Book Review: Free: The Future of A Radical Price

Here's a conundrum of the modern age: people are getting used to not paying for digital content.
You, as a businessperson, have to deal with this problem.

This is the subject of Chris Anderson's Free: Future of a Radical Price. This book discusses the various revenue models you may have to adopt.

Here's an excerpt from the New York Times review:

"More precisely, the marginal cost of digital products, or the cost of delivering one additional copy, is approaching zero. The fixed cost of producing the first copy, however, may be as high as ever. All those servers and transmission lines, as cheap as they may be per gigabyte, require large initial investments. The articles still have to be written, the songs recorded, the movies made. The crucial business question, then, is how you cover those fixed costs. As many an airline bankruptcy demonstrates, it can be extremely hard to survive in a business with high fixed costs, low marginal costs and relatively easy entry. As long as serving one new customer costs next to nothing, the competition to attract as many customers as possible will drive prices toward zero. And zero doesn't pay the bills.

The answer, Anderson argues, lies in cross-subsidies: "shifting money around from product to product, person to person, between now and later, or into nonmonetary markets and back out again." Most obviously, online advertisers can subsidize content by paying for eyeballs or, in some cases, for detailed information on potential consumers. Less familiar is the "freemium" strategy, in which a site like Flickr offers one package of services free but charges for an ad-free package with more features, allowing a small fraction of users to subsidize the rest."

We just ordered our copy. It'll be here anyday. Check out is free.