There has been a lot of hype lately on various forums about the Death of Internet marketing and the Death of Crap products and a host of others. I think what we are seeing here is a change in the web that is directly related to the new Web 2.0 and social bookmarking craze. I had a long conversation with my wife today about this topic ( she is a psychologist). We spoke at length and came up with some ideas as to why this may be. People on the web are changing. At one time people used the internet to do research on topics that interested them and they still do that and will continue for a long time, but things are becoming different. People are now wanting to interact more with other people who have similar interests. Social sites such as MySpace and YouTube.com have become hugely popular over the past couple of years. Niche forums are more popular than ever before and you can even see this with the popularity of sites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon. These sites allow people to vote and share articles and stories that are of interest to them. This means that the people of the internet will start to determine what the internet becomes.
Marketers are part of those people, but if they are only selling products and not actually contributing useful information to the rest of the net then they will not be as popular. Things have to change. The era of cookie cutter sales letters determined to separate as many users from their money as soon as possible by selling the dream of easy internet riches are coming to an end. Quality sites have ruled the net since its infancy and that will continue. Its nto enough to just build it and they will come. You must build quality and add value and they will vote for you when they come so others will come.
The fact is when you go to a search engine and type in what you’re looking for, there are only 10 results on the first page. That’s it. Ten web pages, minus the ads, of course. Recent studies tell us that the first 3 results get over 70% of the clicks. That means that if you are not on the first page of the search results, for your keyword, it will be highly unlikely that you will get any significant traffic.