Internet marketing predictions for 2006
Internet marketing has been making some pretty dramatic changes
over the last few years, like the growth and evolution of the
search engine optimization industry, viral marketing,
pay-per-click advertising and the mainstream adoption of
blogging. Despite the recent changes I predict that even greater
change is still yet to come, thanks in part to the growth of
broadband internet access, advances in hardware and software
technology, and marketers need to reach consumers through
multiple mediums.
As people's lives become more busy, fragmented media will result
in more opportunities for both advertisers and web site owners.
Standard advertising mediums such as television, radio and
newspapers have been loosing effectiveness (partially
because of new technologies like TiVo and XM Satalite
Radio) while online advertising has become more effective.
As an advertiser, there are more opportunities available than
ever before to reach highly targeted prospects with a relatively
small investment by advertising online. As a web site owner,
there are more opportunities to generate additional revenue by
providing advertising space on your web sites. As people spend
more time online, this trend will continue to grow.
RSS will become a powerful, trackable marketing tool. In it's
current form, it is a great tool for reaching out to people who
have the technical background to use it but it does have some
limitations. Many customizable web portals (My Yahoo) let
users display RSS feeds on their home page, but require users to
sign in with cookies. Some email programs can display RSS feeds
and several programs have even been specifically designed for
displaying RSS feeds. However the user base is still fairly
small. With the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista, RSS will become mainstream
and be adopted by soccer moms everywhere. Once that happens you
can expect to see tools developed to manage and track the
traffic from RSS feeds.
The search engine optimization industry is another area that
will change considerably. All of the major search engine
companies have taken considerable steps to reduce web site
owner's (or an SEO firm's) ability to manipulate the ranking of
their web sites. As the algorithms that determine the importance
of a particular web page become more comprehensive and better
able to filter out spam you will see two things happen. First,
the search results will become more relevant. Second, the SEO
firms that are using dishonest techniques in an attempt to rank
higher will collapse one by one until only honest, ethical firms
exist.
About the author:
Jeremy L. Knauff is the founder of Wildfire Marketing Group, an
aggressive guerilla marketing
company specializing in helping smaller companies to compete
with larger companies and win.
Written By: Jeremy L. Knauff