Is the Internet the Ultimate Free Market?

By Richard Igoe

In an ideal web, the laws of supply and demand should determine the price of most things, but on the internet it is not only price that counts!

Definitely the internet is the largest marketplace ever built, but knowledge of internet marketing is the single most important factor that restricts entry into this huge ocean of opportunity.

A website is really a marketing or selling tool. Whether it is your personal website promoting you, a brochure for your company, a branding site, or a full e-commerce site, your number one mission is to market what you have.

You must understand that your website is only part of the bigger picture. How you use this tool will determine your success on the internet.

The bigger picture is your overall approach. You must develop an internet marketing frame of mind to be able to use your website effectively. Read articles, read internet marketing courses, take in knowledge! Learn from others that have already experienced the learning curve.

Because of the free market nature of the internet you need to be one step ahead of your competition.

Your website is however your single most important marketing tool as it allows you to use your internet marketing knowledge to maximum effect.

It allows you to portray the image of yourself that you want your clients to see.

It allows you to ask your visitors for their email addresses so that you can follow up and use your powers of persuasion.

It allows you to satisfy demand immediately, either for information or for a product or service that you sell.

It gives an individual the same opportunity as a multinational corporation to get a number 1 ranking on the search engines!

And it allows you to manipulate the minds of your visitors to buy from you.

Your website is the shop window of your business and you need to use it effectively.

By making it attractive and changing the content often, your visitors will want to return and this gives you a better chance of making a sale. But remember you must first bring visitors to your shop window.

The internet search engines allow you to bring HIGHLY TARGETED traffic to your shop window, and as such they should be an integral part of your marketing strategy.

This brings us to the question "Is the internet the ultimate free market?"

Larger companies have some advantage as they can use their huge advertising budgets to plaster their name on billboards, newspapers, in the metro, on buses, even on aeroplanes, and this is all part of their branding or marketing campaign.

Also the search engine robots are becoming more intelligent and rank sites not only on their placement of keywords, but also on how many other HIGH QUALITY sites are linked to them.

Large sites can form strategic alliances with other large sites to improve their position on the search engines. This all seems to give them an unfair advantage.

BUT large corporations do not necessarily have the best or most informative sites!

They are also more inflexible. They cannot adapt as fast as an individual to changing market situations, and the internet is dynamic and changes every day!

AND remember there are also the directories!

To get listed on a directory your site needs to be full of relevant content. Directories are reviewed by experts. Yahoo is the most famous but the GO Network is fast becoming very important too.

The Go.com directory is reviewed by a panel of voluntary "Guides" however for a site to be included in the directory it has to be reviewed and approved by 2 other Go Guides, and since the Guides have a reputation to maintain, they cannot afford to recommend bad sites.

Directories will usually include you if your site is relevant to the category you are trying to get listed in, and if the content is good. So if you are an expert in your field, you have just as good a chance as a large corporation of getting listed.

Also one other thing that the search engines take into account is the theme of your site. The more focussed your site is the more relevant your web pages will be so pages in sites built around a theme are going to be given more relevancy and get better rankings.

So the internet is certainly not a free market in the traditional sense of the word, where the laws of supply and demand rule.

It is however a free-for-all market where the better your internet marketing knowledge, the more chance you have of being noticed.

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Article by Richard Igoe, TheWebsEYE.com. Get his latest Free Website Success Course and find out whether you have the 6 essentials of a successful site!