It’s interesting as a marketer to watch how the Internet has changed over the last ten years, especially what has changed for solo entrepreneurs and small business owners.
When I started investigating how to make money online in the late nineties, most strategies were e-commerce focused, or built specifically to take advantage of the dot-com bubble.
You either set up a website to sell something physical like Amazon.com did for books, or you set up some kind of service and focused solely on user-acquisition, since most entrepreneurs were more interested in growing fast rather than making profits. The logic being you could figure out a way to make money after you built a huge user-base, but you usually get bought out way before that happens, so you exit rich, even if the company doesn’t make a dime.
I was keen to cash in on the dot-com bubble myself, though being in Brisbane Australia, not exactly a hot-bed for Internet start-ups at the time, it wasn’t easy.
I remember calling a mastermind meeting at my friend’s house to discuss opportunities. We had some good ideas, and some bad ones, but nothing really cemented together. My friends went off and started or continued their careers, while I went back to fiddling around with different web projects in my spare time.
Back then there was no blogging, or social media, or even Google. AdSense and Adwords didn’t exist yet, and affiliate programs were only just becoming readily available in different niches.
That’s why so many people had to focus on selling physical items using online stores. You could make money with advertising or information publishing, but most people didn’t have a clue how to do it. There weren’t courses or all the free information we have about these subjects today to help guide you. You had to figure it out yourself.
Fundamentals Stay The Same
As I’ve watched things change over the previous years I’ve noticed a few key fundamentals that haven’t change, namely –
- Building an asset is the most important thing, and in most cases the best asset we have as a small business owner is your contact list. In the online world, that means your email list.
- Websites increase in value over time, especially if you have a mechanism to continually improve your site, for example by constantly adding new content.
- Branding is more important than you think. In an increasingly noisy environment, your brand is your means to stand out. If you can become an authority, you win.
All three of the points above are interlinked. When you carefully nurture your email list and build a solid authority website, your brand is enhanced. Your brand is the intangible energy force that is created as a result of the relationships you build through your email list and website.
If you combine these three elements you can build a sustainable business that has the potential to become life changing, if you work at it long enough.
Changing Landscapes
One of the wonderful things about spending time in an industry long enough is you start to see what is a trend and what is here to stay.
The three elements I listed above haven’t changed, however the environments they operate in have.
Having an authority website has always been an advantage and very likely will remain so as long as humans consume information using the means we do today (text, audio and video). However, how we build authority sites has changed. The tools are constantly evolving and what worked before doesn’t work as well today.
For example, back when I was building websites before blogs, everything was about getting links, any links, to improve your organic search rankings. Attracting links ten years ago was as simple as asking for a link exchange, and later on techniques like article marketing through article directories like EzineArticles.com became popular.
Google was just entering the search engine wars and the current leading search sites like Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, Hotbot and Looksmart were more about keyword density than clever things like Pagerank.
As long as you used the right keywords in the right places and gathered a handful of links, regardless of where they came from, you could start ranking well. It was a very unpredictable science, oftentimes highly frustrating and plagued by keyword stuffing spammers.
The Pitfalls of Social Media
Over time new techniques came and went (remember banner networks, web rings, and blog and ping?). Link building is still important, but how you go about it has changed a lot, as has the entire landscape of Internet marketing.
If we look at the environment right now, you can easily see that social media is in focus, although the term “social marketing” is perhaps too broad, as it includes lots of technologies and techniques that need to be examined individually.
Let’s take for example two of the early social networking sites – Friendster and Hi5.
Now I profess to never being a huge user of either of these services, but I do remember when they enjoyed their time as leaders in the social networking space (pioneers even). I used to receive daily invites to join these two networks (spam), but they lost ground and eventually MySpace surfaced as the leader.
Today though it’s clear that Facebook is the dominant player, although it’s tough to say for how long. MySpace still has power, but you can feel that it’s no longer a trendsetter.
If you look at social bookmarking, the first site to get my attention was Del.icio.us. It was quickly superseded by the explosion that was Digg and later all I could hear about was Stumbleupon.
All these sites continue to command large pipes of traffic, but you can feel the energy shifts are constantly moving to what’s new. Twitter is a great example of this. It’s cool right now and enjoys the lion-share of media attention, but for how long?
All of the tools I’ve mentioned have been studied as marketing resources as well. You’ve got your Digg guides, your MySpace Marketing resources, your how to get the most from Stumbleupon articles, how to leverage Squidoo lenses, how to Tweet your way to riches, etc etc.
The problem, as I see it, and one that many new marketers fall into, is that few people understand how best to use these resources to reinforce the fundamentals I listed previously. The mistake is that they try and use these resources AS the fundamentals, which will result in a critical failure long term.
What do I mean by this?
Here are some critical problems…
- People look to create assets – authority sites – from resources they can’t control. You can’t rely only on your MySpace page, or Facebook profile, or even your YouTube channel as your asset base because you don’t own it.
Your degree of manipulation over these resources is limited to what the companies who own the services let you do. If your means to reach people is only through MySpace, then you’re in trouble when they delete your page or change the rules regarding how you can communicate to your followers.
- You can’t control the subscription mechanism, nor do you own your list. List building is vital to any business, but if your only subscription mechanism is how many people are friends in your Facebook profile, or your followers in Twitter, you’re in trouble.
- Most social media is a trend, it won’t last. If you rely on certain channels of communication, for example Digg or Stumbleupon as your main source of traffic and eventually people move away from using these services to something else, you’re screwed.
Obviously not having all your eggs in one basket is a sound business practice, and it’s just as important to understand the transient nature of the Internet and marketing. NOTHING stays the same, accept that and never get too comfy with any one technique.
So What Is The Right Way To Use Social Media?
The first thing you need to do is lay the framework to build your fundamental assets: Your authority website and email list.
I won’t go into detail into how to do this in this article as I’ve written plenty regarding how to use a blog to build authority online and how to leverage email marketing for massive profits. If you’re new to this, check out my Articles Page under the appropriate topics, and read my free reports, The Blueprint, The Roadmap and The Masterplan.
The key point to understand is that you use social media, while it’s popular and applicable to your industry and situation, to build your assets. Social media are communication channels, marketing techniques, just like all the techniques that have come before. Some will last longer than others, and they can represent huge opportunities, but don’t see them as the bricks to build your business upon – they are merely the roads to drive on to get where you want to go, you have to build your vehicle using much stronger stuff.
At the heart of all online marketing is an effective content strategy. Distributing content first through an asset you own, such as a blog or website, is the first step. Leveraging that content through social media is a fantastic way to increase throughput of traffic back to your site, and then, once it’s there, you need to use a mechanism to capture that traffic on to a permanent subscription base you control, in other words, your email list.
In what is typically termed the hub-and-spoke model, the different social media tools make up some of the spokes, while your blog/website and email list are the hub. The hub is solid, the spokes are changing, with new spokes added and old ones removed as they become ineffective. The content you produce is the grease that keeps everything working.
If presently your online strategy relies extensively on any resource you don’t own, or you’re not building a contact list you control, or you’re too heavily invested in a single marketing technique, then you’re asking for trouble. Get the fundamentals right first, then leverage the power of whatever is trending upwards now, by injected your current content strategy into the mix.
Yaro Starak
Socially Marketing
I suspect most of us are trying to earn money online in order to give ourselves freedom from the nine to five and hopefully the much talked about a two hour work day. (Or even 6 would be nice!)
In order to work two hours a day we are encouraged to outsource as much as we can, so many people outsource their social marketing. That’s not very sociable is it?
And if you want to do it yourself, who has the time to keep up with Twitter, FB, Myspace, Stumbleupon, Blogcatalog, Digg, plus another 50 or so media sites AND be active in forums AND comment on blogs AND get your work done on top of that!
I think all of these social media sites have made it harder to succeed online and had the effect of increasing our working hours to around 15 a day. So I am trying to build my list without social marketing. So I am building a small list.
There. I feel better! You can’t beat a good whinge can you?
Hit the nail on head again Yaro. Too many people these days rely on social media for their internet marketing prowess. This should be a last resort as you build and share value online is usually the most important and best way to position yourself with some authority.
I’ve been receiving your email newsletter for years, and I never found any of the articles this much interesting. At last, you’ve done something to impress me
I 100% agree with your thoughts about “who owns the content?”. Companies are obsessed in sky rocketing the FB followers lists, but what is FB all of a sudden start charging for every status update you post on your FB page?
This is a great post. I think there are so many advantages to social media, but at the same time, the disadvantages are pretty huge. Relationships (real ones) are getting mixed up with the ‘internet’ ones. The lines get all blurry. Now, as a marketer if you know how to take advantage of the blurred line, for the time being, one can do very well. But be prepared for short-term profits only, if that’s all you are going to put your energy into.
Good information. Thanks. I use both twitter and facebook, but have to admit, they both are just so full of spam… I find it useless most times. I don’t see how it helps to have hundreds, even thousands of tweets coming at you all day long. Very few stick or are of value. I’ve tried sending tweets and they instantly drown in the never ending deluge of tweets. Any ideas to make a tweet stand out?
Yes Yaro,
The fundamentals of building relationships are same at both places: In WWW or in Real Life.
It is always the intention behind your interaction that is important. If we start with an intention to make profit, that is reflected on others without our awareness. While, on the other hand, if the intention is to provide value to others, people recognize even that and the bonding develops easilly and lasts longer.
Learned a lot and resonated fully with this post.
Kind regards.
There are so many options – Web 2.0, SaaS apps that interface with the Social media – but we have the same amount of time.
It’s crucial to decide what we want to follow or interface with – I believe that Twitter is the fastest way to interact and converse.
I always enjoy reading the articles and it’s very exciting to learn something new everyday.
All the best,
Dan Gabriel
http://www.twitter.com/gdan
Great post Yaro. It is way to easy to spend to much time on social media without seeing the results we would like. Thanks for reminding us that building our “Authority Site” is the main priority.
Great post. I always like to hear how successful people got their start. It gives me motivation to see exactly what people have done to get where they are. I admit that I don’t use social media to its full advantage. I am still trying to figure out the best ways to use these sites. I guess I have it too engrained in my head that a lot of these kind of sites are big time wasters. So I have been avoided them in fear of wasting time. Perhaps now is the time to rethink that strategy and make another attempt at using social media effectively.
The “time wasting” aspect of social media is easily vindicated if you are busy with a steady “growing” process. It doesn’t function like a regular link building process where you are impressing the search engine spiders, but you are building a real network. Targeting your audience is the challenge, and key to success here. Playing Mafia Wars on facebook doesn’t count
Thanks a lot Yaro for sharing your knowledge. What ever you said about hub-and-spoke model really struck me. It is very important to know how to use each of the asset we have and use it for the success of our business.
Content and relationship building is the bedrock of a solid business online and a social profile should stem from this not the other way around. As Daneil touched on above, if you build a solid asset then your audience will help raise your profile for you.
Great post Yaro.
I was actually in the process of writing a post similar to this one. It is very true to have a solid foundation first before thinking of using everything else. You have to build a good base like your blog and email list. If you don’t own the resource you are building, such as a social networking profile, it could be gone tomorrow and you would be starting all over.
Social networking is wonderful and I love it. I love Twitter, Facebook and all the others but one day there maybe something shiner that comes along and everyone will flock to it. Since I don’t own them, they are tools to help me connect and build relationships along with traffic; they are not the base that I build my business off of.
Hey Yaro,
Really we all are talking and using twitter and Facebook for our marketing business, but this is not sure for how long, something much better than twitter will come tomorrow and we all have to make a change then.
Being with the basics is the best practice because, you don’t know when the trend will change. The basics that you have mentioned are now in my list.
Thanks for introducing these wonderful social media basics.
Hi Yaro,
Great post you certainly hit the nail on the head with this one.Great stuff. I will be back.
Michael
Just some food for though…. It is interesting that as we evolve and our technologies enhance, in the end the basic fundamentals of human interaction, and things like that stay relatively the same. I first learned about this in my Management course this semester, where alot of the principles of management that we are learning, have been around for centuries and still apply in Today’s day and age.
Till then,
Jean
Very nice article for someone like me who just started getting serious about this whole thing online. I hope to shape my activity along this premise especially for my new site which was only up and running last July 2009.
Your discussion of this topic is very timely. A few years ago, I wanted to try all the latest web 2.0 sites. These days, it’s hard to find time to read a description of each one. Your article brings a good perspective to the issue.
I get the fundamentals of building an asset and communicating with your prospective and actual customer base once you have a list.
What are the fundamentals of social media – the vehicles for it change according to innovations and popularity but how do you personally engage with people in such a way that they think, “Wow, interesting, my kind of thinking, my kind of person”?
There must be a simple formulaic approach with an 80/20 bias in it somewhere. If anyone has figured it out then I’m dying to know.
Yaro, thanks for this. I have clients that insist upon using Facebook as their main source of advertising and exposure; this article spells out why that is a good tool to use–but certainly not the only one. I am quite fascinated by Twitter right now and trying to decide if it’s a useful business tool or just a trendy waste of time. Anyway, thanks for this insight!
Hi Yaro,
Great information about social media everybody talks about but nobody really spells how it works or how can be useful. Thank you
Its all about being social, hence “social media” its just about connecting with people and telling stories. All these Web2.0 sites like Twitter, Digg, Facebook e.t.c are just tools to facilitate the communication.
I think a big pitfall is those people who don’t really grasp the idea that this form of new media is about connecting with people and sharing experiences, they think because they use twitter there using “social media”
I agree with you about Branding, if your “brand” is consistent you will gain authority and attract an audience, its all about standing out from the crowd.
Thanks for the great tips Yaro!
It’s so common for marketers to treat social media purely as a promotional vehicle for their main asset (web site) that they could use a little more generosity when it comes to content for these sites.
Building a presence at various social sites beyond just trying to get people to your site can pay dividends over the long haul (if these web 2.0 site last that long). And unique, valuable content made just for certain sites are the best way to go. Most everybody will either syndicate their existing content or have promotional messages masquerading as content… and you can really make a name for yourself by going one step further.
And really if you are niche on your main site there is plenty of article ideas, bookmarks, videos, pictures, whatever… that don’t work perfectly there but would be much better on some social site: you build an audience there (where the people are already) and some of them will trickle over to your main site.
Just because you want to build an asset doesn’t mean everyone wants to go along without getting to know your first, if ever. So you might as well keep in touch with the people that will never leave those sites rather than spurn them since they won’t come to your web site.
I couldn’t agree more with this idea. Social media should be a medium of keeping contact with your customers an it’s hard to imagine a sucessful business without them, but depending solely on them seems like a risky play.
Another great artical Yaro. Thanks for the tips
Good Article Yaro, most of the people forget the basics .