It\’s all changed. It happened so fast, we hardly even noticed.
But looking back, it\’s incredible how different everything is today.
When I started out in Internet Marketing, no one had any idea who I was. No one needed to. All they had to do was know where my websites were and enjoy the content I was putting up.
It was impersonal and it worked both ways. My users might only have thought of me (if they thought of me at all) as some publisher who put up interesting stuff for them to read. I could only see them (although I did think of them a lot) as a list of IP addresses on my Web log.
In the days before comments and talkbacks, I had no idea who was reading my content and I could only tell whether they liked it by looking at whether the numbers of page views were going up or down.
Today, I could list many of my readers by name. I might even be able to recognize some of them in the street.
They\’d certainly be able to recognize me.
That\’s what social media has done. I now have 5,000 people connected to me on Facebook, the maximum the site allows. I can see who they are, who their friends are and what they\’re interested in.
More than 6,000 people read my tweets, and again, I can see what they look like, who they\’re following and read what they\’re doing during the day.
I\’ve never had more information about the people I\’m trying to help.
And they\’ve never had more information about me.
In the old days, it was possible for an Internet marketer to be a wallflower. You could hide in your home office and pretend that the Web world was some alternative universe populated by \”users\” rather than real people.
Not anymore! There\’s no hiding today. I don\’t know how anyone can market a website to the max without making use of Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media tools out there.
If you want to make money on the Web, there\’s no other way than to get out here and join the party.
And you know what I\’ve learned in the years I\’ve been doing this?
Change is fun.