A glance into the future of the Internet by Richard Grady

Hi Folks!

A glance into the future of the Internet

As we all know, the Internet changes on an almost daily basis. It is always developing and at times, it can seem impossible to keep up with. From an entrepreneurs point of view this is excellent because every change represents a new opportunity. How many other industries provide you with a new opportunity to earn money every single day?

I wanted to spend a few minutes to talk about how I think the Internet is changing and how it will continue to change in the future. However, I am not talking about over the next five, ten or twenty years - I mean in the next six to twelve months. A year is a very long time online and let's face it; we are interested in what is going to make money today not in 2014 :-)

The biggest change that I see occurring in the next few months is the growth of multi-media. By this, I mean the use of audio and video on websites and within specific products. The technology to allow webmasters to easily integrate audio and video is available and with more and more people getting faster broadband connections, these mediums will only become more common.

Even today, it is not unusual to have audio on sales websites. I don't mean the incredibly annoying music or bleeps that some people still insist on using, no, I mean verbal sales messages from the site owner trying to persuade you to purchase their products. Audio used in this way can be very powerful and many site owners report large increases in sales after adding a short audio introduction to their site. An audio message helps to build confidence and your relationship with your customer and this helps to increase sales.

The use of video is also on the increase, particularly screen capture video. Screen capture is when someone records what they are doing on their computer into a file which someone else can watch on their own computer. This is excellent for training videos because you can see exactly what your tutor is doing even though they could be thousands of miles away. Video files are considerably larger than audio files and as such, a fast connection is required to appreciate this medium to the full but there is no reason why video (and audio) files cannot be copied to a CD-R and posted to a customer.

This brings me to another prediction....

Info-products as we know them will begin to change significantly. Whilst there will still be eBooks, there will be far more training and how-to info-products available in audio and video format. In addition, whilst one of the attractions of selling eBooks is that the product can be delivered instantly with no work on the part of the seller, there will be more and more physical info-products being sold. People like receiving things through the post and are usually willing to pay more for them. A package of five CDs that include audio, video and eBook files, along with a printed manual is far more attractive to the buyer than a single eBook.

If you want to take full advantage of these changes, then you need to be preparing now - consider putting an audio sales message on your site or start that eBook that you have always intended writing but include a few screen capture videos as this will vastly increase the value of your finished product.

Finally, think about this - would you like to have been around when the first eBooks started appearing for sale on the Internet? What a superb opportunity to have been in at the start. Well multi-media IS the next big thing and you are now in at the start....

Your say....

Another readers question now and this week I answer a question for Fred - he actually asked me three questions so I will try and answer the other two in a future edition of the newsletter.

Fred asked me, 'What is the best way to advertise online - I currently only use offline advertising?'

Well, there are many ways of advertising online and each one will vary in terms of how successful it will be for your business and how much it will cost (from free to very expensive!)

If you are already doing some offline advertising I assume that you are paying for this? This being the case, I would assume that you are happy to pay for your online advertising? The reason I make this point is that there are ways of getting free advertising online and many people are only interested in the free ways (for obvious reasons). However, as you might expect, free advertising will usually either yield poor results or will take a long time and a lot of work to start delivering worthwhile results.

Therefore, if you are prepared to pay for your advertising, head over to www.adwords.google.com or www.overture.com and start up a pay-per-click campaign. This will allow you to advertise your business on some of the main search engines based on users searching for a specific keyword/s (which you choose). Each time a surfer clicks on your ad, you pay a fixed amount (the amount you pay depends on how popular the keyword is but can be as low as five cents).

This method of advertising is very simple and effective and you will see almost instant results. Just be aware that this can get expensive if you are bidding on popular keywords so do keep an eye on your expenditure.

Thanks for the question Fred - I will do my best to answer your other two questions shortly. :-)

Until next time....

Richard Grady