"The Lightning Speed Internet Sales Success Course"
          
                                   LESSON #7

                             © 1997 B.S.A. / F.M.
                     http://web.idirect.com/~bsa/index.htm
                        _______________________________          

                                  THE TOPIC:
                         
          How several entrepreneurs have created value out of thin 
          air on the World Wide Web, to the tunes of millions of 
          dollars ... simply by rearranging, indexing and 
          simplifying existing information.  

                                  THE ANSWER: 

          Directories and search engines of various kinds on the 
          Internet are prolific money-makers. Let's start off by 
          examing the ...  

          Top 10 Revenue-Generating Web Sites For The Second Quarter 
          Of 1996 (And they said the web would never generate 
          revenue.) 

          Netscape          $7,755,990
          Infoseek          $3,793,464
          Yahoo             $3,702,500
          Lycos             $2,551,860
          Excite            $2,397,500
          CNet              $2,080,015
          ZDNet             $2,072,088
          NewsPage          $1,407,663
          ESPNet SportsZone $1,343,322
          WebCrawler        $1,235,000          

          5 of those top 10 are search engines, plain and simple. 
          The rest rely to varying degrees on generating traffic by 
          indexing and/or archiving information of one kind or 
          another.  

               World Wide Web Search Engines
          
          This is the original and top-grossing information-indexing
          profit scenario on the Web. Yahoo was the first big player,
          and they get paid LOTS OF MONEY for banner ads on
          their site. Many have followed - Excite, Lycos, Altavista
          and so on.

          Search engines do one simple thing, and with the exception
          of Yahoo which uses human indexers (how crude), they all
          have automated software that cruises the 'Net, indexing
          entire web pages and sites, and following links to other
          pages and sites, to simply bulldoze through the World Wide
          Web and index as much of it as possible.

          Because people have a hard time finding things on the Web,
          they have to go to search engines to find what they want.
          Hence, search engines receive upwards of millions of visits
          per month. Thusly, they are great places to sell ads!

               Newsgroup Search Engines
     
          Same story as WWW search engines. The king of the hill in
          this category is http://www.dejanews.com - a simple and
          automatic idea that generates plenty of ad revenue.

               Commodites Search Engines And Directories
     
          Some search engines are niche-targetted. They simply index
          cars, trucks, boats, paintings, statues, real estate etc.

          The information is indexed, people visit the engine to search
          for what they want, and the site owners are remunerated by
          selling banner advertising to people who want to advertise
          to these special interest groups.

          Try these ...
               http://www.autoweb.com
               http://www.cars.com  
               http://www.boats.com  
               http://www.art.com

          And so on. One of my "bored moments" habits is to pick words
          at random out of my head, stick them between www and com, and
          see if such a web site exists. Usually, it does.

                            *     *     *     *

          Whatever its nature, any search engine succeeds to the 
          point that it can index a ton of information that a lot of 
          people will want to sift through. The more traffic a 
          search engine attracts, the more it can charge for 
          advertising.  

          If you aspire to be the next multi-million dollar Internet 
          Indexing company, you can count on 2 things - hard work, 
          and the need for automated software running in tens of 
          thousands of dollars worth of FAST equipment. For those of 
          you with more modest goals, you might find money in a more 
          modest and niche-targetted endeavour.  

          So ... what is there out there that needs to be indexed, 
          archived or categorized, that you have an interest in ... 
          and that could become a high-traffic, lucrative web site? 
          
          Let's see - web sites and newsgroup messages have been 
          indexed to death. I'm not sure if it's been done for 
          listserv messages - maybe that's an idea?  All you need to 
          do is find a couple of techno-geeks - get them to 
          subscribe to thousands of top listservs - and have them 
          set up the software to automatically index each incoming 
          message.  

          Here's another idea - you could use another search 
          engine(s) to find, let's say, a thousand web sites that 
          contain paintings scans. Your automated software could 
          visit each site and exhaustively record the exact URL to 
          each painting along with the artist, title, year etc.