by Tony Murtagh
When I first read the book and watched the film over 30 years ago, I never dreamed that come 2001, I would be sitting at my desk with a powerful computer at my finger tips, communicating to the world at the click of a mouse.
Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick predicted that man would land on the moon - it happened just one year after the film was released; that we would have talking computers like HAL. We also have ones, like HAL, who play chess - IBM's Deep Blue, even beat the then World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
They predicted that there would be orbiting space stations (Mir) and that a space ship would make the journey to the outer reaches of the Solar System (Deep Space 1).
The one thing they could not foresee, was the extraordinary growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
I believe that as we come into 2001, we have the opportunity to take ourselves on an Odyssey, every bit as exciting as that embarked upon by the astronauts
As the World Wide Web continues to grow, so do the business opportunities for the average "man in the street". No longer do we need large sums of money to invest in order to build a business - we can do it (with a lot of hard work) from the comfort of our own homes, simply by using our computer and a phone line. We can compete with the big boys, provided that we find our own special niche on which to concentrate.
In fact many of the "big boys" who thought they could build a business on the net by throwing huge sums of money at it have gone broke.
There is however no reason why you can not build a successful and profitable web based business with a very small outlay combined with a little knowledge and a great deal of hard work.
I believe, as do many more experienced "web gurus", that the future lies in building content rich, niche, or theme sites, that will attract visitors and search engines alike.
I have just finished Dr Ken Evoy's Affiliate Masters e-mail course in which he takes the reader right through the steps of building a great, content rich, niche site, right from coming up with the initial ideas through to building a keyword rich site.
Like all of Ken's courses, it is well written, full of useful advice and information and, what is even better, it's FREE.
Check it out yourself - I am sure that you will find that it will help you to make 2001 the start of your own (cyber) Space Odyssey
mailto:tamsaardvark1@sitesell.net
Tony Murtagh has spent all his career involved in sales, sales management, marketing and PR. He was a UK National Sales Manager (Major Accounts) for a mobile communications company, had his own publishing company producing a monthly Business to Business magazine and has acted as a PR consultant for a number of small businesses. He is now sharing his wide experience of sales, marketing and promotion in his new web site: -
http://DevelopYourWebSiteAndYourself.com mailto://murtagh@DevelopYourWebSiteAndYourself.com
and in a weekly e-ezine Aardvark Marketing, which you can subscribe to from the site, or