We’re only 3 weeks into 2012 and we’re already seeing these 7 Marketing Trends of 2012:

1. Noise Reduction – Being more mindful of what we share to reduce the numbness oversharing can create
2. Commitment - “Commit” is a word you’ll hear a lot more going forward and you’ll be expected to do so
3. High Value Content - This ties into Noise Reduction and Content Marketing, but means that what you create must have value
4. Humanization - This is not ‘corporations are people’, but a realization that corporations are not monolithic, but run by people
5. Case Studies - Showing how your company or product overcame obstacles and solved a problem is both High Value Content and Humanization
6. Stories - Storytelling has been around a long time, but the art of weaving it into everything from your About page to your office decor is a new trend
7. Do Something Great – Similar to High Value Content and a cousin to Committment, this is a push to use 2012 as a moment to make something great

Noise Reduction – I wrote about noise last week, but now that Social Media and Internet access has become somewhat ubiquitous a new rule has emerged: As the ease of sharing increases, the value of sharing decreases. Let’s call this Stauffer’s Law. You probably are already aware of this law even if you didn’t know what to call it because the people who post the most, often get read the least or blocked completely. It’s not enough to be creating great content, you also have to temper when you share it. This applies to your personal Facebook wall/newsfeed/timeline, your Twitter feed, or your company newsletter. Decrease what you share and increase the value of what you are sharing to keep your content from being filtered out like noise.

Commitment – Have you noticed feelings of drift? People saying they feel lost? Do you know people who can’t make up their mind or make a decision about what to do next? We hate it when politicians waffle back and forth, but most people and companies are no different. HP dropped computers, picked them back up again, and changed CEOs in 2011. 2012 will be looking for HP to commit to a goal – long term dedication to a cause beyond the next quarter’s estimates. And 2012 wants to see you commit to making something work, not looking for excuses for why it failed. This doesn’t mean you can’t pivot, but you must commit to something.

High Value Content – I recently wrote about writing what matters which talked about writing about solutions for your customer’s problems versus writing about your products. Very few companies can make a product that people care enough to buy for the products sake – even companies like Apple originally had to solve a customer’s problem by allowing them to carry all of their songs in their pocket. We used to call this type of writing a “white paper” and in 2011 we may have called it “content marketing”, but in 2012 it’s not enough to write content, you have to write what matters to people. Be impactful or risk irrelevance.

Humanization – Unless you’re using a computer to write your content, you need to show your human-ness. Humans make mistakes. Even the mistakes computers make are actually mistakes made by the humans who programmed them. In 2012 people are going to be looking to do business with other people like them – a.k.a. humans who have made similar mistakes. If 2011 was about being transparent about who you were, 2012 is taking that a step further by admitting your mistake and what you’ve done or are going to do to fix it.

Case Studies - Showing the customer how you’ve solved a problem like theirs in the past is a great way to “sell the hole”. It’s also a great way to show your human-ness by admitting your mistakes and how you overcame them. No one expects you to be perfect and those who think they are risk losing business. People like to root for the underdog and if you sell yourself in that light, it can help. There is a whole other piece of case studies that include customer interviews and solution interviews, which is a great way to write what matters, but that’s a separate topic for another day.

Stories - If you’ve ever had someone explain what a song means to you, you know the power of a story. Every time you hear that song you’ll remember what that person said and think of that moment. I’ve heard advice on how to tell a great story like, “Make the listener the hero”, but this is harder than it sounds. I’ve been trying to do it for the last 6 months. What I’ve found is that by practicing telling stories in non-marketing settings like blogs and emails to friends and family, you can practice the storytelling arts so that when you do pitch to a client, you can turn their use of your product into a story that makes them the hero in 2012.

Do Something Great - It’s never been easier to start something than it is right now. You have more resources at your fingertips than ever before. So why is it that the best we came up with in 2011 was a new timeline for Facebook and a new way to stream music (Spotify)? Sure, there are people in France trying to get fusion to work and others trying to find the Higgs Boson particle. And Bill Gates is both trying to eradicate malaria and create ways to reduce nuclear waste by reusing it in a new type of reactor in China, but what about the rest of us? Some would argue that the low-hanging fruit is already picked. We can’t just sit down and invent a paperclip before our benefactor comes back from lunch, but there are still big problems to solve – like how to replace Middle-Eastern oil, how to improve energy distribution and creation, how to standardize and distribute medical records, and of course, flying cars.

In searching for a way to close this article, I ran across this quote from Catchers in the Rye:

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I’ve been building sites with the thought process that content matters more than SEO. I’ve been doing that by solving peoples problems. I look for those problems by finding sticky posts on forums, reviewing Yahoo Answers questions, and reviewing search terms for people finding my site (only works after you have content).

Here are some recent graphs of sites once I started using this method:

What I’ve learned from that is that there are direct search results related to doing this strategy and I spend very little time backlinking because I don’t have to. They customers find me because I’m solving a problem for them – they look for me instead of me trying to bait Google to make them find me over someone else.

After reading what this sales guy, Frank Rumbauskas of Never Cold Call (Again), has written and listening to his webinar, I’ve realized that the crux of his premise is that by creating content on your blog or in an email or fax that you send, you’re answering a problem, fixing something that your customers care about.

The result is that you’re spending more of your time finding out what problems your customers are having, solving those problems and publishing the results so that other people who are looking for the same solutions find you and hire you. You’re no longer selling, you’re taking business as it comes to you, and it will.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is not useless. In fact it can be often be very useful as 70-80% of all traffic is organic vs. paid. I make part of my living from SEO web design, but I also make part of my income from affiliate marketing. Those are somewhat in juxtaposition as I make money from people who want more organic results and from people buying ads that display on my sites.

How to Make Money Online

Making money online is not always easy.  It’s work just like any job, but it seems to have this allure to it.  I think that allure has a lot to do with a feeling of being your own boss or getting as much out of something as you put into it.  At your job, no matter how hard you work, the pay is the same (in the short term), but when you work for yourself, the dynamics are different.  Making money online is essentially like running your own business.  Where “people have dreamed about owning their own business and have not followed through because of the investment in resources,” says Jim Griffith, head of eBay University, “the Internet allows people to at least try without making a large initial investment.”

Here are 12 ways you can make money online

1. Online Ads – Pay-per-click (PPC) links are ads that display on your site, served up by advertising programs like Google AdSense or Chitika are a great way to get started, but don’t expect to get rich off of it unless your site has a lot of traffic. The good thing is you get paid regardless of if the advertiser makes a sale, but the bad thing is they don’t usually pay that much for the click. You don’t have to pick out what ads will display. Google will detect the type of content on your site and show relevant ads auotmatically. Chitika works a little differently. It goes by what a visitor searched for in order to find your site, not your site’s actual content. Although they may be one in the same, they don’t have to be. Also, Chitika ads will not show up if you browse to your site, but Google Adsense ads will. You’ll want to have good, original content either way to attract visitors and the best ads. Google saves its best paying ads for sites that rank higher and have better traffic. Google also requires that you have a privacy policy on any website displaying their ads or you could risk losing your account. If you don’t know what to write, you can use our privacy policy as an example.

2. Affiliate Programs – Pay-per-purchase (PPP) links are affiliate ads that display links to products or programs where you get a percentage of the sale whenever a purchase is made. Percentages vary based on the product, manufacturer, and affiliate program. Amazon Associates, an affiliate program from Amazon, goes from 4% to 15%, but it’s a tiered scale that requires making sales at lower percentages before you can make sales at higher percentages and it resets every month. LinkShare, another affiliate advertising program, lets you choose what advertisers to work with. Once you find one you would like to promote, you can apply to add them as a product. If you run more than one site you’ll want to set up channels for each site under your account settings. Each channel will have to apply for it’s own advertiser programs even if you’ve already been approved on another channel. Commission Junction and Google Affiliate Network are two other good examples of affiliate advertising networks like LinkShare. While clicks and purchases can be less for PPP links, the payouts can be higher per purchase, making this a good next step for those who want more than just PPC links on their website.

3. Direct Sales – If you’ve got a product to sell, whether it is something you’ve made or something you have bought to resell, if you are selling it on your site you are doing direct sales. You may also have to fulfill your own orders unless you work with an order fulfillment service. The advantage of direct sales are that you get to control how much mark-up you add to the product, but the down-side is that you are on your own for dealing directly with payment processing systems, shipping, returns, and other logistical issues that may come up. If you’ve got a good product to sell, and you’re just starting out, you might want to partner with an already established distribution company like Amazon.com, ClickBank, CafePress, Zazzle, or Threadless, depending on your product. This is a form of commissioned sales, which is the next way to make money online.

4. Commission Sales – If you’ve created a product to sell, but don’t want the hassle of selling directly, commissioned sales is the way to go. For a share of the revenue, the distributer will handle the store front, the payment processing, and returns. All you have to do is ship the item and cash the checks. Some distributers will even store your items for you or make them on-demand. For example, ClickBank will store your ebook for distribution and CafePress, Zazzle, and Spreadshirt prints your items on t-shirts or other merchandise at the point of order. This is kind of like micro-manufacturing or on-demand manufacturing, but essentially it means very low inventory costs, which allows them to charge a decent amount and still give you a cut. You create the idea, they sell it, and give you a commission. If you want more of a commission over time, you can open your own web site, which would be a step back into direct sales. Examples of distributors include Amazon.com, iStockPhoto.com, ClickBank, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, and CafePress.

5. Online Ad Sales – Once your site has enough traffic, you can start to sell ads directly to advertisers. This is a form of direct sales, but the product is ad space on your site that you would normally give to Google Adsense, Chitika, or an affiliate link. The upside is that you can potentially charge more for the space than Google or Chitika would give you for the same space, but you risk not making any direct ad sales at all. But if you have a large enough following and can prove visitor counts, then you may have a good chance in selling ad space to an advertiser interested in marketing to your readers. Again, the key is good content. That’s how it all starts.

6. Domain Flipping – For those who are great at finding niches, can fill a site with content easily, know how to promote a site, and not get too emotionally attached, domain flipping is for you. It has great potential to make a lot of money and can be quite profitable if you know what you are doing. There are sites out there like Flippa or Sedo which specialize in flipping domains and there are are many tutorials out there to teach you the best way to do so. Selling a domain is equivalent to cashing out of a business you’ve started and can be a good feeling, but it’s not for everyone. Sometimes you’ll wish you never sold and then there are just those who like the slow and steady, latent income over the hussle of constantly buying and selling domains.

7. Convert Your Content – Turn your blog into a book or your site into a magazine or your Twitter account into a television show – yes, all these things have been done before.

While the last seven examples have been about your own content or site, the next five focus on other things you can do online to make money:

8. Online Auctions – Sell things on Ebay or Craigslist. This can only last so long unless you go out and get more to sell, however if you get good at it, you can help other people sell things online as well, charging up to 33% commission on the sale.

9. Online Surveys – If you know where to find them, there are plenty of sites out there that will pay you to fill out surveys. You may have to fit into a certain type of income or age group, but eventually you will find one that you can fill out for cash or gifts. This certainly won’t replace your day job, but some enjoy doing it on the side for fun money.

10. Micro-Jobs – This is another low-on-the-totem pole idea that is worth mentioning, but will not make you rich or allow you to quit your day job. Sites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk will allow you to bid for jobs that pay very small amounts. The upside here is speed. If you can do the jobs in a short amount of time, then your rate of pay can increase. It’s hit or miss on getting accepted to do the job though so you take a risk on how you spend your time. Try and do an opportunity cost analysis first to see if there are better ways to spend your time to make money – online or off.

11. Freelancing – There are lots of freelancing sites out there to find work to do, but one of the most popular sites is Elance. They all pretty much work the same, though. People who need to get stuff done can post their wants or needs up on the site and people like you can then bid on doing the work. If your bid is accepted, you do the work, get paid, and the connecting site takes a commission off the sale. If you do enough, you might be able to shake the commissioned sales model and go direct, essentially starting your own business, which is the next example of how to make money online.

12. Start Your Own Business – This is part of the American dream and very easy to do online. You can even get incorporated online, depending on your state. Whether your business idea is to become a consultant, sell a product, offer a service, or just blog for profit, starting your own business has tax benefits as well as making you feel a sense of pride. I’d recommend it to anybody who wants to experience the free enterprise system to the fullest.

Read Forbe’s Eight Ways to Make Money Online for more tips on how to make money online.