So you managed to get a website up and working. You managed to set up a pay per click campaign. But you have not managed to get lots of buyers, callers, joiners, clickers or whatever it is you were after. You may even be advertising to a niche market, yet your website speaks to a general audience. If you try to be everything to every body these days and you will end up being nothing to anybody. So let's look at how you might make changes to your site to speak to a niche and get some conversions.

News Flash. The general store can't compete with the amazons of the world.

If you try all by yourself to compete with mega mart, you will get lost in the big black wormhole of the internet-- also known as the limp, lame, solitary server for misplaced website owners. That's why you choose a segment or a niche strategy. It offers you an opportunity to carve a market share out of that big giant pie. The trick is to identify the niche market or brand audience who will value the service or product enough to pay for it.

How can you position to a primary target audience ?

Don't shoot at the ocean hoping to hit a fish. You need to follow a plan or niche strategy to develop your website so it speaks to this primary target audience. A website is a marketing tool. So here is a brief outline regarding how you might go about the process of creating a well-positioned, marketing savvy website that is not generic. This is an extremely simplified website plan for positioning to a target audience but it outlines a process that you can follow.

• Define your site- Before you can actually choose the type of software or tool you will need to create your site, you need to first determine what KIND of site you want. Is it a site to promote your business? Or an eCommerce site to sell stuff? Is it a community forum for like minded. You site definition determines which development tools you'll need. A free template might do the trick or you might like to look into ecommerce programs.

• Define your goals- What do you want this website to do for you? Sell? Get additional business? Advertise more high-profit items or services? Serve as a status gateway for your sales and marketing team? Do you want it to be an informational platform that is supported by advertising. Writing down your goals gives you a focus.

• Define your target market- It's not "everyone on the internet". Big companies spend MILLIONS to define their market and create an appropriate strategy. So you need to research the segment of the population who you are trying to reach. If it's teenagers, is it female teens with self esteem issues? Is it teens who are book worms? If you know which segment it is, you can further define the audience and know how to speak to them.

• Define features- These are the features you want on your site. If you are a real estate firm, do you want an amortization calculator? Do you want a venue for people to leave comments? Do you want a slide show, streaming video, audio files? Do you want a schedule of how-to clinics and sign up capability for these clinics? What about registration and payment capability? All of this helps determine the tools you use, the package you might buy the host you will choose. Some hosts are better if you happen to be posting lots of video or audio content for example. Still others offer ecoommerce packages with a higher level of tech support for these customers.

• Target marketing strategy-Your marketing strategy is a plan to reach specific objectives. It does not have to be catchy. It just has to define what you would like the site to accomplish. Example: For instance, you want your computer repair business to cater to home office entrepreneurs who want same-day repair. Your focus is getting computers fixed fast from a remote location and keeping the business person at peak productivity by minimizing downtime. You may also want to get an affiliate cut for spyware you recommend on your website and other products that keep computers virus free and performing smoothly. You want to keep in touch with your market through a newsletter with free tips on how to boost performance and with latest virus alerts. You would like to start offering monthly contracts for being the "IT Department" for the home office entrepreneur and eventually establish yourself as the go-to company for IT services.

Remember to write or use copy that does not focus on yourself or your company, but think strategically in terms of how your product(s), service or company benefits your target market. Then your website should guide them along the path to the action you wish them to take much like a live sales person would do. Plan your website well and it could become one of your least expensive and highest yielding marketing and sales tools.

As you know we are all fond of the easy things in life. We all like the path of least resistance. The easier we can find our way the better for us. The more complicated something appears the less we understand it and as consequence the less we like it.

With this in mind we need to approach the building of a website in a way that will avoid all of the above. Your website will need to be laid out in a way that understands the visitor's needs and addresses them clearly and concisely.

The question then becomes how to do this? When considering what subject to build your site around you will need to start your research on the forums relative to the topics of choice. For example if your passion relates to golf then you will need to visit forums where this subject is discussed.

Here you will need to look at what questions are being asked and where the people posting to this forum are having difficulty. Then you will need to get engaged and try and help. Here is how you could do this. Create a signature that links back to a free blog that asks the question "what is the biggest problem you face when it comes to golf"

On your free blog you could ask other questions. Your blog then can have a form where people can submit their questions. Of course you would need to offer them something to do this that will help their game and of course you will need to offer it for free.

Based on this you will be gathering actionable intelligence relative to your target market. With this information you can then build a website that addresses these concerns and provides a product that you are either affiliated with or that you have created yourself.

Now that you have this information you can build a real website that can generate a real income in multiple ways. You will want to build a site that is structured properly for the search engines and one which is easy to navigate for your visitors.

To conclude if you lay the groundwork properly then the rest will fall into place.

Introduction

Semantic web as defined by the creator of the web Tim Berners-Lee is "a web of data, in some ways like a global database" (Berners-Lee, 1998). To elaborate further Mr. Berners-Lee explains in an interview held by IDG Now, data is expressed on computers as associated files with applications that deal specifically with information, an example would be, data in calendars, bank systems, spreadsheets, and database application. Looking at a web page, data is not clearly defined and not associated with any of the applications usually on computers. Semantic web will allow data to interact and connect together; it will bring on a common data format for all applications, for databases and web pages alike (Moon, 1999). Semantic web is not to build an artificial intelligence system which allows computers to understand what humans write on web pages; on the contrary, it is an attempt to make web pages more understandable and well-defined to support automatic extraction of data from within web content (Berners-Lee, 1998).

Analysis

The emergence of the web and the way HTML took off was driven by how society's needed to grew, from Internet chat to file transfer to high-end communities through blogs and wiki's. HTML was not limited to web content, knowledge base and help files adapted the language as a format to document software applications and provide training material. The revolution of technologies on the Internet allowed companies like Google to index pages; a thought that was very far away, says Tim Berners-Lee in his lecture at MIT. Web services have evolved to pave the road for distributed information and modular programming allowing interoperability among sites. Through XML, data in one site can be used by another using the common protocols and standards supported by both (Berners-Lee, 1998). XML defines schemas that deal with fields of data, what is required is a system that can tell the computer what sort of information (data) it can derive from within a page (Moon, 1999). With Web 3.0 a site will provide data that can be navigated through and extracted from multiple sites, this is a result of the fact that semantic web data model is closely related to a relational database where records of data share common fields that connect them together (Berners-Lee, 1998).

The solution provided to support semantic web is in the form of metadata that describes the data contained on web pages. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a base to manage metadata; it is the ground that computers can use to exchange and interact with applications on the Web (W3C RFC, 1999). The applications for RDF include digital libraries, online catalogs, and indexing systems that are usually associated with content and content relationships models deployed in most web pages. With RDF data within business portals will be analyzed and identified as resources, properties, or statements transparent to the domain, further more, the specifications will merge with other documents to comprise a framework of classes. Classes organized as a hierarchy comprises a schema that can be reusable as metadata definitions along side multiple platforms. Resources created in this hierarchy can be identified using a resource identifier (URI), which enables a document given to a machine with this identification to be recognized by the system and triggers it to dig and find similar data (Berners-Lee, 1998).

Implications

Semantic web can be the solution to overpower the limitations of current information management systems in finding and extracting data from unorganized resources. RDF is meant to describe any data regardless of its character, location, source, or type, the concept of URI is richer to uniquely identify any object on the web (Berners-Lee, 1998). The pillars of Semantic web are standards and common protocols that are the bases for knowledge representation; HTML, RDF, the data language resource description web ontology language (OWL) that describes to the machine what is going on, in addition to RDF1 which is a query language to make inquiries among machines much easer, will all emerge and collaborate to bring in more to the web and more intelligent programs that will bring the Internet more closer (Cleave, 2004).

The current research and implementation of Abilene network and the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Internet 2 of high-performance backbone network linking major universities and research labs across the US, is a good foundation for what Semantic web can do, and represent the perfect platform for grid computing, digital libraries, virtual laboratories, and distance learning (Abilene, Internet2). Internet2 or I2 was developed by a group of universities in 1996 providing improved connectivity standards to reach 10gbps (gigabits per second). With more than 227 universities and libraries connected, network based applications and experimental programs can run on this network of high-bandwidth connection feeding on the latest technology of gigabit Ethernet and IP protocol version 6 (Reardon, 2004). Semantic web standards can be the base of material and data distributed on this network, providing the best test platform to explore the full potential and what can be achieved.

Conclusion

Tim Berners-Lee believes that with Web 3.0 we can succeed and fantastic things can happen, but the infrastructure need to be built, laws of privacy and security need to be revised and honored, further more, the web need to remain open for researchers to allow for continuous upgrade and development. Semantic web will kick off when individuals materialize the need to work on data processing, and think about collaborating their data, with company's information and that of the government (Moon, 1999).

References:

1. Berners-Lee, Tim. 1998. Semantic Web Road map.W3C team. (14 October 1998) http://www.w3.org/ DesignIssues/Semantic (accessed 16 Jul 2007)
2. Moon, Peter. 1999. The future of the Web as seen by its creator. IT World IDG Now (7 July 1999) http://www.itworld.com/Tech/4535/070709future/ (accessed 14 Jul 2007)
3. W3C RFC. 1999. Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification. W3 Consortium (5 January 1999) http:// www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax/ (accessed 20 Jul 2007)
4. Cleave, Kenith Van. 2004. Regis University Database Practicum Experience. Regis University. (14 November 2004) http:// trackit.arn.regis.edu/dba/Thesis%2520Papers/

   kvancleave_2004Bfinalreport_20041118.pdf (accessed 16 Jul 2007)

5. Abilene, Internet2. http://abilene.internet2.edu/about/ (accessed 17 Jul 2007)
6. Reardon, Marguerite. 2004. Internet2: 2004 and beyond. CNET, News (24 August 2004) http:// news.com.com/2100-1034_3-5321053.html (accessed 19 Jul 2007)