The 4 Internet Mistakes Businesses Can No Longer Afford to Make Part 1 of 3

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Friday, 25 July 2008

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By:Tim Dillard

When the Dot Com Bust occurred, people like Warren Buffet, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway came off looking really smart.

I never invest in anything I do not understand, was the explanation Buffet gave to a snickering investment world as the investment world figured the old man had finally missed one.

That investment world, which lost billions on the Dot Com feeding frenzy, found out the old man knew what he was talking about after all. Now, he is taking his billions and giving them to Bill and Melinda Gates for charitable impact. The rest of us have to deal with the realities of not having billions of dollars.

That reality is rooted in what Steve Martin noted in his 1978 movie, The Jerk,
Ahhhh, a profit thing.
And that profit thing is centered around your website.

If your business is not measuring marketing success by visitors to its website, then you had better wake up fast. What was missing with the Dot Com Bust now exists. Look at what Rupert Murdoch, king of all media and Chairman of the Board of Newscorp said in their annual shareholders meeting in October, 2005:

The media industry is one that, in my more than 50 years working in it, has evolved in ways people could never have imagined. With that in mind, and at a time when our financial position is stronger than ever, we have turned our attention in recent months back to the Internet. It is an area of the media industry we simply can not ignore, and indeed has become our greatest single area of focus over the past year. Why the urgency? The Internet is the fastest growing advertising market. It has the fastest growing audience. More importantly, broadband proliferation is at last real, meaning the opportunity is now to grow exponentially the distribution of our vast video content in news, sports and general entertainment.

What Mr. Murdoch was saying is this, What we thought was there then (the Dot Com Bust) is there now (connectivity).

During the last 7 years, something powerful has occurred on the Internet, it has grown a back half. Search Engines took off when businesses recognized that the pre Dot Com assessment of the Internet as cyber real estate were unfounded. Cyber techno geniuses found out the hard way that the Internet was not about location, location, location. Do you think Yahoo would pay Mark Cuban another 5.7 billion for his site, Broadcast Dot Com today? Maybe 5.7 million, but nowhere near 5.7 billion.

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch has recognized publicly that the future of all media now sits on the Internet by paying 580 million cash for a two year old website, Myspace, that had not even seen 20 million in gross revenues in its entire existence. Why?

Why would Google pay 1.6 billion for a company that had never had a profitable month? Youtube?

Because Murdoch and Google see that the Internet is now connected. Just like a highway system across the roadmap of the United States, people are traveling all over the Internet. If one gets up high enough, you can see all the traffic at once.

To do so, requires that you understand what new mistakes, call them assumptions, are being made about the Internet of today.

I will detail the first two mistakes in part 2 of this 3 part series.

Article Source: http://www.dailynewarticles.com

Tim Dillard is CEO for DLB, an Internet Marketing & Branding company based in Houston. He founded North Pole Network, a TV network shown in malls in 36+ states. His company also owns Tops In America.com, and more than 5000 websites. http://www.dlbllc.com tim@dlbllc.com