THE TRUTH ABOUT SUSTAINABLE INTERNET BUSINESS GROWTH

There are three factors that will assure you of sustainable Internet business growth.

• Moore's Law,
• Acceptance of digital environments, and
• Convergence.

Learn and understand these principles because they prove that Internet marketing will have exponential growth and exponential results for decades to come.

To capitalise on the impact of these principles, you need to learn how to best position yourself as a home-based entrepreneur to take advantage of the Internet opportunities that are growing exponentially every day.

 1.   MOORE'S LAW
Moore's Law describes the continuous decrease in cost of digital technology. I assure you that nothing else I have purchased over my lifetime has decreased in cost in terms of value for money. Twenty years ago you would pay a fortune for a desktop with a 350 megabyte hard drive. For the same money you can now get a desktop with a 2 terabyte hard drive.  Each time I upgraded, I spent about the same amount of money but got more and more computing power. So, what really happened was that my computing power increased significantly every so often for the same capital outlay.

Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel Corporation, made mathematical observations in the 1960's of the engineering practices which allowed miniaturization in semiconductor technology. This miniaturization applies to processors and other computer components as well as memory chips. What he observed mathematically is that computers can be made four times more powerful every three years for the same cost. Some argue that this same formula has held true for a full century, if you include the mechanical computers of the early 1900's and the old-fashioned transistors that followed.

If you knew that you could get four times more raw materials every three years with no increase in cost in a given business, would you want to get into that business? The overwhelming answer everywhere is, of course, a resounding "yes!"

All businesses, even traditional brick and mortar businesses, must market their goods and services. Because businesses look for the lowest cost to perform their processes, more and more marketing information and marketing processes, even for brick-and-mortar businesses, will become digital.

Moore's Law ensures that Internet businesses, especially Internet marketing, will continue to grow and flourish at an exponential rate.

• Will Moore's Law continue to hold true in the future?
• Can engineers keep making computer chips cheaper?
• Intel's engineers assure us that Moore's Law will continue to operate for several more device generations, if not indefinitely. 

2.   ACCEPTANCE OF DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS

The next factor that ensures continued growth for Internet businesses is the acceptance by consumers of digital environments.

• People have taken to Cyberspace. Despite the many predictions to the contrary, people have warmed up to digital environments with enthusiasm.
• Many Web communities have been formed and their participants report feeling all warm and cosy in those digital environments. Participants have developed a strong sense of identity with some of the digital communities.
• As Moore's Law continues to operate, our technology becomes more and more capable of producing engrossing digital environments in which even larger numbers of people will enthusiastically participate.
• On-line communities are forming in much the same way that communities have formed in the physical world throughout history—only much faster.
• The success stories of Google, eBay, Facebook, YouTube and others make it pure folly to think that brick-and-mortar business will go on as usual, unaffected by the Internet.

3.   CONVERGENCE

The third factor assuring a prosperous future for Internet entrepreneurs is convergence. Simply defined, convergence is the coming together of separate things.

• Convergence is now occurring at both the industry level and the consumer level.
• On the industry level, computing, communications, and media companies are merging to form major new entities.
• On the consumer level, new devices are being used to combine computing with phones and televisions.
• In the very near future, consumers will replace their phones, TVs, and PCs with one central media centre (which may have several satellite devices for convenience and portability).
• Even our money is fast becoming digital, as we have automatic bank deposits of our earnings while we buy things with credit and debit cards.
• What this means is that digital products and processes become more and more important as the Internet gets closer and closer to people's everyday lives.

4.   THE POTENTIAL

These three factors—Moore's Law, acceptance of digital environments, and convergence—assure us that the potential of the Internet for the home-based entrepreneur is nothing less than incredible.

• In fact, the belief in these three factors has been driving our economy for some time now.
• Venture capitalists are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into purely digital ventures.
• In the digital world, the large corporations have to compete, not just with each other but also with the home-based entrepreneurs. The large conglomerates no longer have the exclusive advantage.
• Given the low cost of computing power, individual entrepreneurs now have at their disposal the raw materials to develop digital products and processes and make them available to the world.
• Even more importantly, individual entrepreneurs can band together in digital environments to combine their skills and knowledge and use convergence to their advantage in a very efficient way, rivalling the large companies with the results.

5.   HOW TO POSITION YOURSELF

To obtain convergence, you must bring together computing power, media content, and information processing.

• To obtain the economies of scale, you should position yourself within a digital community where resources can be shared.
• Despite the low cost of computing, there is still power in numbers with regard to media content and information processing.
• To position yourself as a marketer for one of the fastest growing digital communities in existence is without doubt the smartest move you could possibly make right now.
• Having done that, you can use your individual creativity, skills, and resources in an environment of freedom employing the low cost computing power at your disposal to obtain your financial goals.
• Due to the three factors discussed in this lesson, there is an unprecedented opportunity available to you right now as an SFI affiliate. You have but to take advantage of it.

This above gives you to the big picture. True success, however, is in the details. In future articles I will address some of the issues you need to master in order to become a successful e-commerce entrepreneur. We will touch on how traffic flows across the Internet. Understanding those traffic patterns is crucial to your ability to interact with Internet traffic in a successful way. Cyberspace here we come.