It"s the End of the World As We Know It

By the title, you might have assumed that I was talking about a nasty weather front moving in...
well, I'm not a meteorologist.
Actually, as I write this, I can say that I haven't EVER been in a true storm when related to the weather.
Can you believe that while living for four years in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico in Pensacola, I never had an opportunity to experience a hurricane? When I lived in the Northeast, I never got hit with a terrible winter storm, and while living in California I have never experienced a devastating earthquake (nothing even slightly major...
) I think that I'm the antidote to natural disaster.
So if you are living anywhere near me, you might just be pretty safe.
What does this have to do with what I'm talking about? Nothing, but good to know, right? So what am I talking about if not a vicious weather front or natural disaster? Well, I am talking about the advancement of the internet in relation to how business is done.
Think of how far we have come in the last 20 years.
Who really had a web access in 1990? Only a very few select government agencies and scientific research labs, and of course CERN, where the development took place.
Now, there are people with websites whose pets have websites.
What amazes me though as I talk to potential clients is that there are many businesses who do not realize the power that the internet has to offer.
Though some have a website, they haven't optimized it, or they optimized search terms with keywords that are nowhere on their site.
There was a day where it was fine to just have a website, but now there is so much competition that the sites have to be optimized fully - keywords, descriptions, and title have to match content, links have to be built and maintained, social media sited created and updated, blog posts written, and there must be compelling information on the site in order to keep the site visitors attention.
That may seem like a lot to have to maintain for the average business.
Some larger companies employ whole teams to handle the responsibility of site optimization.
Think of having a team on your payroll to handle all of your optimization.
Let's take a median salary of $50,000, and multiply that by a team of 3 - your Search Engine Optimization expert, a Web designer, and a paid search/social media manager - so $150,000/year in salaries, then add in insurance, health, life, vision and dental, and then you have vacation and sick time to take into account.
Oh yeah, don't forget the incidental expenses such as software, hardware, and electricity usage.
So besides being difficult to maintain, there are costs involved as well.
As more and more companies saturate the internet marketing space, there is a great need to be found online.
Fewer and fewer people are going into regular brick and mortar stores, and are shopping more online.
This is an age of instant information, and people want answers immediately.
Whether you run a bakery, insurance agency, or widget company, the online marketplace is where you need to be, and where your competition already is.
What's stopping you from being found online? As the internet continues to grow, and people continue to turn to online resources for information, the next 20 years will show that even as crazy the marketplace is right now, it will pale in comparison when we look back.
by Bryan Kauffmann