William Seaton, a longtime Hudson resident and employee of the University of Akron, knew he loved the Internet almost immediately after his children unwrapped the computer he gave them two years ago on Christmas Day. But he had no idea he would one day plan his future around it.
After he got over the initial thrill of tapping into the mysteries of this unknown world, Seaton bought books about the Internet and learned. On weekends and at night, he pored over pages and tapped on his keyboard until he not only unraveled the Internet’s mysteries but figured out a way to become a part of the world as well.
Soon, he was designing Web pages, and, in time, attracted clients such as LifeCenter plus fitness center in Hudson. But it wasn’t until he had what he calls a eureka experience that his business was complete. A subscriber to a number of Internet newsletters, Seaton read about someone who had an Internet site for a small town on the East Coast.
“When I looked at it, I had the eureka experience,” he says.
The 54-year-old college administrator at the University of Akron’s College of Fine and Applied Arts had already been accepted for early retirement. This idea could round out his new life.
For weeks, he researched and wrote and designed and thought. He could barely contain his excitement as he created HudsonOhonline.com, a Web site for the Western Reserve town with the clock tower, gazebo and the Main Street that looks like it popped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
With offerings ranging from where you can go to church to where you can go to the movies to where you can shop to get that dress you’ve been dying to find, this Web site offers Hudson businesses and residents a one-stop shop for information that can’t be matched anywhere else on the Web.
There was just one question. How was Seaton going to make money with this gig?
“I didn’t think about it until it was nearly finished,” he says.
This kind of honesty may be unusual, but with Seaton’s money-back guarantee for advertisers who don’t get the response that they’d hoped for and free sample sites to companies who’d like to have a Web site but aren’t quite sure what they want, it’s clear that he does business the way people did long ago.
In this same spirit, Seaton has a number of ways that businesses can advertise free — such as listing a business card or a calendar event or placing a classified ad. But he also plans to make money by selling ads in his Business Directory, which costs $100 a year, and Sponsor Pages, which also cost $100 a year and give users a handy link to a sponsor’s site.
More creative offerings include $200 ads that announce sales, holiday greeting cards for $15 that let businesses say happy holidays to their online customers and online discussion groups that for $100 enable the local mechanic, for example, to have live discussions with customers about oil changes and timing belts and knocks and pings — anything the customer wants to ask.
Seaton is just one of many entrepreneurs who have dove into this new world and started swimming without knowing exactly where he’s going to end up. While he will most likely stand out because of his tight niche and his commitment to customer service, he’s entering a world that’s as cutthroat as it is creative.
According to Kelly Mooney, director of intelligence at Resource Marketing, a Columbus company that’s been in the technical marketing business for nearly 20 years, Seaton and others are fighting “to not get lost in this vast sea of Internet space,” she says. “Anybody can have a Web site, but what we always say is, ‘You can build it, but it doesn’t mean they’ll always come.’”
In other words, says Geoff Karcher, president of The Karcher Group, a Canton Web design company, Seaton won’t rise above the pack unless he makes sure people in Hudson know that HudsonOhonline.com exists.
“He has to promote the daylights out of it,” Karcher says.
Reserving key words such as Hudson or Northeast Ohio or Western Reserve on search engines might steer traffic Seaton’s way, but with search results numbering in the hundreds — even thousands — Mooney says Web businesses have to figure out a way to get to customers.
“Reach them in their real world,” she says. “[Get] into their home or, if they’re commuters … advertise at the bus station or train station.”
Unless you’ve been out of the country for the last three months, your nightly television watching has probably been interrupted by sights of thoughtful women talking about their health on ads for iVillage.com.
But to be a success, Web site advertisements have to do what every successful advertisement does: Reach an audience. iVillage.com, for example, “has a message that says, ‘We’re the place where women come together [to] get advice and help manage their lives in these chaotic times,’” Mooney says.
If you have no room in your budget for advertising, however, you have to make sure that your Web programmer plugs you in to search engines in the right way so that your customer finds you. One thing Karcher stresses? Avoid business jargon.
“If you use technical words that you know, that doesn’t mean that’s what your customer calls it,” he says. “Keep it simple, stupid. If you go by that principle, you’ll do well.”
But none of this matters if a surfer finds you and is so bored he never logs on to your Web site again. Seaton’s taken care of that with lively content that answers virtually every question somebody might have about living in Hudson, Ohio. And that’s the key.
“There are three keys to an effective Web site,” says Karcher.
It’s got to look good. It’s got to be easy to use.
“But your most important piece is to have good content,” he says. “Allow the user to accomplish something by coming to your site. And you’ve got to keep something new there. Give someone a reason to take two seconds to log on to your Web site and check it out.”
Web businesses can also do customer profiling to see who is logging on to their sites and ask questions such as, “What do you like about the Web site?” “Why do you buy products online”’ and “How often do you eat dinner out each week?”
“They save it in a repository that builds on itself so that they can … know what you might buy the next time or how they can get you buy more things,” says Mooney. “It’s direct marketing at the heart.”
With this data, Web businesses can also e-mail customers with news about subjects — or products — that they think the customer will want. Amazon.com made this tool famous.
“Their belief is that it will pay off down the road because they will know [more] about their customers than anybody else,” Mooney says.
But no matter how much marketing and e-mailing and profiling Seaton does or does not do, and no matter how much money Seaton does or does not make, he doesn’t regret taking the risk.
“I had to do this for a lot of different reasons,” he says. “I really believe in it.”