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5 hot Internet businesses for 2005
If you are planning to start a new business in 2005, you should seriously consider one of the many Internet based businesses available today. The online businesses have numerous inherent advantages in comparison to their brick and mortar counterparts. ...
A Business Guide For The Very New Internet Entrepreneur
Did you recently buy your first computer and just started surfing the Net? Isn't it fun? All the new websites and places to go, sights to see! Have you ever wondered if you can make money with your newfound toy? I think that thought is something that ...
Internet marketing and Public Speaking: Ten Tips for When the Twain Shall meet
Copyright 2005 Larry TracyInternet marketing and public speaking? Not quite ham and eggs, is it?Those two phrases are rarely found in the same sentence. After all, many people decide to do their marketing in cyberspace so they’ll never be required to ...
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For an online business, traffic is paramount. Without it, conversions drop off, ROI’s dwindle and businesses can fail. In the United States, netScore reported that seventy-four percent of the top 50 Internet properties experienced less traffic between May and June of 2001. A big reason for this huge reduction is the decrease in at-school Internet traffic. Visitor traffic from at-school computers, which represented almost 8% of U.S. Internet traffic in May, began declining as summer vacations started and decreased 40.5% in June compared to May. Traffic doesn’t see an increase until mid-August. This means that for nearly four months, online sites are not seeing the traffic they so desperately need.
International Web usage is seeing declines in the summer months as well. Between mid-May and July of 2002, Russia reported a twenty-percent decline in summer Internet usage. Sweden saw its summer traffic stifled by eighteen-percent as early as July 1999, and many other countries around the world are feeling the hit of summer traffic reductions as well.
Seasonal traffic fluctuations are a recent phenomenon. The first few years of Internet usage saw such rapid growth in both the number of users and the number of pages visited, that seasonal variations were hardly noticeable. In recent years, however, Internet growth rates have slowed dramatically as the United States and the
rest of the world crawls towards the user saturation point.
While most sites see drastic reductions of traffic from May to August, certain summer-oriented sites tend to be protected from the summer burn. May, June and July kick off the blockbuster movie season, drawing millions of visitors to Cinema sites. According to movietickets.com, traffic to their site rose 66% to 600,000 visitors and Twentieth Century Fox Film reported that web site traffic jumped 26% to 372,000 visitors. For the lucky few online Cinema sites, summer’s heat fires up traffic.
Weight loss and travel sites have also seen increased summer usage in the past as people try to slim down before venturing to the beach.
As noted above, Internet traffic regains strength beginning in mid-August. E-commerce and apparel site usage increases dramatically with back-to-school sales, and by September, vacationing begins to decline and general Internet usage rises to normal levels.
The important thing to note for online businesses is that decreased traffic doesn’t necessarily have to mean decreased profits. Make the most out of summer Internet traffic and prepare your site for fall and winter traffic increases. Now is the perfect time to update and optimize your site.
About the Author
Rob Young, Manager of Natural Optimization and Creative Director of full-service interactive marketing and advertising agency UnREAL Marketing Solutions, has been with the company since its inception in 1999. Young oversees the Natural Optimization and Creative departments.
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