What Are The 3 Biggest Trends in Internet Marketing?
By Anna Johnson on February 22nd, 2010According to Internet marketing expert Ed Dale – founder of the Thirty Day Challenge Internet marketing training program among other things – there were three major trends in the Internet marketing niche during 2009. What’s more these three trends are likely to gather steam in 2010.
Ed Dale mentioned these three trends at his recent Coming Home Seminar, held in Melbourne, Australia, February 19-21, 2010. These trends are not just relevant to those selling products and services in the Internet marketing niche (i.e. the ‘how to do Internet marketing’ niche) though.
Due to the highly competitive nature of the Internet marketing niche, what happens in this niche is something of a leading indicator of trends likely to emerge in other niches.
Which means that, whatever market niche you’re involved in, you’d do well to consider, if not apply these, trends in your business.
In this case, Ed Dale’s three (3) biggest trends in the Internet marketing niche all have to do with CONVERSION (i.e. getting people to opt-in, buy or perform some other kind of desired action). They are the ways Internet marketers are increasingly using in order to convert prospects into buyers (or leads, subscribers, etc as the case may be):
1. Webinars – Internet marketers are finding webinars to highly effective in terms of enticing webinar attendees to buy a product or service.
2. Testimonials – fewer Internet marketers are using testimonials in their sales materials. While this is partly due to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s new stance on testimonials (i.e. that testimonials must reflect the typical, rather than best, result of using a product or service), Internet marketers have also discovered that testimonials weren’t the ‘Holy Grail’ of conversion they used to think. Either that or the effectiveness of testimonials has diminished over time (and over use)…
3. Videos – videos have largely replaced long-form sales letters on web pages. Case in point: Andy Jenkins’ recent ‘Video Boss’ launch. After a pre-launch campaign involving Andy releasing a sequence of high quality, educational videos, Andy’s training program sold out in 9 hours – that’s 1,100 sales of a $1,997 training program in 9 hours. Andy did NOT use a long-form sales letter. Instead, he had a video and an order button.
Some Internet marketers are combining videos with long-form sales letters, but Andy’s results indicate that you may be able to do without a sales letter altogether. In fact, product launch expert Jeff Walker literally views an effective pre-launch campaign as a ‘sideways sales letter’ in which the sales letter released on launch day is more of a formality than the thing that converts people into buyers. But as Andy’s experience indicates, maybe you don’t even need it if you’ve sufficiently sold your list during the pre-launch campaign.
I reckon Ed Dale is right on the money in observing these trends. And I agree that we’ll probably see these conversion tactics embraced even more in 2010…
