Long-time friend of MANA Bob Reiss has graciously allowed Agency Sales magazine to serialize his book Bootstrapping 101: Tips to Build Your Business with Limited Cash and Free Outside Help, available now on Amazon.com. The book looks at surprisingly effective low-cost and no-cost ways to acquire the resources you need to run your company. Whether your company is an existing enterprise or a start up, a manufacturers’ representative company or a manufacturer, this book will introduce you to innovative ways to cut your costs and drive more of your income into bottom line profits.

Last month we addressed using publicity as a means to build your business. This month we tackle the subject of the Internet Revolution and how it has impacted independent manufacturers’ representatives.

The Internet has profoundly and rapidly changed the way we communicate and conduct business in the United States and globally. It has had an impact on our lives comparable to the Industrial Revolution. Though still in its infancy, by March 2009, according to Internet World Statistics, 1.596 billion people worldwide were using the Internet, with North America at 74.4% having the highest user penetration relative to population. As of April 2009, there were 231 million websites, a 46 million increase from the beginning of the year, according to Netcraft.

To give you some idea of the size of the Internet, here are some recent figures on individual companies. Remember, these companies are relatively young.

• Google revenue in 2008 was $21.8 billion, with more than 95% coming from “ad words,” their advertising vehicle. They currently have a market cap of more than $121 billion.
• eBay, the Internet’s #1 E-Commerce auction site, sold more than $100 billion of pre-owned items in 2008. They had, on average, 81 million monthly unique visitors. PayPal, owned by eBay, is the premier Internet credit card company and has more than 149 million registered users. Skype, owned by eBay, is the world’s fastest growing Internet communication company. It is available in 28 languages and has more than 309 million registered users.
• Amazon.com, known for its book selling, had revenues of more than $19 billion dollars in 2008 and has a current market cap of over $32 billion.

Although these are examples of large companies, do not assume that the Internet is only for big businesses. To the contrary, it’s the best venue for small businesses to better compete with the “big boys.” This is best illustrated in advertising. Anyone can buy local ads on the Internet. You can specify the zip codes you wish and for the budget you can afford.

Google’s Ad Words and other sites will accept your ad and only charge you for the visitors that click on your site (called “pay per click”). You can start with a $200 budget. This is affordable, a variable cost, and a great way to test. Google claims that most of its clients and revenue emanate from small business.

The computer screen is the same size for a Fortune 500 company as Joe’s corner grocery store. The Internet is a very democratic media. Anyone, regardless of income, background, race, gender, credit rating, etc., can have a web page on the Internet. Some are free. Of course, those companies with more money can afford to create better designed sites to more effectively generate web traffic through their spending.

There are two types of businesses using the web:

• Those whose only income is from the Internet.
• Those that use the Internet to support their non-web business.

Almost all human and business activity is conducted on the Internet. In the business sector, products and services as diverse as education, cars, consulting, research, real estate, publicity, housewares, lawn services, flowers, gifts, gadgets, communicating, politics, apparel, pets, collectibles, books, used articles, charity giving, polls, news, information, and sports are offered, along with many, many more.

On the personal side, there is dating, keeping in touch with friends, voting, travel, investing, job searches, entertainment, game playing, and much, much more.

So whatever your business, you should be able to find some way to use the Internet to advance your business no matter the initial size of your budget. Your knowledge and smarts will serve you as well as cash.

The Internet, its strategies, nuances, costs, potential, etc., would apply to most chapters in this book. In nine of these chapters specific reference is made, usually to a website address to help you. In the government chapter, there are references in all 10 of the agencies mentioned. Instead of weaving the Internet into each of these chapters, I felt it better to do so in this separate Internet chapter.

I see four main areas to explore.

1. Creating a Website

The cost to do so relates to your resources and strategic purpose.

2. How Will People Find You?

The adage of having the best mousetrap doesn’t mean you will have the most sales. Your potential customers need to know about your product or service.

3. Getting Actionable Results From Those That Visit Your Site

You need to achieve your web objectives and there are many strategies to do so.

4. Monitor and Analyze All Your Website Activity

As in all businesses, you should be prepared to change tactics and strategies based on what is happening. To do so, you first need to know what is going on.

The quantity of information available to everyone on creating a website is overwhelming. I just went to the two largest search engines and typed in “creating a website.” Here’s what came up.

On Google, there were more than 400 million entries. Yahoo had more than one billion. These numbers constantly fluctuate, but they are always of a high magnitude. At the same time, I went to Amazon.com to see how many books there were on creating a website. They listed 2,818. They offer new books, used books, e-books, and many are also available for Kindle readers. A large number of these are geared for beginners. Titles like Building a Website for Dummies and Create Your First Website by 3:45 This Afternoon are indicative of the genre.

The cost to learn about creating a website and how to use it is virtually nil. The websites you’ll be directed to from Google and Yahoo are free and book costs are minor. With all this information available to you, I don’t see any purpose in trying to offer a tutorial about creating and marketing a website. I do believe, however, that it is very important to create a web presence for your company no matter its size or business type and to keep learning on how better to use it to advance your business.

Before you delve into creating a website and how to employ it, you should address and answer some key questions, such as:

• What is the purpose of your website?

Your website objective will determine how and who builds it. If you are going to sell product, then special features must be installed to handle the payments for goods and the acknowledgement of orders and shipping of same. If your website is primarily to showcase your work like an artist or journalist, the website can be simple and less costly. Whoever builds it should know ahead of time your objectives, the demographics of your customer, what you are offering, and the benefits you are offering them.

• Create your website or hire a pro?

A lot of the considerations in resolving this issue are your resources, your purpose, your knowledge, the people who can help you, etc. You will see a plethora of websites that will show you how to set up your site for free. As everything in life, the quality of people offering free web services and for-fee services differ dramatically. There are many scams out there. You need to do your homework to screen the players. I would first look to people you know or their associates who have gone through the process of creating their websites. They should be able to offer you helpful insights. I would consider using some of the services or people mentioned earlier in this book for help and guidance, like SCORE, SBDC, mentors, universities, etc. Students studying computer science can be a great no-cost or almost-free source for you. You might think about hiring a computer-savvy student as an intern and give him or her real responsibility to enhance your website effectiveness. If they add value, I would consider paying them a cash bonus.

You can also do this in stages. Early stage, where you are really cash poor, do your website yourself; as your company progresses, hire a web specialist to further improve your site.

Pre-Website Preparation

Before creating a website, you should come up with a domain name, a host to run your site, and determine how you will track and analyze your web’s activity.

Domain Name

After deciding on the name you want, you need to ascertain if it is already being used by someone else. This is easy to do. I recently did this for this book, and you should realize that I fall into the computer-challenged category. Fortunately, someone I know recommended going to the website www.GoDaddy.com.

First, I went to the spot to check out if anyone had the name I wanted. I then typed in “Bootstrapping101.” (Didn’t need to hire a consultant for that.) Word came back immediately that the name was clear. Cost — zero.

Then I quickly applied for the name on the same site. Filled out the credit card information with the name application and immediately received confirmation that I had my website. Cost — $10.19.

There are many other websites that offer this service.

Choose a Web Host

Every website must have a host. Based on Google and Yahoo rankings, www.4creatingawebsite.com is one of the most popular sites for creating a website. www.4creatingawebsite.com says, “A Web Host stores the website you create on their servers and transmits it to the Internet so that when someone types in your domain name, your website appears. A server is just a fancy computer that ‘serves up’ your website to the Internet.”

This same site goes on to explain in detail how to choose a good web host and recommends hosts. There are many other sites that do the same. The bottom line is that you must have a host. The cost for a host currently varies from $4.95 to $29.95 a month with savings if you commit for a year.

Analyzing the Visitors to Your Site

The reason you want to look at this question upfront is that you can initially incorporate this analysis feature into your website. You can determine who comes to your site, what they look at there, how long they stay, what action they take, and more. Your Host can provide some of these answers as part of its fee, but the consensus is that “Google Analytics” is the best source for this information. Cost is zero.

Getting the right visitors to your website is a more formidable task than just creating a website. There are a vast array of strategies and nuances available. You will be dealing with Blogs, Search Engines, Key Words, Social Networks, Banner Ads, Pay Per Click, Megatabs, Search Engine Optimization, E-mail marketing, and more. Your decisions will be based on your resources, knowledge, and commitment to making the Internet work for you. As in creating a website, many of your actions are free and many for a fee. Your early actions will be somewhat dictated by what you can afford. As you grow your business and more cash is available, you can afford to invest more in your web.

Much of your web growth like business growth is based on your creativity, innovation, and continuous learning. Here is an example of a small company that creatively utilized its website to further their company’s growth at little cost.

Winning Moves is a Toy/Game company located in Danvers Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, that started in 1995. They created their first website: www.winning-moves.com the same year for e-mails and just to have a presence. According to their VP of Marketing, Joe Sequino, they revised the website in 2004 to sell their games through their website. The cost was minimal.

Winning Moves sold games nationally through toy and specialty stores. However, there were many parts of the country that did not have a local store carrying their games. They felt their website could address that problem.

The sale of games from their website did very well even though they refrained from discounting, a proven e-commerce strategy to maximize sales. They did so to protect their retailer customers by not undercutting them.

In 2006, they completed a major upgrading of their site to accommodate their sales success, maintain and improve customer service, and make it easier to update the site. This revision was done by a professional company. However, at this point Winning Moves was a successful enterprise with the resources to fund this web upgrade.

They then started to use the Internet creatively to advance their position with their retailers, consumers, and sales reps. In addition, they started to film two-minute to eight-minute videos, explaining the merits of all their games. They then put more than 25 videos on YouTube for the world to see. There was no cost to do this as Joe Sequino himself did the narration of each game on his home camera. This example of no-cost utilization of a social Internet site has proven very successful.

Next, Winning Moves’ sales manager will make short videos on best practice ways to sell the company’s products that will be shown on YouTube. They can restrict the YouTube viewership just to people they want to invite to see these videos. This YouTube privacy feature is offered at no cost.

Martha Hanlon, co-founder of Market Out Loud, an Internet marketing company for entrepreneurs and small businesses, has kindly shared with us the website resources she has personally found most useful for website creation and management. She also offers the caveat that things change as we work in Internet time. By the time you read this, there may be new excellent resources.

Be aware that Internet strategies, companies and sources of information can get obsolete in a hurry. The Internet is a constant learning experience which best comes from personally exploring, trying, using, and adjusting to and with it.

Whether you are a product or service company, an Internet-only company, or a non-web business, if you focus on the innovative ways to exploit the power of the Internet, you should be rewarded. You also should be able to compete on a more favorable basis with big companies. Small companies are generally more flexible, can act more quickly, and are not burdened by the politics inherent in most large companies.