Take It to the Net

A lot of the innovations that you run into online are just offline businesses, marketing, and products that have been converted to their online form by an entrepreneur that decided to take a little risk and run with a dream. And if you think that everything has been done before, think again. Because while you are sitting in your easy chair thinking that there is nothing new under the sun, some other internet marketer will be taking an idea to the net that you could have had and making millions with it.

Someone, somewhere was driving down the road one day watching the billboards going by and had the brilliant idea of bringing them to the net and the first banner ad was born. Of course, it may not have happened that way and the heyday of banner ads are over, but there was a time when they were the best thing going and websites could make bank just by selling space on their homepage. Some still do. But all things must come to an end and this is why you should always be on the lookout for offline marketing techniques that are just waiting to be converted.

How many ebooks do you have on your computer? I have close to one gig of space dedicated to them and you know what, if I could convert all of my print books to ebooks, I would. It would definitely make it a lot easier for me to move next time. For info junkies, books are gold. I would rather have someone steal my car than all of my books. Then again all of my books may be worth more than my car. And if books are gold, than ebooks and their convenience are priceless. Taking books to the net is a billion dollar business. Just ask Adobe.

Who ever thought that a site for collecting Pez dispensers would become an American icon? I doubt that even Pierre Omidyar did when he founded Ebay in 1995 but now there is an Ebay in every country you can think of and anyone else who has started an online auction business cannot hope to be anything more than a copycat. This is an example of a business that was taken to the net and flourished even more than it could of offline, because the medium allows for millions of customers a day.

Of course, with the good also comes the bad. Canter & Siegel decided to convert junk mail into something that they could use in the newly born world wide web by posting their commercial message to every newsgroup they could find and spam was born. Now it is a part of every day life. And I would rather have it that way. The freedom of information we have on the net is worth the price of deleting a few emails or even a few hundred, but that is just my opinion.

Look around you. There are ideas waiting everywhere. Products that are begging to be converted into something that can be delivered electronically. Marketing techniques that only need a twist to become the latest and greatest internet marketing tactics. Businesses that not only will thrive on the net, but literally take over it. You can remain lazy and say internet marketing is over, the world is flat, and no one will ever walk on the moon or start today and take it to the net.