View From a Height, IM in 2010 & Beyond

Okay, some of you know I've been trying to get this post out the door for a little while, but I've had a few health issues lately and I apologize for the delay.

But to get started, a few years ago, I was doing a little contract work for a fellow who…, well…, I already mentioned in a previous post the guy who would admit to a personal fortune of about $80,000,000. (I never researched it, but some of his close friends and associates told me it was considerably more). So one day we were sitting around on the back steps of his deck just shooting the breeze. I knew he'd risen from poverty, and I asked him what he believed was the secret to his success.

Instead of puffing up his chest and giving a lecture all about self-discipline and hard work and being a self-made man and having pulled himself up by his "own bootstraps" (like so many do claim, with one clichéd phrasing or another), he refreshingly replied, "Mostly it was just being in the right place at the right time."

He went on to explain, and in some particulars maybe he was just being humble, but it's not the details I want to talk about here. I want you to pause for a moment and think about that idea — being in the right place at the right time. Could a lot of unusual success be simply that? Just being in the right place at the right time?

Well, those of you who have already read the article on affiliate marketing I wrote back in 1996, and especially those who may've read it way back when (and I assume many more who have never read the article and never will), probably already understand The Importance of Being There (– wasn't it Woody Allen who quipped that 95% of success was showing up? –), but how often do you really pause and think about what it really implies in terms of the larger picture?

Being there implies getting from here to there, and that implies motion through taking action. And motion implies not only 3-dimensional space, but also forth-dimensional time, because unless you are subatomic you cannot get from here to there in zero time (in spite of the claims implicit in the sales copy of some internet marketers), and so the importance of being there was always really about being there (in the right place) after having taken the proper action so as to be there (at the right time).

Journalists for example have always understood the importance of this. Some have built entire careers and reputations on it, sometimes risking their lives just to be in the right place at the right time. A member of my extended family, for example, as a photojournalist, used to chase storms in tornado alley, risking his own safety just to get that perfect picture.

Of course such time and place may be figurative, not literal. In some contexts, such as in marketing, being exactly where you are in 3-dimensional space may not be the challenge, but where you are psychologically or in terms of your knowledge and comprehension.

Marketer, understand thyself?

A lot of the "dumbest" professional wrestlers understand this. Some of them are the smartest folks you'll ever meet, but at a certain moment in their lives they realized that appearing to be too smart isn't always profitable, and that what many fans (their "market") really want — aside from the entertaining melodrama and action — is payback for having felt victimized by bullies of one kind or another and to feel somehow superior to the big, tough (powerful) guys and gals. And so they go on to make a fortune giving the fans just that — men and women, some with master's degrees and Ph.d's, acting like they're just big, dumb brutes who can hardly speak a coherent sentence — because at a certain moment in their lives they understood the importance of being in the right "place" at the right "time."

(Really good politicians understand the importance of this too, sometimes to our society's great detriment, but that's another subject.)

So does this mean that getting a jump of understanding on others about where things are, and are headed, technologically, or culturally, or demographically, or otherwise — and taking massive action on that understanding — might be *all* one really needs to do to achieve unusual success?

Maybe.

I had a brief discussion with a very successful online marketer recently, and we had a sharp disagreement about where internet marketing is headed. He has been successful in the past and seems to be assuming various conditions won't change. According to his outlook, the basics of marketing, the internet, and who the major players are, won't change. Meanwhile, I'm convinced nearly everything will change, in fact, is already changing.

I run into this kind of thinking a lot, have run into it all my life come to think of it, and I just don't understand it, i.e., that this or that is impossible, unthinkable, or can and will never happen. Where have these people been for the last few decades? To say anything is impossible, or will never happen, is to have paid no attention to all the technological and cultural breakthroughs of the last 30 to 40 years, and more; it is to pay no attention to the headlines every day; it is to pay no attention to the constant change in the world around us.

In The Importance of Being There, I told folks where I thought internet marketing was headed then, but while urging others to take massive action, I unfortunately did not take massive action myself. This was partly because I was so much more oriented toward why affiliate marketing was the right internet strategy for established big business and venture capital interests (who were at the time my targeted clients), instead of considering all the implications it might have for my more humble, creativity-centered enterprise, which was at the time primarily oriented around design, copywriting and consulting, i.e., the only thing I was into marketing at the time was myself. Further, after a bad breakup with my wife, I'm pretty sure now that I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to take advantage.

But all that's behind me, and now I want to talk about where I think internet marketing is headed and I plan to continue researching and watching — for your benefit as well as mine — and to take massive action myself this time.

Am I saying we can see exactly *how* things are going to change? No, of course not. Not even close.

But we can look around at what is already happening, and we can intuit, and extrapolate, and think, and maybe even come up with a few guidelines that apply now and may apply even more in the very near future.

Firstly, as everything has accelerated in recent years, if I'm right, don't expect it to take 10 or more years this time (like it did for some of the predictions in The Importance of Being There) for all this to go into massive effect. Much of this is already happening, and in terms of it dominating trends, I will be shocked if everything I have to say here takes even three years to come to pass.

Secondly, as we proceed, try to keep the above thought in mind, i.e., the importance of being in the right place at the right time.

So how do you increase your chances of being in the right place at the right time, figuratively or literally?

We may very well be on the brink of one of the most challenging times for internet marketers. Various factors are coming into play and may create the 'perfect storm' to sink a lot of online marketing "ships." The first, already in effect, and that everyone probably is familiar with already — the new FTC guidelines regarding testimonials, endorsements, etc. How these new rules are going to be enforced and play out in the courts is an open question, but obviously, for many in online marketing the impact could be substantial. Another concern is, as always, Google. Google seems to have gone into something akin to a panic lately, implementing all sorts of changes and introducing new programs and paradigms at a rapid pace, e.g., Google Caffeine, the introduction of "Real Time" searching, a move toward "visual" and "personal" searches, and other changes, all of which should be coming on in a full court press early next year. And then there is Bing/Yahoo which may be coming on strong as well. Further, there are various other technologies that may be maturing very soon, along with some potentially massive corporate moves online. No one seems to know for sure what all this will mean for online marketers, but it is likely to be a wild ride.

Okay, we don't know. None of us. But can we make educated or intuitive guesses about what at least some of it may mean?

Well… to start, quite a few marketers are deeply into automation, and that's fine. Automation can be a very useful tool in this business. I've used and recommended automation software myself. Unfortunately though, automation usually tends to look like automation, and that is not what most average consumers are looking for now, and it is unlikely to be what they will be looking for tomorrow. This is the whole tech versus touch discussion. The more advanced the technology becomes, the more people are looking for that personal, human connection, and the marketers who forget this forget it at their own peril. Unless some of the developers start working a lot harder at making automation look and feel a lot less automated, I believe nearly all these tools will become more and more ineffective, and very soon. For example, there are already rumors that Google is poised to slap down a lot of the social media backlinks that many niche marketers rely on to drive traffic and rank, and at least some of this is because they are so obviously being created not by individuals, but by marketers using tools of automation. Further, automation, whether it is in the form of blog posts or backlinks, often doesn't add very much perceived value from the point of view of the consumer, so be on the look out.

Developers of such tools should consider this a wake-up call. I know it will be anything but easy for many, but the time is now to begin. Be preemptive and begin now to remove any automated "footprint" in terms of behavior as well as any clues of automation that may be left in your products' wake. More typical marketers should consider this a time to open up every ear, eye and brain in their organizations so as to have everyone prepared to re-think every assumption and re-envision every marketing strategy.

Well, I have quite a bit more that I want to say, in some cases very specific — items and issues I know you will agree are useful for newbies and seasoned marketers alike to think about. But as I indicated at the start, I've been sick and still am not feeling all that well — and I have other pressing matters at the moment — so this is going to be it for now. If you'd like to read the rest of what I have to say, fill out the form below and I will email you a link, hopefully within a few short days, when I'm finished. You can, of course unsubscribe at any time, but if you don't sign up, you won't get this information, at least not so soon, and perhaps not for free. So don't say you haven't been warned.

Notice: After a heated discussion early this morning (Dec 24th), a close business associate pleaded with me (and ultimately paid me) to keep my further thoughts to myself. So the above offer has been withdrawn until further notice (but if you are one of those who already signed up, you will get this information, of course).

I am very sorry about this. I didn't do this just for the money; I kinda owed this guy a favor. But you can still sign up for my list if you like, and you will recieve a small bonus for your trouble (when you confirm).