Jane would like to begin today's post with a quote from a favorite author, Dr. Seuss. What creativity! What entertainment! What tongue-twisters! Jane could never get enough of Dr. Seuss when our children were young. Now, here we are, using some of his so-valuable insight into business and people, to help you build your business by marketing to women who shop online:

Quoting from Oh! The Places You'll Go!, "You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed. You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead. Except when you don't. Because, sometimes, you won't."

Jane dearly hopes that does NOT describe you, dear reader. We hope you will PASS the whole gang and not be part of the "won't" crowd. In order to "have the speed," you need to be aware. Here are some facts of business life guaranteed to make sure you don't "lag behind."

From an article  out of the Greensboro/Winston-Salem Business Journal earlier this month, titled  "Businesses shift ad money online in search of clients," reporter Mark Tosczak had this to say,

"Nationally, marketers are shifting more of their advertising dollars away from traditional mass media such as newspapers and television and into a broad array of new online marketing tools."

The article goes on to point out the advantages to local marketers. Jane would like to note that successful businesswomen are more interested in using technology to further their business interests, than men, as noted in this quote from the Center for Women's Business Research:

"Women owners of firms with $1 million or more in revenues are more likely than their men counterparts to embrace technology as integral to their business strategy (58% vs. 35%) and more likely to have a web site with transaction capability (56% vs. 38%)."

This means: women with $$ to spend are looking for you online.

A second factor in helping you leap ahead of the crowd by appealing to women online, comes from this report out of Nielsen/Netratings, from June of this year. "Nielsen/Netratings reports June 2005 online advertising spending: General Community Web sites capture fastest growing sector in estimated online revenue."

The operative words there are: "community web sites." Women are more active in online communities than men. To prove our point, we merely direct you to a Google search on "women's communities online" to which you will receive this return: "Results 1 - 10 of about 10,100,000 for women's communities online. (0.25 seconds)" where the first 10 are exciting places to find women customers.

BTW, searching on "general communities" gives this return: "Results 1 - 10 of about 20,500,000 for general communities online. (0.66 seconds)" few of which are actual sites with actual people who belong to or have a connection to the link offered.

We leave you with this knowledge, that in the aforementioned article (Jane likes to get formal now and then -- we feel very British when we do), General Community sites were followed by Health & Fitness, Business and...Mens. Now, which gender do you think gives more traffic to the Health & Fitness and Business sites? We believe we have provided the answer here.

Don't lag behind...lose the "don't" and the "won't" and join women online and, Oh! the places you'll go!

What's not to like about that?