We all love a new discovery and unveiling the "next big thing" has always been a great way to attract traffic in droves.
Let's be real though, the fundamentals of optimizing for search engine placement haven't really changed all that much over the past several years.
Interestingly enough, those updates mostly affected sites that were pushing the limits already, and playing outside of their guidelines anyway, the search engines just found a way to algorithmically put it to a stop.
Those fortunate enough to hire SEO or marketing companies that focused on real marketing, have just gotten stronger as those updates have happened and the sites sneaking by on shortcuts have fallen by the wayside.
Even so, there are still a handful of tactics you can use right now to make some quick cash with an affiliate site, blog or disposable asset, but if you are using these undenounced to your clients, it is time to come clean and do some real marketing.
Once you stop spending your time focusing on the next quick, short-term way to get ahead, you will see that digital marketing offers some lucrative opportunities.
Local SEO is quickly evolving to be more user-centric and successfully navigating the local Web landscape is not the simple task (on page + building citations) it used to be.
A partnership between Swirl Networks and AccuWeather will allow marketing agencies and business owners to use real-time weather data to tailor customer in-store messaging, opening up so many possibilities.
SEO, in-store marketing, desktop and mobile advertising, and even email marketing technology is making it possible to do things we couldn't have dreamt of 20 years ago.
Take Google's Maximize Conversions strategy in AdWords for example. The platform will adjust your bids based on past campaign data and current signals in order to generate the most conversions for your budget. Sadly, many people who spend hours researching shortcuts for SEO don't even have conversion tracking set up. Ever heard the old saying "stepping over dollars to pick up pennies"?
At its core, marketing has remained much the same. Content marketing, while all the craze over the past couple of years, have been around over 200 years. In 1732, Benjamin Franklin started "Poor Richard's Almanack" to promote his own printing business.
(Image Source: Contently)
John Deere is another such example, having released "The Furrow" around 1895 to help educate farmers.
YouTube videos now sometimes stand in for TV commercials; native advertising is awfully similar to the ads you see in your favorite print magazine; and Google has all but killed the phone book. Even though the mediums are changing, the fundamentals are not.
Attitude.
The real change is in how digital marketing is being perceived and approached. Fly-by-night cheap SEO companies are disappearing (although not fast enough). Great resources like Website Magazine are educating consumers about what goes into real SEO and real marketing, making it easier to avoid low-quality providers. Technology is making it easier to reach the right people, at the right time, with the right message.
Be real, be remarkable, be innovative and you will be successful. Once you have those fundamentals in place, today's technology will make spreading the word fast, efficient and effective. If you don't have a great product or service, look at how you can improve that before getting bogged down with the "next big thing" and you will be leaps and bounds ahead of the pack.