What have I missed during the past 2 years? (+rep for all help)

To mods: I wasnt entirely sure where to put this, but since it is about buisness in general I felt this was the best place for my thread; move if necessary!

Hi there, I have been a webmaster for about 5 years, but took almost 2 years out untill recently coming back to it all..

Because of this, I'm wondering what I've missed in terms of changes of SEO, earnings, and all things related to the internet business.. Because before I invest money I want to be aware of all things which are different to how they were say 2 years ago..

Any information will be greatly appreciated, and +REP will be given upon help.

Thanks a lot
Chuckun

 

Well, I would guess the biggest change in the last 2 years has been the explosion in social networking.
It follows it's own fashion - first you just had to be on myspace, then it was all Facebook - now Twitter is the latest trend.

 

Most affiliate programs will ban you for using their domain name or certain keywords they deem "theirs" in Adwords campaigns bringing customers to your affiliate landing page before going to them.

Google doesn't pay for refferals anymore.

The buzzards are waiting patiently for Yahoo to die.

Microsoft is having a mid-life crisis.

 

Thanks a lot, rep added to the both of you

The google referrals info is very very interesting... :O

And Microsoft is always having a mid-life crisis! Lol

Thanks again

Any more info will be greatly appreciated!

 

Please, anyone with info, please help me out here

Thanks!

 

The lines between the blog and the website have been blurred as more people and businesses want to run their site using a content management system (CMS) to run their entire website, from the blog and forums to the main page

The direction of blogs is constantly changing. The year of 2008 brought more widespread acceptance of the “social media revolution“, with more blogs adding Twitter and the like to their sidebars to more closely interact with their visitors.

 

why not just look it up yourself? follow some big name bloggers on twitter and you'll be caught up in a day

or you could follow me

 

I can see I'm gonna have to get my head around this Twitter pretty fast >.<

Ohhh dear.. Rep for both of you >.<

 

In the event you have a product or service you'd like to sell a good approach would be to create a continuity effect to your sales process... What I mean by that is that it would be a good thing if you create a squeeze page or a landing page where you give away information or knowledge to your visitors or even some free products, software or even e-books.

Then, you can build up on that and have a box for them to fill in with their details like name and e-mail for them to opt in for the paid products. This way you put the bait - the free product and then tell them that the real jewel is inside the paid product. This way you build a list of loyal and interested customers who then become the object of your sales.

The "get this for free and see what's inside the real thing for a small fee" aspect of this makes it real easy for you to target a specific audience and create a continuity model of your sales.

There are many examples of this model on the web.

Hope this helps!

 

Things like digg have also become a must have for online entrepreneurs. Also google has been said to pay less in adsense now.

 

oh wow. 2 years is a long time. Where do i start? basically a lot of things have changed on how search engines value sites. I believe Google are now quick to ban sites that are doing blackhat (from my experience). in affiliate marketing, some offers have changed the way they should be promoted. before, you can just incentivize offers, but now you were likely going to get banned if you do so... Really a lot of things... some email submits have also vanished from some networks and the trend now is on social media

 

• The 'long tail' of search terms has grown longer - phrases are now more common than keywords as search terms, niches have developed within what you probably thought of as niches 2 years ago.
• Blogging is starting to emerge as a professional occupation - check out problogger.net for some great stuff there. Top bloggers earn 7 figure salaries from it, but there's only a few of them. The vast majority earn 3 figures or less.
• Wordpress has emerged as the main option for blogging - especially self hosted via hosts with cpanel and fantastico
• Social networks have already been mentioned, but if you're worried about getting your head around twitter, just think of blogs crossed with IRC (instant chat) and you pretty much have it. It's also mad fun. Myspace came and seems to be waning now, except for young teens. Facebook is growing (but getting very annoying). There was a brief controversy when they implemented a monetisation strategy that suggested products based on what your friends had bought, for eg a girl found out her bf had just bought a diamond ring, and you can imagine how he spat the dummy when his surprise was blown...
• On that topic, people now seem to be dumping relationships via facebook (changing status back to 'single') or txt rather than email these days. I guess if you get dumped face to face you must be archaic.
• It's a bit slower where I am in Australia because of network coverage issues, but a lot of internet connectivity has gone mobile - phones, wireless connections etc, which means that people are online more, and communicate faster.
• Politicians have been using the internet for their campaigns - the last election in the US (and the one we had downunder before that) both had significant elements online. I don't know about up there, but down here our government is still using it as a means of communicating with/canvassing the public.
• Google has developed a lot more applications, including an online version of office which is free to use (google docs, spreadsheets etc). You'll see a whole string of google options across the top of the search page now... Have fun playing with them, they'll tell you a lot.
• RSS is the new form of subscription - email lists still exist but rss (really simple syndication) now lets people sign up 'anonymously' and subscribe/unsubscribe instantly. Feeds are collected by rss readers, which is kinda like an inbox for the bits of the web you want to get - since you're collecting it, you don't give details and maintain total control over the stream. The biggest one is google reader but others are out there.
• Gmail has taken over from pop mail, since it has unlimited storage space and now is constantly adding new functionality. You can integrate your email with your calendar, to do list, contacts & just about anything else you feel like.
  (Holy cow, I just realised, Google is taking over the world!)
  

That's the quick run down. Is there a particular topic you used to specialise in and I can give you a bit more detail? I tend to follow social trends online.

 

I used this method back in the day... But thanks so much for your response +rep

DIGG was getting big when I left, I figured it would be something major for us now.. And the google adsense payout is key info I was after too! Thanks alot! +rep

Indeed, it has been a while! The affiliate marketing strictness is news to me! Thanks a bunch! And yeah, I'm gonna have to get into this social media marketing! >.< +rep

Wow, that was a brilliant help, thanks ever so much! I have seen google docs but not played with them yet! Thanks a lot for all that info; I appreciate it!! +rep! (also, no particular topic, I'm looking to try new things now!)

Thanks a lot you guys, if there's anything else, please do let me know!

Chuckun

 

youtube marketing is yet another thing worth mentioning...

finding quality videos with a lot of views and topics relevant to your niche is a good way to get a greater exposure on the web. How do you do that? Once you find these videos you just get in touch with the owners of the videos and ask them to put your site link in the about section of the video (for a certain fee of course)

Once you do that you'll be enjoying some targeted traffic coming your way.

 

Thanks shuttle! This could prove very handy!

+Rep will be added when I can give out rep again (limit reached)

You can count on receiving it.

Thanks again shuttle!

 

Although, most of the things have already been covered in here, but do remember that most blogs are established without some certain optimizations and organized content. There are dozens of free tools that are offering bloggers & webmasters to observe their sites... get an idea about what is attracting traffic, what is not. Without knowing your mistakes, your site will not be going in a right way.

 

Thanks erolelcott

I've always run statistical mapping, tracking, logging etc on my site's, but I had forgotten that to be honest with you >.<

Thanks a lot! As aforementioned, I cannot give rep right now, but as soon as the limiter allows me to, you'll get your GREEN!

Thanks again
Chuckun

 

no problem mate...
hope you do well, Good Luck !!

 

- PR (Pagerank) is dead and no longer rules!
- Youtube popularity has dumped TV channels
- Blogs had overtaken Newspapers to convey news!
- Facebook and Myspace connect almost every person in the planet.
- Firefox rules in webbrowser war and has overtaken IE!

Thats all i can recollect!

 

Lets see:

Operating Systems:
- Linux gained a small share in the home computing industry
- Since mac allowed windows to be installed on it's computers, sales have gone up alot.
- Windows is worried that if it doesn't push Windows 7 out fast enough and without any major bugs, people will use linux even more.

Search engines:
- Google, as always, keeps adding new features to all of it's services and never goes out of beta?
- Yahoo is slowly disintegrating
- MSN is out there some where

Computers:
- Netbooks have become extremely popular ( think laptop, but smaller, like almost the size of a portable DVD player )
- Intel keeps expanding it's plants to cut costs even thought it is a resession
- Dell & AMD have cut way back

Software:
- Firefox took over the market
- Google launched a web browser
- There are 9 Billion new versions of Linux
- There are "free" solutions to almost every paid program on the market. ( EX: Need To Edit Photos? There are 12 different free software programs that have many of the features that photoshop does. My favorites are Gimp and Paint.NET


Micro Industries:
- The PTC site market has crashed and sites are selling for as little as $5.00.
- More clone scripts are on the market than ever.
- There is a "free" revolution going on, meaning that alot of things are being given away for free that used to cost money.


I hope this helps to some degree...