Advertise Space - Blog Avertising » social marketing

Yup, Google makes billions of dollars off search advertising and there stock price is pretty solid, so why do I think search marketing/advertising is on its way out?  And to clarify, this is for advertising on the search engine itself, not through the millions of publisher sites.

Well, super savvy early adopters don’t use search engines to find great sites and products.   When was the last time that you went to a search engine and looked for a great site or a specific product?  If you answer is, “all the time”, then you don’t fall into the super early adopters category.  

These elites are using their power circles as reference tools, asking friends and their ‘online semi-acquaintances’ for suggestions and referrals and also giving out unsolicited advice in a constant never ending stream.   Just like the best jobs are not listed on job boards or super exclusive restaurants and nightclubs don’t need to advertise or sometimes even have a external facing street sign, power marketing won’t include a search engine component.   The best blogs are not found Googling, they are usually found from referral links or other blogs talking about a great post, and sometimes you just stumble upon them, literally.   Social circles are becoming the new holy grail for advertisers to get in front of.   Personal recommendations from friends and colleagues.   

Gone will be the days of going to Google or Yahoo and typing in ‘graphic designer’, ‘plumber’, ‘compact digital camera’, or Hawaii vacation’.   The savvy are already twittering, twirling, and plurking these questions from their power circle.   And so will you…if you have any friends.

(And kill it at the same time…)

1. Use a services like PayPerPost or sponsored reviews and pay someone to blog positively about your product but don’t worry if the blog is completely off topic to your market.
2. Sign up a bunch of fake alias in multiple forums, answer a few questions, and then start flogging your product to yourself.
3. Create a few splogs loaded with scrapped content and loaded with relevant keywords and then blog about your own product.
4. Spam all of your friends and ask them to Digg and stumble your blog posts daily until you have no friends.
5. Create a FaceBook fan club for your product and invite everyone you know and do weekly updates to everyone even if they didn’t join the group.
6. Offer your product for ‘free’ to prominent bloggers only if they write something nice about you
7. Buy a whole bunch of fake traffic and then put your site up for sale on SitePoint telling everyone how much major traffic you have, then cancel the auction and tell everyone, that you site is way too valuable to sell.

Got any more fun ones?   Add them in the comment field.