Vancouver Sun INTERNET MARKETING CONFERENCE BRINGS TOGETHER WAVES OF FUTURE: Cedarshed Industries marketing manager Greg Bailey's laptop is an essential tool in the lumber yard.

(Cedarshed's website)

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When it comes to business and the Internet, you have some choices.

You can make lame jokes about dot-bombs and keep away. You can curse the gold-rush mentality that made a few geeks rich beyond your wildest dreams. You can figure out where it might take you, because it's on the move, whether you're there or not.

Before the Silicon Valley sweepstakes made people crazy, many companies of all sizes were testing the water. "We ought to have a Web site," was how the thinking went, "so we'll be ready." What exactly they were getting ready for was a little harder to nail down.

Show me the money was the tough part: most of them had to admit they weren't making any on the Web, and weren't too clear on how to turn that around. Even Amazon.com wasn't making money, and there was a business tailor-made for e-commerce.

That was then. This week, a couple of hundred people are in Vancouver for the Fifth International Internet Marketing Conference. They're here to trade experiences and listen to a bunch of experts whose names probably wouldn't ring a bell.

They know there's big business out there, and they want to know more about it. PriceWaterhouseCoopers calculates the money spent on interactive advertising has quadrupled to about $8 billion since 1998, and that sounds okay to these folks.

Even the conference, which started in Copenhagen and has wandered through Stockholm, Las Vegas and Berlin on its way here, is profitable, says Lennart Svanberg, the guy who started it back in Stockholm.

Lennart likes the looks of things here. In Europe, he notes, the Internet has to deal with language issues, even while trade barriers are removed. In North America, it's a whole different game.

Greg Bailey, sales and marketing manager for a Langley company called Cedarshed Industries, has a pretty good grip on it. He can show you the money.

"In helping our business grow, at least 40 per cent of our business is generated through the Internet either directly or indirectly," he says.

Right now, business is running in "the $5-million to $10-million range," he says, politely declining to give away his exact revenue figures. Sales are up 25 to 30 per cent over last year.

Cedarshed manufactures gazebos, garden buildings and furnishings from Western Red Cedar. It started in 1980, employs more than 100, and has about 300 dealers selling its products around North America. It was a classic bricks-and-mortar business model, and in 1999, it established a website.

"It was very basic and we didn't really understand it at all," says Greg. "So consequently, we didn't get a lot of feedback from it; it wasn't really out there.

"We just thought we needed to have an Internet site. We didn't know what that meant exactly. We thought you put your company brochure on the Web site and that's about the end of it. If somebody called in, you could say go to this URL and maybe we can help you."

"Then we started looking at it a little closer and decided to re-do our Web site. The concept was, let's use our Web site to help our dealer network."

Andrea Hadley, president of NetSetGo Marketing and co-organizer of this week's conference, was one of the people Greg worked with to change the site.

"Greg wants to do two things," she says. "He wants to create more awareness of his product -- to build his brand online, which is the Cedarshed brand, and provide consumer information about that brand -- and he wants to connect the consumer to the dealer, so he's there to facilitate that connection."

Nowhere on the Cedarshed Web site (www.cedarshed.com) will you find one of those little grocery carts for your purchases. You'll find everything else, from suggested prices to Quicktime videos on how to assemble a shed to a list of provinces, states and cities where you can find a dealer. The site isn't trying to sell you a shed retail; that's the dealer's job.

"Say someone's sitting in Alabama and they say, 'Hey, I want to buy a shed,' and they put in 'shed' and Cedarshed comes up," says Greg. "Then they either contact us toll-free or send us an e-mail.

"We have a dealer, say in Montgomery, Alabama. We don't tell them where it is. We want to qualify the lead, so we want to have a little communication via e-mail or a toll-free call. Then we'll find out, are they looking or what are they doing, exactly.

"Once we qualify that, we'll send them to the dealer. Then we'll phone the dealer and say, we're going to send so-and-so to you to start looking for a shed. If they get an order, we'll know, 'cause we'll get an order in the system."

Getting from a key-word search for "shed" to Cedarshed's site is one of the basic elements of Internet marketing, and those are the kinds of details they're kicking around at the conference.

From the point of view of the customer and the manufacturer, the ability to make that connection is critical.

"The thing that's excellent about the Internet is that you have somebody thinking about sheds, so he's already interested in products like yours. If you have a really good online brochure, you just convert him with your message."

As Greg notes, he can (and still does) advertise in magazines for readers whose interests may include his product, "but how many people want a shed when they [look at] that magazine? It's probably very few, and it's very expensive to do that."

What does Internet marketing cost? He reckons you can expect to pay $5,000 to $10,000 to arrange a good Web site, and $50,000 to $60,000 a year on Internet marketing, including such sophistications as pay-per-click, in which a search engine chooses your site over all others, for a price.

Compared with a small ad in a glossy national publication, those figures start to look pretty good.

The Internet also works well for finding dealers to carry the Cedarshed line. The old method was to pull out the industry directories and cold-call lumberyards and garden stores all over the continent, hoping they had the money and the interest to make it work. Things have changed.

"We probably get five inquires a week from people who want to become Cedarshed dealers and out of those, we convert maybe 20 per cent, so we'd probably pick up one a week."

What next? Greg says he didn't come into this as a computer geek; he was a sales and marketing guy. Since 1999, he's learned plenty, including this:

"The Internet is like the wild West; it's changing weekly."

mbridge@pacpress.southam.ca