Web 2.0 Is Just So 2008 – ClickZ

Web 2.0 Is Just So 2008 – ClickZ

This is great article. ClickZ often puts out articles to keep in front of the reader, many of them suck. Sometimes a good one comes up, and this is one.

This article reinforces what I have been saying over and over. The new internet marketing is about giving the people what they want. The mystique of the internet is gone, it doesn’t amaze anyone anymore and no one goes on to just aimlessly search and search. If you want to stay relevant, you need to be a destination.  I am not talking about adding a chatroom to your auto parts site, but you need to be a place where people who want auto parts can go to when they don’t need auto parts.

If you cant think of a way to increase your content and add some interactivity, at the very least you need to be out there participating in other ‘networks’ and attaching your personality to your website.  This is a prime example of what is wrong with  so many agencies. They still think that you just need to build the site, maybe throw in some cool flashy doo-dads and then just leave it. That is a recipe for disaster.

Read up on Web 2.0 (I hate that term about as much as I hat the term ‘generation X’) Find out about social networks, social bookmarking, video marketing, article marketing, etc. The one constant is – Content is king, however, as I have said – the name of the game is reputation and interaction. People need interaction, with you, and with each other.

The internet is rapidly becoming another dimension where you can live part time. If you think of it that way, imagine if you lived in a world, alone, filled with nothing but shops, and in the shops there were tons of products but no people, maybe one person behind the register to take your money, but no one there to tell you if what your buying is any good, no one to talk about last weeks game, its just you.  Who would want to live in a world like that?

Get with the program

I really shouldn’t get in the habit of talking smack about people, especially people I work for, but sometimes it’s hard to keep my mouth shut.

Those who can do, those who can’t run a web marketing agency.

The amount of wasted money that flows through is staggering. There is no effort made to stay current, to learn what works, to even know the definition of social media, web 2.0, widget, twitter, social bookmarking – so say any of those things just gets a blank stare.

No interest in allocated even a fraction of the budget to article marketing, or content creation. The #1 method for getting incoming links – ignored.

I wouldn’t be so irritated if the powers that be were informed and made a conscious decision to not participate, but its the total lack of interest in learning about any of the methods that are essential to stay competitive. It baffles me.

There is no trick to marketing your business on the internet. No secret forumulas, no passwords or secret handshakes. It’s a new day. All you need to be successful online is :

1. Offer quality content
2. Educate yourself on what works and what doesn’t
3. Hire people who are actually interested in the process and give them incentive to help you succeed.

Apathy will kill your business like a cancer. You can work as hard as you want, but if your support system isn’t there, then it will all be in vain.

SENuke: Automate Posting, Social Bookmarking, RSS, it does it all

I am a big fan of tools and automation. I have tried just about everything out there and continue to do so, but so far there are only a couple software solutions that rise to the occasion. If you are looking to kick start your marketing and you can’t afford to bring someone on to help you, you need to automate as much of the process as possible. When using any kind of automated submission tools the biggest concern is getting banned from the network you are trying to get your links on.

CLICK HERE TO TRY OUT SENUKE FOR FREE

There is a very simple formula to getting your site indexed and SENuke takes care of 90% of it. When I was working for Starkmedia, I was not given any staff. I was running the search marketing department which included paid and organic. The fact that I didn’t have any help still baffles me. I was in control of 30 or so websites, a few of which were big time (Briggs and Stratton power products) and I was expected to handle off site promotion by hand.  If creating a link on a journal site or social network takes 10 – 15 minutes, well, you do the math.

I paid for a couple pieces of software out of my own pocket simply to make my job easier. SENuke was and is my #1 goto solution. SENuke will allow you to create accounts on Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, 30 social networks, 12 video sharing sites, 50 social bookmarking sites, 20 RSS sites, and now will even create 200 high PR backlinks! It will spin content, and keeps track of everything in its own database. SENuke is hands down the MOST POWERFUL MARKETING TOOL AVAILABLE. The name SENuke is unfortunate because it has a real spammy sound to it, but thats not what the purpose it. I suppose you could use it for that, and I’m sure some do, but you can use it to do the work of 10 people.

I tell people that there are 3 tools that I pay for every month and will continue to do so for as long as I am in this business. SENuke is one of them. You can get a fully functional trial version of it, no credit card needed. The guys who make it know that if you use it for a week, it will become absolutely necessary. If you are thinking of starting an online marketing business, you could do it with this one piece of software. It does so much more, but I am on my way to a cooking demo so I will end it here. Make sure you check out SENuke, download the FREE trial and see for yourself. You will thank me later.

CLICK HERE TO TRY OUT SENUKE FOR FREE

Marketing your website. Social Networking and a couple analogies.

I was thinking yesterday about what I’m going to say in the tele-seminar today. The tele-seminar is essentially going to be for owners of bowling centers, how to market their business maintain a strong presence online. my part in this whole company is essentially search strategy and that includes social networking, and all of the new social network fads. I find it easier to explain with analogies that people can understand. Everybody has heard of MySpace.com, Facebook.com and of course now the big one, twitter. The DVD of the metamorphosis that is taking place in online marketing is that the Internet is really just becoming a series of networks. They used to sort of explain to new, website owners that the Internet was sort of like a neighborhood. I never really liked that explanation, because it really wasn’t a neighborhood now. It seems to be moving closer to that original explanation.

The Internet really is now just a bunch of communities and portals and if you want to look at something like Google. I would almost say it’s like a map. Or rather, a guidebook. For the most part, the days of manipulating Google, and I use Google in place of search engine. They pretty much managed to become the name of all search engines. The best example they used to use for that in marketing class or xerox. At any rate, it is becoming harder and harder to manipulate Google, they have put so much of their resources into trying to get their search engine to act like a human being, to listen and pay attention to what’s going on outside. In these other communities. So, in order for you to have a successful presence online. You need to participate in as many communities as possible. You need to have a constant steady flow coming in and out of your space, you need to have people talking about, you, hopefully in a favorable way, and you need to make an effort to get out there at least once in a while. Show your face and interact with people. I hate saying that the days of iif you build it they will come are over, that analogy has been beaten to death. However there are still so many people and businesses that believe that if you just throw up a website that you are. Or rather, they are owed their place in line, and because they run a quality business that is somehow going to guarantee them a favorable spot in the search engines. And that’s just not the case.

We have developed a plan, right now we’re calling it the $2 million plan, which I’m not going to go into. Actually, I will never go into a publicly. However, it is a plan that literally covers all the bases. I read an interesting article from someone at Google. I don’t remember who it was but I’m pretty sure it was not Matt Cutts. Actually it was not an article at all it was a phone call that I had with my Google representative. I was asking him if he could possibly give me any insight into the Google algorithm, and how to rank well, of course, everyone they talk to, tries to get them to admit something. And of course they don’t. But what he did tell me was that Google likes to see a steady flow of information. It does not like to see a stopping point. So there should be many paths into your website and there should be some paths out of your website and the pads out of your website should lead to other websites that have passed out of their websites, etc. etc. They said that the algorithm or the spider automatically get suspicious when it finds a website that is sitting by itself. Essentially, if there are some links going into the website, but the website is not saying anything about anyone else. Google does not like that. Now I don’t really see how this applies to websites like target.com. I don’t really see any links from their website to anyone else but a perfect example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is always going to have the top spot for just about any search term that matters. Its just the way it is is the perfect website.

I don’t really know what going with all of this and I really should be spending my time doing other things, the clock is ticking, and I’m obviously procrastinating. So I’m going to cut it off here, but I am very interested to find out what the people on this tele-seminar tonight. No, and more importantly, what they want to know. Explaining search engine optimization has become easier and easier of the people that own a website are familiar with the terminology but trying to explain the importance of social networking, at least I have found, is incredibly difficult to get people to grasp. I know MySpace.com is for 16-year-old kid rock bands, and I know that Facebook is primarily for generation acts to look up friends from high school and see how fat they’ve gotten. But as far as the value of having some sort of a presence there, it’s absolutely necessary. Social networking, article writing, social bookmarking, twitter, you name it. The only way for your website to succeed today is that you have to take an interest in it or you have to pay someone to take an active interest in it. In either case, it’s expensive, it’s definitely more expensive than it used to be, because you are either making a constant investment in someone like me to create a constant buzz about your website or your spending hours out of your day learning about the different promotion methods, and the new technology in the new science. Its never-ending.

If you had asked me even a year ago I would have probably said that I thought that the Internet, or at least marketing on the Internet have for the most part, found its bottom or rather, where it was going to stay at least for the time being. I certainly didn’t anticipate something like twitter coming along then again. I constantly underestimate the narcissism that is so common in today’s society.