Chapter Two

The New Addiction

By Ben Hart

Let’s begin with the most basic building block of making money on the Internet.

You cannot be in business in any serious way without a website.

If your customers and clients cannot find you and your business on the Internet, they will assume you are not real.

So, at an absolute bare minimum, your business does need a basic general site that acts as your online brochure—that tells your prospects, customers, and clients what you do and how to reach you, and that also impresses your friends, relatives, and in-laws so that you don’t have to keep explaining to them what you do.

But the Internet is so much more than that—so much more than just an online brochure.

Americans today are spending a big chunk of their day looking for things that interest them. A recent survey my company conducted shows that among Internet users in America:

• 21.5% spend 1-2 hours online a day
• 60.2% spend 2-4 hours online a day
• 18.3% spend 5 or more hours online a day

These numbers will be higher by the time you read this.

The Internet is the entertainment media of choice for many people today. More and more, people would rather surf and play on the Internet than watch TV.

When people are searching for information or something they want, eight out of 10 will first go to the Internet, and will spend an hour or more looking for what they want and researching. If you and your business are nowhere to be found, your business is dead, or will be very soon.

People watch video on the Internet. They watch TV shows and movies that are produced just for the Internet. They listen to their radio shows on the Internet. They attend seminars on the Internet. They download music. They watch live concerts. They go to the Internet to meet people. We communicate over the Internet.

Our phone service now comes over the Internet. High-quality camcorders now allow us to use the Internet as a videophone. We play video games on the Internet. We download our software, movies, and music from the Internet. We get college degrees over the Internet. We meet our mates over the Internet. We socialize over the Internet. We do our Christmas shopping on the Internet. We use the Internet to telecommute. We run our entire businesses over the Internet. More and more, we are trading in our costly brick-and-mortar offices for super-cheap (almost free) virtual offices on the Internet.

We hold conferences, webinars, meetings, training programs, and tutorials, and help our kids with their homework—all on the Internet. We check the weather, get our maps and directions, book our travel, and order pizza delivery over the Internet.

With the Internet, there’s almost no reason to get off the sofa anymore, except to go to the toilet, take a shower, get something to eat, and do some exercise now that we have this device—a computer with a high-speed Internet connection—that will keep us entertained, informed, connected, and supplied 24/7.
The Internet is an entirely new world. Many people are now spending more hours a day in cyberspace than in the physical offline world.

I believe a big reason for that is that people can create their own world on the Internet—an entirely different world from the physical world.  It’s the new drug, the new escapism, the new addiction.

Is this a good development?

In many ways, probably not.

But it’s reality and it has profound implications for how we build our businesses and market our products and services.

So if your entire marketing strategy on the Internet amounts to just putting up a static online brochure on what you and your company do, you are short-changing yourself.

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