Wow!

Is it 2010 already?  I see my last post was in June last year — where did all the time go?

Anyway, Here’s to a happy, healthy and wealthy 2010 – may it be your best year ever!

My, it’s difficult to keep up with all the changes. Consider what’s happened to the Internet in the last decade: Internet users were a mere 360 million in the year 2000 but grew to a whopping 1.7 billion in 2009 – a 380% growth and this growth is set to rocket because:

Despite this massive growth, world internet penetration is still only 25.6%.

Asia, with a population of 3.8 billion, only has a penetration rate of 19.4%, that makes only 737 million users. — This is not a lot when you consider China has a population of close to 1.3 billion and India of 1.1 billion…

But Asia and especially these two countries are going to become more and more prominent throughout the decade. Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine is about to launch it’s own mobile app, Google has launched a Chinese language spoken app. and Microsoft recently launched a twitteresque application in China called MSN JUKU.

This is just an indication of the importance the big players are attaching to the rise of the Asian markets.

Online Advertising Expenditure Will Rocket

Respected research firm eMarketer says 10% of all projected ad dollars in the US will go online this year.

According to ZenithOptiMedia, global online ad spending will surpass total radio ad spending … and overtake magazines ad dollars during 2010.”

More and more major businesses will aggressively go online throughout the coming months and throughout the decade…

And what the companies know about the online world is relatively little right now so they will be looking for guidance from you the copywriter and marketer. So the time to get in on the action is NOW because it won’t take them too long to learn.

What does this really mean to us as Copywriters?

This is probably our greatest opportunity because… It means web copywriting is going to rocket… the categories to go for are enormous… It could be landing pages, email campaigns, sales letters or even ads…

Your marketing skills will also become more valuable and the trend will be for more and more copywriters to offer marketing advice rather than simply writing services. Some say the traditional sales letters are slowly dying out but I feel there will be a need for MORE integration in marketing.

A combination of online, offline, social media, video etc. will become paramount. the best returns for any campaign will be through a combined approach. So any copywriter portraying preeminence in marketing web copywriting and video scripting will be in high demand.

Another thing, more and more people are getting into home businesses.

Why?

Well, after all, many have no choice: they have been laid-off and must survive. Others have suddenly found their retirement funds and pensions have been cut so are exploring different ways to make money simply to be able to retire!

This then means that you should not ignore your next door stay-at-home-mom who has a website that trains people about pet grooming… If you bothered to talk, you may realize she’s struggling with the basics of marketing or doesn’t know how to do an effective email campaign to her list. And that’s where you come in 2010.

Sales letters that are incorporating video will be on the rise in 2010

In fact, Amish Shah recently launched his ‘Magic bullet System’ using video sales letters alone. If you were watching you’d have noticed the total lack of ‘traditional’ sales copy on his site.

So, many opportunities lie in store which makes me feel positive about this decade…

Here’s to your continued success!

Stuart

KungfuCopywriter

PS

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