“Content is King” has been touted for nearly a decade as the one axiom to obey when it comes to online publishing. However as time progresses and technology evolves, exactly what type of content is best suited for this job comes into question. For year it was basic text content, such as news, whitepapers, guides, articles and other informative writing. This still remains true in the large majority of cases, but it is started to be encroached by another, more visual, means of content.

Video the New King?

Video content has become more and more prominent on the web. Youtube is now known as the worlds second largest search engine (right behind Google). Viral videos have long been a source of tremendous amounts of traffic and exposure, as well as sources for news reports (take for example, the Arab Spring, with its use of social media and camera phones, and the recent riots in Missouri and protests throughout the USA).

It makes sense that video would be a new medium, since it has only been in recent years that people have had the capability to consume video content with handheld devices. This has made the spread of the medium much more pronounced, and much more quickly, then in years past. The advent of 4G mobile internet has also made this change very pronounced. One has to think that a purely text based media, with all of today’s advanced data technology, has to become sidelined to make way for more visual, data intensive transmission.

Of course, this all has caveats. Surely video will not take over every medium, but for certain cases it seems to make more sense, such as news reports and online education. This brings us to our next point:

Video Lessons and Lectures – The Online Education Takeover

Online education used to be a punch line. It was looked down upon for being inferior to brick-and-mortar institution. People doubted whether online learning could be as effective and face-to-face instruction. However now it is poised to be a 20 Billion dollar industry by 2016, and renowned institutes such as Harvard, Columbia and MIT have funded studies to look into long term online education as a viable option for American academia.

Video is a key part of the online education experience. Video lectures can be done which mimic, and some would argue improve upon, the class lecture of colleges and Universities. In addition, video lessons are now making their way into other learning avenues, such as music education (video guitar lessons are one key example which have seen growth in the past years). Khan university exploded into a worldwide phenomena simply by using Youtube and lesson plans to tutor students and help provide free education.

Conclusion

Video is a powerful tool. It’s not going to replace textual content all across the web, that would be ridiculous. However it stands to reason that it will become a much more prominent method for information transmission, news, and education in the coming years. As mobile Internet bandwidth increases and the access to informative videos, lessons and news clips become more widely available, it’s no question that video will become more prominent.

Marketing a small business is difficult, and sometimes it’s difficult to know how to handle your marketing campaign, especially on a local scale.  Many of the tips and tricks you may see advertised on bigger sites like Entrepreneur.com or Moz.com might only be applicable to a larger, national or multi-national business.  What is the small-medium sized business to do when they need to market themselves, grow there business and attract/retain more customers?  Hopefully this article will give you a bit of a head start on the competition, and provide you with some helpful advice as to how to go about getting started.

For this article we are focusing on one moderately sized local market, Plymouth, England.  It is a good example because it is not too large that it would start becoming a national problem, and it is not too small as to warrant being disregarded as not worth marketing to.  You can see these types of examples all across the globe, and with the rise of mobile Internet usage, more people are finding and interacting with local business through online mediums.  This makes local Internet marketing one of the most important and potentially lucrative avenues of approach when it comes to growing your small business.

Local Directories

One tip for all local companies is to make sure they saturate their business information across all local directories.  You may be surprised at how much these things are used by locals to find something they need.  Not only do they usually all offer free listings, but they also can provide welcome and needed traffic, as well as potential benefits for your website when it comes to the Google algorithm.

Local SEO Companies

Following our Plymouth example, the next step the local business would do would be to find an seo service company plymouth and start consulting with them on a strategy.  Hopefully your site is already in a decent standing to start receiving some organic traffic, but even if you’ve done everything right, you will still probably need a skilled hand to guide your site to the top of the rankings.  SEO companies do this for a living, so it may be best to consult with one of them before trying it on your own.

They can also usually hook you up with graphic designers or content writers for you site.  It may sometimes seem like an afterthought, but proper design and content is pretty crucial to a good SEO campaign, and if you are just getting started it may be helpful to go with an SEO for these fronts as well.  I’ve seen several examples where a site needed to be completely redesigned in order to make it suitable.

Go Old School, Word of Mouth

This may seem counter-intuitive for an Internet marketing article, but going old-school and getting some good traction with word-of-mouth can be the most useful and effective way of generating and keeping business.  Sure, the web accounts for billions of searches a day, but nothing beats the trust established when someone recommends a company to a friend.

Set up some incentive programs for current customers, so that they can get rewarded if they bring in new clients.  Dentists do this all the time, and I’ve personally gotten leads on a very good dentist in my hometown.  This may have happened anyway if they hadn’t given some incentive for doing so, but it doesn’t hurt to grease the wheels a bit

So I hope this has provided a little bit of value to you.  Hopefully this year sees your small business grow to be a much larger one…

Chicago is American’s third largest city, often loving called the “Second City” because it usually plays second fiddle to NYC.  Nonetheless it is an increasingly important aspect of the overall economy of the US. Recent worries have started to surface about Chicago’s economic future, and this is paired with a bit of optimism about tech companies in general.  This article details some of the intricacies of Chicago’s technical outlook and potential future endeavors.

With the recent “recovery” from the fallout of the financial crisis in 2008, tech companies have largely been the driver of growth, and many of those technology companies are of the smaller variety.  Larger companies (the mega goliath, titans of industry types) have recently been falling victim to corporate mergers and are quickly being eat up and conglomerated by foreign forces.  This is a scary prospect for local interests, and as such many have rested their hopes of economic growth on the smaller tech-savvy business of the midwest.

This makes sense, since smaller companies have always been the driver of economic activity in the country and through-out the world.  It also makes sense because the future will most certainly be comprised and controlled by a few innovated and motivated smaller companies that eventually make it big.  At one time, Microsoft was a small start up out of Seattle, now, decades later, they remain Seattle’s 4th largest employer.  It’s sort of like prospecting for gold, or venture capital, you have to hedge your bets on the future, and smaller companies on where to do this.

Increased Need for IT Support

With this increase in hope and rise in the popularity of local tech companies comes the increased need for local tech support services and IT support.  Companies like SolveMyPC IT services have taken to providing for these services for both companies and residential customers.  The increased economic activity in Chicago and the surrounding areas has made the past few years extremely active for the niche, and it doesn’t show any real signs of slowing.

Computer help desks and other services are in high demand, and there is an increasing trend of “re-shoring”, i.e. bringing services back from overseas.  The new tech support services are largely found here at home, and local companies providing service for the local community is a trend that most everyone can get behind (it is the main source of economic activity for most all cities in the U.S.)

The Future is Now

For nearly 100 years the world has worked on paper and mechanical devices, but that started to shift with the advent of the computer and, more prominently, with the advent of the Internet.  As the older generation wanes and the newer generation comes into dominance, we are started to see the final shift to a tech savvy culture.

The future is now, as it were.  Tech has started to come into full blossom and the years ahead will see a cementing of the Internet and high tech products into the ecosystem of the American economy.  The older folk that have been the head of the resistance movement are moving into retirement and old-age, and the younger generation is fully comfortable with more high tech devices.  This means that sooner, rather than later, nearly 100% of the population will be interacting with each other and performed purchases and other economic activity with computers, tables and other devices.  This means that the need for IT support and technical expertise is going to grow right along with it.

 

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