Immediate results, instant gratification, instant riches. Today thousands of online marketing products promise the same things and try and make money. And every minute, someone out there purchases a new product right before the price goes up. The new product, which inevitably is going to change the way we do Internet marketing. If you don’t purchase instantly you are going to get left in the dust while early adopters make all of the money.

Internet marketing is like a treasure hunt because the treasure may or may not actually be at the end, depending on whether you believe in it all.

The process needs to be revealed. The process needs to be flexible enough for personal modifications. And the process needs to guide a person through to profits.

The Marketing power of Internet sites

With the rise of individual voices and the eroding effectiveness of mass marketing techniques, it’s no wonder that so many marketing and communications disciplines are enamored with cracking the code on influence, specifically influence among people.

For example to market a book, an old-school form of media, we turn to a couple of the newest: video file sharing and online social networking, create a video spot for YouTube and our own Web site on MySpace.com. YouTube and MySpace, gives us an access to 30 million people, so you can well imagine how many potential customers we can line up with Internet. The reason why this technique is translating into sales is that videos are a lot visible to a large number of people.

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I’m quite fond of the Really Simple Syndication (RSS), but it hasn’t always been this way. Over the last year or so, while i slowly built a list of RSS feeds for the BBC Web site, I continually scratched my head and wondered, “What’s the point?”

RSS technology is a result of the growth of XML and its ease of use. It allows Webmasters to produce XML news feeds for their sites easily. Those who run reader software can subscribe to and read the feeds. I understood how RSS worked. What I didn’t get was who would see the feeds, why they would read them, and what they would do with the links. Read more…

Skype took Internet Communication ahead

As the world’s largest Internet communication community, Skype has been giving its users the ability to set their conversations free at home, at work and on the move. It is developed its ecosystem of more than 50 hardware partners and more than 150 Skype-certified devices to broaden the appeal of Skype to a wider base of users who want to use Skype away from the PC, no matter where they happen to be.

Why did Ebay purchase Skype?

Ebay buying Skype has been a bold move for a company, that from last so many years was just revolving around its e-commerce knitting services. Although It was not very easy to draw parallels between the Skype acquisition and eBay’s purchase of PayPal, buying Skype is clearly a big departure from eBay’s previous expansions, all related to e-commerce in one way or another.

Ebay might try to use Skype to expand its moves into new markets, such as new cars, travel, real estate, and personal and business services. Those markets already are accustomed to both paying for leads and talking directly to customers throughout the purchase process. Indeed, this new business model would be ideal for some of eBay’s new forays, such as its recent purchase of the shopping comparison site Shopping.com.

There is no denying that eBay and Skype do share some similarities despite inhabiting entirely different markets. Mainly, they both share the coveted quality of becoming more valuable the more members they have. Indeed, along with PayPal, which had the same characteristics, this would be eBay’s third business that has grown from these so-called network effects.

Is Skype turning into a mere telephone service now?

In my perspective its just about the importance of human voice communication. For a very long time people have failed to understand the significance of Internet in their lives and conversations.

We all know that Skype cannot be used for emergency calling. It cannot be used the same way as a telephone. It basically depends more on the Internet and all the occasional frailties that brings. But for many of us it has become a fundamental means of voice communications. In our minds it became inseparable from phone service. Not in fact, but in our perception which, of course, equals reality. If you are Skype, that is a strong position to hold. –A remarkable position to hold considering what it is built on.

Even more remarkably many who are not users of Skype speak of it as a phone service. Maybe that is because it is easy to talk about that way, but now we have not only a strong user community, but a much larger community that accepts Skype, not for what it is, but what we think it is. The criticism of Skype’s handling of the “service outage” seems in some part a result of Skype/eBay not knowing how to handle the role they had assumed.

There are plenty of lessons to go around here, an expert field day for sure. When it is all said and done, remember that Skype, and other similar services, are not the phone company. Internet communications offers more than any phone connection—and it also offers less. Let’s now enjoy each for what it is.

What does the future hold for Skype?

While most of the collaboration industries knows Skype voice quality, ease of use and unbeatable price (it’s free), few have been paying close attention to the deeper revolution that Skype heralds, and the major transformations it is giving way too when it comes to disruptive, free, real-time communication.

Whichever way you want to look at this, it is hard to see how traditional telephone companies are going to counter Skype’s incredible disruptive power as it already allows me to talk in real-time with anyone around the world on independently of the type of computers used while offering very cost-effective paid access to any land line and mobile number in the world.