2007 the Year for Launching Your Own Social Media Portal - Internet Advertising and Search Placement on a New Level!

Whether you know it or not, most of the websites that rank on the search engines already are Blogs: short for Web Log, a blog is an ever-growing, constantly updated with new content, web site which grows at the rate the market does to achieve and maintain search placement (something yours truly predicted over 18 months ago). Now, these highly automated sites where people interact and unique content is produced will need to be replaced again, already; upgraded to Web 2.0 Social Media sites; where every user has his own page, blog, feeds, voting, ads, and interaction on every level. The website of 2007, to get traffic, must be a Social Media Site:

This all began, publicly, with the success of My Space, which now has a lot of all the generations using it: now Utube, Associated Content, and others have turned the Hollywood 'casting couch', the Associated Press and many other time-proven institutions upside down; the New York Times is for sale for the first time in ages: the entire publishing industry has changed! The playing field, again, has been leveled. Now anybody with an internet connection and a brain can get into the online publishing game: and many are finding and capitalizing on huge audiences with a niche-targeted marketing campaign involving this new Social Media System.

What you need to play in the new Social Media Advertising game is:

1. An idea, and some knowledge about a niche market, ANY NICHE!
2. A modern, Social Media website (it is still space on a hard drive with some programming!)
3. Unique, human edited data - and you can harvest it from your visitors!

There is a wonderful irony here: we are a gregarious creature, human beings do not want to sit by ourselves in a room in front of a computer: we desire to interact with each other. Now that anything a computer or programming can do is dirt cheap and almost all of us have a terminal (and the rest will soon), the premium is on what a computer or program cannot create or fake; and a Social Media site can definitely catalyze these; and that is the reason for this new mega-trend.

Now, as water is to the desert, so is human edited data to the internet; and creation, collection, and distribution of that data; the facilitation of human communication and interaction is what has value! Like reality TV, Social Media Advertising is the new big trent in online marketing.

Social Media Websites require more setup and ongoing maintenance than the old brochure sites of the past; they are constantly growing and requiring more and more space and resources and maintenance: but, just as this website has massive success, they are the new standard. The race is on again: who will be on top at the beginning of 2008? I say they will all be Social Media websites! The word blog is confusing, people don't like it, but Social Media is here to stay: because there are billions to be made:

Consider the example of 29-year-old Kevin Rose, founder of the popular citizen journalism Web site Digg.com, who achieved post-boom bootstrapping success when he came up with a new method to empower millions of Internet users and bloggers by encouraging them to gather and centralize global news. Now that kind of software is available to web developers to build niche solutions with.

Three years after Rose used $1,000 of his own money to start Digg.com (which allows users to submit and rank popular articles about everything from music to politics to technology), his dream is evolving into one of the most frequently visited Web sites in the U.S. - and there's no sign that the "digging" frenzy is slowing down any time soon: Kevin is definitely independently wealthy, as the founders of activerain.com (a social media site for realtors) will be, and so will Dan and Laura, the founders of the site Biznik.com ("Business Networking that doesn't Suck"), only one year old and growing, whom I know personally - they started it as a casual sideline!

There are literally thousands of opportunities for niche markets which are wide open to be taken over by these modern websites: what local, regional, industrial, topical, or other market do you know about, HMMM?

By creating a "feed" from a blog or social media site, syndicating that feed to 'ping' (tell) the whole world whenever there is fresh data available (hmm, water on he desert!) you can target the market of your choice very effectively, achieve first page 'organic' (natural, un-paid for) search placement for your chosen search terms, and make a lot of money - even if your only money making plan is to get paid by Google AdSense (https://www.google.com/adsense).

Many are doing just that, capitalizing on huge traffic by displaying ads as their entire business plan - with no other overhead needed!

Israel Rothman is an internationally recognized Advertising Consultant who writes for this Magazine and others.