Stupid question of course – the Internet can’t exactly die, but it can lose all relevance to real businesses, and maybe that’s what’s happening, while we watch?
I’m referring to the ways businesses use it. And particularly I’m talking about the way great new concepts emerge, flourish, then wither and die, almost before anybody gets to know about them. Or at least, by the time we mortals get there, the opportunity has gone.
Website Marketing
Sites limited to presenting a product or service get very little air time with Google searches these days. It prefers to return sponsored sites (pay per click adverts) and blogs (free content) as responses to search queries.
Now it turns out the Adwords auction is biased toward the big spenders with Google’s quality rating, so we can “buy” our way onto the first page perhaps, but it costs the new advertiser more than the established sponsor.
If we choose to attract customers with blogs we find the search system is biased in other ways. Google favors sites which have been optimized (so it can find the content) and add value (measured by the number of other blogs which link to them).
So, in our case, getting on the first or even second page requires a) we buy ppc ads and pay a premium over our competitors or b) we have a combined marketing site and blog with lots of valuable content and a great deal of effort put into SEO.
With a lot of money spent on the site design and thousands of hours spent writing content, we’re starting to find a place in Google search results, and for the right query we can even get on the first page. To put this achievement in context, Website Grader rates us at 93 out of 100, which is quite impressive, until we read that equates to ranking among the top 67,000 sites.
- Marketing sites with keywords are passed their sell by date.
- PPC only really makes sense for big brands with deep pockets.
- The blogosphere is dominated by people with very little expertise, other than trying to exploit the Google’s Adwords/Adsense.
Social Networking
We all know about the success of Facebook, even if we don’t understand what the site does. The same is probably true for Linked In, Twitter, thousands of Ning sites and countless other networking opportunities.
Internet Marketing gurus are telling us about “the big conversation” going on in social networking, and the new way to market our products is to join in.
It’s true there are millions of people joining networking sites, but most of them don’t hang around very long. When real business people looking to meet other real business people find these sites dominated by “Internet Marketing Experts” they lose interest quickly.
Probably the first sites to suffocate under the weight of these experts were some of the Ning based services – certainly the ones we joined.
The process is under way for Facebook – we’re already seeing our Walls full of “visit my blog” rubbish.
Over the last three months Twitter has become flooded by them, using autofollow and automessage tools.
At Linked In we find them in the networking groups and answer categories.
The big conversation doesn’t hold any potential for real business people when they can’t get a word in.
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