The New Era Of Internet Marketing

Are we dawning on a new era of internet marketing? Is everything we have come to learn about how to make money online about to become obsolete?

Think about the typical internet marketing “style” we have all been taught over the years. Squeeze pages, long form sales letters, testimonials, pre-sells, “free” and “instant access” buttons. These things have made a lot of people a lot of money, but are they going to last forever?

I’m certainly not saying these things are bad or no longer useful, but as far as landing pages, customer acquisition, and the typical internet marketing business model… Are you noticing the crackdown like I am on the way we do things?

I have been thinking a lot about where I want to take my internet marketing business in 2011 and over the christmas break I have been going through a bit of a mindset change mostly due to the mentoring and advice I have been receiving from James Schramko and Ed Dale.

It seems that the era of quick tricks, loopholes and workarounds may be coming to an end. If you have been involved in internet marketing for more than 2 years you will have noticed some big changes.

You will have noticed that the Big G… Google, is not favoring the way we do things. They are slapping our ad campaigns and de-indexing our sites because they see our typical internet marketing tactics as deceiving, and of little value to the rest of the world.

You will have witnessed the FTC crackdown on testimonials and how we now need abundant disclaimers in our ad copy and affiliate recommendations.

If big corporations are cracking down on the way we do things, Is it time to wake up and change our approach?

when I look at successful people making not just 6 figures a year, but 7 figures, I notice they have a more real world corporate oriented approach.

Take a look at James Schramko and Mike Filsaime. Interestingly they both have a similar backgrounds as General Managers in executive car dealerships. Mercedes Benz and BMW. They have been required to manage large teams of people, run a real offline business, and turn a profit at the end of the day.

They have an incredible set of real world business and management skills that they have applied to online marketing, and have absolutely crushed it quadrupling their previous income in no time.

It seems to me that the smart money is moving away from what we know as “internet marketing” and developing sites that look more like the rest of the world. Real businesses.

I mean, if almighty Google doesn’t like what we’re doing… doesn’t that say something?

What do you think?

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Developing Cross Platform Applications

Gone are the days when you could whack together a quick windows app and call the job done. Back when Microsoft had over 85% market share on the home desktop pc you didn’t really need to worry about mac OSX, or linux. It was only the hardcore programmers that would play around with grep and regex etc. commands on linux.

Nowadays, the situation is quite different. Almost everyone I know is moving to an iMac or Macbook. One of the main reasons I moved over was because I could still run windows on a macbook. That made the decision so easy. Such a smart move on apple’s part to integrate Intel processors into their systems. Now I run Windows and OSX at the same time using vmware fusion and it works great.

Linux still doesn’t seem to be a major player in the desktop operating system scene, but there’s always rumours of linux making big moves to compete in this space. Generally I find that most cross platform development applications that support mac and windows will also support linux so there’s usually no need to setup a linux box to create and test applications. I only ever bother testing on mac and windows. That’s probably not a die hard developers ideal point of view… but it gets me by.

You can still develop windows apps, and do quite good sales volume. I have noticed that quite a few internet marketers are still developing windows only apps, but I think those marketers will need to adapt to cross platform apps very soon as more and more people are using OSX and are demanding a compatible solution. Specifically I’m thinking of Alex Goad’s Rank Builder app which I bought when it was released. A very good app and lucky for me I could run it on windows using vmware fusion. It looks like it’s built as a windows form application in Visual Studio. Quite a complicated application using multiple dll library files and xml files for data storage. I would be interested to know the stats on how well that application sold and what the support requests we’re like. I am thinking he may have had a lot of people refund because they couldn’t get it to work on their mac.

So, what’s the options when creating applications for end users?

Well, not only do you have to think about multiple operating systems but you also have to think about whether the app is going to be web based or a hybrid desktop/web application. Adobe’s AIR environment is quite a good option as it is cross platform and there are a lot of tools around to develop AIR applications. The popular Market Samurai software uses AIR.

I was right into Adobe flex builder a few years ago before I got more involved in business and marketing. That was when Adobe just released AIR. I remember getting quite bogged down with MVC design architecture and cairngorm but I managed to develop some simple applications including a graphical analytics application that I still use today to check my traffic stats across all my sites. That app uses Adobe charts and Midnight Coders Weborb for php to connect to my mysql database using AMF remoting. I haven’t touched AIR in quite a while but my current programmer is developing an application for me that utilizes AIR, and he’s developing it in javascript using Aptana IDE. A totally different approach to how I was inclined to developing AIR apps.

The other option is leveraging existing tools that are already cross platform. It seems every major software has support for plugins and addons developed by third party users nowadays. A good example of this is my most recent tool, Domain Digger Pro which leverages a web browser to gather and compile data from different sites. Initially I created this as a windows software just like Alex’s Rank Builder. I was being very “old school” and created a simple vbs script that opened internet explorer (as that is the only option when developing with Microsoft) and used the DOM model to collect data from pages, and javascript injection to fill and submit forms. I then created a wrapper with Visual Studio so I could have a simple UI where the user could input data and click a button to run the vbs script. Worked great on my windows xp vm, but when I released it to the public I had heaps of people experiencing problems with Internet Explorer, errors on Windows 7, etc. which overall meant it wasn’t a good solution for a basic user. Not to mention that I was ignoring half the market who run OSX. After consulting a few of my techie friends, the obvious solution was to make it a Google Chrome extension. Chrome is already cross platform, and I could simply modify my app to have a simple html UI that opened when the icon was clicked in the toolbar. Perfect!

The other option for cross platform desktop apps is java, but I haven’t played with that yet. At the moment I’m satisfied with AIR for desktop applications or hybrid web/desktop apps, and developing extensions or addons for widespread applications like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and possibly in the future mobile devices like the iPhone.

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