Lesson 4	Site business model revenue strategies
Objective	Describe Potential Revenue Strategies to establish your Business Model

Potential Revenue Strategies to establish your Business Model

As you develop your site, consider how you are going to earn revenue.
You can attract people to your site, then court advertisers and partners to place ads on your site, or you can purchase space from other sites in your marketing niche.
Generate revenue online
Some of the ways to increase exposure to your site, and thus revenue, are shown in the following Slide Show.

How to generate Revenue using a Portal

1) Establish your website as a gateway, or portal, to other services. This option is effective if you can prove your site's popularity with a group.

2) Engage in partnerships with established companies in your particular marketing niche.

3) Increase revenue through subscriptions.

4) Use directed emails to carefully target interested parties. Many companies have adopted the use of email presentations.

5) Optimzie your site's HTML to attract hits from automated search engines.

6) A careful posting to a newsgroup can help increase awareness of what your website has to offer.

7) Consider using cross-media publication. Find mediums other than the internet to promote your website.

8) Include your web site url and email address on all relevant literature.

The Role of the Portal

Our discussion of the e-business architectural blueprint has arrived at a point where it is no longer possible to continue without touching on the main subject of the course which is the portal. Although the term portal has appeared already multiple times in the course, it has so far been treated casually, in broad strokes, without explanation or definition. Since the early days of the Internet, there has been a common attitude that a Web browser is the most important technical component of the digital world. Because the whole concept of the Internet is based around the notion of exploiting common Web protocols, such as HTTP, to access information and information dissemination services with ease, the concept of a common Web browser is fairly important.

Web Browser Role
The current importance of the Web browser is analogous to the early days of space exploration, when access devices such as rockets and all-purpose space vehicles (for example, space shuttles) occupied our imagination. We are now into space stations and the possibilities that they can offer. This is similar to what is happening with the evolution of our thinking about Internet technology. The widespread diffusion of the Internet and all kinds of related internet-technologies and information facilities has given rise to the concept of the porta. Initially, this concept was structured around the information searching and dissemination possibilities presented by the World Wide Web. Hence, the term portal meant an entry point or originating Web site for combining a fusion of content and information dissemination services, and attempting to provide a personalized home base for its users, from which they will be able to launch broad-based exploration expeditions into cyberspace.

Features such as

customizable start pages to guide users easily through the Web,
filterable e-mail,
a wide variety of chat rooms and message boards,
personalized news and sports headlines options,
gaming channels,
shopping capabilities,
advanced search engines and
personal home page constructionkits, and
many others have become common characteristics of portals.

General Information Searching

More recently, the convergence of general information searching and information dissemination technologies with a wide array of business-oriented features, such as business intelligence tools, data warehousing, collaborative and workflow systems, EAI tools, Web publishing and personalization tools, has opened an entirely new set of possibilities. The convergence of these functionally related technologies offers a substantiality and massiveness of information exchange on the Internet at such high levels that it has given rise to a new conceptual theme of ebusiness docking stations, referred to variously as

enterprise information portals,
corporate portals,
B2B portals, and
Web portals.

This has generated momentous changes in the nature and operation of information technologies and business processes both in virtuality (cyberspace) and in reality (traditional business).

Portals

A portal is a site that offers a centralized place for multiple goods and services. In effect, it offers "one stop shopping" on the Internet. A portal is not limited to offering its own goods and services for sale. It acts as a gateway to what the Internet has to offer. More specifically, it allows Web surfers specific channels that help them direct their surfing efforts more efficiently.
An effective Web portal offers:

Essential "stickiness" for people to return to for convenience of their services in one place
A sense of community for people to chat and pursue similar interests.
Direction
An information source
A revenue stream for other sites listing on the portal

The trick to creating an effective portal is finding clever ways to provide directional information as value added to the information a user wants.
Web Portal
A web portal is a web site that provides a gateway, or an entry point, to other resources on the Web. Examples of portals are www.msn.com and www.yahoo.com. Web portals provide a broad range of features, services, and content. Of special interest to the information seeker are portals that were organized in the form of a subject directory. As of the March of 2017 dmoz.org has been shut down. Web directories consist of a topic categorization, including amongst other categories:

Arts,
Business,
Computers and Internet,
Entertainment,
Government,
News and Science.

To find information on search engines and directories from the Yahoo Directory, you will have to follow the topic hierarchy from the Computers and Internet category to the Internet, then to the World Wide Web, next to Searching the Web, and finally to Search Engines and Directories, which will give you several relevant sites and suggest several additional subcategories you can investigate to find what you need.
Directories organize the information in a natural manner, where the sites in the directory are compiled by human editors. Navigating through a directory as an information-seeking strategy is useful for a novice but may lead to frustration depending on how specific the information need is and how many different categories the user needs to navigate through. Also, there is the issue of coverage discussed earlier, as compared to the billions of web pages indexed by the main search engines, the Yahoo Directory lists only several million web pages. To overcome the problem of coverage, directory services either partner with a web search engine such as Google to provide supplementary answers for their users' queries, or they power their own search using proprietary search engine technology.

Company Name and Web site
Indirectly related to revenue in terms of company "branding," your company Web site name is important for many reasons. It defines who the company is and possibly what it does. Remember, too, that limited options are available for domain names. It is possible that you will create an e-commerce site for an already-existing company. If this is the case, you have to consider what to name the site. If you are lucky, you will simply name the site after the company. Many site developers for large, multidivisional companies must create site names that reflect a particular company function or product. On January 27, 2010, Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation for $7.4 billion dollars based on an agreement signed on April 20, 2009. You must create a name that adequately conveys the site's purpose, products, and services.
In the next lesson, the process of defining products and services will be discused.

Site Business Model - Exercise

Click the Exercise link below to create a site name and learn how to register the name on the Internet.
Site Business Model - Exercise