when a surfer types in the key words for your service. Do whatever

is necessary to get in the top 10. "The most important thing we

do each week is that our marketing director checks seven engines for

each key word to see whether we show up in those top 10 results,"

says Scott.

"It is just like anything else," says Scott. "If you don’t

have a human responsible for it and being creative, it won’t get

done."

Joanne Pinter, the marketing director, not only monitors the

searches but also gives the first response to all the queries. For

the top five engines she watches (Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite,

and Infoseek) the firm was in the top 10 for four of them. Only in

InfoSeek was it number 14.

is by far the best, Alta Vista a strong second, and Lycos is a distant

third," says Scott. Scott bought the key words "budgeting

software" and "budgeting" on five engines. The

clickthrough

rate is 2.6 percent on Yahoo but only .6 percent on InfoSeek, a rate

that Scott attributes to InfoSeek’s appeal to consumer rather than

business surfers.

have the key words locked up through the year 2000. That is an

important

point for players like us," says Scott. He spends a minimum of

$1,000 to $2,500 per month at a rate of $60 per 1,000 impressions.

Total spent since January is $15,000. "We are able to be the

number

one marketer in this environment, and we will reach 2 million

impressions,

cumulative, this year."

marketplace.

For Helmsman, that would be http://www.CFOnet.com

and http://www.BusinessFinance

ads emphasized the pain and aggravation of budget work, but by using

organized trial and error Scott found they didn’t pull. "The

beauty

of online results is that they tell keyword by keyword, banner by

banner, which pulls what, and you drop the losers," says Scott.

He found that the best-pulling ads are animated, simple, and upbeat.

"Our conclusion is that people don’t want negativity, darkness,

and clutter. `Are you in budgeting hell?’ pulled terribly on the

Web."

"To our surprise, our best pulling banner ad pulls 3.3 percent

with Yahoo and consists merely of this statement: `Helmsman simplifies

budgeting. Click here to evaluate.’"

"Everybody does it. You have to update the content regularly,

so you legitimately do have something new to provide, but if you don’t

submit it regularly they think it’s old and drop you down."

Scott pays just short of $50 monthly for a consultant

http://www.submitit.com

to keep submitting his pages to 400 search engines. When the automatic

submissions don’t work, as with Yahoo, which employs live people to

do the evaluations, the marketing director submits them "by

hand"

and less frequently.

<B>Jason Olim and his twin brother Matthew Olim

have grown their business, CDNow, from the basement of their parents’

house to the point where one of the world’s leading technology

companies,

Sun Microsystems, is taking out full-page ads in the New York Times

to brag about how it has been CDNow’s platform from the start. CDNow

recently merged with Music Boulevard, also on a Sun platform, and

so CD shoppers can choose from more than 500,000 sound samples, read

reviews, and buy digital downloads of full-length albums from

http://www.CDNow.com.

Olim has become an inspiration for all the start-up entrepreneurs

who hope that chutzpah and creativity will substitute for deep pockets

and corporate support. That’s why he was chosen as the keynote speaker

for the NJ Technology Council Software Forum on Friday, June 18, at

7:30 p.m. at the Sheraton at Woodbridge Place. Cost: $180. Call

609-452-1010.

The young web-entrepreneur was hand-selected by Mel Biada, of

the Council’s Software IT group and chairman of Bluestone Software

(http://www.bluestone.com) in Mount Laurel. "I think

CDNow personifies the internet start-up. I think Jason is familiar

with what it takes to start a business from a financial perspective

— how to keep stock valuations at the appropriate level and

compete

against the Amazons of the world — and he has a good cross section

of technical experience." The conference will also include panels

on web-enabled applications, security, and web-powered businesses.

Panelists include Tom Scott of the Helmsman Group (see above).

In the book "The CDNow Story Rags to Riches on the Internet,"

written with his brother and Peter Kent (Top Floor Publishing,

1998), Olim tells the quintessential tale of how starting big can

be a disadvantage. "Some of our competitors assumed that going

into business on the Internet is just like opening a traditional real

world store. These large established companies believed they could

quickly dominate online music sales just as they dominate real-world

sales." But based on an initial investment of $20,000, in three

years CDNow had a 33 percent share of the entire online music

business.

That doesn’t mean the small start-up won’t have some harrowing times.

"When things went wrong, having no one to turn to was a real

problem,"

Olim writes. "For instance, there was the night we had a system

crash. Just one of those things — we never did find out what had

happened."

"This was late in 1994 while we were still in the basement. We

were grossing around a $1,000 a day, which gave us a gross profit

of about $150 a day, so money was still quite tight," writes Olim.

"One evening the computer system just locked up. We had backups

but we had never really tested them, and in any case, we didn’t have

everything backed up. We had backed up irreplaceable data

related

to the operations of the store, but we hadn’t backed up the operating

system."

"It was on nights like this that we’d realize we were just a

couple

of kids in a basement. We may have been running one of the world

largest

Internet stores, but we were just tired 25-year-olds working by

ourselves

below ground level."

"It was a really scary night. We had no spare disk drives, and

we simply didn’t have cash for that sort of luxury. And we felt that

we couldn’t be down for a minute. We were living on the float in those

days. As it turned out, we lost perhaps $500. Back then, it was enough

to really hit us hard."

The business changes daily. Just last week Sony Music Entertainment

announced it would solve the problem of insufficient on-site retail

stock in retail stores by setting up digital vending machines in

retail

stores. Customers will be able to choose digital files from 4,000

albums and — after 15 minutes processing — take them home

as CDs, DVDs, or minidisks.

But the Olims have gained a huge head start: "The expertise

required

to build an online music store — making it easy to use, figuring

out the tricks of online merchandising, making the store personal,

making the most of potential sales — involves newly developed

skill that take time to acquire, but our staff has these skills: the

very best people in this business work for CDNow," says Olim.

Olim says that five C’s should determine whether a business will work

on the web:

distribution,

because by freeing the store from space limitations, much wider choice

can be provided.

incomes, 25 to 49-year-olds who simply don’t have enough time.

technology — the system by which the consumer can access the

available

choices.

of place, the reviews.

customized

store. How else, without the Internet, could you customize a store?

you’re looking for a product category that really fits the net

perfectly,

one that will be changed enormously by the new technology, look for

a product that can be digitally distributed," says Olim, "then

check to see if it fits this concept of the Five Cs."

Corrections or additions?

— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.