So what is it… beside a catchy URL…

In short InternetOnlineWebsite.com is a website about websites. It has been created with the idea to educate, enlighten and delight those who are looking to add to their online presence and marketing efforts.

Does this sound familiar to you – “I need this same thing on my website, but i dont know how to get it, where to get it, or even what it’s called! THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY!”

So, don’t fred any more! InternetOnlineWebsite.com knows what “it’s called. InternetOnlineWebsite.com is designed with the most frequently used features of today’s popular websites, and lets you discover more about these features – what they are called, why you need them, and most importantly, who you need to get them created.

Clicking on objects at InternetOnlineWebsite.com will bring up Aquent’s pop-up orange box where you can read descriptions about what the thing is for, why you need it and who you need to hire in order to accomplish it.

And there is more!

InternetOnlineWebsite.com is not just about websites. It also addresses other helpful aspects of one’s successful online presence, like marketing campaigns including:

• Mobile Internet Online Sites
• Send to a friend E-Cards
• Sharing on all of the most popular online social places
• Flash Videos
• Direct Mail Items
• Promotional T-Shirts

So here it is – no more struggling with technical jargon and no more having to explain your uncle what SEO is – no more Internet Anxiety Disorder. And it is FREE! Check it out.

Basecent offers businesses a strikingly comprehensive and efficient platform to enable a straightforward communication with their existing and potential partners and clients. It points out your business precisely – with no noise, no distractions and limited banners.

The key functionalites of Basecent are:

• an easy-to-make company website
• interactive chat and messaging system
• classifieds and tenders
• events creation and promotion
• a system involving more than 150 social networks
• personal blog creation
• ads posting
• intelligent advanced search to better target clients and partners
• top-positioning based on four different criteria
• posting products and services
• updates and additional features based on your feedback
• monthly reports

Some of the benefits to your business are:

• unlimited, low-cost exposure
• interactive communication with clients and partners
• no more loose targeting – get to all the companies and clients you need – fast
• advertise, do PR
• find exactly what you want by posting classifieds
• find contractors and partners by posting tenders
• gather the people you need or attend an event

It was such a pleasure to partner with Basecent’s CEO Mr. Spas Simonov and accomplish such an ambitious project. Go check Basecent out, and please let me know what you think : )

I think that the Blue Ocean strategy can be very useful to both beginner and professional entrepreneurs. As entrepreneurs we are fighting competition harder and harder every day, but there is a way to change this. With just a slight change of focus and with a bit of clever initial planning we can have more and easier profit.

The Blue Ocean Strategy Concept

The metaphor of red and blue oceans describes the market universe.

Red Oceans are all the industries in existence today—the known market space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies and entrepreneurs try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of product or service demand. As the market space gets very crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities or niche, and cutthroat competition turns the ocean bloody. Hence, the term red oceans.

Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today—the unknown market space, untainted and untapped by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of market space that is not yet explored.

The corner-stone of Blue Ocean Strategy is ‘Value Innovation’. A blue ocean is created when a company achieves value innovation that creates value simultaneously for both the buyer and the company. The innovation (in product, service, or delivery) must raise and create value for the market, while simultaneously reducing or eliminating features or services that are less valued by the current or future market. This is totally opposite to the widely popular idea that successful businesses are either low-cost providers or niche-players. Instead, the Blue ocean strategy teaches finding value that crosses conventional market segmentation and offering value and lower cost.

Blue Ocean Strategy vs. competition based strategies

The authors of the Blue Ocean Strategy – Kim and Mauborgne argue that traditional competition-based strategies (red ocean strategies) while necessary, are not sufficient to sustain high performance. Companies need to go beyond competing. To seize new profit and growth opportunities they also need to create blue oceans.

The authors argue that competition based strategies assume that an industry’s structural conditions are given and that firms are forced to compete within them, an assumption based on what academics call the structuralist view, or environmental determinism. To sustain themselves in the marketplace, practitioners of red ocean strategy focus on building advantages over the competition, usually by assessing what competitors do and striving to do it better. Here, grabbing a bigger share of the market is seen as a zero-sum game in which one company’s gain is achieved at another company’s loss. Hence, competition, the supply side of the equation, becomes the defining variable of strategy. Here, cost and value are seen as trade-offs and a firm chooses a distinctive cost or differentiation position. Because the total profit level of the industry is also determined exogenously by structural factors, firms principally seek to capture and redistribute wealth instead of creating wealth. They focus on dividing up the red ocean, where growth is increasingly limited.

Blue ocean strategy, on the other hand, is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players. This is what the authors call “reconstructionist view”. Assuming that structure and market boundaries exist only in managers’ minds, practitioners who hold this view do not let existing market structures limit their thinking. To them, extra demand is out there, largely untapped. The crux of the problem is how to create it. This, in turn, requires a shift of attention from supply to demand, from a focus on competing to a focus on value innovation—that is, the creation of innovative value to unlock new demand. This is achieved via the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low-cost. As market structure is changed by breaking the value/cost tradeoff, so are the rules of the game. Competition in the old game is therefore rendered irrelevant. By expanding the demand side of the economy new wealth is created. Such a strategy therefore allows firms to largely play a non–zero-sum game, with high payoff possibilities.

To make this clear, in the next post, which I hope I’d be able to post soon, I will share few casestudies on applying the Blue Ocean Strategy.

Should you have any questions or need some advice, do not hesitate to leave a comment or contact me.

Everybody knows Ebay. Few are the people, however, who are aware of the existence of a totally different e-commerce platform – Etsy. These two platforms offer consumers two completely different models of online purchasing. While Ebay is known to be the 2.0 leader for years, Etsy is progressively establishing itself as an e-commerce  model in total rupture with Ebay’s.

Etsy is all about hand crafted goods. In a world entirely dominated by mass and serially produced goods, Etsy is a helping hand towards craftsmen. Thus this platform can be supported by a community of 300,000 members and 26,000 sellers! Impressive, isn’t it? Web buyers, of course, recognize the richness of function and symbolism superior to that of Ebay.

The reasons for the success of Etsy are found when looking into the platform’s user experience on  which it is positioned – selling crafted goods. Also Etsy offers very original search interface, organized by colour, time and connections. There is a huge editorial effort brought by a very doog blog and Editor’s Pick – interviews of craftsmen and artists.

Currently Etsy is the only sales platform that offers such a purchasing experience, thanks to the method that gives a predominant place to a more individualized communication between buyers and sellers. This proximity differs greatly from the secured “fortress: of Ebay and lets buyers and sellers develop a more personal relationship.

Numerous are the distinctions from Ebay and are more than enough to affirm Etsy’s quality and to affirm its true value against Ebay. Etsy’s members have a feeling of belonging to a community, to a different and more authentic econimic system. Lastly, Etsy launched the Handmade Movement video contest where members could express what Etsy means to them.

Right now i am at my university, that’s right student again, and am enjoying my morning coffee. This time last year i guess i was sitting at my ex-company’s office, getting bored and dull while doing some really boring work. But earlier this year when i quited this company i finally had the time for myself and my own work and business plans, so i partnered with two other professionals and now we run a company of our own. Things are going really well for us and since i am now having a lot free time i decided to go to university again : ) and have a taste of student life again. I really love learning and meeting new people, so i am very happy now. Right now i would have been even happier if my dog had not passed away last week, but alas…

I am an internet entrepreneur and i am not definitely not in the Bahamas, nor i drive a Ferrari!

I am writing you this, because the truth about internet business is that it wont fly you to the Bahamas and wont buy you a Ferrari quickly. The clickbank and similar products tell you the opposite, but it wont happen. Be aware of that. Getting such ideas from sales text only inspires you to buy and eventually discourages you once you come to realise that what the sales copy promised is not going to happen to you.

The truth is that you need to work hard, get things going, then work even harder to keep them going, and even harder to scale them. Be persistent!

Here is something useful you can think about – if you want to get into internet marketing, no matter in what niche, make your competitors irrelevant! Do not compete! How do you do that? What do you offer? It is up to you, but make it something different and useful to people for a change!

Any ideas? : )

With a stunning navigation, The Profiler, offers a never-ending data flow from your profiles, unless you disable some of the profiler tabs.

Without a doubt The Profiler is a remarkable technical achievement, and by communicating so much on social networks Belgacom taps right into the social marketing trend, but yet – not without a risk! Has anybody asked the question what happens to less experienced clients whose Internet use is more 1.0 rather than 2.0?

]]> http://psykoid.com/2009/09/the-profiler-enter-the-web2-0-matrix/feed/ 1 http://psykoid.com/2009/08/let%e2%80%99s-say-no-to-%e2%80%9cbribing%e2%80%9d-marketing/ http://psykoid.com/2009/08/let%e2%80%99s-say-no-to-%e2%80%9cbribing%e2%80%9d-marketing/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:52:54 +0000 psykoid http://psykoid.com/?p=944 Now we live the era of new media marketing – “360 communication”, “social media marketing”, “cross media marketing”,  in terms of Internet advertising, have become the keywords to successful marketing today.

Brands are communicating with consumers directly and are beginning to pay attention to consumers’ thoughts and experience. Nowadays brands market with their consumers, rather than TO their consumers.

We, the humble people to whom their Internet connection is an essential part of our lives, now have a voice and are heard! We are the Influencers!

…And I really hate marketers to bribe me! I really hate being said to something like – “Buy a pack of three toothpastes, and get a toothbrush and a pack of toilet paper,  for free”.

I also hate “Take this survey and win a free iPhone”!

I hate Call-to-Action marketing, and marketers who still use it are losers!

Check out why:

People talk about your brand! No matter if you are happy with it or not, no matter if you are a big brand such as Apple, Starbucks or Sony, or if you are a small brand such as the coffee shop round the corner. Even the people you work with talk about your brand, and there are companies, such as Intel, which have already considered this: Intel Social Media Guidelines.

Social media works and is important today , because it gives a human aspect and authenticity to your brand. More and more are people trusting their human nature to be engaged in and be influenced by a person-to-person communication rather than to engage on a one-way broadcasted message from an  unknown source. This is why brands that act on their customers’ behalf get 44% more brand advocates. And if you are not present in the online conversation and do not consider actions based on this communication – you lose opportunities and be sure that your competitors will exploit them.

So… what can you do with social media?

Many tools exist for endless possibilities.

(and these are just very few of them)

These possibilities can be – to create a community, to promote and inform, to get to know more about your customers, to improve your product or service, to deal with complaints, to give support; all of which providing you with a long-term customer relationship!

And what is even more important – all of this is coming to mobile NOW! Via smartphones, notebooks, and God knows what other type of e-mobile devices, people can share their experience, ask, talk, look for advice and reviews online even as they are in your store and are about to buy!

Today people search with Google, but tomorrow people may start searching with Facebook or with any other social network where their friends are!

No matter the reason, you should know that in order to “make it” (whatever that “it” is) you either should be/become a good marketer or hire one to develop a  marketing strategy or plan for you and your business goals.

Being or becoming a good marketer is impossible to happen fast. There is no quick scheme to learn that and anybody who says or sells you an opposite idea, is wrong.

I write about social media, because I want to give you an insight on cost-effective solutions that work. And am exposing stupid digital products in order to convince you that these can not be a solution. So in general I tell you what can be working for you and what can not be working for you. I am saying this, because most of you are rather attracted to the “EXPOSED” posts. Don’t be – there is no point in using them. I expose these products, because only by trying them yourself you’d realize that they are not worth it.

So, if you want to succeed, I really hope that you give social media and marketing a chance. Even John Chow said (in the video from the latter post) that he managed to succeed, because he had used to work as an Internet Marketing specialist before.

Coming up a little bit later today or tomorrow morning is a post about – why anybody – a company or an individual – should use social media.

For those people that are interested in what i am talking about, here are some older posts on social media and “new era” advertising : )

Buzz monitoring tools

Buzzing and Twitter

Shustir.com – the big revolution of small businesses

Mission Statement or something like that

Why was Susan Boyle such a viral success

Sony launches Resistance 2018 – play on Twitter

Tvnima – the 3D future of presentations

Will 2009 the ultimate social year

How has the Internet influenced us to become influencers

Social Media and success online

UPDATE: Download page has been moved. People who are still interested in the software, can drop me a line.

Back on the “exposed” topic :)

Here is a very promising, at least from the sales text, and potentially very useful tool – Mass Article Control.

Mass Article Control basicly consists of two software tools – Mass Article Creator and Mass Article Submitter. These names pretty much explain what the product is about.

“Mass produce thousands of high quality articles from just 1 main seed article – within 30 seconds – at a push of a button… AND THEN.. submit them to the top major article directories automatically!”

Is not this a dream?

I have not had the time yet to personally test it, but here is the feedback from people who already used it: