Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Internet Marketing in the 2010s -- The Rise of the Little Guy in Blogging
It used to take years of working your way up the corporate ladder and developing serious social connections to achieve a position of influence in whatever field you wanted to influence. Today, all you need is an Internet connection and a solid understanding of how to market yourself there.

Many bloggers have risen from obscurity to positions of great influence in their market. That only stands to increase in the next decade.

News bloggers whom the big media companies once considered eccentric cranks now erode listeners away from the big behemoths. Similarly, big companies outside the news industry have felt the effect of a negative comment from popular bloggers. "Little guys" have shown themselves fully capable of bypassing the old power structures to have massive influence through their blogs.

That's not to say that anyone and everyone who starts a blog will automatically exert great influence on the world around them. You still need a solid understanding of how to find, attract, and engage an interested market to have any chance to rise to a position of influence in whatever field you have a passion for.

Even getting that understanding of marketing no longer is a big obstacle anymore, though. You don't have to go through the old power structures to get it. You just need to get it online and put it to work for you in building your business.

How can you take advantage of this opportunity? A quirky little blog called John Cow.com offers a free ebook that walks you, step by step, through the process that they have used to build their profits and their influence as bloggers in a number of different niches.

They walk you through all the steps from how to determine whether the niche you're eyeing even has potential for profit, through building your site, through promoting it successfully. It helps you build a profitable blog and an influential position for yourself. And it does all this for free.

In short, you don't have to be one of the "big guys" to have influence in whatever niche you have a passion for. All you have to do is use your passion -- and a bit of marketing know-how -- to build your own audience and become a recognizable name to them. In doing so, you can become a mover and shaker in that field.

I won't lie to you. You don't reach a position of influence overnight. You'll need your passion to motivate you to make the effort it will take to build that position of influence. If you're willing to make that effort, though, the opportunity is there.

Many people bemoan the fact that they didn't get in on the Internet riches when it first started. Those people miss an important fact. The opportunities are still right there.

In many ways, the opportunities are even greater than they were fifteen years ago. The Internet has spurred the development of many tools that didn't exist back then.

Those tools now give anyone the chance to leap past the gatekeepers that used to hold "the little guy" out of any chance of grabbing the limelight. You can use tools, like blogging and the print-on-demand capabilities that I described yesterday, to do things that would have been impossible for you to do in the "Wild West" days of the Internet.

Take advantage of the opportunities that this upcoming decade offers. Those opportunities make it possible for you rise to a real position of influence in the decade to come.
Jeff

Labels: blogging, marketing, predictions