Year: 2008

Marketing on the web is a constantly evolving practice mixed with a touch of art and success based on intuition. In other words, it’s very hard to come up with a solidified tried-and-true formula for marketing on the web that can be easily replicated. There are just too many variables, and time is an incredibly important vector in web marketing.

Add to this mix the realization that mobile web browsing will explode in the coming decade and web marketers should not feel guilty for scratching their heads and trying to figure out the best way to position themselves for the future.

Mobile Browser Market is Transforming and Will Grow to 1.5 Billion Units in 2013 | Press Release | ABI Research: “While a large number of phones today still use browsers with very limited web browsing capabilities, many smartphones are incorporating browsers that support the latest capabilities such as AJAX and RSS, as well as websites optimized for viewing on a mobile device. ABI Research sees this segment of the mobile browser market accounting for the vast majority of growth over the next five years, as the open-Internet browser (OIB) segment for mobile grows from 76 million in 2007 to nearly 700 million browsers delivered in 2013.“

How do we, as web marketers, make sure that we are in a position to play in the exploding mobile field? Display ads as we know them don’t work in a mobile paradigm. So, here are a few thoughts and possibilities for how to succeed in the mobile world:

1) Increased focus on mobile friendly sites that work both on the web and on mobiles and include clear call-to-actions (either affiliate, branding or lead based).

2) Dedicated mobile sites that are light on bandwidth but heavy on immediacy.

3) Heavy reliance on geo and demographic targeting as well as device targeting. Marketing experiences on an iPhone are much different than on a BlackBerry or a Motorola Q (not to mention non “smart phone”). Mass marketing and mobile are not happy bedfellows.

4) Mobile landing sites that encourage the “learn more” approach where the viewer can get more information via email, rss or related channels. AdMob is doing very interesting things with this concept.

5) Diving even more into the long tail and finding communities and hubs where dedicated and highly motivated readers/participants are more likely to use a mobile device in a marketing scenario and follow through with a purchase/conversion/sign up.

Whether or not you’re interested in the mobile space as an affiliate marketer or as a merchant leveraging the affiliate channel, one thing is clear… you need to be interested. Turning a blind eye to mobile and not being prepared for the future will lead to an expensive exercise in playing catch up in the coming years.

Steve Rubel posits that we are in for a global climate change type scenario on the web caused by the proliferation and unbridled polluting of web marketers…

Micro Persuasion: An All Too Convenient Truth: Many Marketers Pollute the Web: “The web is facing it’s own global warming crisis as marketers continue to pollute it. Consumers are voting with their clicks and eyeballs by engaging with authentic content that adds value, while ignoring the rest.”

I completely agree with him.

Steve’s supposition that consumers (yes, I still hate that term) are ignoring blanket marketing messages is accurate (at least from my stats and many other affiliate and online marketers). Remember how all the characters ignored the massive Coca-Cola billboards in Blade Runner? We’re there. We’re polluters of the senses and the web.

So, what do we do? What’s our analogue to the Kyoto Protocol?

1) Make good content. Be sticky. Offer a long term appeal and value proposition to people. Stop making MFA sites or PPC thin sites. Plus, they just aren’t economical…the margins aren’t there anymore.

2) Go multimedia. Make video, do podcasts, take pictures. People like that kind of thing. See #1.

3) Stop rehashing what everyone else is saying and talk about what you know. Find ads to structure around what you know. Those ads are out there.

4) Stop thinking that StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Twitter, YourMamaHasASocialNetwork are all great places to get traffic. They’re not. They’re terrible traffic for marketers who just want performance conversions. They are good for marketers who are making good sticky content. There are very few marketers like that on the web at the moment.

5) Think outside the box. Brainstorm. Don’t rehash. You can be an individual and be a marketer. Those things are not mutually exclusive despite what Techmeme or the eBooks tell you (and stop reading eBooks).

We do need to clean up our act and build for the future. Or, you can keep playing the short term game while those of us in the performance marketing world evolve and adapt and realize the benefits of a more “green” type of web marketing. Your choice.