Cash in On The Future of Internet Marketing 2012

Tick tock 2011 has wound off the clock, and it’s time to take a look at what’s happened in internet marketing and more importantly how you can cash in on the next wave of changes coming in 2012.

Whew, what a busy year.  It’s been a long one, spent working exclusively online.  It was the first year in a long time that I wasn’t busy worrying about school, and a million other business projects.  I got to keep it simple, work on some exciting projects and launches, and focuses my attention on the blog here.

Now, as someone that’s spent nearly every waking day reading, researching, and actively participating in the business of online marketing and commerce I’ve got a strong perspective on the internet marketing zeitgeist that I want to share.

With that being said let’s get all nostalgic on ’11 and take a look at the biggest shifts and changes in the market place, then look at what’s to come in 2012.

2011 Internet Marketing Review

Hello Panda, Goodbye SEO

This year brought a firestorm of discussion for all the search optimization experts.  Google is constantly tweaking their algorithms to improve quality.  Most of the time it’s a small tweak with minimal impact.  However, every once in a while they really shake things up.  Good for them, bad for search experts in charge of generating good rankings.

This last year saw the introduction of a massive change nicknamed Panda.   (if you were hit by Panda, or get hit with a future update check out this post on the subject.)  At first, it was not that bad and the impact minimal.  Unfortunately, it was re-released October 14th with a major update that caught nearly everyone by surprise.  This version had a much broader reach leaving some site owners seeing as much as a 50% drop in traffic.

In fact, (I believe this is the first you’ll hear about this…) the keyword “internet marketing” itself changed drastically.  I’ll discuss what happened in a minute.  For now let’s just look at what it all means.

The biggest lesson here, is simply the reminder that you can’t build on Google alone, or get complacent.  It’s a full time job just keeping up with their changes and you are at any moment subject to their updates.

$2497 Backlash 

Another interesting trend I noticed involves the super mega product launches.  More accurately, it involves the response to the mega price points.  As the economy continually faltered, a new chatter started showing up around the forums.  Suddenly everyone was declaring launches dead, and showing greater disdain for those few launches that relentlessly saturate the market.  While I can firsthand say that launches are alive and well, there were some elements of truth hiding below the surface.

I assisted in several product launches throughout the year at normal price points and they did just fine.  However, word on the street is that the usual super high price point launches experienced less than stellar results.  I recall one launch that was a really solid product with a price point in the one thousand range.  I got great first page rankings, but I “only” made a few thousand in commissions from it.  Rough I know, but I feel it should have done much better as the product was great.

Take this with a grain of salt as it’s just my observations, but given the constant dreary drum of the news, chatter on forums, and this next revelation, I’d say it’s a fair bet that high price points took a hit last year.

Micro Offers

Which brings me to micro offers.  I noticed a very big surge late in the year for smaller low priced introductory offers, with profits off the back end.  These offers were particularly prevalent in the forums, and from an entirely new crop of marketers not usually associated with them.  What would send this influx?  Well, you would certainly see them if that’s what’s working!  You’d also see them if the usual higher points weren’t.  Generally marketers follow the money.

Loss leaders are nothing new, but the increase in trial and low price offers suggests a shift in buyer behavior this year.

Offline marketing

On an unrelated note, offline marketing became a huge topic in 2011.  Everyone was suddenly releasing a course, or praising the fortunes in marketing to the offline world of business.  Having spoken with many business owners in the real world, I can say without a doubt they are nearly clueless about marketing online and can use all the help they can get.  They also pay well.

However, I caution that this field should be left to those that already know at least a few things about marketing online, or you have some legitimate means to help an offline business improve online.

Mobile

Finally, mobile continued to grow drastically.  We saw an app game company go public of all things.  That’s serious money!

The increase came as Apple continued to release updated versions of it’s iPhone.  As they did, previous generations went down in price bringing on more and more late adopters experiencing mobile browsing for the first time.

Along with this, Android continued to improve and make it’s way onto more devices.

Several savvy marketers cashed in on this early, and the internet marketing community saw the release of several mobile courses.

Predictions

Local Growth

As mentioned above, Panda introduced some wild changes.  One of these changes was an increase in local results.  Look for this to continue through the new year.

I assisted in the launch of Dominating Local, and the response was incredible.  Local marketing works, and it’s still relatively untapped.  Pay attention and get on it.

Economic Recovery

I read a massive amount of news each day, and as the hours waned on 2011 I suddenly saw some positive rumblings about the economy.  I don’t expect a full fledged recovery, but I do see consumer confidence improving slowly as the year goes on.  At least until the Mayan Apocalypse (sorry I watched too many History Channel docu-dramas this year).

As this continues, I would expect a decline in the micro offers as they most certainly will experience some saturation by mid year.

Get your micro offers, trial periods, and backend funnels out there soon, but watch for market shift and keep testing higher price points throughout the year.

Forum Advertising  

Hang on to your avatar.  Word isn’t officially out, but in the internet marketing community big players are diving head long into forum offers.  When that happens, the rest follow.  Prices will go up to run ads and soon it will be an overcrowded mess.

If you want in on this action, hurry.  I don’t see this lasting all year long.  Think of the early days of google Adwords.  Eventually it was overrun with a constant influx of over bidders and profits were only for the highly refined and calculated marketers.

Facebook

Here’s another platform that just keeps growing.  They have incredible targeting mechanisms, and still low prices.  A few big internet marketing names have really pounded their ads through Facebook.  It’s not as wide open as it once was, but there’s still plenty of time to join before the masses catch on.

Mobile

Optimize your site for mobile traffic and sales, and watch your stats.  There is no slowing down in this arena.  App development commands prices in the thousands.  Apps themselves can generate huge daily revenue streams.  In app marketing is a very raw field and there’s plenty of room to build an army of apps cross promoting each other and building up large revenue streams.

SEO

You heard it here first, but Google killed “internet marketing” as we know it.  It took me a while to make sense of it, but the results for that keyword phrase have dramatically changed.  6 out of 10 listings are now service providers.  This mirrors the growth of local and offline advertising mentioned above.  That alone is a good sign to watch for those to areas to be important in SEO.  If you’re not targeting on a local level you’re missing out.

Aside from that, the overall shift in SEO is away from content farm sites designed to push straight through to ads.   Consider highly focused sites designed to draw visitors through at least one page of your site after coming in off the search engines.

Don’t forget to incorporate social sharing.  These types of links will help spread your traffic outside of the search engines, but also be a strong indicator of value and importance to your rankings.

I’m also seeing lots of regular listing movement.  It definitely seems as if rankings are now highly variable based more on location, and the search history of visitors.  Your rankings are no longer going to be long term stable holdouts, but an aggregate of constantly changing positions.  Take advantage of the new real-time data in analytics to get an idea of what’s really happening on your site.

Personal

Here are my predictions for myself and the blog.  This year I want to do a lot more traveling to attend conferences.  I also expect large growth in the list and social presence.  I will be focusing on creating more video and external content across different topics as part of a traffic diversifying initiative.  I’m also of course going to be taking advantage of some of the above predictions, and so should you!

Finally, I have been working at becoming more efficient through better planning.  As the site grows along with my goals I need to continue to get better and use my time effectively.  I anticipate adding more help this year as well.

Overall, I look forward to a big year helping many new friends and connections through the site.

You

What are you goals and plans for 2012?  What do you see as important?

 

 

Similar Posts:

• Google Decoded: Critical Changes You MUST Know for 2012
• Local Mobile Money
• Local Mobile Monopoly
• Internet Marketing Convergence
• Mini-Launch Revealed: Over 1,500 Sales In Only 7 Days

Tagged as: 2012, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online, marketing online, predictions