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Grassroots Convergence - The Changing Web
By Jim Hedger (c) 2006

The first two weeks of November saw me traveling from the west
coast to New York, and back to the coast before heading down to
Las Vegas. I had the privilege of attending two of the most
important annual search and Internet marketing conferences,
ad:Tech NYC and Pubcon Las Vegas. As a writer in this space, my
goal was to try to speak with as many people as possible in
order to figure out where the industry is going in the coming
years. Road-weary and exhausted as I am, I feel enlightened and
exhilarated. The state of search marketing is stronger than
ever. It is however, going to change radically in the coming
year.

The first thing webmasters need to understand is how Web2.0 has
raised the intensity of information sharing. The concept of
using mass or micro-interest communities to basically inform
themselves, has transformed the businesses of the smartest
search marketers. An important facet of effective website
optimization is the inclusion of RSS feeds and social networking
tags to relevant documents housed in relation to the site.
Similarly, new website marketing campaigns often include MySpace
profiles, Flickr photosharing and blogcasts of some sort or
another.

The days of the brochure website as an effective marketing tool
are long over. While it is ok to carve a quaint niche in your own
quiet location on the web, chances are that location will remain
quiet unless you use social media tools to attract visitors
along with the standard search listings and paid advertisements.

The second thing webmasters should concentrate on is the
production of marketing materials that bring radio and video
formats to the web. Online marketing is no longer confined to
what has traditionally been considered the online space. Web
enabled cell phones, iPods and handheld devices like
Blackberries are as important today as desktop or laptop
computers were in previous years.

Text and graphic based advertising preceded audio advertising as
the radio preceded TV's promotion of video advertising. It's
sort of like the circle of life in an electronic world repeating
itself again. Video trumps text again. It's only natural after
all.

The very first press conference at ad:Tech was held early Monday
morning and I was one of four reporters to attend. That's too
bad because many missed a good story that is based in common
sense.

If video advertising works, as we all know it does, interactive
video advertising likely works better. That's the bet many
marketing professionals are making going into 2007 as the
annual ad-spend on online video is projected to grow by 89% next
year.

According to eMarketer CEO, Geoff Ramsey, the new online media
is rapidly replacing traditional advertising channels as younger
viewers search the Internet for entertainment. Ramsey suggests by
the end of the decade, traditional advertising will be a third
as effective as online advertising, citing a March 2006 American
Marketing Association Study that says 78% percent of leading
advertisers agree that effectiveness of TV ads has diminished in
the last few years.

In other words, those expensive ads that drove the development
of television are not working as well anymore. TV production
values begin to slip and eventually the viewers look away. With
YouTube, MySpace and the general history of user inspired mayhem
of the web, more than a few generations are growing up looking
online. The older medium is slowly starting to starve while a
bountiful new media ad-spend eats TV's lunch for breakfast.

Money is now trickling down to the grassroots in the online
advertising marketplace. While programs such as Google AdSense
and Y!SM have provided modest incomes for webmasters for a few
years, a very real sense of monetization is present for
independent webmasters. There is simply not enough advertising
space for the absurd inventory of willing advertisers out there.

Internet users should expect to see a change in the way
independent webmasters relate to the products they create and
offer for public consumption. Though there are a growing number
of highly creative webmasters trying to produce interesting and
stimulating content, the major monetization model of many
independent webmasters is to make a number of made-for-(Google)
AdSense sites and placing as many ads by Google as possible, or
to create parked domain sites populated with paid-advertising.

Along with an increasing amount of user-made content given and
shared freely on the Internet, many are starting to look to the
professional content and support offered by major entities such
as the Yahoo Publisher Network or, in the case of professional
content creators, successful experiments like John Battelle's
Federated Media. Extraordinary content tends to find its way to
the top and over time the coordination and presentation of
extraordinary content is expected to attract far higher viewers
and correspondingly stronger advertising revenues.

Populating any Internet site, regardless of its format, with
extraordinary content requires mechanical assistance, the type
easily provided by the growing number of information feeds
available for webmasters to use and share with others. As most
webmasters working in any sector want their websites to be
consistent traffic attractors many are finding and making use of
relevant, off-site feeds covering items such as weather
conditions, news, accommodation references, or general
information. This cross-pollination of content is used to both
attract and drive web traffic to highly sophisticated landing
pages designed to motivate revenue-generating clicks.

Every page is thus thought of as a landing page. Each is treated
in that spiritual-scientific Zen-space extraordinary search
marketers find when examining a document. One of the companies I
stumbled across, Optimost.com, exemplifies how the bar has been
raised on what is considered effective, revenue-generating
website design. Calling themselves a website optimization
service, Optimost works with clients ranging from Time-Life and
Overstock.com to clients of smaller SEO firms to focus visitor
attention and present advertising options in an optimal layout.
Using an on-the-fly multivariate testing process, Optimost
selects the page or document layout selected by a majority of
site visitors themselves.

Serious advertising money is not only on the table; it is
spilling off the sides. The effect of that amount of money
spread through the web design, online advertising and search
marketing communities is going to make a major difference in the
coming years. Production values are as high as revenue
expectations and those expectations are rising every day. The
market is on the verge of maturing, past its awkward adolescence
and well on its way to figuring out what it wants to do for fun;
and profit.
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Search marketing expert Jim Hedger is one of the most prolific
writers in the search sector with articles appearing in numerous
search related websites and newsletters, including SiteProNews,
Search Engine Journal, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.

He is currently Executive Editor for the Jayde Online news sources
SEO-News (http://www.seo-news.com) and SiteProNews
(http://www.sitepronews.com). You can also find additional tips
and news on webmaster and SEO topics by Jim at the SiteProNews
blog (http://blog.sitepronews.com/).
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