Do you ever wonder why some internet marketers “suck” and other “lucky” ones become multi-bazzilionaires?

Well I figured out the amazing secret formula… (ok…. maybe a bit tongue-in-cheek but hopefully you’ll get my point)

The most successful marketers Pick Their Niche Markets Carefully and Methodically.

What I mean is, they usually don’t go into a market unless they know (ok…. nothing in 100% but the odds are stacked heavily in their favor) they can make money and most of the research is finding the right niche.

There are numerous benefits to finding a niche versus marketing to a large market (markets are too broad…. you will waste time and money in a “market” as opposed to a niche). Not the least of which is finding “buyers” rather than “tire kickers”.

So…what is a niche?

A niche is a specific group of people inside a larger general market which you can market very specific products to.

An example of a large market is: “Diets” or “Weight Loss”.

If you would try to market to these general markets chances are you would get a bunch of tire kickers and make no money. Why? because the market isn’t specific enough to attract buyers.

An example of a niche market within that group is: “Moms who want to lose weight after pregnancy”

Now we are getting somewhere. Can you see the difference in these two groups?

By targeting a small and very specific group of people you get to know your market inside out. This means that you’ll know what they need, what they respond to and what makes them tick. This is difficult to do when you’re trying to be all things to all people. Plus, if you are marketing to Moms who want to lose weight after pregnancy it is easier to identify specific problems that you can create a solution for.

By targeting a small niche market it’s also easier to gain expert status. If all your marketing is focused on one very specific group and their needs you’ll gain trust and expert status within that group very quickly.

Soon, you’ll become the trusted go to expert on that one topic. Once you put yourself in that position your marketing becomes effortless. People recommend you to others and when you have something to sell people will trust the quality of that product and want to buy it – without a lot of effort on your part.

Niche marketing also means more specific keywords and keyword phrases for your website. These are called “buying keywords” because people who type them in are more likely to be looking to buy.

Think of it this way. If you were looking for a camera and you just typed in “camera” into Google do you think you would more than likely purchase something from the results that came back? Probably not…. because they are too vague.

On the other hand…. if you typed in “white mino flip video recorder hd” do you think you might purchase from the results that came back…… oh yea! Cause these are exactly what you are looking for…. see the difference?

Plus search engines love specific niche sites with quality information. By targeting a niche market you can really dominate the search engine traffic results for that niche.

This means more website visitors, more customers, more trust and eventually more money.

It’s hard to be all things to all people. You’ll never get the balance right and someone will always be unhappy. While niche marketing doesn’t assure you won’t have unhappy customers at some point you definitely minimize the risks.

Not only that but you increase the odds of building a highly profitable online business and becoming a bazillionaire.

Sean Cook is CEO of ShopVisible LLC. With more than 11 years of experience in online marketing, management and new technology innovation, Cook translates ShopVisible’s premier e-commerce platform solution into bottom line results for clients.

Social ecommerce is becoming more and more important on networks like Facebook. More than another “new frontier,” it is attracting innovative marketers that are taking advantage of new technologies and responding to their consumers.

Working with fans to create unique shopping and sharing opportunities empowers the kind of viral experiences that were fundamental to Facebook’s own rapid growth and consumer engagement.

But how can you maximize the social network to close sales for your own business? Here are five tips to help you design a Facebook presence that makes buying your products more desirable and easy.

1. Make it Unique

Your Facebook store should be different from your main website. The key is offering fans an engaging experience that makes sense within the environment. You can’t just put a shopping cart in Facebook and expect people to use it. Give your consumers a reason to become fans and give your fans a reason to purchase on Facebook. Consider offering exclusive merchandise available only on Facebook or making products available before you can find them in stores.

2. Encourage Collaboration

Facebook is the perfect environment to create a compelling and collaborative buying experience. People love sharing on Facebook — it’s what the space is built for. Letting people share this information is a great example of how retailers can join the conversation in a relevant way.

Retailers who harness the potential of comments, likes and shares will empower messages to go viral. Facebook makes it easy for your fans to share deals and purchases. Offering incentives, loyalty programs, checkin capabilities and other word-of-mouth generators will not only spread your reach further but give your fans a reason to purchase on your Facebook Page. The retailers who offer wish lists, collaborative shopping experiences and incentivized sharing on Facebook will likely see a surge in traffic and sales.

3. Create an Exclusive VIP Experience

We know from the success of companies like Gilt Groupe that people like to be “in the know” and they like to invite others to join the club. Let your Facebook fans be first in line to access new merchandise, limited edition pieces and products that are only available to them through Facebook. Your fans are more apt to share their limited-access purchase with other fans. This builds buzz for hard-to-get products and prompts Facebook users to become fans to get involved.

4. Privacy and Security are Paramount

Facebook stores that immediately ask permission to access personal data are a major deterrent for all consumers, especially those who are simply looking to browse. Offer an experience that doesn’t require fans and consumers to install an application. Consumers are wary of their personal data being tracked, so if you do require an application installation, specify what information you are going to access and what you’re going to do with it.

People like familiarity, especially when it comes to their financial data. Offering familiar alternative payment methods like PayPal or Amazon checkout will extend greater buying confidence. Make sure that consumers know you maintain the highest security during the checkout process. Make sure you only use technology partners that maintain PCI Level 1 compliance — it’s the right thing to do.

5. Make it Easy to Navigate and Work

Don’t want to lose your customer? Make sure your Facebook store is easy and intuitive to navigate. Consumers shouldn’t endure more than two to three clicks to find the product they’re looking for. Facebook recently introduced customizable navigation links on the left side of the page. Retailers can use these links to provide their customers with quick links to their top product categories. It’s also crucial to offer search capability within your Facebook store. Implementing a search bar that also offers predictive text allows a customer to get directly to the item they’re searching for.

Your website is not the community, and Facebook is not your company site. Don’t just copy and paste between the two. There is a reason why Facebook is unique — it is a community for sharing, collaborating, being the first to know, and much more. Give your fans something of value and make it fun, and they’ll reward you by telling everyone they know.

Social media isn’t only about news, opinion and commentary. It’s also a potentially profitable form of raw data, at least if you ask Wall Street.

Many on Wall Street think they can use social media networks to reliably predict how the markets for their investments will trend. One London-based investment manager says it will launch a fund dedicated entirely to using Twitter for investment decisions. The fund, managed by Derwent Capital Markets, has colloquially become known as “the Twitter hedge fund” among some Wall Street insiders. Although the launch has been perpetually delayed, it has an estimated $100 million in capital.

Wall Street’s interest in using social networks is far-reaching. Many other social media platforms are receiving attention from investment managers who are searching for the next edge; looking to slice and dice content from social networks to arrive at meaningful conclusions. They are not traditional Wall Street personalities. They’re not personalities at all. Instead, they’re computer-driven algorithms designed to buy and sell massive volumes of stocks, bonds, options, and other financial instruments on their own. Don’t think Gordon Gekko. Think Watson, but for high finance instead of Jeopardy!

This investment philosophy isn’t platform-centric as much as it’s content-needy. Wall Street doesn’t care which platforms users are on, only that social media continues to be a goldmine for content to analyze. There are three primary reasons why this is happening now.

Social Media and Trading: Three Connections

Despite coming into prominence in the mid-1980s, this type of computer-driven trading –- now termed “high-frequency trading” in industry parlance -– generally receives little attention from the mainstream business press. In 2009, it broke into the news, with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal among the outlets that published articles meant to explain the technology to a mainstream audience.

The relationship between social media and this kind of trading goes something like this:

• Today, computers make most trading decisions. Some estimate that between 46 and 73% of equity trading volumes in the U.S. are made by these high-frequency systems, which are designed to use computer speed and processing power to crunch massive amounts of data and seek small profits on enormous trading volume. A system that can reliably make a few cents per trade on hundreds of thousands of trades per day is quite valuable to a firm.
• Social networks have unique qualities that make them particularly well-suited for the machines that now dominate Wall Street. The sheer amount of content produced on social networks is enormous and continues to grow. The content production itself is a voluntary act. Even the ways with which social networks interact with one another –- the so-called semantic web -– make content production across multiple networks extremely quick. And of course most social media content is public at some level, especially when a carefully programmed algorithm is doing the searching.
• Other competitive advantages are going away. This growing enthusiasm for social content isn’t so much borne from newness as it is from necessity. As the BBC recently reported, the speed at which high-frequency trading can function is approaching its physical limitation. Speed is a competitive advantage for these platforms but it’s quickly becoming ubiquitous. If and when speed –- called “low-latency connectivity” -– is further commoditized, firms will require a new way to get a leg up on the competition.

These three realities have conspired to create demand for new ways to parse out conclusions from content on social media platforms. Having reliable sets of information -– Wall Street tends to call information “data points” or “market data” –- is centrally important to high-frequency trading platforms. Experimentation in sourcing information from social networks is rising rapidly.

These initiatives are certainly impressive. But they should also raise some eyebrows.

Where Trading Via Social Data May Fall Flat

It should shock no one to learn that these sophisticated models sometimes make mistakes. Recent history is wrought with examples of algorithm-driven trading gone awry, from the shocking collapse of a large hedge fund in the late ’90s to several high-profile market failures in more recent years and probably scores of horrifying details that have gone unreleased.

The problems ironically begin with the very human tendency to jump to conclusions. Paul Rowady, senior analyst with consultancy Tabb Group, says that high-frequency trading platforms can use social media data as trading indicators, either supporting or rejecting an existing hypothesis.

However, it would become problematic, he said, for a trading platform to mistake a trading indicator for a trading signal. Differentiating between indicator and signal is important. Indicators are derived from raw market-related data, such as content on social networks, and serve as inputs to models. Signals, usually based on multiple indicators, are the output of those models and eventually become orders to buy or sell financial instruments.

Wall Street calls the mathematicians and engineers who develop these models “quants,” short for quantitative analysts. They program the models that turn multiple indicators into a specific order.

“Social media can play a role in the form of trading indicators, but at this stage, not in the form of pure trading signals,” he said. “The signal-to-noise ratio for that dataset is simply way too low.”

Figuring out how to determine if a set of social media data is good news or bad news for a particular stock or trade is also problematic. It’s easy enough, said Rowady, to use social networks to capture which stocks will move on abnormally high volume in a given day. Reliably establishing whether they will move higher or lower, however, is another matter entirely.

“You can say, ‘There’s a headline on this ticker, so volatility is going to go up.’ But as to the bias of that volatility, is [the price] going to go up or down? That’s a much harder problem to solve,” he said.

Rowady is referring to the difficulty of measuring negative sentiment on a social network, a familiar barrier for many other industries grappling with social media analytics. Users don’t frequently un-like something on Facebook, and using Twitter to complain about negative consumer experiences is dependent on that user’s personality, not the platform’s architecture.

Where are these blind spots, and how should high-frequency trading platforms treat them? How do algorithms find patterns in language used across the social media sphere while at the same time controlling for false-positives? Those are a few of the questions that are keeping Wall Street from mastering the use of social media to inform high-frequency trading strategies.

Social Content is Unlike Business News

It is incorrect to assume that social media content is similar to breaking business news, which Wall Street has long depended on for trading-related information. Business news, of course, is generally filtered by editors and varying levels of fact-checking, and its impact on the markets is dampened by news cycles and copy deadlines. Generally, everyone gets access to breaking business news at the same time, which is entirely by design. Business news is also reliable in all but the very occasional instance -– a news outlet may report a hoax as fact once in awhile, but the press gets it right far more often than not.

On social networks, content is oftentimes published with little to no editorial standards, and the flow of content is constant. Social networks can disrupt, complement, reinforce, or inform the traditional news cycle, but they do not replace it. Any trading algorithm that replaces news feeds with social content or co-mingles the two is inherently faulty.

Going a step further, it would be fairly straightforward to use fraudulent content to manipulate high-frequency trading platforms that misuse social media data. That’s one reason why the Derwent fund set to launch using Twitter is routinely met with skepticism among some Wall Street insiders.

Realistic Expectations for the Future

For Wall Streeters, however, there are a few reasons to be excited about social media’s potential utility, despite the occasional red flag.

Because social media is a global phenomenon, capturing sentiment in hard-to-reach markets could become easier. Some of these markets don’t have established mainstream press — or, if they do, the press may be censored -– making the technical difference between “real” news and social content immaterial to the strategy.

Certain algorithms can also analyze words in a language-neutral manner. The contextual advertising industry is currently making strides in using multilingual or language-agnostic technology to deploy paid content, and the financial markets probably won’t lag far behind.

Perhaps the biggest potential lies with social media’s ability to reinforce or refute certain signals that ultimately lead to trading decisions. It’s akin to a friend giving the final arm-twist that drives you to order ice cream for dessert, or a helpful mentor saying you probably shouldn’t make that one decision. Social media wouldn’t be an adequate determinant by itself. But paired with all the other available information, it could nudge a set of observations into an actual decision.

If Wall Street ends up using social networks for this purpose, it would represent a shift in the role of automated and high-frequency trading and potentially earn a role for social media in the market.

Interested in more Business & Finance resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.

The Social Media 101 Series is sponsored by Global Strategic Management Institute. GSMI’s Social Media Strategies Series are the leading educational events for organizations looking to advance their online capabilities. Learn more.

There are more than 8 million users on Foursquare — up from just 1 million a year ago. This explosive growth means one thing — you might want to get your business on Foursquare. After all, Radio Shack reported that the average Foursquare user spends 3.5 times more at its retail shops than the average customer.

The most recent iteration of the location-based app, Foursquare 3.0, expanded the features and made it much easier for businesses to jump on the bandwagon and start marketing. Best of all, it’s free. Foursquare is winning the location-based app game because it has the biggest user base [aside from Facebook Places] and it pleases both parties — customers want to be recognized, and businesses want to know who their biggest fans are. Mashable spoke with Eric Friedman, Foursquare’s director of business development, about how businesses can get started on Foursquare and the various marketing options they have available to them.

“Foursquare works well when a moment of commerce happens,” says Friedman. And commerce is exactly what business owners are looking for. Plus, as smartphones penetrate the U.S market (currently, about a third of U.S. consumers have a smartphone), there will be even more Foursquare users.

“We’re on every single platform that’s out there, so there’s never been a better time for businesses to start using Foursquare,” Friedman says. “There’s no cost, it’s easy and it works.”

Want to get started? Below, Friedman walks Mashable through all of the steps.

Brands With Brick-and-Mortar Locations

“[Small businesses] have the same resources available to them as a super large QSR, an Italian restaurant or a Starbucks, and that’s a really powerful tool,” says Friedman. He’s referring to the Foursquare for Business Merchant Platform, which creates an even playing field for restaurants, retail stores, museums, mom-and-pop shops and other businesses. The owners can claim venues on Foursquare, establish specials and analyze data on Foursquare’s dashboard. Here’s how to do it.

Claim Your Venue

To claim your venue, search for it on Foursquare.com. It’s likely that someone has already created your venue to check into it, and you can claim it by proving that you own it. If you can’t find it or you are opening a new venue, click “Add a new venue to Foursquare,” which is at the bottom of the page. Fill out the information in the wizard. Once all the information is plugged in, your venue page will come up. Click “Claim here” on the venue page.

Foursquare will ask you a few questions about the business (i.e. “Is this a chain?”) and whether you are authorized to claim the venue. Then it will ask how you’d like to verify your ownership — either by phone or by mail. If you verify by phone, Foursquare will call you and provide a 4-digit PIN that you can enter on the site. If you opt to verify by mail, the PIN will be sent via postcard. Once you’re verified, you will also receive a Foursquare window cling so customers know you are a Foursquare-friendly establishment. (Fear not, efficiency lovers: If you have numerous locations, you can verify in bulk.)

Adding Specials

Once you’re verified as the owner of a location, you can use Foursquare’s Merchant Platform to create specials to reward your customers. The method for creating specials is pretty self-explanatory, and the wizard walks you through each step as you create your special. You can have two specials running simultaneously at a given location. Foursquare 3.0 introduced a new group of specials:

• Swarm Special. A special is unlocked when a certain number of people are checked in. For example, an ice cream store can give away a free scoop of ice cream when 10 people are checked in at once. You can set a limit for how frequently this special can be unlocked so that you don’t give away too much product.
• Friends Special. A reward for when friends check in together. You can specify how many friends need to be checked in and what they receive for being checked in.
• Flash Special. A special for the first X people who come at X time. It’s great way to incentivize customers to stop by during your slow hours.
• Newbie Special. A reward for people who check in to your business for the first time. Offering a reward for a user’s first checkin — even if it’s a small one, like 10% off or a free side dish — is a great way to start a relationship with a new customer.
• Check-In Special. A reward for every single checkin. Restaurants can offer a free soda or a discount, while retailers might offer a few dollars off a purchase.
• Loyalty Special. A reward for a user’s third, fifth, seventh checkin — you determine the interval — to incentivize customers to return a few times to cash in on their special. Loyalty specials can be recurring (“every three checkins”) or not (“on your third checkin”).
• Mayor Special. The mayor is the person who has checked into a venue more than anyone else. In theory, he is your best and most loyal customer. As such, he deserves a prize, whether it’s a discount, a free t-shirt, a beer or a meal on the house. Mayors tend to be proud and protective of their mayorship, and you might even see some turf wars when the mayorship changes hands. You can offer something whenever a new mayor earns the crown, or you can offer a daily reward for the mayor.

Now that you’ve seen the offerings, click the special you’d like to do and fill in the requirements for unlocking the special. Once you finish entering the stipulations and select what venues will feature the special, it will be live (though it won’t show in the “Nearby Specials” filter until a human verifies that the special is legitimate). There are two one-sheets you can print off to explain Foursquare — one for employees, so they know how to recognize a special, and one for customers, so they know how to get in on the Foursquare action.

Dashboard Analytics

Once you’ve claimed a venue, you can access a dashboard of analytics that show how many checkins you’re getting each day, the time of each checkin, as well as a breakdown of the genders and ages of your Foursquare customers. Plus, there are two lists: one of your top visitors in the past 60 days (your most loyal customers), and one of your most recent customers, along with their Twitter handles (so long as they provided that info when they logged into Foursquare). In my experience, only about 25% of people push their Foursquare checkins to Facebook and Twitter, so having access to the Twitter handles of loyal and new customers provides businesses with an opportunity to reach out, follow up and see how a customer’s experience was. That personal touch is likely to bring customers back, and it may also turn that person into an evangelist for your business.

Also, remember that Foursquare is flexible, and you can make changes in real-time. You can run two specials simultaneously at each venue, so experiment and figure out what works for you and your business. With the right campaign, you could actually be saving money — Friedman says several business have stopped advertising altogether, since Foursquare allows them to reach customers for free.

Brand Pages

But not every business has a brick-and-mortar location — look at MTV and Zagat, for example. If your company is a brand without a physical presence — a magazine, a TV channel, a university of a consumer packaged good — you can use Foursquare Pages and Partner Badges to reach consumers.

Foursquare Pages are “a place for brands to have a program and have a cool way to interact with consumers,” Friedman says. The Foursquare website outlines a step-by-step process for setting up a Foursquare Page, which must be done manually (in the future, businesses will be able to create their own brand Pages). Business owners must submit a form; the Foursquare team will reply in about two weeks.

Your Page is highly customizable, and you can have a custom banner to incorporate your logo. The grey box on the right can be populated with information about your brand, along with links back to your own site or to social media sites. And of course there are tips you can leave for your followers so that when they check in to certain places, your tip pops up. The History Channel leaves factoids all over the country at places like New York’s Highline and London’s Tower Bridge, which provide context as you traverse the city. Likewise, Zagat leaves restaurant tips for dishes and cocktails.

Tips can be timeless, or they can be geared to promote an event. For example, The New York Times left tips all over Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics. Tips can be saved to a user’s to-do list, too. The Foursquare site points out tips for crafting good tips:

• Tips can direct people to a certain place or instruct users to try a certain item. The point of Foursquare is to enhance someone’s experience in a location — if you have some insights, share them.
• Don’t leave a tip that is obvious — try to share insider information, a secret menu item or a fun tidbit

Brand Badges

Once a brand has a Page, it can also offer badges for Foursquare users. Of course, Foursquare has its own badges that users love unlocking, including:

• Crunked. Four stops in one night.
• Photogenic. Checking in to three places with a photo booth.
• Swarm. Checking in to a place with 50 other people.

But the brand badges are more self-promotional, and they’re unlocked for checking in to places and doing fun things that are relevant to your brand. (Foursquare doesn’t disclose individual badge prices, which can vary, but “$25,000 a month with a multi-month commitment” is typical.) Users must “follow” a brand on Foursquare to unlock badges, some of which include:

• MOMA — Art Addict. Three checkins at MOMA or PS1 in one month.
• The Wall Street Journal — WSJ Lunch Box. Two checkins during lunch at a restaurant that’s been reviewed in WSJ’s “Lunch Box” column.
• Gogo Inflight — Mile High. One checkin while in flight.

New York Magazine recently did a Foursquare integration with its “Where to Eat 2011″ feature. Below each highlighted restaurant, users could add a restaurant tip to their to-do lists. Checking in to 5 of the restaurants in the list earns a user the Where to Eat 2011 badge, which could also unlock discounts and prizes at these restaurants.

Advice From Foursquare

Friedman has some tips for businesses about how to optimize Foursquare:

• The best kind of Foursquare specials are those that make users feel, well, special. You don’t need to give a discount and lose your margins. Offering exclusive access to a sample sale or a special dessert that is only available for Foursquare users is a great way to get people coming back and checking in. Plus, not offering discounts means you can attract and maintain customers without affecting your bottom line.
• Remember to utilize the fine print when you’re filling out your special.
• Use Foursquare to grow your business — run a special during your slow times to keep a steady flow of customers all day.
• Make sure you train your staff on how to recognize and reward Foursquare users.
• Remember to set an end date for a campaign if it’s a limited-time offer or a one-day special.

“We try to give all the answers on Foursquare,” says Friedman, but if you have questions, leave them in the comments. Also, if you’re a business owner, tell us what your experience with Foursquare has been like.

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We’ve already seen signs of it — targeted ads on Facebook, suggested people to follow on Twitter, even Google Instant seems to know what you’re thinking — but how is behavioral targeting changing the Internet at large?

Here’s how behavioral targeting works: Targeting companies establish an agreement with a publisher, who puts a piece of code on his website. (That publisher must have a clearly stated policy for the consumer to opt out from having data collected.) Then, when you’re browsing the web, the site will put a cookie on your browser, which populates as you surf. (Though one interviewee, ContextWeb, targets based on content and not cookies.)

Now that your browser has a cookie, the targeting begins. Data points amass as you click your way from site to site, taking note of what you buy, what you read and what you search for. The more time goes on, the more data is collected. Back in 2003, we had audience targeting, which assigned people to various demographics and targeted these demographics based on age, gender and location. Now, with more data, the targeting can be — and is — much more dynamic, and can gauge your interests and preferences. Companies that specialize in targeting can nearly promise more ad engagement by targeting people who have indicated -– through their behavioral patterns on the web -– that they might be interested in the product at hand. It’s a more costly form of advertising, but the conversion rate can offset the increased cost.

All of the data that has been collected by targeters has huge implications for the Internet of the future. We spoke with three experts in the field of behavioral targeting to discuss the biggest effects that targeting will have on the web as we know it.

1. Your Internet Experience Will Be More About You

You know how Amazon suggests items that might interest you, based on the items you’ve perused? That’s how the entire Internet could be soon. With systems tracking your cursor and keeping tabs on your browsing history, the Internet can get to know you better — and be smarter than ever. In fact, Amazon’s algorithm is a paragon of excellence for targeters.

“Amazon does a fantastic job at making the Amazon experience reliable for the consumer. The entire experience is relevant and more efficient,” says Jeff Hirsch, president and CEO of AudienceScience.

And since data collection has been ongoing for years at Amazon, the data points and algorithms have been refined. Years ago, a man might buy a princess outfit for his 3-year-old niece, and then be presented with ads for toddler items the next few times he logs on. That doesn’t happen anymore, says Ted Shergalis, founder and chief strategy officer of [x+1]. “As targeters accrue more data and more sophisticated algorithms, they can lessen the impact of statistical outliers,” he says.

And what’s been done to the algorithm at Amazon is happening all over the web. Shergalis cites the advent of Google Instant as a huge shift in the web’s evolution — results are repositioning information in a way that is more focused on the query. “Marketers are hoping to do that with all of their work,” he says, meaning that the web might be able to tell you what you’re looking for before you even finish typing it.

Hirsch jokes that in 10 years, we may very well look back and laugh that we ever had to type something into Google to find what we were looking for. “Smarter” and “more useful” are two terms he uses to describe how the targeted curation will affect your web experience.

Best of all for marketers, Hirsch says, is that more relevant content can lead to more engagement.

Rose Ann Haran says ContextWeb, where she is the CMO, strives to “curate content so that we can drive a better experience for people online.” She cites how TV and radio, which now have hundreds of content channels, have evolved so that we can curate what to consume. Technology allows us to hand-pick what programs we’d like to watch and when, along with what kind of music we’d like to listen to. That’s exactly where the web is going, she says. “If you think about the online experience, you can really make the analogy to TV and radio.”

2. The Web Could Change Its Appearance For You

So when the web is all about you, will it also change its interface, too? Shergalis says the data that would drive such customization is available today, but that cost, time and resources are what’s hindering us from getting to that next level.

But, he says, “Consumers are going to come to expect it — you can’t just have a simple, one-size-fits-all experience” for all consumers.

“I think the expectations are increasing. I don’t see people wanting to go back to a less personalized, less social, more irrelevant experience, so I think [the customization] trend is going to continue,” Shergalis adds. Especially because there’s so much more information to gather, and the more consumers share their interests with marketers, the more relevant and suited products will be for us, he says.

Haran cites her own Google homepage — and how radically different it is from her daughter’s page. She says they have different widgets above and below the fold and they each have a different number of ads, based on their preferences. So it’s clear that customization on the web isn’t a farfetched idea, and sites could soon know whether you like a clean page with only two ads, or whether you’re tolerant of up to eight ads.

“The tech is there to be able to provide that unique experience for you,” Haran says. But since there are so many players in the market, only “an orchestrated approach would allow us to do that [targeting].”

3. It Will View You as a Multi-Dimensional Person With Many Interests

So you browsed through ESPN.com — does that mean you’ll only get Nike and Adidas ads from now on? No, because there’s more to you than your interest in sports, and the data knows that. It won’t try to pigeonhole you.

This is especially important because there is concern that curation and customization lead to tunnel vision and ignorance of everything else that’s out there. That’s why behavioral targeters are testing demographics and creating algorithms to determine other interests and speak to a person’s depth and varied interests and give them an element of choice. Such algorithms will help marketers “discover a whole new audience and develop a new understanding” of this dynamic, multifaceted audience, says Hirsch.

As mentioned before, ContextWeb targets based on content. Instead of interpreting CNN as a news site, it breaks it down into retirement, personal finance, education — it’s no longer a one-dimensional perception of the site. And that precision helps to refine the algorithm.

“We’re all multi-dimensional people who consume content in different contexts,” says Tanayia Washington, insights and analytics manager at ContextWeb.

4. It’s Tapping Into Social and Mobile

To some, behavioral targeting seems like an invasion of privacy, though the FTC has taken steps to ensure that privacy is respected (no data is personally identifiable).

But privacy seems to be less of a priority among millennials, who tend to be more accepting of behavioral targeting than their boomer counterparts. Perhaps it’s because they grew up with LiveJournals and were the first generation on Facebook, so they’re used to living their lives out loud. Whatever the reason, the things they broadcast on social networks -– where they are, what they’re buying, who they’re with -– are ripe for the picking by marketers, says Shergalis. By virtue of being on these platforms and being so socially connected, young users are essentially opting in and showing a “willingness to participate” for advertisers and marketers. Therefore, behavioral targeters can take advantage of the wealth of consumer information that’s out in the open on Twitter and Facebook, learning tweet by tweet about the audience it’s trying to reach.

And that’s just one aspect of behavioral targeting’s branching out — targeting will also impact the web experience on iPhones, iPads, Androids and other mobile devices. “You’ll see some pretty amazing innovations … and that will get caught under the heading of behavioral targeting,” says Shergalis.

What’s Next?

When you’re on your laptop, a targeter can assume that you’re the only user. But let’s say there’s a family of four that shares a desktop computer. How do you know if it’s the accountant dad, the PTA mom, the soccer star son or the Bieber-obsessed tween daughter? What if the husband is shopping for the jewelry for the wife, and then the wife starts seeing diamond ads?

“[Data] is not personally identifiable, so in a family of four, you wouldn’t really know who was browsing at what point,” says Hirsch. “There is some efficiency lost in that respect, which is a good example of why consumers need choice.”

In short, behavioral targeting is not perfect, but it has immense potential to change the way we consume and search for information. And this potential is more within reach every day as more data is collected and analyzed. In fact, by the time you read this post, millions more data points already will have been collected, making the Internet that much smarter.

Series Supported by HubSpot

The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, which offers inbound marketing software that helps small and medium sized businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and converts more of them into leads and customers. HubSpot’s software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and small business owners to manage SEO, blogging, social media, landing pages, e-mail, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. Learn more.

More Marketing Resources from Mashable:

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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alexsl, Maxrale, quavondo.

More About: ad targeting, behavioral advertising, digital marketing, Digital Marketing Series, MARKETING, online marketing, targeting

One of my  favorite songs from the 80′s is from the movie “Rocky 4″ called “No Easy Way Out” by Robert Tepper.

We use to play this song in the cover band I was in and I got to sing it. What a rush that was.

I know… I know… you’re asking me what this has to do with marketing… well…everything. (and it’s sounds a lot more fun than saying “there’s no free lunch in this biz..doesn’t it -:))

As corny as it sounds, there literally is no easy way out of building a good living online. It still is all about hard work , determination, persistence, and discipline and it always will be. There is no short cut.

That being said, the sooner you quit buying all the latest gimmicks to try to get rich quick, and spend time establishing a solid routing and daily structure the faster you will start to see results from your hard work.

This is not to say that you should quit learning new things every day, this is about finding something that works, that is proven, and sticking with it.

Just the mere fact that you stick with it puts you miles ahead of the next person… because they aren’t going to stick with it.

I lot of people start to earn a decent living online “by default”.

What I mean by that is after the put in so much time the ball starts to roll in there direction and success begins to happen “by default”. They outlasted there competition and start to get more traffic, more sales, more money, and more momentum.

Success by default: sounds easy…. but it is not. But it is real and can be for you too.

So the next time you start to rock out to “No Easy Way Out”  remember “there is no easy way out…. there is no shortcut home” and know that you will start to succeed by default if you just keep on plugging away at it.

Today was a day of strategic thinking on how to increase revenue. Why today? Because I just came of my biggest month ever as an internet marketer and I am truly excited about the prospect of this continuing.

One of the big reasons for my increased success was the bundling of products and implementing “OTO’s” (One Time Offers). These two strategies have almost double my business in a short period of time. Are there other factors involved, most certainly, but the strategies with the biggest impact are product bundling and putting together “one time offers”

Let me take a step back and explain what I am talking about.

The bundling of products is just as the name implies, combining two or more product together and offering a discount. This is especially powerful in the marketing of information products as you have a very low cost base and you are able to offer a nice savings to your customer and increase your overall ring at the same time.

One time offers, known in the online marketing world as OTO’s have a greater impact than I could have ever imagined. I put together a simple web page and placed it right after the payment checkout giving the customer, who just paid for an item, ability to purchase a second item at a substantial savings. I increased my “take rate” by 25% by implementing this strategy and it has had a big impacted on my bottom line.

Now just imagine using both of these together. Exactly……whoa! I bundled two products together and started sending traffic to that offer and then redirected them to an OTO during checkout. The results are nothing short of incredible.

If you want to increase your sales with the same amount of work make sure you use these valuable strategies and watch your cost to sales shrink and your income soar!

The last several weeks my kids (6 and 8 years old) and I have been going roller-skating. As I watch them cruise by over and over again it made me think of some of the parallels between roller-skating and marketing. Trust me, it wasn’t the first thing I thought of, survival was first, but eventually I got around to marketing -:).

What came to mind was the persistence my daughter was exhibiting. She came to me with a floor burn on her knee and a pretty good one at that. It obviously hurt (even though I didn’t see her fall it had to be painful and a minor bruise to the ole ego) and she came over for some moral support.

After confirming that everything was OK and still in working order she was gone, back to the rink to give it another go. Quitting never crossed her mind and her only focus was getting back out there and starting over where she left off.

Certainly there was some subconscious learning from her mistake, but she quickly picked herself up, knocked off the dust, and started up where she left off.

The parallels in life, business, and relationships are endless. Dusting ourselves off each time we fall, learn a bit from the process, and starting over again. Never giving a thought to giving up, never giving a thought to giving in to the doubt in the back of our heads that try to tell us that we can’t do it.

But many people quit after a fall or two. I used to be in that camp, but not for long as I realized it didn’t get me anywhere. Now I try to look at every fall as being one step closer to my goal. Without failure there is no success, no pain no gain I guess.

In her case the pain didn’t keep her from trying again and getting better in the process. I think I’ll give her a hug and thank her for teaching me something today!

Did you ever sign up for an email list and in the sales page it says they will deliver (what ever they are promising you) to your email instantly….. “yes, even if it is 3 am in the morning”. Well, they are using an email autoresponder to automate their business.

Once you get the feel for what your customers are looking for you can continually tweak your messages and keep on adding more email content to them. I have seen some autoresponders set up outside a year long. Imagine the messaging you can send on a consistent basis not to mention the cash you can generate on a regular basis.

In my opinion a mailing list is your most valuable asset. The larger the list the more money it is possible to make. I have made up to $1,000 for one mailing in a very narrow niche with a list of only 1,800 people. But your list is only valuable if handled with care and respect. The important part is that you know how to use it to its greatest potential. Don’t over use it and keep jamming sales letters and affiliate links down their throats. Make sure to send top content on a regular basis and they will be ready to by your product when it comes out.

If I knew how valuable my lists would prove to be I would have started to build them much sooner. It is hard to believe the feeling when you need some cash and you put out an email to your list offering a great deal on some of your e-products and the cash starts rolling in. Once this happens, you will never look at list building the same ever again. I guarantee it!

Before we get into the actual marketing to your list, let’s go over some basics about autoresponders and the steps you need to take before you ever send that first email.

How to Find the Right Autoresponder for YOU

Don’t just sign up for the first autoresponder system you come across. Make sure you compare several companies and see what they have to offer. Do your research and find out which autoresponder has which features and benefits. You want to find the one that best matches your situation.

There are quite a few systems out there to choose from so I’ll tell you which system I use and some of the other top names. Don’t limit yourself to this list. If you have heard good things about a company then check them out. I actually looked at the companies that were used by the guru’s sending me email and started my search from there. That might not be a bad idea for you as well.

I use Aweber because it fits my system perfectly. It is easily scalable and you can start off small and for very little money. This worked great for me and the most of the people I learned the business off of where using Aweber so I gave it a try and have been with them ever since. It may or may not be right for you so compare it to others to see if it is right for you.

Here are some links to other popular autoresponder systems.

Aweber

iContact

Get Response

Email Aces

Making a wise decision before starting a marketing campaign can and will make a difference. Yes, you can change to a new autoresponder later, but why go through the hassle if it’s not necessary. Choose wisely.

Know The Programs Available

Educate yourself on your autoresponder before beginning any marketing campaign. Take the time to learn how all the bells and whistles work. Once you know what you’re working with, you’ll be unstoppable. Don’t leave anything on the table that will keep you from utilizing this powerful tool to its fullest potential.

If your autoresponder can do all that you need it to do, and you know how to use it to your advantage, your marketing campaign will flourish.

Now let’s take a look at some do’s and don’ts. This is where an autoresponder will make or break your business. If done right, you’ll discover why everyone and their brothers say, “The money is in the list.”

Have you ever come across something that inspired you to keep going? I just came across an article that inspired me and I thiougt I would pass it on. It is a blog post from Judy Wright on EzineArticles.com. She is the Author Spotlight for today.

In her blog post she is answering questions about what made her successful and what motivates her, plus the other normal questions asked when completing a quesitonaire.

The finally asked her “If you had to start over again, what would you change?” This was her response:

“I’d relax and realize that I don’t have to do everything at one time. I would also quit feeling guilty because I didn’t understand or implement what I paid someone to tell me. I would conquer one aspect of marketing, like writing articles, and then move to the next. Too many times I would be frustrated because I didn’t “get it” and it seemed like everyone else did. They didn’t. They just quit trying to build an online community and I didn’t.”

Wow, did the BOLD print hit me over the head. She was frustrated because she didn’t think she “got it” and others did. Then she finally realized that others just gave up and she didn’t.

Is that you? Are you going to give up, or are you going to keep pushing and learning and applying yourself until you get where you want to go?

I know this business can be difficult and frustrating, specially if you haven’t made any money or seen any return for your hard work. Fear not, the reward is there, you just have to be better perpared than others and if that doesnt bring you success…that by golly just outlast them.

Be the one that is still standing when the dust clears and you will win in the end. The only one who can stop you is YOU…no one else. Desire, will, and determination will winout over perfection every day. Think about that when you write your next eBook, coaching program, or membership site. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be DONE!

Thank you Judy for your inspiration today. I will keep going and so will many others because of your words today.