Taken from The Southern Star published Saturday, August 31st, 2002

WEST Cork has another international success story to celebrate, as the diet web site - www.annecollins.com - has just been ranked Number 10 out of six million competitors on the Internet and is currently visited by 114,000 dieters every month.

Built entirely from scratch by Southern Star slimming columnist Anne Collins and her husband, Neil, with no outside help or grant assistance, it is now one of the largest diet sites on the Internet with over 600 pages of information and tips.

It was included in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ list of Top 10 diet sites and has been reviewed in newspapers throughout the world, from Alaska to New Zealand.

Anne also runs three other top-ranked web sites and the combined traffic for all four sites is a massive 265,000 unique visitors per month.

In addition, she is the resident diet expert for one of the largest US Diet Forums, based in Florida. As well as this, she writes a fortnightly weight loss newsletter with over 10,000 subscribers that is growing at a rate of 100 subscribers a day.

As a result, sales of Anne’s online diet have sky-rocketed and she now has customers in 40 different countries and in every state in America.

In fact, not long ago, Anne was stopped in a supermarket in Skibbereen by a group of American women who recognised her photograph from the website!

TECHNICAL

How does a web site get to Number 10 out of six million? "With great difficulty!" Anne said. "When we started, we knew literally nothing. We had to learn everything from scratch. Now we compete head-on with multi-million dollar US diet sites who have teams of technical and nutritional staff."

How does Anne cope with the technical side of things. She said: "I leave that to Neil. He is the search engine expert. His job is to get the site ranked as high as possible. I design the site, write the web pages and answer questions. We get about 100 queries a day, every day, from all over the world. Most are from the US, Canada, the UK or Australia, but I also receive them from Asia, the Pacific Islands, Africa, South America and US military bases all over the globe. The world is full of people who want to lose weight."

Is it hard work? "Very hard!" said Anne. "We both work 12 hour days, usually seven days a week. We get enquiries and orders 24 hours a day. Australia is already busy when we get up, then the UK comes online from 8a.m. Then New York, Florida and other US east coast cities start e-mailing us from mid-day. Finally, California wakes up about 3p.m.

"This goes on 365 days a year - even Christmas Day! We usually take a break in the afternoon, but even then Neil is usually scribbling notes in his notebook. It’s a round-the-clock operation."

Does Anne have any advice for people who are interested in running a web business? "Yes. Doing business over the Internet is very different from running a normal business. The top priority is to get a high ranking on the biggest search engines. Without this you’re dead. Unfortunately, there are very few people who know how search engines work. So you need to find out as much as you can, yourself.

"Next, you need a good product - ideally one that appeals to Americans. Because America is still by far the biggest market. Finally you need to offer round the clock support. Internet customers are very demanding and very impatient."

As far as the future is concerned, Anne is cautiously optimistic: "E-business is no easy ride. The Internet is very unpredictable and it’s hard to relax because there is so much competition. However, we have the basics right and we are planning new diets for several different continents, so we’re optimistic that our market share will continue to improve."

In spite of this big break-through on the worldwide web, Anne Collins has not forgotten where it all started and will be resuming her popular slimming column in The Southern Star at the start of September.

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