Some time back, I wrote about Business On The Net: The Morphing Imperative and that set me to thinking about my own morphing on the Net . There is a saying “you make the path by walking on it.” Perhaps on the Net, you make the path by morphing on it. And I have certainly done that. For those of you who are interested, this is my story, so far, on the Net:

The Gold Rush To The Net

It was in December of 1994, that Netscape introduced the browser and the Net opened up the rush beyond the engineers, scientists and government workers who were on the Net before. Now the pioneers who saw the possibilities came, the entrepreneurs and techies and just plain people in remote places who longed for communication with the rest of the world.

At the same time,  in December of 1994, my inspiration for a website was a study I was asked to do for the University of Texas at San Antonio business department.  They had a lot of very rough, raw material ( like clippings or tear outs from newspapers) which suggested men make more money than women, even when women own their own business. The term “glass ceiling” had only recently become part of America’s vocabulary, when The Wall Street Journal’s “Corporate Woman” column identified “a puzzling new phenomenon. There seemed to be an invisible—but impenetrable—barrier between women and the executive suite, preventing them from reaching the highest levels of the business world regardless of their accomplishments and merits.”The Federal government’s Report on the Glass Ceiling Initiative in 1991 was still somewhat virgin territory for the public at large.  It certainly came as somewhat of a shock to me. I thought, Wow, this is pretty interesting stuff, I bet more people would like to know about it.

I spent 1995 learning more about the Glass Ceiling and the Net, as the two converged in my mind as an interesting topic and a new technology platform to present it. I had to learn HTML coding, as in those early days there was no “What you see is what you get ” software, much less content  management systems. It was challenging for many reasons and on many levels ( see Match Your Entrepreneur Story about one of the early Internet conferences in 1995 where I was one of 5 women and about 5,000 men).  When AdvancingWomen.com finally launched, we got about a million and a half page views in a month, melting down our server 3 times. ( But that’s another story).  Remember, back then, the Net was relatively small with little competition.  There were no large corporations.  No Hearst, no iVillage, although I later worked with both of them.

So, I got in on the ground floor with my niche, the first women’s website to focus on leveling the playing field for women, although we’ve continued to evolve and, as we’ve increased our offerings on business and technology we’ve also increased our male audience. Our concept morphed as well.  In the vein of “it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness”, we decided, years ago, it was more effective to give both women and men the tools and strategies to succeed with pocket book and voting booth issues, the pivotal levers, than to keep noting the gap between genders. Consequently, as well as connecting with professional women and business owners, we are one of the leading websites among business men in China and Saudi Arabia, and business and technology experts in the U.S. and globally .We have built a diverse community of both women and businessmen on the web.  And we have moved on to produce other websites and  other business models.  But, back to the beginning:

First Revenue – From Advertising

The first revenue I remember having came from Doubleclick, which invented the targeted ad system. DoubleClick was founded in 1996.  My site, AdvancingWomen.com was selected for the initial women’s demographic and I went to their opening launch party in New York. It was a heady, champagne toasting  moment. I learned a lot about targeting my demographics and managing my website from DoubleClick until we went our separate ways. For one thing, despite the hype and the potential which always seemed just out of reach,  I never really made that much revenue from DoubleClick.  So , trading glamour and glory for actual revenue, I struck out on my own. In the beginning, without large competitive corporate websites, I would typically make $5,000 per month from each large corporation which wanted to advertise site wide with AdvancingWomen.com. This was when web sites were rising like hot air balloons.

About that time I was courted by a New York Stock Exchange company, led by a  rather ideosyncratic mogul, who wanted to create a web portal by pulling together about a dozen sites in different niches. He boasted he could beat Yahoo, the giant du jour, because they were doing everything wrong.  AdvancingWomen.com was selected as the women’s niche and it looked like we were headed for a very big pay day, while getting all the money we would ever need to operate and maintaining a lot of control on top of it.  For a moment or two it appeared Utopia was on the horizon.

Or, as the Cole Porter song goes, was it merely Asbury Park? Despite the mogul’s billions that vision evaporated in the dot com crash, as did the money I was making from syndicating AdvancingWomen’s content. Remember Isyndicate?  One month I was at a huge, plush and glamorous ISyndiate bash in Hollywood, mingling with tech celebs, sipping champagne and sorting through the lavish giveaways.  A month or so later they were toast. ( There’s a lesson in there someplace about applying the bootstrapping wisdom of using ingenuity and elbow grease instead of cash. Fortunately, I have always been into using elbow grease instead of cash so I survived, with the sure knowledge that we were still in the very beginning of the infancy of the Internet.  DoubleClick also survived the dot com crash, perhaps because of its market leading technology and constant adaptation to ever changing market conditions. It was formally acquired by Google in March 2008. )

The next big uptick came from the advent of Google adsense.

I can’t begin to tell you how many things I’ve tested.  I’ve tested travel, which I thought might be convenient for business customers: zero.  I’ve tested business ebooks: nothing ( although this could be the time for that tide to turn with the Kindle and ebooks apps on mobile devices).  I’ve tested many, many products, all of which came to nada, nothing. Even in  the two core revenue producers on the AdvancingWomen.com site, advertising and employment recruiting, I’ve been through a dozen morphing and transfiguration experiments, starting with Doubleclick Ads, from the day they were born, to some new European ad company that sweet talked me into believing they were going to take the Net by storm, but all they did was produce truly anemic revenues and give me one more learning experience.  All this was before I morphed my way into a successful combination of Google ads and ads sold from my site. I also made a decision to increasingly lessen dependence on ad revenue because of its extreme volatility. As hard as it may be to believe, I’ve had 2000% swings in ad revenue.  And that was not ok with me, even on the high side.  I’m a risk taker not a kamikaze pilot.  I needed to put a little dramamine into my site to calm the effects of the choppy waters in advertising.

One product which helped me do that was  a Job Board or the employment recruiting facet of our site at Careers.AdvancingWomen.com. From day one, recognizing job boards were an “evergreen” in the business, not subject to the cardiac arrest of a fad, I determined to have a job board.  I was a part of every one of what seemed like a half dozen permutations of what eventually became CareerBuilder.com. That was ok for pocket change. What I began to realize was that big job boards who wanted you as an affiliate wanted the demographic you had captured but in no way wanted to promote your site. Why should they, as they would be creating their own competition?  Basically they were getting the benefit of your traffic and assuring that you didn’t compete with them or join another competing job board like Monster.com. It worked pretty well  for them, but not necessarily so well for you. Ultimately, I was able to start Careers.AdvancingWomen.com , our own job board which guaranteed a.) I would be building my own brand and therefore an asset I could invest in and  b.) I would not be giving up 50% of the revenue up front.

It just took a lot of testing to arrive at a successful combination of revenue streams to support the business.

Time To Ramp Up and Scale Up: Next Step – GGwebGroup

Less than a year after I started I began helping other sites set up and ramp up on the Net.

Today I operate AdvancingWomen.com, Careers.AdvancingWomen.com, AW Career & Biz Blog, Advancing Women in Leadership Journal,
NewEnergyResearch.net, the first of several planned “green business” websites, and a number of diverse websites for clients.

I have recently formalized what I have been doing for some time now: consulting about, creating and overseeing websites for clients, particularly from a web business perspective.

Tina Forsyth crystalized this concept in her book, Becoming an Online Business Manager.

Tina describes a situation in which business owners “already have teams of virtual assistants, webmasters, designers and other contractors, but what they really need is someone to manage all of this; to play a bigger role in their business so that they can grow to the next level.”
Now, as online businesses have grown and increased in complexity, with more sophisticated online tools available, Tina says she is “seeing more business owners who are ready to hire at the management level.”

When I started reading Tina’s writing, it was with a mild shock of recognition I realized I had been doing what she described for a number of clients for some time. Since I had operated a major website since 1996, I had ample experience on the web, so a number of businesses and organizations I had come into the same orbit with had asked for me to help them set up shop online.  What happened, in every case, was that I was not just setting up or overseeing the set up of a website and collaborative and marketing tools, but helping them think through the business processes they would need to succeed and grow their businesses. It was a collaboration where I implemented their vision, more like a doctor collaborating with a patient, to diagnose the state of his or her health, determine the level he or she really aspired to reach, then prescribing a regimen for increased fitness to ultimately reach that goal.  The actual construction of the website was more like being the pharmacist dispensing the medicine. But, in every case, we’ve worked together to reach the right diagnosis, and we’ve constructed websites which support clients in reaching their goals.  Often I not only implement them, I continue to oversee them, so clients can focus on building their business or organization. As we’ve formalized this process we’ve given it it’s own website GGwebGroup and also formalized a team with differing specialties so we can help businesses not only focus, but ramp up fast to seize opportunities.

This is where we are today but the Net continues to morph and I’m sure we will too so………to be continued.  Sometime in the future.