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The Book MannMaking Your Fortune on the InternetBy: Richard O. Mann |
If you’ve been
around the Internet much this last year or two, you’ll
recall the furor that followed the seemingly innocent act of two
immigration lawyers in Phoenix. Virtually every newspaper in the
country followed the story—the repercussions continue to
reverberate today. Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel manually
posted a short message offering information on the
government’s annual green card lottery to Internet Usenet
newsgroups they thought immigrants might read. It worked so well
that they expanded their postings to every newsgroup they could
reach—approximately 6,000 discussion groups.
Thus was born the distasteful (to many) practice of
"spamming," as the world of business hit the Internet
in a big way. Canter and Siegel present their side of the story
in a briefly best-selling book, How To Make a FORTUNE on the
Information Superhighway (HarperPerennial, $13). Canter says the
overwhelming response of hate mail, phone calls, and faxed
complaints was certainly uncalled for over a "small
commercial posting on a public electronic bulletin board."
I’d liken it more to walking through every publicly-owned
facility in town, interrupting every meeting in progress to read
a totally unrelated ad. It’s irritating, rude, and
pointless, and it amazes me that Canter can’t understand
that. Nevertheless, the book provides a fascinating account of
"the green card incident," followed by a mixed bag of
advice on setting up a net-aware business. Some advice is valid,
the rest will earn you nothing while making you an object of
worldwide disdain.
Business on the Internet
Now, two years later, business has a strong place on the Net that
is both appropriate and useful. Businesses (or users of their
products) can set up their own Usenet discussion groups where all
who are interested participate. The primary home of commerce on
the Net, however, is the World Wide Web (WWW or "the
Web"). Most major companies have a Web site (or "home
page"); Web addresses even appear in TV, radio, and other
advertising media. Business on the Web is now routine as major
corporations provide sales and product information and thousands
of home-based businesses offer their services to any and all.
If you’re interested in doing business on the Net, whether
it’s helping write a résumé from your basement office or
offering product information for a Fortune 500 company, you need
to know a set of basic principles and techniques. Luckily,
there’s no shortage of information on the subject. A quick
search of bookstores and publishers’ Web sites found more
than two dozen interesting books on Net business and marketing
techniques.
Getting Your Feet Wet
The first order of business is to learn about the Internet from a
business perspective. A good starting point is A Small Business
Guide to Doing Big Business on the Internet by Brian Hurley and
Peter Birkwood (Self-Counsel Press, $14.95). Not as thick as the
rest of the books mentioned here, this book is deceptive—it
provides nearly as much raw information as the others, but does
it quickly. It offers nuts-and-bolts practical advice and
techniques, along with concrete statistics and examples whenever
appropriate. The book is also the most up-to-date in the
bunch—an important consideration when the Net changes
drastically in just months. Recommended.
Getting Down to Brass Tacks
You’ll get more detail from Rosalind Resnick and Dave
Taylor’s The Internet Business Guide, Second Edition
(Sams.net, $25). Because both authors make their living from
Internet-based businesses, they write from a rich fund of
experience. The coverage here is detailed, with plentiful screen
shots. The clear, personal, and logical writing style includes
enough real-life examples to keep it interesting—or even
fascinating. Over 50 pages at the back of the book list Internet
providers and other tabular data. Written in early 1995, the
lists are dated and undoubtedly inaccurate. (An up-to-the-minute
directory is available at http://www.meckler.com and other places
on the Net.) Throughout the book, Resnick and Taylor inject
periodic reality checks, emphasizing the high risk of failure and
that few of even the popular sites actually make money. For a
healthy dose of reality along with your Web knowledge, this is
your book. Recommended.
Another gem is Jill H. Ellsworth and Matthew V. Ellsworth’s
The New Internet Business Book (John Wiley & Sons, $24.95).
It covers the same bases as the others, but does it with calm
authority and accuracy. It reflects current reality by
emphasizing the Web’s importance immediately; some of the
others take forever to get to the Web. It’s more up to date
than Resnick & Taylor, which makes its numerous tables,
appendices, and listings more accurate. You can’t go wrong
with this one.
The Internet Business Companion: Growing Your Business in the
Electronic Age by David Angell and Brent Heslop (Addison Wesley,
$19.95) features a section on how to prepare an Internet Business
Plan—it alone is worth the price of admission. The writing
is not flashy (or funny), but communicates effectively—in
spite of occasional bouts of jargon and rampant acronym disease,
which are guaranteed to bog you down. Directories and listings
occupy a surprisingly large number of pages in this thin volume.
It’s a good overview, but doesn’t provide much depth.
Internet Marketing 101
Once you’re in business, you need to "create a presence
on the Web," as the marketers say. Online Marketing
Handbook, by Daniel S. Janal (Van Nostrand Reinhold, $24.95),
clearly the best of the books here, takes a hard-nosed,
no-nonsense look at what you need to do to publicize your Web
site and sell your product or services. Janal is direct and to
the point, uses frequent real-world examples (including a healthy
dose of businesses that failed), and presents the information in
digestible chunks. It feels as if you’re in a seminar taught
by a master teacher who is also a master marketer. Published in
early 1995, however, it’s ready for an update.
Michael Mathiesen’s Marketing on the Internet (Maximum
Press, $39.95) includes a nifty 12-step program for online
marketing that neatly summarizes the marketing advice contained
in all of these books. It includes extensive listings and
directories and gives you a Spry Mosaic Web Browser on diskette.
Learning by Example: Business Directories
Bruce Johnson’s NetMarketing: How Your Business Can Profit
from the Online Revolution (Wolff New Media, $22) briefly
explains Net marketing principles, then moves to a large
directory listing business Web sites, along with notes about
each. The directory can be useful to see what business really
does on the Web, but the marketing information is only an
overview at best.
A more useful directory of Internet business is Ryan
Bernard’s excellent Internet Business 500 (Ventana, $39.95).
Bernard includes the book’s entire text in Web format on a
CD which you can update at your convenience over the Internet.
(After three months, you’ll need to subscribe to obtain
further updates.) Even if you aren’t going into business on
the Net, browsing through these sites is an educational blast.
Actually Doing It
When it’s time to actually set up your Web site, David Cook
and Deborah Seller’s Launching a Business on the Web (Que,
$39.99) will guide you through the maze of decisions and plans
required to get going, always with an eye to creating a
successful business rather than just a spiffy display of Web
technology.
Adam Blum takes a different approach in his Building Business Web
Sites (MIS:Press, $39.95). After 57 pages introducing Web
business practices, the rest of the book is a bit-twiddler’s
guide to HTML, CGI, and Perl (programming languages for the Web).
The included CD provides HTML authoring tools and other programs
for actually writing the Web site program.
A good solution might be the Coriolis Group’s The All-in-One
Internet Business Success Pack, which includes both a grundle of
necessary software authoring tools and other programs necessary
to set up a Web site. Two useful books are also in the box: How
To Grow Your Business on the Internet and Web Publisher’s
Design Guide. Both are also available separately in bookstores.
The Tao of Web Businesses
The 10 Secrets for Web Success: What It Takes to Do Your Site
Right by Bryan Pfaffenberger and David Wall (Ventana, $19.95)
breaks new ground by identifying ten of the best business Web
sites and interviewing their creators. From the interviews, which
compose the first half of the book, the authors extracted ten
secrets which underlie the remarkable success of Web businesses
such as Yahoo, DejaNews, and StockMaster. It was hard to put this
one down long enough to write this review. If you’re serious
about the working on the Web, you need to read this book.
Richard Mann, a popular freelance writer, has published over 400
articles in dozens of national computer magazines over the last
six years. Contact him at 74774.3234@compuserve.com or
RichMann2@aol.com
Richard O. Mann, CPA, is a contributing editor here and at PC Laptop Computers Magazine; his articles appear regularly in many national PC publications. An accountant and auditor by day, Rich sheds that stern visage to become the Book Mann by night. Read any good computer books lately? Rich would love to hear about them for possible future Books of the Month. Contact him at RichMann@unforgettable.com.
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