The Fast Changing World of Internet Marketing

June 5, 2012 in The World Today

This baby bobcat probably doesn't have much to do with internet marketing

By Connor Shirley

Hello everyone! I’m back in Washington, enjoying the fine summer weather (49 and raining) and working hard at my new internship at an online marketing company. So far that has consisted of writing some blog posts and a little bit of basic data entry paired with a whole lot of learning about how companies advertise to specific users. This post is going to go over some of the basic concepts I have picked up lately.

Everything you do is being used to gain marketing information. The websites you visit, how you find them, what things you look at on Facebook; everything. It’s all being used to find people to sell specific goods and services to. It’s like the old practice of selling phone numbers to telemarketing companies, but huge and slightly creepier. Companies can target ads to people only in Arizona, or only in Tucson, or only people who have googled a certain keyword lately. It’s nuts and vaguely Orwellian, but I kinda like it.

The way Google gets search results is changing constantly.  Google is constantly updating its search algorithm. One of the cool things it is doing now is looking at the specific context keywords are used in. It’s not enough to just drop a bunch of phrases into a post or site, it needs to have a context that makes sense and be interacted with by users. Eventually it will advance to the point where we can ask the search engine direct questions and get an answer in a grammatically correct sentence, and then probably SkyNet or something along those lines will occur.

All it takes to start a marketing company is gumption and hell-fire. Alright, maybe there is a certain degree of technical know how involved that is necessary to keep a marketing company afloat, but what is most apparent to me is that the people in this industry are very hard workers and are very self motivated. When Google roll out a new change in the search engine that makes the company lose months of hard work building up traffic, they don’t waste time complainig and instead buckle down trying to figure out a way to game the new Google. It’s pretty cool.

Anyways, I’ll be here most of the summer doing this stuff and continuing to improve my design. If you have any questions about anything related to internet marketing or design, feel free to shoot me an email or leave a message here. Hope everyone is getting some sun, I know I’m not.

This post reflects the author’s personal opinions, not the opinions of Arizona Model United Nations.

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