The most important lesson I’ve learned in 20+ years of marketing online

I was fortunate enough to join the online world near the very beginning of public availability in late 1993 and early 1994. In the nearly 30 years since, I’ve seen changes that I can’t even begin to describe. 

Since everything seems to move faster online, I’ve often thought that I’ve already seen the equivalent of a full lifetime of change since then.

For almost as long as the internet has existed, someone has been there trying to sell someone something. (And of course, direct marketing goes back FAR longer than the internet!) I’ve had a front row seat to that evolution over time. 

As I look back, I’m fascinated by how much has changed, and how one single thing has not. 

See if you can spot it as I describe the changes marketing online has encountered and endured over the years. 

It existed (in a slightly different form) before the internet, and I believe that even as we move into the AI era, it will continue to be the single most important aspect of our work as content creators.

A brief history of marketing

Everyone thinks history is boring, right? (It was my favorite subject matter in school, but I digress.) If you’re reading this, hopefully you are someone who is at least interested in the history of marketing online, and how we got here. 

While online marketing has exploded and branched off into numerous directions since the 1990’s, I’ll keep the focus on how these changes and evolutions have affected the world of content creators specifically. 

There are of course numerous other areas to explore (including paid advertising, the rise of the influencer, drop-shipping, ebay, Etsy, and too many others to mention) but to keep this article front turning into a book, we’ll stick to how this all affects you, the content creator.

We’ll start at the very beginning, with the first “million-dollar online marketer”, Corey Rudl.

(There is some disagreement about whether or not the moniker above is accurate, since Corey shipped a physical product. But he was absolutely the first to reach this milestone without any traditional offline marketing, so I believe it qualifies.)

Physical courses ordered online

Although Adobe released the PDF format in 1993, the concept of content being sold as digital ebooks was still a decade away from becoming commonplace. 

But as people began to develop the first generation of websites, it didn’t take long for the very first sales letters to appear. And even though the first wave of payment processors popped up at around the same time, the rudimentary crudeness of the early systems would be unimaginable to use today. 

During the early days of the internet, web browsers were not “secured”. In other words, anybody could see what was being transmitted. 

So the earliest sellers online required that the customer download a special, secured browser, in order to complete a transaction. (PayPal, which really changed the game of purchasing online for everyone, wasn’t born until 1999.)

It was into this environment that Corey Rudl sold the first commercially successful product online. A car enthusiast, Corey made his initial income online by leveraging Craigslist (which launch in 1995) to profitably buy and sell used cars. 

He then took this knowledge and packaged it up into a program called “Internet Marketing Secrets”, which was purchased online, then delivered in a 3-ring binder to your home. 

In addition to being a pioneer in the direct sales space, Corey was also one of the first to leverage the power of affiliate marketing, and one of the first to use a sequential autoresponder to stay connected to his email list of buyers and interested parties.

Sadly, Corey - a car enthusiast and sometime-racer, died in a car crash in 2005 at just 34 years of age. I’ve often wondered what he would think of how the marketing landscape has evolved over the nearly 20 years since his death.

The rise of ebooks

By the early 2000’s, things were changing rapidly. The PDF format started growing in popularity, and it became possible for the first time to fairly easily convert a Word document to a PDF file (though true integration, like it exists today, was still many years away). 

In addition, web browsers gained the ability to handle secure transactions, encryption of those transactions became commonplace, and payment processors started appearing with increasingly easier processes to connect them to sales letters.

This is when the first true generation of online marketers appeared. Names like Yannick Silver, Jim Edwards, Allan Gardyne, John Reese, and many, many others came onto the scene. 

This is also where I made my first appearance as a content marketer, earning my first dollar online in early 2003.

Communities sprang up overnight - places where internet marketers could get together and share their knowledge, experience and results (or to brag and tell tall stories, which become all too common very quickly on these sites.

Then Google Adsense and Adwords both launched in 2003, and the floodgates opened.

Suddenly, you could post ads on your website, and earn money just by having people visit your page - no sale required.

This was the change that launched the entire content creation and content marketing industry. Helping it to explode even further was the launch of Wordpress.

Also launched in 2003, it wasn’t until early 2005 that it really exploded onto the scene, not only changing the way people built websites, but changing what they used a website for. 

Along with the increased presence of email marketing autoresponders, a content marketer could, for the first time, build out a content-based website without having to directly sell on that website, and easily build a large list of email addresses to communicate with their audience in a totally new way.

Though Blogger launched first and had some initial success, it was Wordpress that forever changed how the internet looked and read.

But even though Wordpress effectively launched content marketing, that road, paved with good intentions, has a number of bumps and obstacles to get through first.

It would be more than a decade before the dust began to settle.

Search engine trickery

Since the dawn of time, humans have sought short-cuts that would get them what they wanted, without having to maximize the amount of hard work it required.

And the internet was no different.

Though Yahoo launched the world’s first search engine in 1995, it was the launch of Google in 1999 that truly transformed how we find things online.

In 2004 Google was still a young company, with a search engine exploding in popularity, and a pair of advertising products that unleashed a tsunami it wasn’t fully prepared for.

With rapidly advancing web publishing software like Wordpress,the ability to earn money simply by having someone do nothing more than visit a page, and the very rudimentary way that Google ranked web pages in search results at that time, the system as it existed was ripe for abuse.

And abused it was.

Almost overnight, software sprang up that was designed to build thousands of pages around individual keywords, with the “content” being nothing more than search engine results themselves.

(How meta…)

Fortunes were made very quickly by numerous people during this brief era (2004-06). Unfortunately, it had the side effect of making search engine results almost useless, as a search engine result led you to a page of…more search engine results.

(Imagine a house of mirrors and you’ll probably get the general idea.)

Google moved quickly to repair the integrity of its search results, and by late 2006, it was much harder to rank pages in this manner. Those same fortunes previously won were quickly lost by many, though those who considered the longer game, and set their pages up to collect email addresses fared better, for longer.

This brief era nearly killed content marketing before it had even had a chance to begin to blossom. It didn’t start to fully recover until 2011, when Google finally eliminated “page generators” for good.

Social media stumbles, then explodes

Oh MySpace, so much has been written about your rise and fall, that I’ll keep it brief here.

By the mid-2000’s internet forums had become hugely popular, and people were beginning to understand the power of internet communities.

But forums, while bringing people together, still lacked something, a certain personal touch, a way for an individual to express themselves, their interests, and invite others to join them in those interests.

Into this void stepped MySpace.

MySpace was the first major attempt at building a social media network. Being a pioneer in the space, and with the iPhone still several years away from the type of adoption we take for granted today, MySpace quickly became tagged as “just a place for teenagers”.

(How differently that moniker applies today in the world of TikTok…)

And of course, once something gets publicly tagged as “for teens” what do the teens do?

They leave. In droves.

MySpace also had ownership issues, and being the first of their kind, struggled to understand exactly what they were, and how to appeal to the masses.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others, all coming a few years after the massive decline of MySpace, learning many valuable lessons from their forebearer.

They also had one major advantage that MySpace didn’t - the coming title wave of mobile devices.

Today, social media dominates the internet landscape, though some cracks in their armor are starting to appear for various reasons, in various ways.

It took awhile, but eventually content creators learned how to leverage these tools to build an audience and provide an income. 

Those who built email lists have done much better weathering the ebbs and flows over the years, as social media networks have made it increasingly harder to reach their audiences without paying for the privilege.

In fact, it was this increased pressure on content creators, who were able to reach less and less of their audience over time, that started the pendulum swinging away from over reliance on social media and back in the direction of self-hosted platforms again.

YouTube and the rise of the content creator

Meanwhile, video content creation, spurred on by YouTube (created in 2005) grew steadily in its first decade, but really began to explode in its second decade. 

As video creation tools became cheaper and easier to use, millions jumped on the opportunity to share their stories, knowledge (and sometimes, conspiracy theories) to the masses.

Suddenly, it became possible to literally have millions of followers, and the idea of “content creator” as a profession, which had struggled so mightily in its first ten years, finally broke through. 

Eventually content creators on YouTube began to learn the lessons of the earlier internet marketers, and began building email lists outside of the network, giving them additional opportunities to present material (and sales offers) to their lists.

The “great merging” as I’ve come to call it, really seemed to accelerate around 2018, and continues to this day. Influencers and content creators across all mediums (audio, video and writing) are increasingly learning the value of having an audience that they “own”, as opposed to being at the mercy of a 3rd party network for all of their exposure and income.

AI and the current state of marketing online

That brings us to today. In 2023 Artificial Intelligence was the buzzword everywhere, with most people believing this will be the next “big disruptor” that changes everything.

That may well be true. Time will tell.

In the interim, there has never been a better opportunity to be a content creator on the internet. The tools that are available have never been better or easier to use.

A balance is starting to appear between the leverage and usability of various 3rd part tools, along with the knowledge of what is the single most important aspect of marketing online that hasn’t changed with time.

Have you figured it out yet?

It’s having a list, a list that you own, of people who are interested in what you have to say, to share, and yes, even to sell.

From the earliest days of direct marketing over a century ago, the phrase “the money is in the list” has endured.

And I believe that will continue well into the future, even if the future is dominated by AI.

People are always going to want to connect with other people at a deep level. No amount of artificially created content is ever going to change that.

Whatever the future holds for search engines, social media networks, artificial intelligence, or anything new that is yet to be known, the power of the list will endure.

So whatever you build, wherever you host it, however, you choose to get your message out into the world, make it your number one priority to build a list of people, your community, and those who have expressed interest in hearing more from you. 

Treat them well, and in return, they will help you build your business in ways you cannot possibly imagine.