12 months ago I took my confidence coaching business – Confidence Club – online, to help a broader distribution of people and to spread the message that ordinary people can achieve enhanced self confidence – and deserve to do so.
So this has been a learning experience for me – an opportunity to find out just how effective Web marketing is, what works and what does not work. I've been a little shocked to see so many hucksters operating in this space, and saddened to realise that some of them may be successful.
What follow are some of my observations. Feel free to disagree, or to challenge these. As time passes, they will inevitably lose currency anyway – that's just the nature of the beast.
1. The Web is incredibly dispersed. Marketeers like to talk about "the long tail", by which they mean all the products which sell in modest numbers on the Web but would never be stocked by conventional shops because they just aren't bestsellers. A handful of magnet sites like Amazon, Google or Ebay can attract hundreds of millions of visitors, but there are literally billions of sites out there – more Web pages than people on the planet – and the vast majority of these attract few if any real visitors. The real long tail is this mass of largely unseen websites.
2. Good ideas decay rapidly. For example, there probably was a time when affiliate marketing made sense, and generated good returns. I'm sure some affiliate marketers are making great money even now. But the dispersed nature of the Web makes it very hard to grab a significant proportion of the available viewers. The idea has gone mainstream and lost some of its power. This seems to be a characteristic of Web marketing. (Incidentally, a useful clue to identify any unsuccessful business model on the Web is the volume of spammy sites claiming to sell the secrets of success in that field. It seems that when enough people have failed in a particular business model they become prey for the 'gurus' who are willing to sell the secrets of their vast wealth for $12)
3. The powerful handful of magnet sites distort the market, and then have to change their model to accommodate the response from hopeful marketers. Google Adsense is an example of this. Adsense ads pay webmasters a proportion of their advertising revenue, on a pay per click basis. So sites have sprung up with hundreds or thousands of pages of 'content' – any old rubbish will do – to try and optimise for Adsense. Of course, some of the content is high quality, but we have seen a glut of megasites recently, fostered in part by changes to Google's search algorithms which apparently favour sites with 100+ pages (at least for now).
4. Barriers to entry are increasing. There was a time when the Web seemed empty, and every new site had a chance. You could throw together a lovely 5 page site, optimise for search engines, and perhaps you'd have a hit. As the money being poured into the Web from real people increases, so Web service providers are becoming more professional. This growing wave of professionalism, coupled with established, large sites which dominate the userbase, means that lone operators (Mom and Pop sites) are increasingly unlikely to be found by most visitors. This is a great shame – one of the lovely aspects of the Web has always been the way that it favours intellectual capital over money. Good ideas count for something on the Web; as barriers to entry increase, this statement will begin to sound hollow.
5. You won't become a rock star, Minnie Driver isn't calling round for tea and you won't be number 1 on Google. Well, you might, if your chosen search term is your company name, or a meaningless phrase. To gather meaningful traffic from Google and other search engines means spending money on pay per click or other forms of advertising, which in turn makes the Web look more conventional by the day. It also enables the big players to consolidate their positions.
What does all this mean? Of course, fortune will always favour the brave – the early adopter, the inventor, the developer of a new twist or angle. I'm one of 6 children, and the phrase "first up, best dressed" means a lot to me. It's a principle which still applies in the Web world. The source of this article – EzineArticles.com – is a great example. By no means the only such service available, this one is professional, efficient and understands the needs of contributors. All good stuff.
However, I suspect that the key factor is simply speed to market – they have achieved critical mass early, and have therefore become the biggest kid on their particular block. Good luck to them. (What this service also does is it closes the loop; webmasters want a link to their sites without paying for it (except through some effort), ezine webmasters want free content (so they can have thousands of pages carrying advertising) and EzineArticles.com gets thousands of links, hundreds of thousands of pages of content and that coveted number 1 position. Everybody involved feels like a winner).
What does 2006 hold? I sense that mediated collaboration will become highly significant in the next few years. Small sites already collaborate in a modest way, through link exchanges, but these also suffer from the dispersed nature of the Web – a link to/from a site with hundreds of daily visitors will do very little, on its own. Grow that community of links and the pool of possible visitors grows – but so does the pool of possible destinations for them.
So small sites need to collaborate more intelligently to gather some of the advantages of megasites. In particular, sites which pay good money to attract visitors don't want to lose those visitors blindly to every other Web site out there. The "least bad" scenario may be that a visitor clicks off your site onto a partner site, and stays within a network or family of non-competitive but complementary sites for a reasonable period of time. This makes particular sense if all of the sites in the network are paying to attract visitors – through Google Adwords, for example. There are many possible variations on this theme, and my prediction for 2006 is that "mediated collaboration" services – to make this possible and efficient for small website owners – will spring up to enable the small guys to band together and be seen. I certainly hope that somebody will develop a mechanism which favours high quality sites over the mass of voluminous garbage we've seen spring up in the past year.
Whatever your views, I would love to hear them. You can contact me via the Confidence Club website – details below.
Jim Sullivan is a hypnotherapist and confidence coach. He may be contacted via the Confidence Club website =>http://www.confidenceclub.net
No comments:
Post a Comment