Internet Marketing in 2011 – Finally The Truth Can Be Revealed…

Internet Marketing in 2011 – Finally The Truth Can Be Revealed…

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://dougchampigny.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Successful Internet Marketing in 2011 will continue the evolution and maturing that the Internet marketing community has been experiencing since the first quarter of 2010. For professional marketers in all areas of online marketing, and people serious about building an Internet marketing business or a secure, long-term secondary income, this is great news. For the posers, fraudsters and those adverse to putting in the effort to build a sustainable online business, they can start dusting off their resumes – as many of those type have already.

But before I get into into my predictions for Internet marketing 2011, I have two issues to deal with quickly… The first is to reveal some test results, the second is a quick word on credibility for those who may be reading this as their first exposure to Teri & I, people who may not know our background online.

The Problems For Internet Marketing In 2010

The first issue stems from the massive slowdown in Internet marketing that hit most online marketers in March or April 2010. The first signs of the scope the global recession had reached online businesses was the frenetic energy suddenly exhibited across the board. Suddenly there was an avalanche of marketing e-mails – those who were mailing daily started sending 2 and 3 times a day, those who mailed once or twice a week started mailing daily, and those you almost never heard from except during launches started mailing out regularly.

Next, you witnessed the average prices dropping on digital products across the web. Even products that were $27 and should have been $47 or $97 were suddenly going for $9.95 or $17. And those ‘playing at’ Internet marketing found they didn’t have either the marketing experience or industry credibility to maintain even those low prices, and dropped valuable resources to $1.99 or $2.99 in a desperate attempt to stay in the business.

Then you saw the changes affecting the big dogs – launches they could have sold out in an hour in 2009 took days to complete, while big JV launches took twice as long to achieve the same effect they had previously, in spite of bigger and bigger bonus and prizes for the top JV partners. You’ve probably seen a couple of the big dogs who publicized their intent to stop Internet marketing, one to focus on applications instead of products, one who has switched entirely to handling offline clients’ needs for online marketing, and others who have just quietly exited the scene. Others have taken or kept part- or full-time jobs without mentioning it to their lists or blog readers.

A large part of how the slowdown affected any given Internet Marketing business was what stage that business was at in 2010, and how the business had positioned itself online in years past. The greater the focus on one area of promotion – article marketing, blogging, e-mail marketing, etc. – the more the business was impacted. In my observations, those who had used a variety of promotional methods have best weathered the storm so far – but then it’s not over yet.

Being full-time in the Internet marketing industry, I speak daily with Internet marketers at all levels, from big dogs to those just getting or just about to get their online marketing activities into gear. For those of us who have been around a long time, most find their business is off by 40% to 65% – a shocking figure. Does that mean we should forget about Internet marketing or tell those wanting to start Internet marketing to forget it? OF COURSE NOT! Even at the lowest points in 2010 we’re making more than 98% of people in the offline business world – just not as much as we had been previously.

The pros with online and/or offline marketing experience won’t see their businesses collapse, but will in fact probably return to, and eventually exceed their former huge incomes. That will occur through the freeing up of spending capital within the English-speaking world, the evolution of the Internet marketing industry in 2011 and beyond, and their efforts to bring their online businesses and online promotional strategies in line with the emerging standards – more on that in the section on Internet Marketing 2011…

These changes led me off my beaten path the last few months, checking out various assumptions and researching the effects of online marketing efforts and techniques in this new online economy.

Internet Marketing 2010 Case Study

Most people in the Internet marketing arena know I’m a heavy blogger, with 13 blogs I author personally. Most oldtimers will remember I had the first major blogging bundle online in 2005 when I released the Secrets of the Super Bloggers. So it’s no surprise that many have written or Skype’d me to find out what’s been going on lately on my blogs. In the 7 years since I started my first blog at Blogger, there’s never been so little activity on my blogs.

But not to worry – I can now reveal why. This blog, my main Internet marketing blog, has had only one post per month in the three months from September 2010 to November 2010. And neither my main affiliate marketing blog (Captain-Affiliate.com) nor my offline business blog (info-at-this.com/offline-businesses/) had a single post in November. At EzineArticles.com I didn’t post any articles during that 3 month period, no videos uploaded to my Internet Marketing YouTube Channel.

I wasn’t being lazy – I uploaded and promoted 34 new products during that time, but all on others of our 150+ sites. What I WAS doing was testing my hypothesis that the Internet marketing industry had evolved into a marketplace best attacked through a wide variety of techniques and a building up of an empirical body of work and legitimate backlinks. Since I knew I’d done that in support of this blog, it became my main testing ground.

Did it work?

Judge for yourself… For three months I only posted once a month, with no outside promotion for the site added during those 3 months except to announce the posts on the social media web. Yet in November 2010 there were over 27,000 visitors to this site, visitors that spawned over 80,000 page views. Is traffic off? Yes – at that rate we’d only serve up a million or so pageviews from this blog. But, at least to my mind, that’s still a pretty hefty chunk of targeted traffic – especially when we remember that Internet marketing is actually one of the smaller niches online.

OK, so score one point for having a big variety of online materials pointing back to your blog – obviously more powerful than just daily blogging would be. But what about the SEO value of the site, with only one post per month? Did the search engines forget me to chase after all those blogs with their auto-blogging nonsense?

Hmm… Guess not. Google visited the site 258 time in November 2010, Yahoo! visited it 134 times, and MSN visited 79 times. Chalk up another point for the wide promotional net theory…

And the same goes for my articles – while I distribute them to 3 or 4 top directories plus a few at my own Articles and Content article directory, lets look just at the EzineArticles.com results. While not broken down by time period, overall my articles there have garnered almost 7,000 pageviews on their site plus about 1600 profile views, and while 205 people (3.1%) have clicked through my links there, more important is that 285 e-zine publishers, bloggers and webmasters have republished my articles as well. This didn’t let up at all, with Google Alerts notifying me every few days of another site they found my work on online.

Social media shows the same trend – my FaceBook account grew daily (just started this summer) and my main Twitter account, SuperAffil, hit 16,000 followers and is on over 1,100 Twitter lists…

Don’t misunderstand – these aren’t huge numbers. People who just blog have busier blogs. People who only practice article marketing have a LOT more articles and more pageviews. Those who focus just on Social Media have – or should have – much bigger followings at FaceBook, Twitter, etc. But it’s the combination of all these, plus the video sharing sites, podcasting sites, backlinks from commenting on related blogs, Squidoo, HubPages, WetPaint, Google knols, etc., that kept this site so busy with so little publishing during those 3 months.

So it’s now my opinion that a widely-spread empirical empire of related resources is the key to the future, at least for the next few years – much more so that focusing on any one aspect of Internet marketing promotional technique or strategy.

Why Should You Listen To These Predictions?

For those who don’t know my wife Teri & I, here’s a quick synopsis…

I’m a true dyed-in-the-wool Internet marketer – I don’t work outside the house, don’t ghostwrite or do copy for other marketers, don’t work with offline companies, and do almost no niche marketing of any sort. I’ve been online full-time since 1996 or ’97, and have criss-crossed the US as a speaker at various marketing conventions. My focus is on teaching people how to build an online business or create a secondary income stream through part-time Internet marketing.

Teri Champigny is my wife, partner, lover & the reason I get up each day. Teri’s also a very accomplished niche marketer with dozens of sites and blogs in areas like pets, health, travel & weddings. All big, very competitive niches and Teri holds her own very well in them – so well that she’s the author of two e-books on niche marketing, including her best-selling Finding Profitable Niches.

Before coming online I spent most of 20+ years in the marketing and advertising, and in the mid-nineties Teri & I predicted the demise of traditional media and the rise of online media and evolved our full-service ad agency into an online agency, spending our first 7 years online building and promoting corporate sites online for clients ranging from a bikini manufacturer to Yahoo!. By 2004 our own marketing, and the online market itself, had grown to the point where we fired our existing clients and have focused on our own Internet marketing ever since.

And we have NO plans to get out of the biz before we’re 80 or 90 – we love the Internet marketing lifestyle far too much. You hear a lot about being able to work at home and make your own hours, but that’s just the tip of it. As we’ve traveled around to my speaking gigs we’ve done the town in Las Vegas, spent a day checking out the Grand Canyon, explored Route 66 through New Mexico & Texas, taken a private airboat tour of the Everglades, Jeeped through the badlands of Utah and Colorado, sipped banana malts for breakfast at Johnnie Rockets after an ocean dip in South Beach, collected seashells on Sannibel Island and frolicked and baked on the beaches of South Beach, Daytona Beach, Myrtle Beach and too many more to list… Gotta love the Internet marketing lifestyle!

Internet Marketing 2011 – My Predictions…

Building Traffic Through SEO, Articles, Videos, Social Media, etc.

First up, it’s pretty obvious that the issues described in the section of this post on the Internet marketing problems in 2010 will not just suddenly disappear, and will affect sales online thoughout at least the first two quarters of 2011. And just as obviously the techniques and strategies covered in the Internet Marketing case study will continue to be your best defensive AND offensive weapons in the battle for online supremacy.

Search Engines:
Contrary to the published reports on the death of search engines and SEO in general, ethical marketers will continue to derive a lot of legitimate target traffic from the search engines, traffic which is likely to convert in higher numbers than other forms of traffic since people go to search engines looking for what Internet marketers sell – information. Right now the written word and video control most of the top spots on search engine ranking pages (SERPs), but watch for podcasts and other audio to sneak into the upper echelons too as the web goes more and more mobile.

FaceBook:
FaceBook is and will likely continue to be the busiest site online. But from your vantage point in Internet marketing, while you certainly shouldn’t ignore the potential of FaceBook, keep in mind that a great many of their users AREN’T there hoping to find information or buy anything – they’re there to talk with friends and family and to play games. The shocking statistics from FaceBook show that the bulk of their game players are women in their 30′s, 40′s and 50′s – a very lucrative and intelligent market, but don’t expect to draw them to your sites without building a relationship with them on FaceBook first.

FaceBook, like Google, is a behemoth that will be tough to bring down or overpower for it’s competitors – but then so was Yahoo! at one point, and AOL and CompuServe in the Internet days before the World Wide Web launched in 1994. They’ve left room for someone to close that gap or surpass them though, through their cap on ‘friends’ at 5,000 people and the insistence that you only send friend requests to those you already know. Since the 5,000-level cap only affects they’re best-known users, a site without that could steal them away and have many of their ‘friends’ follow them to the new site. As for the latter issue, if you and another person have 300 or 400 people in common in your friends, you really should get to know each other even if FaceBook doesn’t seem to think so.

But don’t expect anyone to top their 400 million users in 2011 – it would take time for any site to reach that level of user interaction. Keep them high on your priority list, but not to the exclusion of the search engines and other social media/social networking sites.

Twitter:
Twitter continues to grow in power for Internet marketing when used as one part of your marketing mix, in part because of great 3rd-party interfaces like TweetDeck and the growing uses for your Twitter RSS feed. You ARE making use of the RSS feed for your tweets, right? Not only should you be pinging your feed every so often, but be sure you at least have it displayed on your LinkedIn profile, your FaceBook page and the sidebar of at least one or two of your blogs. Not only does this expose your tweet to thousands of additional viewers, but it’s more places for the search engines to find your backlinks. You’ve heard a number of marketers say they’ve given up on Twitter – but that’s good news for you. They aren’t usually your target market anyway, and them leaving means less competition for your target market. Just remember, none of these resources are going to be strong enough on their own – use Twitter, like FaceBook and SEO, as a PART of your marketing mix.

Article Marketing:
Article marketing is another area that must be included in your marketing mix – just make sure you promote your articles there in with the rest of your mix, not just post them and forget them. We see with our own directory that the authors who tweet their article links, mention new articles on FaceBook, Squidoo, their blogs, etc., get the bulk of the views on our site while the rest get far fewer unless the author is well practiced at writing keyword-based articles that still satisfy their readers.

But starting in 2011 you’ll need to go a step or two further with your articles, making podcasts and/or videos of the articles as well. Mobile access online is growing in leaps and bounds and the MTV generation is coming of age. These people will want audio or video over reading the written word. Watch for the biggest article directories to add either audio uploads to accompany your articles or install text-to-speech software on their sites. Not only will that serve the mobile marketplace better, but it will help distinguish the big directories from the thousand of small directories who can’t afford the diskspace and bandwidth leap this entails. (Don’t worry – Articles-and-Content.com will keep up with them, so keep submitting your articles to us! )

Until the directories get that advanced, however, submit your audios to iTunes and your videos to YouTube to get your work in front of their millions of members too.

Video Marketing
Just as we told you blogging would be huge back in 2005, we used video to tell you in 2006 that video would be the next big thing online on our site at http://www.internet-audio-video.com. Once again we were right on the mark bringing you those tools – look how video has exploded online in the 5 or so years since then. Search Google for a variety of your target keywords and watch how often a video makes page one.

Expect video to double in importance in 2011, but competition in video marketing to quadruple or more as more and more offline companies come online in more powerful ways. Unlike you and I they use the ad agencies or video production firms to produce their videos, so either work at getting better with video or start thinking about outsourcing it.

Other Social Media & Social Networking Sites:
Think of this as your Social Media Conundrum for Internet marketing in 2011. These sites are too big to ignore, but there are too many to use them all and more will come online as 2011 unfolds. Best bet is to focus more on the sites above and your blogging and devote only 5-10% of your time to these sites. Keep an eye on which is garnering the most attention and traffic at any time and be sure to at least include that one. Then at least as the focus changes to the next site your existing work on the last site will still be providing residual benefits. Keep Squidoo, HubPages, WetPaint, Google knol and Yahoo! Answers in your mix, interspersed with the social media flavor of the day.

Blogging:
Blogs will always be one of your most effective weapons, and that value to your Internet marketing profits just keeps growing over time, as the Internet Marketing case study shows above. You’ve seen that you don’t need to blog every day to be effective, but if you love to write and are full of good ideas, don’t be afraid to paste daily or a few times a day, provided you DON”T skimp on the other techniques listed here! Again, tie your blog feed into other popular sites, like MyBlogLog, your LinkedIn profile, your FaceBook account, your Bebo page, etc. Remember that tying your blog and Twitter feeds into these sites keeps them regularly updated, even if you haven’t been back to the site for a month or two.

And by now you should realize from this post that you should be using audio and video on your blogs as well. There are plenty of plugins for WordPress to make this push-button simple for you – for example, some of my blog themes work best with PodPress, others with Audio Player. Both are free plugins that can be found in the WordPress plugins directory. And video is even simpler – once you’ve uploaded them to YouTube, Viddler, etc, just pick up the embed code from their site and use that to also feature your videos on your blog, much like I do in the sidebar here.

E-Mail Marketing:
No one can deny that e-mail marketing has lost some of it’s luster in the last couple of years, and some of it’s effectiveness along with it. The spammers had a major impact, but so too did online ‘marketers’ (and I use the term VERY loosely here) using misleading subject lines, anything they thought might get the recipients to open them. Another issue is the spam filters – with no set standards being employed, what passes one just fine gets stopped by another. And a couple of the big ISP/e-mail providers seem intent on letting no ads through except their own, even when their paying customers have requested the e-mails.

Giveaways and adswaps, while genuinely helpful and effective in earlier years, have added to the problem. A lack of control on the quality of gifts involved has made users less willing to give out their e-mail addresses, and the constant cross-promotion has led to in-bred subscriber lists, with each reader receiving far too many marketing e-mails each day pushing conflicting strategies and leaving many in analysis paralysis, unable or unwilling to sort the wheat from the chaff.

All that taken into account, however, e-mail marketing to your own double-opt-in list is probably still the single most powerful Internet marketing weapon in your online arsenal. Since starting my main Internet marketing newsletter, Marketing Domination, in 2004 I’ve sent out over 1,700 issues according to GetResponse, and continue to send it out daily. I pride myself that a member of our online family could read it for a year, never click a link or buy a single product, and still have learned a lot more about building a business online than they can from most publications sold by others. And that’s they key – make sure you’re helping your readers, whether they are buying or not.

The biggest change for your E-Mail marketing in 2011 will be in how you attract new subscribers. It’s becoming necessary to get your own subscribers from outside the existing marketing crowd, people who aren’t already inundated with dozens or hundreds of e-zines a day. More and more people will be looking to learn how to make money online in 2011 witness the millions who’ve lost their jobs in North America and Europe in the past two years, the massive government layoffs in the UK and Cuba, etc. Plus, with the purchasing power of the middle class being eroded at a faster and faster rate, many more employed people will be looking to supplement their income. How cool is it that by helping them improve their lifestyle it’ll mean higher profits for us too?

Affiliate Marketing Predictions for 2011:
Affiliate marketing is going to change too in 2011 – or at least your style of marketing will change if you want to be a successful affiliate marketer in 2011. More careful scrutiny of what you promote, additional means of promotion and a lot more pre-selling will be needed. Unfortunately this is too long a subject to include in a post already this long, but watch for a post on Affiliate Marketing in 2011 in the next few days on my Captain Affiliate Affiliate Marketing Training Blog. If you plan on affiliate marketing in 2011 you won’t want to miss it.

Overall Synopsis: Internet Marketing Predictions For 2011:
In summary, the game continues to change. Internet marketing in 2011 will be no harder than in earlier years, but it WILL require more effort, more planning and a complete avoidance of the get-rich-quick nonsense like article spinning, auto-blogging, spam blog commenting and the like. New avenues will need to be explored, and concentration will have to be on a well-rounded marketing mix instead of just using a couple of techniques. Most importantly, more forethought and planning will have to go into all aspects of your Internet marketing operations in 2011 and beyond.

The upsides are many – a growing potential market and a general step towards a more professional industry top the list. People who start Internet marketing in 2011 will still find it full of potential, and will still be able to get started with little or no experience – but they’ll have to dedicate more time and money to learning to market professionally. And it will still be far cheaper to launch an online business than one in the offline business community. Many more of the quick-buck artists will move on to other endeavors rather than actually have to think and work, and the lazy folks who like all the get-rich-quick fads will drop by the wayside as well, most complaining that there’s no money to be made online.

Conversely, the downsides are modest – it WILL require more investment and/or more time invested to maintain and grow one’s income from Internet marketing in 2011, or the acceptance of a smaller financial return should you decide to just continue on at the same levels of effort, planning and investment as in 2010 and earlier years.

What won’t change in 2011 is Teri and my commitment to helping you dominate online, and to us always being on the lookout for new ways to benefit us and you similarly. Have a super holiday season – we look forward to helping you take your online business to new heights through your Internet marketing in 2011!

Technorati Tags: Internet marketing predictions, Internet marketing in 2011, Internet marketing strategies, affiliate marketing in 2011, online businesses in 2011, online business strategy, marketing predictions, e-mail marketing, blogging, article marketing, marketing case study, Internet marketing case study, online success, Doug Champigny

 

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