Online Business Then and Now (1997-2011)

Online Business Then and Now (1997-2011)

Online Business Then and Now (1997-2011)

I stood in the lobby of a conference where I spoke recently when an attendee walked up and asked me a seemingly innocent question. "With all the competition online, do you think it's easier or harder to start an online business now, or back when you got started?" The person asking the question seemed to feel as though they'd waited too long to add digital marketing to their business and had fallen too far behind their competitors. But when I broke it down for them in the following manner, they realized it's never too late to start getting business online.Web Hosting & Domain NamesIn 1997, I paid $125 per month for 10MB of web space and shelled out $100 per year to register 1 domain. In 2011, you can get unlimited hosting space for $6.99 per month and pay $12 for 1 domain for a year. ** Winner**: 2011Website Design I bought FrontPage '98 back in 1997 and spent about 200 hours learning how to make a good, basic website. That learning curve was not for the faint of heart. In 2011, with the FREE WordPress software and numerous free themes (templates) I can have a website up literally with 2 to 5 clicks of a mouse. ** Winner**: 2011 Website Traffic No website can survive without targeted website traffic. Back in 1997, your only options were Yahoo! (Google who?), banner ads, and search engine optimization voo-doo. The going was slow, expensive, and very confusing. In 2011, you have about 30+ legitimate strategies for getting real traffic to your website, including Google, Bing, Yahoo!, blogs, social media, and more. ** Winner**: 2011 Consumer Acceptance In 1997, half the battle in selling online was explaining to people it was safe to buy online. Every other media story you saw was about an online world fraught with danger and peril the instant you entered your credit card details. Fast-forward to 2011 and people spend more online than the Gross National Product of some countries! Bottom line: when my mom buys stuff online, you know we've crossed a threshold of acceptance! ** Winner**: 2011Taking PaymentsAsk anyone who sold online back in 1997 how difficult it was to take online payments. You needed an act of Congress to get a merchant account that allowed you to process online payments, while the fees, holdback, and threat of frozen accounts were insane. Now, in 2011, anyone can legitimately process virtually unlimited amounts of transactions using PayPal with no credit check or holdback. Also, many credit card processors now chomp at the bit to get a piece of the online pie and make it very easy to get a merchant account to hook up to your website. ** Winner**: 2011Easy Tools & TechnologyBack in 1997, you had three things you could use to build your online presence: text, graphics, and html. That was it! You could put text and pictures on a page, and you were dang happy to do that without staying up until 2 o'clock in the morning to get it done!Now, the tools to do insanely cool stuff online get taken for granted! Mobile media, website audio and video, social media, blogging, and more get done with a few clicks of a mouse. The first full-motion video I ever put online took me almost 20 hours of work to figure out how to get it done and posted. Now, with a $40 Kodak "Mini" and YouTube, you can get a video recorded, posted, and playing on your website in less than 15 minutes! ** Winner**: 2011Bottom line: It's easier now to get started than ever before in the history of the Web. It's easier to get a website up and running. It's simpler and cheaper to get targeted traffic. And, you don't have to explain to every other person who buys from you that it's safe to shop online. With a great idea and the right skills and tools, it's faster and easier to succeed online than ever before!

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