What's the hottest trend in IM right now?

The hottest trend is to try and build a business without depending solely on Google for traffic.

Shiny objects, and magic buttons are back!

The changes that have been made by Google force you to work outside of Google. Things like social indicators are very strongly featuring in the calculations for rankings, so you need to get successful, high quality, helpful content to get those. That is actually a good thing, since all of people's eggs are not in one basket, and nobody should complain about having their business decimated by Google.

So with that in mind, the most important thing, call it HOT it you like, is that you produce content that other people find helpful and like. And that will also help you with Google, but you no longer look to them for traffic alone.

The new shiny object, whatever that is that month (or week), then the next one. I estimate only 1 to 3% of marketers stick to the fundamentals and are capable of focusing for a long time. At least this is what I observed.

I think Pinterest is pretty hot for marketing right now...

Hi everyone,

The biggest trend in IM in my opinion is to focus on getting targetted traffic

I personally recommend video marketing it is the future

All the best and see you on top

Erwin

List Building is all the rave.

Hi,

I think we are going to see a huge shift towards social based signals and authorship from an SEO stand point.

I believe links will still play a role - but no way near the role that they play now in ranking sites.

My advice - build out your social profiles now and work on your authorship!

Thanks for sharing your opinions guys.

Perhaps the "hottest trend" might have been the wrong wording. I don't mean what's the next magic pill or gimmick. What I mean is what is the next frontier for IMs. Where are we heading in the next 1 to 2 years? It's always advantageous to be the early adopter. Like, if you offered SEO services back in the early days, it was open fields. But now, the SEO market is swamped by tons of competition and posers and at the point where it is difficult to enter that market and offer those services.

My thought is that mobile marketing is going to explode in 2014. I feel like the social media market is starting to get saturated now. Do you guys agree?

I'm seeing it as mobile email marketing. From various articles I have read, it is getting to where more people are reading their emails via their smartphones. So when you email market, they need to be in a format that will work on a phone operating system.

So it won't just be getting your emails read via your computer browser, but it will be phones too. Of course, it is about what the email says and the value you bring, but if your subscribers can't read it or go to the links also on their phones it is one more unsubscribe or lost sale.

Common sense.

The profitablity of building mobile sites is rising. YouTube is exploding and mocking Facebook. High quaility is king now instead of just content.

Greatest trend in IM is SEO, make site and do SEO, dominate SERPs and earn money, this is a strategy for all time...

I would say the hottest trend for this year is mobile marketing.

Apps, Push notifications and even SMS marketing are all on the rise.

After all this is the 'Post-PC' year... so they say

I don’t know, but I believe that the promise to easily make money online is not a simple way to make money from newbies today, like it used to be in the past, when most people ignored a lot about the internet. When I started working online (in 2006) the image I had was totally different. Everyone believed that the internet was something magical, and many internet marketers took advantage of their ignorance. Now everything changed a lot because everyone is very afraid of scammers. So, I believe that the future of internet marketing must be building trust and confidence.

Other niches have the same problem. Proving that you are a serious business owner always is necessary.

Go to WarriorPlus and see what the WSOs of the day are, that will give you a good insight of the current trends.

I think the hottest trend might be to "be everywhere" this way Google finds you rather than you have to game it. So creating videos, podcasts, blogposts, slideshared, etc etc - that´s the way to go. content first

Mobile and social marketing have become huge in the last few years. Many people are still trying to adapt and learn how to best target this new platform.

Mobile and social will continue to grow, and I think people will need to stay on top of the most popular social sites to get great traffic.

Google is tailoring SEO by cities ( IP address) so, yes, that and social media marketing is where I have noticed and learning is what is currently. Email marketing is the bread and butter of Internet Market- I doubt that will change.

The most relevant information you may come across will state if it up-to date or the year if it doesn't then its not up to date.

Mobile is our new way. People need to resize images. Point is that people are dowloading apps now. Basically, it is what we see. Customers do not want to see more of the same. Try to be unique. It is important to push for success. For that we need a presence on micro screens.

I think the current trend in IM is getting to be the "why I'm not there yet and who else isn't". The trend is apparent in the proliferation of "if they're so sucessful what are they doing HERE"' posts we've been seeing in the forum.

The actual trend I see is that more people are thinking in traditional lines when they think of business rather than in how do I make gazillions overnight. The one thing google has actually been good for is to bitchslap some sense back into people. The Net was a new toy for awhile and everyone wanted to play. It's becoming integrated with traditional tactics now that are enhanced via enhanced communications instead of existing as a money raking novelty as is it used to be.

What is hot today online has always been - and always will be: traffic.

When you think about it, each and every "system" - be it something on FB or Google or article writing or backlining, whatever - always comes down to driving traffic to your page.

For most marketers, at the end of the day, it matters little whether they get there through social bookmarking, video marketing, JV's, SEnuke or any other means - they really JUST want their offers to be seen.

The next stage, is conversions. Once the marketer finds a way to drive huge traffic he/she soon discovers that it doesn't convert nearly as well as he/she would have expected. So then the next craze is to learn ways to pitch, to copywrite, etc.

Once they've nailed their creatives and have lots of traffic, they discover that the conversions are still not quite what they thought they should be. So then the next big thing becomes niche research and product selection, complete with demographic studies etc.

Once all three are nailed - it turns out that scaling things up is the next big challenge.

In other words - what is "HOT" will vary depending on where you are with your marketing. But throughout all the stages, TRAFFIC ACQUISITION will remain the #1 concern.

IM systems which address this issue stand to have at least an edge. But note that the vastly dominant form of traffic acquisition techniques center around do-it-yourself traffic - or "free" traffic. Marketers who have tried a few dozen such methods eventually drift towards paid traffic acquisition. That too is fraught with pitfalls but at least it appears to be more direct and way faster.

Whichever traffic acquisition strategy you offer - make sure that you make people aware of the downside - not just the upside.

Its all about quality now. Forget mass linking strategies and bot produced clicks.

Focus on keeping your visitors coming back for more, and the only way you can do that is with quality. Uncle G is mad all about quality right now

There is no one thing that is hot in the IM market. Its what you make of it.

In my opinion, everything is hot in the IM market.

They all sell if you know how to sell.

My advice to you, stop searching. REALLY stop and think about it. Put together a system around what you love the most and go full force on it my friend. That is the true way to succeed...

As I'm more into product reviews than anything, that's what I follow. In terms of hot trends for us product review affiliates, it's going to be realizing that people need to stop sniping one type of product and writing crap reviews made for just clicks, and realize that going for more authority and quality reviews can actually have higher click through rates.

That's not to say I don't recommend doing sites on one type of product, for example LED TV's, since there's a lot to review and compare, and that way you can become an authority by developing a thorough review process of your own.

But what people aren't doing (or the majority), is accompanying these sites/reviews with informational articles such as comparisons, history of LED TV's, why people might want one over other types of TV, what the terms are for LED TV's, a guide on how to buy them, an up-to-date top 3/5/10/20 list, and even news articles on current TV trends or technology.

My quarrel with these types of sites are that they are limiting in income, and you need to keep creating new ones to increase your income (whereas with a broader review site you can keep branching out into new products to increase income), and that people only write simple short reviews with these types of site, which wont fly or stick for much longer with Google.

I've also seen that those affiliates who go the authority route, seem to do better reviews and build better sites, with accompanying info articles etc.. perhaps because of the authority mindset, rather than sniping a product or an EMD and trying to score clicks for sales.

Another trend is realizing that we actually have more than just SEO traffic that we can depend on, if we open our eyes more. So far I've found a dozen that delivers consistent traffic. It's more work, but easier to obtain. It doesn't deliver more traffic than if you were to rank, but you can match it or beat it with a lot of effort, without the worry of being penalized for anything.

Hottest trend:

Porn. Will always be.

trends=>tools, modalities etc...do change but one thing always remains the same. You must deliver value to customers, that is the key.

Hard work.

That's a question that won't get one concrete answer, but in my experience and opinion I'd say the trending money making method is Amazon promoting..which I find funny because if you're not making massive sales or high end sales, your commissions will be embarrassingly low.

Not the sexiest trend, but working hard is an effective one.

Freelancing may not be the hottest because of the fact that most people want passive income right away, however it is still the most effective. It's the quickest and most sure-fire way to make money online that you can eventually save up to start experimenting with passive income streams

The hottes trend is stop looking for hot trends, and start doing something useful for people in a niche you have passion for and knowledge of. If there are enough people who are fascinated by the same thing and willing to pay for it (even if this is just knowledge) - you got your winning formula for finding the hottest niche!

One thing that bothers me is I see people putting a lot of time and money into promoting products from a company that is alway in the red - losing money like Amazon. Looks like a bubble getting ready to busrt.

Everything is hot and nothing is hot - It's like fashion - But the one that lasts always is building relationship and building list.

I think email marketing will always be around. With the amount of Smartphones that receive emails directly, it's hard to think that it wouldn't continue for some time.

Almost anything works if you are doing it the right way! It is up to you how do you work, implement the tactics and find your own twist. At the moment I concentrate on email marketing, but SEO, Youtube etc. works as good and can be of course linked with email marketing as well.

Quality content and google authorship. The purpose of every change that google makes in its algorithm is to provide better results in SERPs and that is the only thing they care about. Their algorithm is coming to a point where it can detect good content, even if the site does not have so many reputable backlinks, or a decent age. I have seen a lot of cases where new websites with good content, PR0, and a small number of backlinks are ranked higher than some old websites with boring content and a huge number of backlinks.

Mobile marketing is a trend too though. Everything that we used to do online or in the computer, is turning into an app.

I think software that automates processes will become more important. Not just as a trend but as a tool to leverage the amount of work people can do in a day.
For instance, most of the Wso's coming out are actually methods that work if you put in the effort. So why do people quit? Because it involves boring repetitve work. When this can be automated it will increase the succes rate and people will be able to upscale their business easily.

I think the biggest trend in Internet marketing right now is flipping start-up websites on Flippa!

The biggest trend? That's a broad question and I'm enjoying reading the answers. I'm looking at one of my sites stats... 2 years ago it had 7% of the visitors coming in on a cell phone or tablet device. Last year it shows 21% of the visitors coming in on a cell phone or tabelt device. This year it shows 46% of traffic coming from a cell phone or tablet device.

Obviously you can make what you will of this. I on the other hand have more information about these visitors than your typical site owner. I actually get to meet them in person, and I use that opportunity to ask them some questions.

Here are some things I've learned.

They don't have pc's and are not considering even purchasing them.

They don't want to see the mobile pages. Their phones are huge, and they want to see the website itself, so they set their phones not to return the mobile page, but to return the desktop page. So you need to be designing what ever you design with this in mind. I for one am looking at finding a high quality responsive theme to migrate to. Then building my sites for mobile viewers. No muss, no fuss. We need to give them what they want.

I look for this trend to only grow larger. I would imagine that next year 60% of the visitors in my niche will be visiting via their phones. withing 5 years it should be well over 80%.

Singly this is the biggest trend I see on the horizon.

List Building never die

The hottest trend right now is creating your own products. If you want to build a full-time business online in the shortest time possible product creation is your best bet.

I wouldn't try to depend on one traffic source in particular to build a business I would instead focus on creating something that can CONVERT traffic from any source so you don't have to rely on one particular campaign to make money.