Facebook Marketing 2010

Aren’t you glad that the social networking sites are making it more difficult for marketers to use stealth tactics to market to (and spam) its members? Even if it’s fruitful for you, it never makes you feel good to deceive customers and annoy the masses.

In 2009, Facebook really took off, replacing MySpace as the marketer’s adult web 2.0 playground of choice. There were some drawbacks, though. You had people complaining that their friends were only talking about business opportunities – and some complaining that they didn’t care to know the personal aspects of their friends lives because they were there to conduct business.

Many marketers decided to clean their friends’ list and open fan pages instead – reserving their official Facebook profile for close friends and family only. Facebook has a lot to ensure their income continues to soar with this influx of non-college students.

Their estimated revenue for the year 2010 is over $710 million. They’ve grown to over 350 million members and that number will continue to soar. While it’s traditionally been a closed site, Facebook is now working to connect its own member content across the World Wide Wide, enabling members to share on their own websites or blogs via Facebook connect.

Facebook will continue to lead the social networking scene when it comes to globalization. It started with a nifty translator that enables you to participate on the site in more than 70 different languages.

One thing is for sure. Facebook’s going to have to find a way to help its members avoid spam. Right now, anyone can send you a message without even having you confirm them as a friend.

That means you’ll get all sorts of spam content – from the long lost relative with the same last name who wants you to pay her $14,000 so she can transfer $1.4 million into your account to the cutesy women who want to chat with you, big boy!

Users of Facebook will be hyper-sensitive to any changes the site makes in regards to the privacy of their content, after 2009’s fiasco of announcing they officially owned your content and then going back on that statement to put out all of the fires that started.

Advertising is rampant on the site, so more marketers will be looking for ways to pay to play there. Right now you can run an AdWords-like campaign on Facebook, targeting individuals by age, location and more. Then you create an ad, choose PPC or pay per impression and track your conversions. Competition for 2010 may heat up, so learn to tweak your campaigns early on.

Will Twitter Traffic Become More Targeted in 2010?

Twitter rose from the lowly ranks of new microblogging social networking sites swiftly. Some say an entire Presidential campaign was won partially off the viral nature of this site – but regardless of whether or not you believe that, there’s no denying it can be a very powerful method of reaching a large audience.

The problem to date has been to determine just how to single out the right people to communicate with. With the implementation of robots to add friends or auto-follow people, you never knew if those who reciprocated your follow were even interested in your products or services that you market online.

In 2009, Internet marketers learned how to get traffic to their domains, blog, Squidoo lenses and forums simply by devising a potent Tweet and sending it out to the web-o-sphere.

They learned how to personalize their Twitter profile page, including product images, tag lines, and hyperlinks to important sites. Some lucky users were grandfathered with the ability to have an animated avatar (which catches many eyes) before Twitter nixed it to the masses.

Just before the end of the year, the site created a Beta test version of list options, that supposedly wasn’t available to everyone using the site. With lists, you’re able to take the people who you’re following and categorize them, allowing you to read the Tweets of one particular group at a time rather than wade through hundreds or thousands of Tweets that might just be a courtesy follow instead of a true interest.

Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, is going to help marketers out by allowing you to open a business account for the year 2010. It will be a paid version of the site, but you’ll get perks such as analytic tools to help you focus your message more precisely.

You can’t blame Twitter. It must be horrible to have developed such a powerful social networking site that’s become a household name and still not be profitable. That’s the primary goal of Twitter in 2010 – to make acquisitions of developments that help them make revenue for the site. As marketers, we’ll be paying the bill for things we use, but hopefully well be reaping the rewards and our ROI (return on investment) will make it well worth it.

Another 2010 forecast is that your Tweets will soon be indexed in real time on both Google and Bing. As any marketer can tell you, this is wonderful for those who are marketing trend products and services and want to defeat their competition using effective keyword-laced Tweets that result in decent conversions.

Trending Topics for 2010 Info Product Pursuits

There are always certain topics that remain the same in nature and some that evolve from year to year (even faster in many instances). If you enter a niche where trend spotting is important, then that’s a skill you need to learn how to master.

For example, if you were to write an eBook about the grieving process when a loved one dies, you could get away with writing an eBook that pretty much didn’t change from year to year (unless there was some new mind-blowing process someone came out with). Dog training is another similar niche – dogs aren’t changing, so training them pretty much remains consistent over the years.

But if you are in a niche about fashion, Internet marketing, finances, or technology, then you’d better stay abreast of several things – consumer needs, wants and demands and marketplace developments that create selling opportunities for you.

Let’s take finances as an example first. Consumers are going through a disastrous economical crunch right now. They need, want and demand money savers. Your info product could teach a wide variety of things.

When gas prices hit the roof, a ton of eBooks about saving on gas were flooded into the marketplace, but what else happened? Technology developers created tools to help convert water into gas and stretch the gas out. Those who were early on this trend made a lot of money with it.

In 2010, consumers will continue to need cost cutting advice. We’re not out of the recession yet. They’ll also need advice on how to find or keep a job, since unemployment is very high going into the New Year. Work at home topics will be highly sought after for those who want to save on daycare and commuting costs, or those who weren’t able to find a job the traditional way.

Mobile networks will become even more popular in 2010. Cell phones, social networking from your mobile gadget – all are on the horizon of becoming mainstream, where grandma has a Motorola Droid and she’s Tweeting at her grandchildren’s recital. Even your gadgets will have gadgets developed for them. Cell phones are going to have boosters – if you only get 1 bar in a certain area, you can use a gadget that boosts you by 3 more bars.

In the gaming niche, video games will almost make handheld clunky controllers a thing of the past – developers are coming out with games that are controlled more by the movements of your own body.

You’ll need to determine if your own niche has trending possibilities and create a forecast based on some market research that you conduct with keywords and a little investigative spying on what manufacturers or experts are predicting.

ClickBank Changes for the Year 2010

Expect more competition both as a product creator and an affiliate marketer on ClickBank. While this prediction might make you squirm a bit, consider it a beneficial forecast. A thriving marketplace attracts more consumers.

ClickBank just introduced three tutorial videos to help bring on German, French and Spanish speaking sellers and affiliates. This will help widen the global audience and your potential for sales.

They will be doing more handholding for the masses, training product creators to stay above the board and not spam or do unethical things, and training affiliates to utilize tools to make more sales.

For example, in a recent ClickBank blog post, they even advised affiliates to use PLR to help promote ClickBank products. That’s a positive thing for marketers, because many online companies frown on PLR, not understanding its ability in the marketplace.

ClickBank is going to continue cracking down on vendors. Many topics are already being declined from the list in 2009, and you can expect them to continue weeding out topics in the coming year.

They’ve recently shut down topics such as credit repair, marketing through social networks, multi level marketing memberships, and more. You’re unable to submit topics in these categories at all and they will not review your product for you.

ClickBank plans to ensure its vendors are in compliance with the FTC regulations – especially if you’re using the Vendor Spotlight feature. They don’t tell you what’s wrong, just that you’re not in compliance – and they direct you to the FTC’s website so you can investigate the rules yourself.

The site has also begun expending its marketplace categories, and probably will widen it more as the number of vendors and affiliates grow. You may have noticed, if you already have a product there, that when you log into your account, you’re told of your new category and subcategory – and given a chance to dispute it if you wish to do so.

Some people complain about the ClickBank marketplace, preferring instead to use another form of affiliate marketing like PayDotCom. But for those who want to cover all bases and have their products promoted by a large number of affiliates (or want to have a large number of products to promote as an affiliate), it’s best to just stay abreast of the ClickBank rules as they’re announced, which means staying tuned into their blog.

Video Marketing Gets Easier in 2010

Internet marketers have been buzzing about their plans for 2010. What did they need to learn? What tools did they want to invest in? Video marketing was the top topic for so many people hoping to edge out the competition, and with good reason. It conveys professionalism and personalization all in one.

There are a lot of tasks you have to learn in this industry and it can get overwhelming trying to decide which to focus on and which to ignore. You need to know how to conduct niche and keyword research, how to set up an email marketing campaign, how to cash in on social networking.

Video marketing is just one more important component of your online strategy. It’s powerful. But to date, only top marketers who had the money for tools and the technical savvy to master them had been riding this wave of success.

In 2010, every marketer will be searching for video marketing methods that help them dominate in their niche. Because of increased demand, developers have been working on tools that help the average consumer.

Video marketing will help you brand your company in a positive and professional (not to mention cutting edge) slant. It helps you highlight the benefits of your products and services. It increases the stickiness of your site, which is how long your visitors stay on your domain. And it also help you connect to your audience for sales conversions and instructional tutorials.

Some marketers have yet to invest in their copy of Camtasia. Editing video was deemed too hard. But there are free tools like Camtasia Studio that can help you get started and get comfortable before immersing yourself into more complex recordings.

You can even invest in simple point and click technology where you aim, click the button to record and stop, and upload it online via your USB port. You can do this with a Flip Video Camera.

In 2010, there will be more tools dedicated to helping marketers use video marketing as an SEO support system. Video advertising will be one of the increasingly used media formats in the social networking world, too.

Not only will your target audience be seeing a video played automatically on sites like Facebook, but there will be mobile video advertising, too. It’s not too late, but you want to educate yourself ASAP about this form of marketing so you won’t be behind the times when it comes to capturing the attention of your consumer base.

SEO Predictions for 2010 – How Much Will Change for You?

Don’t you hate it when you spend a lot of money on how to guides, memberships and tools helping you with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts, only to find out everything’s changing for the coming year?

It happens to everyone and some marketers can roll with the changes with ease, while others struggle to keep up. If you look to the future, it can help you predict how things might change so you can head off the SEO lag time most marketers will experience and stay one step ahead of the competition.

The biggest change you’re going to notice is that things are evolving into real time. Keywords, indexing – it’s going to be updated quicker than in the past, so you won’t be able to rest on your laurels enjoying a top spot in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and likewise, you’ll have ample opportunity to move up in the ranks if you pay attention closely.

In 2010, you’re going to see Google working on ways to combine real time results (which basically means the last one to mention something, if it’s indexed, will be shown) with relevancy, which was Google’s biggest beef with websites that were using keywords to trick searchers in the first place!

Real time search doesn’t replace regular SEO page results, though. It’s integrated into the SERPs so that you have the option of choosing the latest results or the pages. So you’ll be able to capitalize on both options as a marketer.

All of the regular SEO tactics will stay the same. You’ll want to post frequently on your website or blog. You’ll want to use relevant keyword phrases without stuffing them into it so that it reads awkwardly.

Backlinks from the right kind of relevant sites will be to your benefit, while so-called bad neighborhoods will still damage your reputation with Google. It’s expected that businesses – both online and offline – will be increasing their spending to SEO experts and investing in SEO tools to help them either boost or maintain their position in the search engines.

You can be a self-taught SEO expert just by educating yourself about what tactics are allowed (and which are frowned upon) and tracking and tweaking your methods so get the best traffic results.