Internet Publishing: The process of producing and delivering content around a niche, small or large, in order to carve out a loyal readership who reward you with clicks, affiliate sales, product sales, or any number of other [TAG]monetization[/TAG] methods.
A time is coming when people will look back at the early years of the web as “the wild west” for more reasons than simply an abundance of opportunity.
The way sites are published and marketed is changing radically.
How it Works Today…
- Everyone is an independent publisher in the extreme sense
- Most people now learn and do their own SEO
- Most site owners are responsible for keeping up on myriad, complicated marketing tactics
- Most site owners are responsible for manually adding good content regularly
- Site owners have to keep up with site building technology to stay current
- Most sites are still in static html
- Most sites do not run from a central database on a template driven system
- Site owners have to be “jacks of all trades” to succeed online - not just content providers
On the new web an ideal is taking shape that is going to radically change the way people build online businesses, market them, and profit from them.
Here is the Future…
- Sites will become, more and more, hosted publishing systems
- The hosts will keep up on SEO and marketing technology and keep the system we publish on working at optimal levels for search engine placement
- Some smart SEO firms will become hosting companies as well in order to optimize the technical backend of the publishing systems that get the best results in the engines
- The rest of the SEO industry will fade into obscurity since there won’t be enough demand for SEO work for independent sites
- People will be publishing on technology that is too complicated and too proprietary to give to individual site owners to work with
- But the technology will work so well that people will more and more give up the Wild West do-it-yourself days for better search engine placement and a much more professional presence
- Books and courses that teach “How to get a top 10 ranking in Google” will be obsolete for anyone publishing on a supported network where that training is included and much of the work in this area is done by the publishing system itself and not website owners
- Writers, experts, bloggers, coaches, and product/service marketers will be able to simply focus on content, and post and rank for their content
- Design will be handled by designers on a hosted system, not by site owners who cannot design their way out of a paper bag, thus design and navigation of sites will improve drastically across the web
- Web designers and programmers will begin doing the bulk of their work THROUGH the hosts of these publishing systems rather than individual web site owners
- Hosting companies will pick up on the trend toward “optimized publishing systems” and start including competing products in their service
- Site owners will become content providers, period, with the time to master the art of creating content that drives traffic rather than being responsible for everything else it takes to make a good publishing machine run optimally
People with something important to say and/or sell will simply be able to log on, say it, sell it, and not worry about SEO, design, html, layout, hours of keeping up on techie things each week just to stay current, programming, hiring programmers, and everything else that goes with The Wild West internet today.
The Market
There are far more people in the world with good ideas for sites and products than there are people who understand how to best build and optimize those sites.
People do not want to know HOW fuel injection works on the car they are purchasing. They want to know that it improves performance. They don’t care about the science behind braking systems. They just want the vehicle to stop properly.
Online, most people glaze over when the geeks start talking about RSS, syndication technology, autodiscovery, feeds, plugins, search engine algorithms, Google updates, meta tags, html, shtml, php, java, flash and the hundreds of other components of a successful publishing system.
They simply want to know that the platform they are publishing on works better than anything else for their purposes. The biggest gift anyone could give the average website owner would be the gift of taking all the technical barriers down and putting them on equal footing with established competitors.
People want a system where they “just add content.” They want to post and rank. They don’t want to install anything, program anything, optimize anything, or pay high fees to have those things done for them outside their hosting company.
People want a marketing system that is also optimized. Lead generation, followup, community building and everything else that goes with an optimized on-site marketing system should be plug and play.
What else is going the way of the Dodo?
Geeks will stop trying to sell people on technology and start creating systems where the technology works, but stays out of the way of the publisher.
Geeks will start consulting with each other more rather than trying to teach the world how “cool” their technology is and how it works.
People don’t care how their instant messenger program WORKS. They just WANT it because of what it DOES.
No one cares how Skype does what it does. They just want to make internet phone calls and connect with family and friends.
We on the cutting-edge of technology have to stop trying to force people to learn what we know. People want to build an online business not become expert script installers. People want to know they will be in the search engines for their content, not how they got there or what it will take to get there again.
If people can stop spending thousands, even tens of thousands per year on courses, services, programming, and scripts, they will have enough money to try paid advertising and other marketing that tends to get pushed aside when people follow the old system of “know it all” publishing.
If you have something to say, something to sell, or anything to offer the world on the web, there should be no barriers preventing you from letting the world know.
Will your ideas or products and services make you rich or successful? That’s up to the market. But the market has to be tested and it cannot be properly tested if you are constantly working on every facet of publishing just to get a site up and your content published.
If we take away the barriers to getting on the web and becoming successful in a niche, by creating a powerful publishing “vehicle” for them to drive, far more people will get into web publishing.
This will make for a more diverse and exciting internet experience for everyone when the geeks and highly motivated, over-worked, stressed out do it yourselfers have to compete with great ideas rather than their competition’s search engine optimization skills.
If you want to check out the leader in hosted publishing solutions, you should take a look at what Content Desk is doing to make the ideas expressed here a reality.
Don't
Miss Out On Free Traffic!
Subscribe to the FTR RSS feed
or our
email list so you don't miss out on real, traffic driving tips from Jack
Humphrey! You can also and Follow Me on Twitter! Thanks for visiting!
Related Friday Traffic Report Posts - 7 Blog Promotion Strategies That Work I just finished looking at my stats and thought I would show you where my traffic is coming from and what marketing tactic I used to get it. Below are only the things that produced visitors to my site in the last 48 hours. Nothing theoretical whatsoever....
- How to get banned from the search engines Take this 7.5 step short course on getting banned from the search engines!...
Related Websites - How to get visitors to your site without search engines ?? How will internet work without search engines? I can't imagine the old days of marketing websites without search engines,but probably there were lists of web-servers: they were manually updated and publicized in news updates like this. And then the search engines came crawling, indexing and sorting out pages. As the......
- Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings Your website's ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines....
{ 1 trackback }
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Jack,
Great view into the future. I feel that SEO will be a dodo and that companies will start to close up their web sites and create more sensible funnels using opt-in or other internet marketing techniques.
One segment I am looking at is the software vertical.
I feel that software companies are going to have to adapt or else get eaten by internet marketers, who will soon branch out beyond selling to each other.
If you have any stats on this segment it would be appreciated.
Cheers,
Peter
Jack,
The future you describe is already here!
I published a short article on “Stompernet” using the Content Desk system and I get ranked No.9 on Google the next day.
Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO, Who needs SEO?
Anthony
I think this is very true.
SEO will die and there will be a huge treand towards the
social net to judge how popular a site is. A “authority” content site is the only way to garuntee a future.
-Mark
Here, Here! I second, third and fourth your staements and insight.
It is high time that everyone recognize that there are inherent limitaions with everyone trying to learn everything.
Those of us that spend all of our time creating, learning and teaching cannot possibly cover every topic and thus will teach all that we know to a limited number - Our clients.
I for one, have no interest in publishing any number of ebooks to get someone from who knows where to look at my sites. It is far better for me to concentrate on my core business and give the systems and services to everyone who wants to create their own “mark”. This will allow many more people to enjoy the ability to create a market and stand out from the crowd.
Thank you for your generosity and truly professional insight.
Most Sincerely,
Chris Moos - AdCentsWebs.com
You are absolutely right. Being a non-tech person if I had something to tell or sell I sure don’t want to spend the next 6 months deciding what tools to use. I’d want to find a “one stop shop” that handles all the tech stuff with an easy control panel for me to add my thoughts, products etc. Simplified, blogs proved this and I believe Content Desk is ahead of the curve.