" 20 Reasons to Put Your Business on the WWW"

1. To Establish a Presence
Approximately 790 million people worldwide have access to the World Wide Web (WWW). No matter where your business is located, you can't ignore your 790 million potential customers. To be a part of community and to show your interest in serving them, you need to be on the WWW. Because you know your competitors will be part of this community.

2. To Network
A lot of what passes for business is simply nothing more than making connections with other people. Every smart businessperson knows, it's not what you know, it's whom you know. Passing out your business card is part of every good meeting and every businessperson can tell more than one story how a chance meeting turned into the big deal. Well, what if you could pass out your business card to thousands, maybe millions of potential clients and partners, saying this is what I do and if you are ever in need of my services, this is how you can reach me. You can, 24 hours a day, inexpensively and simply, on the WWW.

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3. To Make Business Information Available
What is basic business information? Think of a Yellow Pages ad. What are your hours? What do you do? How can someone contact you? What methods of payment do you take? Where are you located? Now think of a Yellow Pages ad where you have instant communication. What is today's special? Today's interest rate? Next week's parking lost sale information? If you could keep your customer informed of every reason why they should do business with you, don't you think you could do more business? You can on the WWW.

4. To Serve Your Customers
Making business information available is one of the most important ways to serve your customers. But if you look at serving the customer, you'll find even more ways to use WWW technology. How about making forms available to pre-qualify for loans, or having your staff do a search for that classic jazz record your customer is looking for, without tying up your staff on the phone to take down the information? Allow your customer to punch in sizes and check it against a database that tells him what color of jacket is available in your store. All this can be done, simply and quickly, on the WWW.

5. To Heighten Public Interest
You won't get Newsweek magazine to write up your local store opening, but you might get them to write up your Web Page address if it is something new and interesting. Even if Newsweek would write about your local store opening, you wouldn't benefit from someone in a distant city reading about it, unless of course, they were coming to your town sometime soon. With Web page information, anybody anywhere who can access the Web and hears about you is a potential visitor to your Web site and a potential customer.

6. To Release Time Sensitive Materials
What if your materials need to be released no earlier than midnight? The quarterly earnings statement, the grand prize winner, the press kit for the much-anticipated film, the merger news? Well, you send out the materials to the press with "The-do-not-release-before-such-and-such-a-time" statement and hope for the best. With the Web, the information can be made available at midnight or any time you specify, with all related materials such as photographs, bios, etc. released at exactly the same time. Imagine the anticipation of "All materials will be made available on the Web site at 12:01 AM". The scoop goes to those that wait for the information to be posted not the one who releases your information early.

7. To Sell Things
Many people think that this is the number 1 thing to do with the Web, but you should consider selling things on the WWW only after you have done all the things above and maybe even a few others on this list. Why? Well, do you consider the telephone the best place to sell things? Probably not. You probably consider the telephone a tool that allows you to communicate with your customer, which in turn helps you sell things. That's how you should consider the WWW. The technology is different, of course, but before people decide to become customers, they want to know about you, what you do and what you can do for them. With WWW, you can provide this information easily and inexpensively.

8. To Make Pictures, Sound and Film Files Available
What if your widget is great, but people would really love it if they could see it in action? The album is great but with no airplay, nobody knows that it sounds great. A picture is worth a thousand words, but you don't have the space for a thousand words. The WWW allows you to add sound, pictures and short movie files to your company's info if that will serve your potential customers. No brochure can do that.

9. To Teach a Highly Desirable Demographic Market
The demographic of the WWW user is probably the highest mass-market demographic available, usually college students or graduates, soon to make or already making high salaries. It's no wonder that Wired magazine, the magazine of choice to the internet community, has no problem getting Lexus and other high-end marketers to advertise with them. Even with the addition of the commercial on-line community, the demographic will remain high for many years to come.

10. To Answer Frequently Asked Questions
Whoever answers the phones in your organization can tell you, their time is usually spent answering the same questions over and over again. These are the questions customers and potential customers want to know the answers to before they deal with you. Posting them on a WWW page saves you and your potential customers time and effort.

11. To Stay in Contact With Salespeople
Your employees on the road may need up-to-the-minute information that will help them make the sale or pull together the deal. If you know what that information is, you can keep it posted in complete privacy on the WWW. A quick local phone call can keep your traveling staff supplied with the most detailed information, without long distance phone bills.

12. To Open International Markets
You may not be able to make sense of the mail, phone and regulation systems in all your potential international markets, but with a web page, you can open up a dialog with international markets as easily as with the company across the street. As a matter of fact, before you go onto the Web, you should decide how you want to handle the international business that will come your way. And if your company already has offices in other countries, they can access your home office information for the price of a local phone call.

13. To Create a 24 Hour Service
If you've ever remembered too late or too early to call the opposite coast, you know the hassle. Business is worldwide but your office hours are not. Trying to reach Asia or Europe is even more frustrating. But a web page can serve your clients, customers and partners 24 hours a day, seven days a week, providing them with information when they need it.

14. To Make Changing Information Available Quickly
Sometimes, information changes before it gets off the press. With electronic publishing, changes are easily made. No wasted paper, ink, or printing costs. You can even attach your web page to a database, which customizes the page's output to a database you can change as many times in a day as you need.

15. To Allow Feedback from Customers
You pass out brochures, catalogs, and booklets. But they produce no sales, no calls, and no leads. What went wrong? A web page allows you to get feedback instantaneously with no extra cost. An instant e-mail response can be built into your web page so you can get the answers from your customers, without the cost, delay, and uncertainty of a response of regular mail.

16. To Test Market New Services and Products
Instant feedback from visitors to your web site also allows you to test market new services and products inexpensively. You can reach a larger market without having to spend lots and lots of money.

17. To Reach the Media
Every business needs the exposure that the media can bring, as we touched on in reason #5 "Heightening Public Interest", but what if your business is reaching the media, as a newswire, a publicist or a public policy group. The media is the most wired profession today. Since their main product is information and they can get it more quickly, cheaply and easily on-line, on-line press kits are becoming more and more common. Digital images and text can be put in place and easily made available on the web.

18. To Reach Students and the Youth
Consider that most schools and universities already offer internet access to their students. There will be nothing but growth in the under 25 market that will be on-line.

19. To Reach the Specialized Market
If you sell fish tanks, art reproductions, and flying lessons, you may not think the internet is a place for you. Think again. The internet is not just for computer science students anymore. With the 790 million and growing users of the web, even the most narrowly defined interest group will be represented in large numbers. Since the web has several very good search programs, your interest group will be able to find you, or your competitors.

20. To Serve Your Local Market
We've talked about the power to serve the world with a web page. How about your local neighborhood? If you are located in San Francisco, CA, Raleigh, NC, Boston, MA or New York City, there are probably enough local customers with web access to make it worth your while to consider web marketing. A local restaurant can take lunch orders online. No matter where you are, if a big client has web access, you should be there too.