The Internet Marketer's Secret Weapon
Last week’s CMA 2006 Digital Marketing Conference was information-packed and very inspirational, and I’m not just saying that because I am a member of the Conference Committee!
While I learned a lot more than just seven things at the Conference (I took 15 pages of notes), there were a number of key points made by various speakers that really struck me:
1 CommentMost of us by now have heard how blogs are search engine friendly and can supposedly pick up lots of traffic quite easily. Last month, I conducted a ‘top secret’ experiment to test this theory. Now it’s now time for me to unveil the results for you.
On April 1, 2006 I launched my Internet marketing blog, which goes by the name Sweetmantra. “Launch” is perhaps overstating the case since all I did was remove the password protection that was blocking access to the site. Only a handful of people knew I was launching the blog, and they were sworn to secrecy and told NOT to visit it.
Since I’ve spent over a decade helping people drive traffic to their Websites, it was very ironic (and at times frustrating) for me to sit on my hands for an entire month and NOT market my new baby.
The only “marketing” of Sweetmantra that I did was the following:
# Registered Sweetmantra with FeedBurner, PubSub, Feedster, and Technorati
# Added links to my new blog from a couple of Websites I have editorial control over
# Published a new post once a week
That was it!
Here’s what happened next:
bq. “Video killed the radio star…”
That wasn’t only the first “video”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=8yKnQM46a1g played on MTV, it’s also wrong.
It seems that throughout history whenever a new medium for communication arrives, the death knell for the previous is sounded. Movies meant the death of radio, TV meant the death of both radio and film, and the Internet meant the end of everything. Lately, the death knell has been sounding for email. *Email for personal communication is unlikely to be replaced.* How we read that email and on what kinds of devices: that is anyone’s guess. But business email is also unlikely to be completely replaced by technologies such as RSS(Real Simple Syndication).
Why?
h3. Ease of delivery
Email is a killer app. An overused term, but a good one, because email was and is a killer app. For the majority of the population, there may have been other factors, but you bought a computer to be able to email regularly. RSS is never going to be an individually personalized delivery vehicle, but will likely become a standard for delivering customizable content. The value of email is immediately obvious ; RSS is more of a sell job and is likely to become an embedded technology versus a driving technology. In other words, you will still have an email address in 2020. It may not be called an email address, and it may not look like the email addresses we have today, but there will still be a way to delivery personal virtual messages into a semi-permanent mailbox.