Online Marketing in 2024

brandonbaker

brandonbaker

Member
Jan 10, 2011
576
3
18
New York City
With all kinds of black and white animals wreaking havoc on our SEO efforts and affiliate marketing in general heading in a negative direction, in what direction are you placing your long-term efforts? What forms of online income are not churn and burn (if your timescale is in years, not months)? Even the pearliest white hat tactics today may very well be frowned upon by Google in a few years time (press releases and guest posting, to name a few recent examples).

What's here to stay? I know it's the million-dollar question, but I wanted to start a discussion for those of us who are in this for the long haul and don't want to stay in rebuilding mode for the next...ever.

I've been in the game nearly 5 years now and every project I begin has a longer shelf-life than the one before it, but I'm looking to enter spaces where my work is cumulative in nature.
 


Big Data seems like it will always be around. If you can be the person aggregating the data, interpreting it, and displaying it, you'll have a brighter future on the internet. Reason being, the internet is just so chalk full of data at the content level, the aggregation of it - removing the nonsense, maybe take it a further step and analyzing it, interpreting it, and displaying it to make people's lives a lot easier - that's always in demand - from a b2b standpoint. Even if you think about it from Google's (b2c) perspective, they are essentially doing Big data interpretation for consumers - their data source happens to be the top layer of the internet.​
 
I have nothing to back this, but I believe in the next 10 to 20 years everything will be based on apps. Google search (and other search engines) will go away, not totally, but it's not going to be the #1 thing everyone is clamoring for any more. So I don't really believe in the future of SEO marketing.
 
While I battle with Google on some of my properties my main long-term focus is a project that does not involve them at all. How? It's not a shitty affiliate site or churn-n-burn (actually none of mine are c&b) but a brand that is building nicely. It's not an overnight success - oh no no, but I don't just market online. I look at the bigger picture of overall marketing, brand awareness and also by producing something people will naturally share and want.

I am deliberately not relying on Google (or any search engine) traffic even though a shed load comes in from there, I'm not focussing my efforts on trying to 'game the system' with them as they're almost irrelevant, what matters to me is people going to my site from every avenue possible. A good deal of this believe it or not is actually offline with printed materials, sponsoring events, marketing merchandise 'as a freebee' etc. It's out-and-out marketing and not SEO.

That said, I will be focusing on SEO when I've reached my goals and targets for traffic from non-Google sources both on & offline. Then I'll see what Cutts makes of it. I guarantee this - there is absolutely nothing in his 'penalties' that will hurt my revenue stream. Google traffic is considered a bonus.

I will say though - it's bloody hard work and takes a lot of effort to maintain - for each positive reach there are a hundred knock backs, but the simple answer is keep moving.

Never stop never give it up is my motto on this particular property.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyRPfK-U0Oc]THE BRAND NEW HEAVIES - Never Stop - YouTube[/ame]


edit: Shit! That appears to be our man CEOSam playing bass! lol


edit#2: Ah CC - just read your post. What you're saying is pretty much aligned with my project. :thumbup:
 
vstin said:
It seems you already gaved up on SEO though.
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Different - I haven't started yet. I'm approaching this particular site from a completely different position / perspective.

For example, I am not worried about it's SERP positions and I certainly don't intend wasting my time tracking them, that means absolutely sweet fuck all as far as I'm concerned. Brand awareness offline is the main theme here, for it is one of my long-term projects.

You will most likely be aware of it at some point, but probably not through Google.
 
CCarter said:
This post has to be a troll.

SEO not being primary source of traffic ≠ giving up on SEO. It's called regular marketing.​
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Indeed. I've never considered SEO as actual marketing, more a technical aspect to 'gaming the most popular search engines'. For this I often refer back to Eli's, and other's blogs and apply the thought process & logic to today's space.

Marketing hasn't changed, and SEO is not dead. Shit... did I just say that? er... what I meant was SEO is dead. Long live SEO. ;)
 
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