Internet Marketing Trends in Advertising
I’ve always heard the phrase “jumping on the bandwagon” and sometimes wondered why they called it that. So, I decided to look it up and it seems that back in the 19th century, there were bandwagons that were used in the pre-circus parades. The members of the circus would ride on these colorful bandwagons and as they passed by, spectators would notice and join the procession. The circus promoters hoped that this would encourage the followers to actually become paying spectators of the circus itself. That is how the phrase jumping on the bandwagon got started.
What does this have to do with internet marketing trends in advertising? Pretty much everything! See, any time an internet marketer finds or creates a new form online advertising everybody and their dog jumps on the bandwagon and uses that method of advertising to promote their products or services. It doesn’t matter if the method has been tested and proven to work or not. As soon as one internet marketer sees another one using it, the bandwagon jumping begins because nobody wants to be left out of the “it crowd.”
So, what have been the top internet marketing trends for online advertising lately?
Probably the most widely used method of advertising is, and will probably be for a long time, Google Adwords. This is a relatively inexpensive and effective form of internet marketing that precisely targets the people who you want to reach. That is of course assuming that you set your Adwords campaign up properly. Many have gone broke because of poor keyword selection, poor choice of bid amounts and just plain awfully worded ads. Google Adwords is by no means a sure thing if you don’t know what to do with it.
Another form of marketing that created a huge buzz recently is Butterfly Marketing. This is basically just another form of viral marketing where a friend tells another friend and so on. It’s word of mouth with a few twists to it. Many Butterfly Marketing sites have shown incredible success, again if you set them up correctly.
Another marketing trend that has taken the internet marketing world by storm is Bum Marketing. This is basically the practice of writing articles after doing careful keyword research on the topic of your choice, and then submitting those articles to article directories. The key is to make sure you have a resource box that contains a way for people to get more information through your website. It’s actually very effective.
And let’s not forget about social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook, or social bookmarking sites like Digg and Technorati. These are all the craze right now. In fact, they are being used so much as an advertising method by internet marketers that it’s getting to the point where some of the sites quality has declined drastically. They can be a great marketing tool but they can also be ruined by marketers.
Of course aside from the “new wave” of marketing trends, there are still the tried and true methods like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), E-zine Ads and a few other things that have worked since I can remember. The thing about trends is that many of them are really just reworked ideas of old methods. The ones that aren’t, usually don’t last very long because when all is said and done, the most effective forms of marketing have probably already been invented.
So, if you’re looking for a tied and true advertising method in the internet marketing world, you may not have to look any farther than optimizing your website for the search engines and taking out a few good solo ads in the better E-zines. Of course writing and submitting an article every now and then can’t hurt.
Internet marketing trends come and go but the tested and proven advertising methods will never die!
If Content Is King, Demand Is Emperor!
If you have an online business or do anything dealing with internet marketing then you have heard the saying, “Content Is King.” Basically this means whoever produces the most content on a certain topic will make the most money online.
When you see all the people out there who are constantly writing content or finding places where they can get content written for them cheaply, you would tend to believe that this statement is definitely true. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not minimizing how important content is, but you know what? I am not stupid enough to believe that content is all that you need to make money online.
You see, while content may be leader of one kingdom, demand is the ruler of an entire empire. That’s why if content is king then demand is emperor! To make money online you need both of these monarchs.
There are economic laws of supply and demand, and as you can see demand is one half of the equation. If you’ve never taken a course in economics, then here’s brief little explanation to help you understand the concept…
Supply and demand is a really basic economic concept. But in order to really make it as easy as possible for you to understand, I’m going to give you an example of how powerful supply and demand really is. This will help you understand it much better than a long and boring explanation.
Let’s say John Smith has a widget, but he only has one widget. It turns out that this widget will earn anyone who owns it $100,000 per year. Everybody wants this widget. But there is only one. So John Smith decides to put it up for bidding at an auction. The bidding goes out of control. People are bidding this widget up to $500,000 because they realize that they can use this widget for many years, so paying $500,000 for it now will be more than worth it.
Suddenly, in the middle of the bidding war, Jim Jones comes out with an almost identical widget but has 1000 of them available. He sees the current bid for John’s is $500,000 so he decides to sell his widgets for $250,000 each. Well guess what? All of a sudden, John Smith’s widget isn’t as much in demand because there are 1000 other widgets that are just as good and for a lot cheaper.
So the demand for John Smith’s widget goes down. Now he has two choices… He can stick to his guns and try to still sell the widget for $500,000 by somehow convincing buyers that his is better, or he can lower his price and try to undercut the competition. But the problem is he knows that if he just uses his widget for a year he’ll make at least $100,000 so he can’t lower it too much or he won’t really be making any money and he could even end up losing money.
So now you see, if the supply is high and the demand is low, then you won’t be able to sell the item for as high a price as if the supply were low and the demand were high. However, even if the supply is high, if the demand is still high, you can still sell at a fairly high price. You may not be able to sell it at as high of a price if the supply is low, but still, demand is that powerful.
The point I am trying to make is this; if you put out tons of content to promote an item, but there is no demand for that item, or very little demand, you won’t be able to sell it for much and you probably won’t make very many sales to begin with. Therefore, you will not make money and your online business will fail.
Now you know that all the content in the world can’t overcome a low demand. This holds especially true if you wanted to sell your content. It doesn’t matter if you only wrote a few articles on a subject or many articles. If there is no demand for what you are selling, you’d be lucky to be able to give those articles away, let alone make money from them.
So when it comes to online business content may be king, but demand is the emperor!
Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
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