How and Why People
Use the Internet

Understanding why and how people use the internet is important to how you build your home based business website.

With traditional (brick and mortar) businesses, location, location, location is very important. A great location increases your chance for success. People can find you simply by walking or driving by your business.

Location on the internet however has no importance. Before building a website for your home based business, it is important to understand that people find you on the internet because they are looking for information.

They are not necessarily looking for your particular website. They do not know you. They are looking simply for information. If your website contains that information, their search may land them on your web page.

Moreover, people do not search the information highway simply to make a purchase.

Yes, people do buy over the internet. They make purchases to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The best news for you is that a major percentage of those purchases are with home based businesses.

The reason why people make purchases and why they use the internet revolve around the same issues. They want to fulfill a need, solve a problem, satisfy a desire, or answer a question.

Often, internet searchers do not intend to make a purchase when they enter your website. If your website provides valuable, relevant information, they may "pause" to consider what you have to say.

This becomes your opportunity to capture their attention. You then must solve their issue by demonstrating how your product or service can help them.

The first mistake that many home based businesses make is to offer (immediately) their products or services for purchase. Worst yet, they do so on the home page of their website.

Placing ads or a shopping cart on your home page is a mistake for many reasons.

The important reason that concerns us here is that first-time visitors to our home based internet business have no reasons to purchase from us.

People will find our site by various means. Once they find us,

• Have we given them a reason to buy from us?

• Can they just as easily buy from someone else?

• Are they able to make their purchase offline?

• Have we demonstrated how we can resolve their issue?

In fact, they probably have many on-line and off-line ways to make their purchase and solve their problem. This fact makes having the "right type" of website that much more important to us.

People want valuable content. They want content relevant to one or more of their issues. They want information from a knowledgeable and trusted source.

Once visitors arrive to your home based business website, you have the opportunity to become that source of information.

However, you have only a few seconds to make a favorable impression. Or, they will click away.

There's a lot of clutter on the information highway.

People must find you if you are to succeed. All the web pages on Start-Your-home-Business-Website (.com) are to help you build the right type of home business website.

People look for information on the internet by using search engines to find what they need. People now refer to this use of search engines as googling. Because, more people use Google's search engine than all other search engines combined.

However, there are many other search engines. The four most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.

MSN

For now, it is important to know that when people find your website through search engines you are receiving what we call organic traffic. When you receive organic traffic, you receive visitors to your website without paying a fee.

This is Free website traffic!

If you cannot generate free traffic, you will have to advertise to get people to your site. Receiving free traffic of course is preferable. Because, when you pay for traffic and then stop, the traffic flow to your website also stops.

Understanding why and how people use the internet gives us the basis for how we should build our web pages.

If you have not done so, now is a good time to look at Understanding Search Engines, for the non-tech person.

Return to Website Content - The Dual function of Content.

Return to Home Based Internet Business.

Back to Top - Why and How People Use the Internet