Video was not even compatible on the web for many web browsers 10 years ago. In less than 10 years, video is now the most popular mode of entertainment on the web and YouTube, founded in just 2005 now receives millions of unique users per day! This is absolutely astonishing considering that internet video is still in its infancy relative to what it could and will become.

There are over 800 million unique visitors to YouTube each month. That means almost one seventh of the population of the world visits YouTube every month, and it has only existed for less than eight years. 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day, making it one of the most rich and quickly improving media outlets there is.

Having a video has never been more important for a business than it is today. With YouTube and the influence of internet video exploding over the past decade, you can now market yourself free online without having to pay for commercial space as you would have had to in order to get video exposure in the past. This is an unbelievable medium for business owners, who do not have the money to pay for large quantities of television ad space.

Every business owner should plan on having a video for their business within the next year or two because of this explosion in internet video. Either hiring a professional to create a video for you or finding someone that is more inexpensive to help with this process is most definitely worth the time and effort.

A few months ago I wrote an article regarding Pinterest and how they would have to make a move to eventually monetize because of the massive money thrown their way. I suggested that adding a business feature similar to Facebook would be their most likely starting point. Well only a few short months later, Pinterest, a social bookmarking site, officially launched their business page platform to no surprise.  A business can now create a profile that is separate from their personal account in a few short steps.

Pinterest, arguably the most recent social media phenomena sweeping the nation is now ranked 15th among trafficked sites according to Alexa traffic ranker. The amount of traffic they are receiving is enormous and is growing steadily. With their recent business page launch, it should be expected that Pinterest will soon join the talks of Google plus, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin as a premier social media site for both personal and business use.  Businesses will now look to Pinterest as a site to build a search engine optimization (seo) presence.

Pinterest was only founded in 2010, but in less than three years has become one of the most popular websites in the world, especially the United States. With so much content being submitted to the Pinterest website, it is only a matter of time before ads or some sort of business feature is incorporated.

There are a few ways that Pinterest could go; one would be to simply create an ad function similar to facebook, so that users scrolling through all the things they are interested in may stumble across paid advertisements leading them to websites that eventually turn into sales. This could be an effective strategy, however similar to Facebook the effectiveness of these ads could be minimal making it difficult to monetize, especially on mobile.

Social media advertising is going to struggle to compete with search engine advertising because users on search engines are ready to buy consumers looking for products and services, whereas social media users are generally not looking for a particular product or service. This makes it incredibly difficult for social media to provide an effective advertising platform for small and medium size businesses that do not have a national brand. Small businesses will have a much better time gaining real customers from search engine ads targeting specific keywords and locations relevant to their business. However, marketing on social media is essentially a shot in the dark when your brand or business is not very large. Larger companies can afford to take that shot in the dark in order to build brand awareness at the national level.

There is another option that Pinterest could pursue, and that would be to develop a more dynamic business page allowing businesses to market and advertise their products and services to the actual users of Pinterest. Developing a more dynamic connection between the businesses and regular users of Pinterest could provide some sort of Segway towards a more stable monetization plan than simply advertising. The execution of such a platform would be no be easy, and the advertising route is most likely going to be their first option because it has worked for other companies before. Regardless, it would be wise for Pinterest to look into other options for monetization besides the conventional advertising method, because social media has proven to be ineffective at providing a quality advertising platform for the average business compared to the major search engines.

On November 6th, 2012 I had many family members and friends ask me if I voted and who I voted for. To their surprise, I said I had voted for nobody. Why did I not vote? Well there are many reasons, one being that my vote simply has zero effect on whether the president or senators in my state get elected because no one won by one vote. This is a very dry way to look at it, but given my math and science brain it is a logical way to think.

That is not the actually reason for why I did not vote, but is a good example of how our current system is severely outdated given our increased population and technological improvements. In other words, although it may seem as if your vote or “voice” matters, it really has little effect on the direction of the country unless you hold high political or business positions with influence on others around you. Regardless, The reason for my non-vote is that our current politicians and government system is undermining the human and technological potential we have as a country and world. This is not necessarily because of greed or corruption, but simply a lack of understanding of how the system works, why it is outdated and what we can do to improve it.

Currently we are in a fiat monetary system in which central banks can print essentially unlimited money to support governments who continuously run massive deficits, increasing the global debt. This is one of the central problems we face, and no politician seems to talk about it or have any idea how to fix it.

As Sergrey Brin of Google put it, in order for our country and society to advance our politicians must abandon party politics and focus solely on what we need to do to improve our country. Party politics hinders our ability to produce objective solutions and methods for solving our economic and environment problems. If all of our politicians were simply independent then we would actually have candidates who did what they believed was best, and not what would help them win their parties candidacy.

When I hear politicians talk about how they are going to reduce the debt by increasing taxes or reducing taxes and government spending, they either have no idea what they are talking about or they are simply lying. No amount of tax increases will reduce the deficit because tax increases will reduce consumer spending and thus reduce the amount of total money taken in by the government. Additionally reducing taxes will not do anything to reduce the deficit because our economy is inflated by government spending and reducing taxes and government spending will reduce our GDP.

The fact of the matter is that our country and economic system is severely flawed, and the democrats and republicans will not fix the actual problems because that would be political suicide. The global economic system is set up so that debt is money, and increasing loans or the amount of debt increases the money supply and thus world GDP. This cannot go on forever, and eventually will be disastrous for everyone across the globe.

How can we fix these problems? Well the truth is, no one really knows the answer. Jacque Fresco of The Venus Project proposes a resourced based economy. The idea of a resource based economy has some merit, however his explanations lack many specifics and his idea seems more like a general direction than an actual solution to our current problems.

An economy based on resources and maximizing resources would solve many of our economic and poverty related problems, but actually accomplishing this transition seems almost impossible. Additionally formulating a government and all the logistics of creating this new economic system seem far from feasible anytime soon.

A short term solution that could help improve the current political and economic woos we continue to face would be to at least vote online. This could improve the amount of people voting, the frequency of voting and the number of issues constituents could vote on. This would allow the average person to push for issues and promote change online that could go viral quickly, so that more could get accomplished in less time.

Voting on the internet would definitely open up brand new possibilities for not only government but the entire world. If we were to establish politically and non-corrupt online open source technologies for citizens to collaborate and generate policies, we could accomplish more than we do in our current divided political state. Voting online does seem like a good idea, but the security risks are enormous and voter fraud could be difficult to defeat. With all the technology we have it would seem that we could figure out a way to stop voter fraud online, so that we could develop a truly democratic form of government in which everyone can vote and draft documents or bills and not just a select few who have the money and influence to win elections.

However, until a safe proof method for voting online is established, voting online is just as much as a pipe dream as a resource based economy. An article by CNN, The Washington Post , and The LA Times offers some good insight into online voting and the problems or solutions it could cause.

I have been adamant that the internet will one day rule television and become the normal means for people to watch shows and media on a bigger screen for several years now. The jump to internet television has still not quite taken off, as most people continue to watch television on the major networks and premium channels like HBO. However, it was a conversation with a programmer that made me realize the jump might take longer than expected, but will happen nonetheless at some point in the future.

This programmer told me about how he first started programming when he was 10 or 11 years old on the Apple 2E computer, before the internet, operating systems, and even hard drives were installed on pcs. He said he would make software programs and save them on floppy discs for fun, but he grew out of the fad and got out of programming for almost 2 decades, before getting back into it. I asked him why he didn’t continue programming and go to school for computer science. He told me that there just wasn’t much you could do with programming and that even in the early days of the internet there just wasn’t a lot of interesting things you could build. He finally got back into programmer and is now a self-employed web designer that will be joining forces with MuvDigital in the next couple of months.

What I realized was that the technology to employ internet onto television is still in its infant stage relative to what it could become. In other words, new age television with internet browsing capabilities and more user friendly methods of watching videos, television shows and other types of media will soon become the norm. An article by Techradar seems to agree with this stating that sleeker internet television designs will become the norm throughout the coming years and that using the internet on television will become easier and more accessible.

Sony, Samsung, and LG all have invested heavily into building smart TV’s with internet capabilities and applications that can be updated so that your TV does not go out of date if a new software or browser comes out. Just as it took several years for flat screens to become the norm, internet television will also take at least a few more years to become a common place technology in mainstream America.

Google and Apple are two major players that have already begun to make serious headway into the internet television revolution. It would not be surprising if one of these two internet giants overtook the major television players Samsung, Sony, and LG because of their internet dominance in this new transition to internet television.

Websites like Netflix and Hulu essentially destroyed conventional video stores like mega chain Blockbuster that is now out of business. Now you can only find a Redbox or the occasional mom and pop video store if you want to get a DVD or movie. The next transition will be internet television eventually destroying major TV networks that are loaded with commercials and downtown that can be avoided with the internet. When this transition will happen is hard to say, but regardless it is a transition that will happen, and it could come sooner than later throughout this decade.

The last several years has caused a massive shift in the way that people receive and look for information. With smart phones, tablets and free Wi-Fi access exploding across the country, searching for a business or information relevant to what you want to do such as movie times or events has never been easier. Mobile internet devices will surpass desktop and pc use this year, making information more accessible than ever.

The US has the highest percentage of internet access at over 78 percent of the population compared to 38 percent for the entire world. As developing countries continue to expand their internet access and mobile devices make their way into mainstream America, the internet will become more and more universal. Having internet at all times, AKA having a smartphone, has dramatically changed the way that most people live who are lucky enough to have this luxury. A person can look up any information, whether it be a business location or sports news at any location they receive smart phone internet service. This changes everything about the way we expect to receive and interpret information because having this luxury causes an expectation of instantaneous information.

There will come a time when almost everyone in the world has internet access either at home or at a nearby café that provides free internet access. As we accelerate towards this point in time, in which more information is accessible to more and more people we will start to see exponential increase in digital information use.

This exponential increase will be caused by the multiplying effect of more people having internet access combined with more people building and creating internet media. In other words, each passing day, there are more people with internet access and more immediate access such as mobile or smartphone internet access. This contributes to the overall population of people that will be creating and building internet media such as social media profiles, websites, blog posts or news articles.

Additionally, traditional cable television will slowly be replaced by internet usage on television. New televisions are often fitted with internet access, and it is fairly easy to hook up your computer to most TV’s. The internet is quickly becoming the dominant form of media; however most people and businesses are not prepared for this accelerating change.

You would think that computer science and information technology oriented majors would be increasing at a pace similar to the demand increases in digital technology and usage. However, skilled computer science and programming employees is becoming a major shortage in the United States and many developed countries. In fact, some reports have claimed that there are as many as 150,000 computer science related jobs opening each year, and only approximately 14,000 computer science undergraduates graduating each year. That is a massive shortage, and quite extraordinary considering how most recent graduates are finding it very difficult to get a new job.

Technology companies such as Microsoft and Google are providing training and free classes to young students and teachers willing to teach computer science to high school students. It seems that students are not interested in computer science yet it is one of the most lucrative majors you could pursue. The reasons for this seem to be point to a few things.

Most parents are not familiar with computer science and are unlikely to push their children to study to computer science. Additionally, students lack knowledge about the industry and are not aware that it is one of the highest paid majors one could attend. Lastly, it is not an easy major, and students seem to stray away from majors that require substantially more time than other majors.

Businesses are also lacking technical expertise, regardless of the shortage of technical employees available. The average business owner is over 45 years old, and lacks the computer and information technology skills needed to successfully manage a business competitively. This makes it hard for businesses owners to even know where to begin when it comes to competing online. Without technical expertise or knowledge how can a business owner hire the right person to help where they are lacking; or find the right company to fill in the void at a lower cost than hiring an employee to do so? They can attempt to research and learn on their own what they need to make an informed decision but they still may not be effective at finding the right technical help they need to succeed.

This overall lack of information technology expertise from both an employee and employer perspective is an interesting phenomenon because of the explosion of information technology jobs. Technical expertise has never been more coveted by businesses, yet there are barely any more computer science majors than there were thirty years ago. In fact, some years have actually had a major decrease in computer science majors. This lack of information technology and programming knowledge will create a massive void in one of the most important trends in the 21st century, the information age.

It seems that the small percentage of people willing to major and study computer science will be the ones to take on a stronger role in this shift to the information age. The internet will no doubt take a stronger role in most people’s lives from both a social and economic perspective. The few people with the foresight to master this craft deemed “information technology” will be the ones that progress through the 21st century without pain, and the ones that fail to adapt to the accelerating change we are experiencing will fall behind.

Without Steve Jobs will Apple continue to launch leapfrog products like the IPod, the Ipad and the IPhone? These products have redefined the information technology industry and transformed a generation of young professionals who prefer Apple to PC’s. With massive potential to move into the commercial market for information technology products Apple still has room to grow, as big as they have already become. More and more businesses are switching to the Ipad for sales and traveling, and the small MacBook airs are great for business traveling.

Apple’s innovation and “think different” motto has separated itself from the competition, to the point where it is now the largest company by market cap value, skyrocketing past the competitors. However with intense competition from companies like Microsoft, Google, and other smartphone and tablet producers the need for innovation and top notch products will only increase.

There will come a time when the next line of innovation is needed and simply redesigning or improving old products will not be enough to maintain the lead in the ultra-competitive information technology world. Without the visionary work of Steve Jobs, will there be someone else who steps up to the plate to lead Apple through the second decade of the 21st century. With such a stranglehold on the market, the need for such a figure in the company may not be necessary for the next several years, however in an industry that changes practically daily, the need for someone of that stature may come sooner than later.

According to the hacking group Anonymous, they are taking credit for the hack into Godaddy because of their support for SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).  Anonymous says that Godaddy is supporting attempts by the government to censor the internet that could deprecate the free and open source of information a non-censored internet provides.

The member of Anonymous said the attack was not affiliated with the group; however some reports say that it was not a hacking attempt and just a corrupted router malfunction.   Whatever the cause, it is still not clear as to what exactly happened.   Regardless, such major downtime to the largest registrar of domain names is not something to take lightly.

Information technology is an amazing thing, but as we become more accustomed to its benefits we seem to forget how fragile such massive systems are.  To keep everything working properly requires amazing precision and systems cooperating in sync, and one disruption such as what we witnessed with Godaddy can cause major uproar in the Information technology sector.

Penguin penalizes spammy backlinks and Panda is designed to downgrade websites with poor content that is either spun, keyword stuffed, or just obviously built for SEO and not for genuine content.   Before Panda, webmasters and SEO’s could spam articles that were poorly written, and use programs like article marketing robot to generate thousands of article submission backlinks.

MuvDigital is now changing its search engine optimization focus to on page SEO and quality content creation.  MuvDigital believes that the trend towards penalizing weak backlinks and bad content will continue, and having a good site with fresh and updated content is the best way to safeguard against this.  Although this strategy may take longer to build a strong effect on a websites rankings, it is a much better strategy for the long term growth of a website. An article by Search Engine Land seems to agree that blogging is a secret weapon underutilized by most small businesses.

Relying on backlinks is not a safe way to grow your online presence, because websites come and go all the time, thus building up your own website is a much better way to get more long term traffic to your site.
If you are a furniture store that wants to get ranked for used furniture, writing a post titled “Used Furniture” could work, but writing something a little more creative may actually benefit you more in the long run.

Writing a post such as “Why Used Furniture is the New New Furniture” is something that is much more likely to catch someone’s eye if it is written well.  You could easily write a post about how used furniture is a growing industry in these tough economic times, and Google will not consider that spam or poorly written content.  Trying to write blog posts using the exact same keyword you are ranking for may work, but for the sake of building a good website with long term value, putting part of the keywords in your titles as blog posts or writing about the topics indirectly may serve better.  Additionally, this will allow you write many posts that are all somewhat related to the keywords you are looking to rank for, and you will not come across as someone trying to write just for SEO content.

Blogging is the most useful tool when it comes to building strong content on your website.  Of course adding new tabs and drop-downs to your site is essential to building a quality website, but building a website with a blog has never been more important than it is today.  That is why content management systems with built in blogs such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are taking over, because anyone can start a blog with little to no work.  Building quality posts takes time, and trying to build a post just for search engine optimization purposes is not a good idea.  However if you have keywords in mind, it might be good to come with a blog post that is related to a blog posts.

Regardless of what you choose to write about, having freshly updated content will also help you get quality backlinks.  Trying to spam links and hunt down links is not an effective strategy if your website is lacking content and quality content.  Google wants good backlinks that are relevant to your business, and make sense for your website to have.

Small Business Marketing

Think of your website as your store front online. But rather than having maybe a few hundred or thousand people walk or drive by each day, there are literally millions of people searching for what you have to offer, pretty much looking for you online. So if you think about it literally, you could be generating incredible amounts of money by having a well designed site that people will find and want to look at. In short, don’t be cheap with it. It’s important to remember that to make a website takes time and a lot of expertise so it can be a little pricey, but as long as your dedicated to making it work, the benefit far outweighs the cost.

Here’s the thing, just do it. Set aside time each week, even an hour, to just write about your business. Write about; your products, trends in your industry, tutorials and how-to’s, or pretty much anything you find interesting and post them on your website or on your blog. Which brings me to my next point – your website.

Have a call to action on your website. A call to action means getting people who visit your website to do something whether that be to hit a button, call you, download something, fill out a contact for, or anything else you typically do online. Call to action allows you to generate leads from your website. A very useful tool is call tracking. This allows you to see how many people are calling you specifically from your website. You can even put different tracking numbers on different pages of your site, so you can literally see what pages people are going to that create conversions.

Local Listing Sites

Business owners should want to put their business everywhere they can online, especially if it’s free. There are hundreds of business listing sites out there on the internet. Local listings can drastically improve your chances of being found so it’s critical that you claim your Google Places Listing, Bing Listing, and Yahoo! Listing. Also put your business on sites like Superpages, Thumbtack, Yelp, and any other one that is no cost to you. They are another place for you to be found on. Why not, right?

Offer incentives to share your business Social Media Sites with their friends. People are more likely to buy from you over someone else if they have seen that their friends have liked or shared your business. Giving 10% off for a client to share your business on their Facebook page will more likely than not give you an extremely high ROI. Maybe not immediately, but over time those “friends” that saw their friend Susie like “Tanning Salon A” 6 months ago on facebook will choose “Tanning Salon A” over ”Tanning Salon B”.

Be active on forums for your industry. Go out find forums, niche listing sites, and anything else that has to do with your industry online and then be active on it. Make sure that every post you make has your websites link in it as well. Be active in your online community, it gets you known in your industry. This can be especially helpful if you are selling B2B because all of your potential customers will be there too!

Website Management

Have “a guy” for your website. Although this is not in everyones budget, it is always good to have someone on call that knows about the internet and can make the changes that you need so that you are successful and are well represented online. What takes them 10 minutes to change on your website, at the very least could take you hours and hours, and even then you probably still won’t get the results that you wanted. So what if it costs $50 bucks? It’s worth your time since you can focus on what you know, and they can focus on what they do.

Search Engine Optimization

At the end of the day, small business owners do not put enough value on their online presence. They have the hour, they just don’t think it would be better spent working on their online presence than working on their profit and lost statement. It is time to fill that gap and be informed. Now more than ever people are searching on Google, Bing, and Yahoo for products and services. In fact 70% of people used Google to search for a business way back in 2009, imagine what that number is now. As humans we want instant gratification and it is hard to see the long term benefit of something like online marketing. The business owners who do see that potential and are willing to put in the effort to reap the benefits later, are going to be the ones who thrive in the coming years.

At the beginning of the 21st century, all you needed to do was go start up your computer and search for any information you wanted such as what time movies were playing, where the coolest hang outs were, what the hottest new trends were; well you get the picture, everything seemed to be at your fingertips. It seemed as though literally ANYTHING that you wanted to know was at your fingertips- as long as you were by a computer. Now our impatience has reached an all time high. That impatience resulted from us now carrying mini super computers in our pockets, everywhere we go, all the time, so at no point anything is out of our reach. If you don’t know something, take out your smartphone to Google it, and you will.

Anyone that has had a smartphone for an extended period of time, meaning over 2 years understands how impatient one becomes with such technology.  Without my smartphone I literally feel lost, almost like a child without his parent.  This is the sad reality that mobile technology has created.  With such amazing technology comes the draw back of relying on such amazing technology.  Having GPS wherever I go causes me to feel as if I know how to get anywhere, but when my phone dies, I am lost without the experience of navigating using signs and road cues.  It is an interesting phenomena, as it is the people that know how to create, use and build such technologies that hold  such great power, but it also those that are too reliant on such technology that lose the original skills we once needed to survive such as directional awareness.

Mobile computing is the new phenomena that has changed everything.  Did you know that 87% of the world population now has a mobile phone and they are using them all day long. 9 out of 10 mobile Searches result in some form of action whether that be a purchase, store visit, call or some other action. People are using mobile and it is doing nothing but grow; in fact from 2005-2015, mobile commerce or “mCommerce” as it is being dubbed will grow ten times larger. This article on mobile marketing growthshows how mobile is growing across the globe, and is exploding in Asia, the continent with by far the most people in the world. Now is the time to get a grasp of that emerging market. Set up an mCommerce site that will drive sales to your business, set up shipping, and make more money!

Still wondering if Mobile Marketing is important? Well consider this: Google has previously stated that in the near future they will be indexing whether or not your website has a mobile optimized site, and it will help your SEO, moving you further up the ranks if you do have one.  As more and more people become reliant on smartphones it will become more and more important for businesses to reach out to mobile consumers.  The time to get into mobile technology is now, whether it is building an application for your business or a mobile website.

Just as the internet has grown to rule the marketing landscape, so too will mobile internet grow to new heights.  The capabilities of Mobile computing will grow exponentially because of the ability to fit exponentially more transistors (informational holding units) into smaller and smaller microchips.  Thus it is only a matter of time before the computing powers of mobile devices outgrows those of conventional labtops and desktops.  This will open up a whole new landscape of mobile application and web development the world

The time to jump on the mobile bandwagon is now, regardless of whether you are a small business or large corporation. Mobile computing devices are here to stay, and the reliance one has upon such technology only grows the longer one has it.   The children growing up with Iphone’s and Android devices will one day become college students, and thus heavier consumers.  It is these future generations that will drive mobile marketing and technology to heights that most might consider unfathomable at present. has never seen.

The most important and under appreciated component of mobile marketing is that most businesses haven’t even tapped into this market.  It is the businesses that invest in the new technology trends that will stay ahead of the competition.  There will be entirely new industries built on the backbone of mobile devices and mobile computing, just as search engine optimization is a relatively new profession.   A decade ago, 99 percent of people would have no idea what SEO was, now it is just starting to become a household term.  Just as search engines destroyed many marketing industries such as the yellowpages, mobile marketing too will cut into many arenas.  However, it is those with the foresight to see such potential that will reap the benefits of the mobile boom without taking the hit in the industries that die off.