It’s True, Web Marketers ARE Polluters

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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 .

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.

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