Now you are online have a good look around; let your imagination run wild. With a few clicks of a mouse, you see a commercial world where the old rules have been torn up.

The internet has made names and fortunes, and killed off a whole host of major players who were household names in our lifetimes.

So might you be the next Myspace or eBay?

Well why not? You would have to be very, very lucky to hit the jackpot on their scale, the competition is enormous, but do you need to be that mega to be a whole lot better off than you are now? Lots of people make a good living just trading on eBay, take a look.

So what are the advantages of the internet

as a market over the normal bricks and mortar approach. Well:

It is a hell of a lot cheaper to set up and being cheaper it is also a lot less risky You can avoid overheads costs, any office will do, even your own front room You can respond quickly to market opportunities: no delays while you print new brochures and get them out to the market Your business is on-line 24 hours a day and 365 days a year No having to deal with planning laws You can organize your service delivery cheaply and flexibly

It does of course have a downside.

You have to get your site noticed by your customers and that involves Search Engine Optimization (SEO)- a mysterious process that gets your site near the top of the list. Just go on the internet and type the word television in. You will get 113 million

hits and you will never read any of them that do not appear on page one or two.

The moral is that you have to tune your approach to meet the specific needs of your clientele. You can not hope to sell cheese (17.2 million hits), but you might manage French Cheeses (158 thousand hits) or Low Fat French Cheeses (49.6 thousand hits) a mere 2.9% of the original hits.

If you are already in a much smaller population of sites, say those within eBay then you can be even more effective.