Logan Daily News

Net Watch
by Bob Green

I learned a lot about practical business applications in college through case studies. I have a business case study of my own to share with my readers in today's column. It introduces some good points on advertising, and explains how to use the Internet to send and receive massive amounts of faxes very inexpensively.

Having been involved in some type of sales for the past twenty years, my enthusiasm can sometimes run amuck. I get these wildly exaggerated visions of what an idea or an advertisement can do. When I'm wise, I keep my mouth shut, but then there are times like last week.

I learned about a new service on the Internet several weeks ago, and then last week I learned about yet another service and a light and bells went off in my head. That's generally a dangerous sign. Anyway, immersed in this new enthusiasm and delight about this wonderous idea, I contacted my client. After hearing the concept, he asked me what type of response his company could expect should they decide to fund the notion. With a gleam in my eye and confidence in my voice, I told him we could expect at least a fifty percent response. He gave me the approval.

Over the past twenty years, I've learned several things about advertising, some of which I apparently forgot during my conversation with my client. The first point about advertising is that it is indeed effective. There's an appropriate old Jewish merchant's saying that states it well; "Show it sell it, hide it keep it". The overlooked second point is that irregardless of what is being offered, it generally takes three to five messages to get people to respond. The error that most entrepreneurs make is the same one that was displayed in the response to my client. They are consumed with the over confidence that as soon as people see their great idea or great product, everybody will obviously respond. This is where most entrepreneurs fall on their face. Nobody, or very few people respond to the first few ads, so they stop their ad campaign just before it would have been effective.

For an analogy, have you ever used one of those old hand pumps where you had to pump the handle up and down to get water? If the well was deep, you had to pump that old handle quite a bit to get water to come out. Once it started you didn't need to pump nearly as hard or as much to keep it flowing. However, if you stopped before the water started flowing, you had to start all over again. The same principle applies to advertising.

If an ad is going to be effective, it will generally provide a one to five percent response immediately. In other words, if five people out of a hundred reached act on the first offer, be very happy. If only one responds, be satisfied. If none respond on the first time, don't be discouraged just yet. These numbers will significantly increase after three to five offers are run.

Several weeks ago, I learned about a fax service on the Internet that enables a user to send an E-mail to a fax machine (www.faxaway.com). It's very inexpensive, only costing a dime a minute over their high speed fax modems. Many faxes cost less than seven cents for an entire page of text. I've been using the service now for several weeks and it works great. I also learned that there is a way that, using the same service, you can direct it to send the same message to more than one person at once. My client had given me a project to locate all the businesses in the U.S.A. of a certain type in his chosen target industry. That was easily accomplished by using a United States Yellow Pages Directory on cd-rom. These amazing programs can be purchased for less than fifty dollars and hold the names, phone numbers, fax numbers and addresses of over sixteen million businesses in the US.

The next part of the assignment wasn't so easy. My search turned up over twelve hundred businesses that matched my client's criteria. The next step was to find the names and personal phone numbers of people in charge of a certain function in each of those businesses. That would take forever. Although it would mean good job security for me, the client has so many more pressing things that need to be accomplished, there simply had to be a faster way. I contacted Faxaway and asked if they could send a single message to twelve hundred people at once. The response was yes, they could. All I had to do was send the results of the cd-rom search and they would store it as a group. All I had to do was reference the group along with the message I wanted sent, and within several hours they would all be faxed.

So what was the idea that got me so excited that I left conventional wisdom behind? My brilliant idea was to send them all a personal message including appropriate details of the client's company and politely ask them to fax me the name and phone number of the appropriate person in their company. I found another service on the Internet that does the reverse of Faxaway. They take a fax and convert it to E-mail and the benefit is their machines can accept dozens of calls simultaneously (www.jfax.com). You don't have to worry about your own fax machine being jammed up and missing their calls. Jfax assigns you a fax number that you can use for your ad campaign which costs twelve dollars and fifty cents per month.

Well, it's Saturday morning as I am writing this column. The faxes were sent Thursday night and I've received eighteen responses so far. A few more will probably stray in next week, but the end result will probably be around two percent. For a first time advertisement that cost less than two hundred dollars, two percent response is good. This proves out to be a viable advertising channel. Unfortunately it falls a bit short of my fifty percent projection. The client may be discouraged from using it long term due to my overzealous projections.

As a summary, there are many new tools and opportunites appearing on the Internet that might be used to enhance your business. Get excited if you want, but put a damper on it when talking with others. Though many of the tools are new, people remain the same, so many of the old time-tested business principles remain intact.