Whilst there are more books, courses and tools about succeeding on the Internet than ever before, technology and competition working hand-in-hand are now starting to close the window of opportunity for new businesses trying to establish themselves in cyberspace.



Consider that as few as 5 years ago, the static website was the mainstay of the Internet. Something that most people could learn to create in a few weeks - months at worst.

I self-taught myself everything I know and have never attended any formal education on the subject.

But technology is now moving at such a pace that the learning curve to getting a successful website online is getting steeper and steeper.

One example of this is RSS - standing for Really Simple Syndication - whereby your content can be turned into one of these datafeeds and sent directly to an Internet user's RSS browser. They need never visit your website or check their emails to get the latest news and products from your site - so long as they've subscribed to your RSS feed.

Also consider that you can add other people's RSS feeds to your own site to create a constantly, dynamically-changing site which updates itself regularly with all the latest news and events in your market.

This creates a very user-friendly experience for your visitors, and helps keep the search engines interested in your site.

Consider social bookmarking sites which can send huge volumes of traffic to well-built sites, but are based on users adding your site to their publically-viewable bookmarks list. This too can also have the side benefit of attracting the search engines.

Speaking of search engines, consider that they no longer just search text, like the old days. They now catalogue RSS feeds, images, video, audio and more. Every one of these is an avenue to investigate to further increase your market penetration.

Consider the way you can now submit every page of your site to Google and Yahoo using one simple form (if you know how) to help them catalogue your site, and consider that submitting an RSS feed to the right places can lead to you generating visitors in days, not weeks or months.

Think about how multimedia content in general is growing and podcasts and online video are gaining momentum with specialized technology and search sites designed just for these media types.

Think about the use of mp3s to attract visitors - and think about user-generated content itself.

Large sites like Ebay and Amazon have welcomed user-generated content for years but the rest of the net is just getting started in this field. Allowing customers to add comments, articles, questions, advice and so on thus further making your site unique, attractive to the search engines and useful to your traffic so leading to repeat visits.

Consider database-driven sites that constantly update themselves automatically without you having to completely rebuild your site from scratch.

And so on.

The development of new technology is happening at a truly dizzying pace and unfortunately if you don't have the basic knowledge needed to best utilize these opportunities, by the time new businesses come online, there will simply be too much information, too much they need to learn, too much they need to create and do to be able to effectively penetrate a certain market.

Secondly, consider how websites are increasing their revenues. They're learning more every day about how to turn browsers into buyers.

And the more buyers they have, the more they can afford to spend on advertising.

As their own results keep increasing, so do the budgets spent on advertising and already highly competetive markets and keywords are garnering astonishingly-high a aquisition costs of $10 or more per visitor.

How can a small business compete with that?

Soon enough those with first mover advantage will have so much knowledge on the subject - that the barriers of entry will become nigh on impossible to scale unless you have some major angel investors backing you.

The end result is this - if you have an idea for a website, stop procrastinating. Get online, get building your site, and get building your business.

Because if you wait around too long, I have a feeling the window of opportunity may just have closed for good.

Copyright 2006 Richard Adams