How to Startup a new Business on the Internet
Avoid missing important developments in your industry
Learn of business opportunities via timely recognition of relevant events
Accelerate sales cycles by identifying relevant prospects and contacts
Track existing clients and key accounts
Monitor suppliers, partners and competitors
Pitch better by staying abreast of client initiatives and current organizational structures
But once you’ve got it right, you’ve built something utilitarian and of lasting value.
Any company that truly becomes a utility also becomes very valuable.
In software, this is the story of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc. We use these companies daily to be able to do things that we think are basic needs. For the same reasons, telecom carriers and cable networks also are valuable utilities. Yahoo (Overture - pay-for-placement search service), and Google have proven that search monetizes better than other web applications.
This is not a surprise, because the search utility tends to captures user intent well.
Online Guide to Small-Business Technology
Moneybookers Ltd., London, Registered in England and Wales no 4260907. Registered office: Welken House, 10-11 Charterhouse Square, London, EC1M 6EH, United Kingdom. Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority of the United Kingdom (FSA).
Instantly Connect with Distributors & Manufacturers
Doba - Join Today and Earn $10 / Lead
Just as directory based approaches gave way to general full text search as web content grew, now we are seeing the transition from general search to vertical searches such as people, product, travel, health, source-code, auctions, etc. These new category search engines can improve user experience dramatically.
However, these business`s take time, talent, and investment to bring to fruition.
They all start with crawling web documents, filtering for the category, extracting and disambiguating entities, and then building a rich user interface.
To attain success, any new search startup needs to think about 3 main things:
1. How can you build something defensible, that is own the relevant domain names, and copyrights.
2. How do you get distribution, time and exposure.
3. How to attain maximum leverage given the high fixed costs.
Defensibility
A custom application for finding and building, provides users a rich and convenient user experience, the strategy is defensible.
Human-powered search, that people can add information too such as pictures, tags, related people, etc. that are not easily found on the web.
This aggregated search result ends up creating the default place on the web for people information.
Also the human powered search strategy is highly defensible while providing a great user experience.
Distribution
Startups have limited budgets and therefore can’t spend much to advertise their services.
Thus, most successful web startups rely on zero cost viral growth.
However, unlike social networks and other web applications, most search engines are not inherently viral.
This makes distribution and growth a challenge.
In general, few users will discover a new website, and in the first few years growth will be slow.
Some search applications, especially in product search and information have found ways to aggregate content in a way that not only is valuable to users, but also adds value to search engines like Google.
This can be a good early growth strategy for such search engines.
Leverage
Building a website search engine has a lot of fixed costs.
Most search engines need 10 to 20 top notch engineers and at least 2 years to get to a reasonable place.
In addition to talent one needs a lot of hardware to crawl, index, and serve up a large data set.
It is therefore important to limit the scope of the problem, go after low hanging fruit, and find a way to deliver a good user experience.
Discover everything you need to know about a topic, that is the way Google did it.
You’ll need to raise $15-$30m and spend a minimum of 2 years before getting to healthy profitability if you’re going after large fragmented categories like people or product.
If you can find a way to dominate a smaller category quicker and cheaper (with a smaller end outcome), that is wise.
With Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, we’ve really only seen the first phase of an enormous and ever expanding field.
The second wave of category-search companies (auctions) have the opportunity to build large stand alone businesses that deliver tremendous value both upstream to Google and downstream to the category that they serve.
It is now time for Auction101 to take over the Worldwide auctions search business. Auction101 has had a presence on the Worldwide Internet for over nine years.
There has been no business plan or real idea for the direction the project has been or should be going, until now, 2008.
It seems that there is now a Niche, business opportunity that might be described as a totally new opening online for a smart operator (ambitious, wise) to establish a very large source of income, and jobs for many people, using the domain name auction101.com.
http://www.auction101.com
Every now and then a golden egg appears.
It’s a site that is mature, and has tons of original content, has exhalent coverage in the search engines.
That site
I’m intimately aware of.
I’ve owned and grown Auction101.com for the past nine years, but now it’s time to say goodbye.
It’s ripe for affiliate networks, PPC campaigns, text link ads, and much more.
It is waiting to be monetized. Why do I want to sell it?
It is a part of my life that I’ve been letting go of this year.
I’m also wanting to sell it to invest the money into different things, like upgrading my home.
So, if you’re looking for the perfect website to take over and monetize, check out the website. http://www.auction101.com/
Wouldn’t it make more sense to have one local directory, Worldwide Auctions Community, that any search engine can access? You would then have a single place to manage all your local information which any search engine can access making for the greatest local reach.
The purpose of the Website is to Inform, that is, to provide Information on new Products and new Technology, about Developments in other countries and above all, about people in the profession, the trade (gossip has always had the highest information - or misinformation - quotient of all communication).
Sale includes: a partially developed website and, the domain names:
auction101.com, auction101.org, auction101.net, auction101.info, auction101.us, auction101.in, auction101.biz, auction101.cn, and auctionclopedia.com
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE AUCTION101.COM Trademark Act Section 2(d), 15 U.S.C. §1052(d). TMEP §704.02. Identification of Services "Providing information in the field of local and online auctions, in International Class 35".
http://www.auction101.com is a network of websites for enthusiasts whose passions are under served by Web content.
AUCTION101`S content discovery engine uses a combination of human intelligence and semantic technology to find and rank the best news, editorial, photo, video and other content related to a particular topic.
AUCTION101 sites only publish the best content, and filter out spam, splogs, repeats, and other fake sites.
AUCTION101’s content discovery engine requires little configuration and maintenance, so it is possible to rapidly launch with minimal cost and manpower.
“AUCTION101 is an intelligent publishing platform that will help millions of people find the content they’re really looking for online.”
Editors create AUCTION101 pages`s by assembling a semantic glossary of terms to teach the publishing engine how to identify the best content related to a particular topic.
The platform is capable of unsupervised learning, and automatically improves over time through user feedback across the AUCTION101 sites.
Many online properties struggle to capture a huge readership in order to create a viable advertising-based revenue model.
AUCTION101 has turned that model on its ear by creating a scaleable network with dozens of sites, each catering to a particular topic, and each bearing a low cost to maintain.
Web Startup to Watch
One of the most innovative ideas of the Social Web.
http://www.auction101.com
Worldwide Auctions Community
Social computing platform
The growing host of online communities makes it abundantly clear that the social networking phenomenon is virtually exploding.
Auction101.com is a single, secure, universally accessible launch pad and landing zone for conducting and managing every facet of your Auctions online world.
Whether its searching. scanning the latest news headlines, or managing your profile across multiple communities, Auction101.com is your one-stop answer to the ever-present question, what do you want from your Web today?
Auction101.com, currently in a development stage, leverages the highly interactive, graphically rich interface of many Search engine`s capabilities, to elevate the online experience for buyers and sellers alike.
The iron is hot for the striking, in fact it's blazing red hot. Right or wrong, there's another "shake down" happening in the Auction World. It's time for someone, anyone, to readjust the online auction game.
It is all about the long waited web evolution where static web sites from the nineties step down and give freedom to community driven, user-centric, multi-channel distributed, search engine independent, next-generation, cross-platform concepts, applications and programs. Obviously, the web transforms, but what is next? Perhaps the innovations mentioned below might give you the answer.
Someone needs to find and use the synergies among the growing multitude of independent online Auction sites. It is not about someone trying to buy them all in an attempt to sew them together. What is needed to completely change the playing field is for one single entity to create a one stop pipeline where all the smaller auction sites can be found.
All that would be needed is a good healthy rack of first rate server space, a top notch administrative team and a small but talented sales force that can sell the benefits of a unified effort.
All the small sites would remain fully independent, they'd just have a closer relationship with their retail neighbours. They would each retain their individual ownership, their administrative teams, their chosen payment systems, either Google Checkout, PayPal or their own merchant accounts.
The new entity would be like the common area in the interior of a shopping mall. It would be a routing facility with click through, directly to dozens and possibly hundreds of smaller independent sub malls. Eventually, it would become a simple task to solicit click through deals with larger retailers also.
Coordinating the top One Thousand or so independent auction type sites would assemble an active user base of about Twenty million people. The harvest is ready, the tree is being shaken and some of the finest fruit has already become ripe for the picking. The right people with the right plan could really pull off a major, effective and extremely profitable business.
Something like this will end up knocking eBay down a bit while becoming very successful in its own right....if done properly. A portal where feeds from all auction sites as well as retail sites end in items showing on one site, that can be sorted by fixed price, auction, reverse auction, best offer etc., would be a great site for buyers. Such a site would also spider shopping sites that are not submitted.
What investors and eBay huggers fail to see is that this type of site WILL be built....it's just a matter of when. When it is built, and built correctly, it will level the playing field a bit. A site such as this that becomes popular will mean that shoppers no longer just check eBay because of the time factor, or the greatest inventory factor. This type of site would allow buyers to have the massive results of shopping through a straight Google search, without having to weed out all of the other results that have nothing to do with products for sale.
It is a matter of when such a site will be built.
We are talking about sharing, in order to help a company grow and be profitable using approaches in favour of common effort, this creates a rising tide that lifts all. A solution for users (companies) to consolidate some contact points into a single unified communications strategy. Unified communications reduces all those separate elements to a single infrastructure.
This gives companies access to a global marketplace of ideas. Platforms for participation create a global stage where large communities of partners create value, and harness the power of human capital across borders and across organizational boundaries to increase innovation and improve morale by cutting across organizational hierarchies.
This is a new way of organizing effort and a new method of competing.
The Chinese motorcycle industry, the biggest in the world, has hundreds of little companies making parts, There is no OEM or big company like Harley-Davidson pulling all the strings. Instead, people can collaborate across the silos of power and production in ways that contravene traditional hierarchies.
Join us in peer-producing the definitive guide to the 21st Century Auction World at “Auction101.com” .
1. Great things start from small beginnings.
In putting up an auction site, one must not be too ambitious right away.
The first sensible step is to look for a niche and make an auction site that is targeted to that niche. Once that is done, it is easy to branch out to other marketing areas.
2. Creating the auction site is a cinch.
Register a dot com name. .
Select, a web host.
The web space must have at least 5000 megabytes to allocate enough images and information.
A script to operate the auctioneering.
The script will be the foundation of the auction system..
CGI Resource Index is overflowing with these scripts.
3. Promotion, promotion, promotion!
A search engine is a good way to start, in terms of promoting the auction site.
No money is required.
Get the auction site listed with the top search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Link to other websites related to what is being auctioned off.
4. Reports are necessary.
One must come up with a systematic listing schedule and reliable database to check the auctions on a regular basis.
Keeping track of the business is important if one wishes to be successful.
Back up files automatically.
5. Inventory management is the key.
Keep track of the auction items.
Buying Experience
The “buying experience” is a combination of many different aspects of Worldwide Auctions.
Finding, for instance, to make finding items easier and more exciting for shoppers. The goal is to thrill and delight both buyers and sellers, with the best shopping destination, on and off the Internet.
Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) to give buyers more information about the kind of service they can expect from a seller.
DSRs add transparency to the marketplace by giving buyers a sense of how accurately sellers describe their items, what their shipping times are like, whether previous buyers have felt their shipping & handling charges are fair, and how they handle communication during the transaction. The majority of sellers deliver a great buyer experience, and now it’s even easier for them to differentiate themselves from those that do not perform as well.
The majority of eBay sellers deliver consistently positive experiences to buyers. However, a very small minority -- just 1% -- of sellers currently cause fully 35% of bad buying experiences. This small minority not only damage their own reputations, but also indirectly damage all of the good sellers who benefit from a strong and vital marketplace.
Seller Non-Performance policy considers a seller’s buyer dissatisfaction rate. There are currently two types of input (ebay) from buyers which are used to measure a seller’s buyer dissatisfaction rate:
The percentage of negative and neutral feedback they’ve received and
the percentage of Items Not Received complaints filed against them.
Sellers (ebay) who have demonstrated buyer dissatisfaction rates greater than 5% within a 90-day window are now subject to temporary 14-day restrictions in the form of selling sanctions or reduced listing volume.
Sellers with dissatisfaction rates that are 10% or greater are now subject to indefinite restrictions until they improve their buyer dissatisfaction rates to less than 5%.
In both cases, sellers are given instructions on how to resolve their open disputes and take other recommended actions to in order to regain their full selling privileges.
More about Feedback and DSRs
eBay helps sellers improve their satisfaction rates and become successful.
The goal in restricting or sanctioning sellers is always to drive them to resolve their business challenges, improve their satisfaction rates, and remain in the marketplace as successful sellers. Communication with sellers spells out specific actions they should take to improve their rates, such as settling any open buyer dispute issues, refunding buyers when appropriate, asking for mutual feedback withdrawal when disputes have been resolved, etc.
It is the bottom 1% of current sellers, who cause 35% of the negative buying experiences.
The vast majority of sellers provide great buyer experiences by following these and other best practices:
• They accurately represent the condition, size, and quality of the item directly in the listing.
• They accept payment for an item at the end of a successful sale.
• After payment is received, they promptly ship the item with proper packaging.
• They proactively and professionally communicate with the buyer throughout the transaction.
The Attorneys Forum - Legal help and Discussion Forums. Get free legal advice from Attorneys in your area.
The rural and small town business resource.