Internet Marketing Advice for 2010

In 2007, internet marketers said 2008 would be different. It was. In 2008, they said the same thing about 2009. And it was. In 2009, they said 2010 would be different. And you know what? It is.

The largest change in 2010 was predicted to be the changes in FTC guidelines.  You know those Acai products that were “$0.99″ and then charged “$49.99″ twice to people’s cards due to a subscription they didn’t, or couldn’t cancel? The guidelines were projected to eliminate those by requiring the companies to state out-right that fees would be charged.

Yet, it’s almost a third of the way through 2010 and those monster companies are still thriving as much as ever. The only thing that has changed, only in part because of the FTC guidelines, is the fact that companies like “Freecreditreport.com” have been forced to state that their services are, unsurprisingly enough, not free and that United States citizens are entitled to a free annual credit report.

As of more recent news, Facebook has recently become the major “target” for internet marketing. If you have an account, you may have been suggested to a few hundred pages involving three steps to get something. This, no matter how much money you could make off of it, is where my internet marketing advice for 2010 starts off. Don’t be stupid and blitzkrieg Facebook with spam. Moreover, don’t spam at all.

The common “moral”, for lack of a better word, that holds in spamming is that “It only hurts image.” Contrary to popular belief, it hurts both the image of whatever you’re promoting and the ability to promote in that same method in the long run.

As a matter of fact, as I write this, I’m sure that the 3-step-blitz is being culled as we speak by Facebook’s developers. So what lesson is there to learn from this? What panacea of internet marketing advice can be tokened away from this? A few things specific to 2010 can be.

1. Start thinking long term. A quick buck is a quick buck, but what good is $8,000 today when you can make a grand total of $0.00 the rest of the year? The “quick answer” is it doesn’t matter, you’ll simply find another way to make money. While it is true that there are literally thousands of ways to make money online, how many have you tried and succeeded with?
2. Stop thinking short term. While this may sound redundantly redundant, stop thinking about the short term. Think about the long term. Start building a name, an image, perhaps even a website. The biggest piece of internet marketing advice that I can give is to at least begin one of the long-term money making strategies that have been outlined here. It doesn’t matter if you work with referrals, membership sites, or even free content that users read. Just do it, at least on the side. You’ll thank yourself for it later when everything else goes to hell in a hand basket.
3. And finally, think about next year. That being said, reflect on the current year as it happens and plan ahead. The people who rank at the top of search engines for some of the busiest terms in the world either watch, read and listen to everything about search engines and business that they can or they have other people that watch, read and listen and who get paid to give them internet marketing advice.

So what’s the moral of this story? Plan ahead and stop looking at today’s quick buck. Tomorrow’s steady stream of income is today’s impossible goal. And today’s impossible goal is ALWAYS preferrable to today’s inevitable screw-up. That, in a nutshell, is my internet marketing advice for 2010.

I have also opened comments on this for everyone to reply with their own internet marketing advice for 2010. I’d love to hear your own personal thoughts and opinions on this.