I rarely interest myself in the very latest up to the minute trends of SEO, SEM, etc. marketing, as I have always believed that if you publish outstanding and unique content, that is worth an entire auditorium full of SEO Black Hats. However, there have been some fairly recent developments in Outbound and Syndicated Marketing which usher in a new era where the user is in control, and fortunately the excesses of the past where Web Marketers beat their customers into submission by overwhelming them with popups and spam are soon to be history. Outbound and Syndicated Marketing on the Web is primarily used to help concepts trickle through the internet from the main business website through a wide spectrum of various tools and techniques. That is what is usually known as Push & Pull marketing: The Push is where direct channels are utilized to reach out to clients, and the Pull is where customers opt-in to receiving information from the specific business. Syndicated feeds and RSS are a well received Pull method for users to choose to receive the information that you provide and that specifically interests them.

If the great fear of the old style television advertiser was to have the viewer go to the bathroom or to get a beer during the commercial breaks and just return back in time to watch more of the program itself, the equal great fear of today's Pull Web Marketers is the Spam/Unsubscribe button. At any time the carefully concocted marketing program can be terminated by any client with one click of their fickle little mouse. That's why it is imperative to keep Pull marketing vital, alive, relevant and exciting... otherwise the client will soon go to seek that information elsewhere.

Email marketing usually is nothing more than Spam in a Can. Today's web users have become savvy enough to understand that when the beginning of the email reads:

Dear Mr. Smith:

Your family at the Smith household and your neighbors in Pleasant Glen all know that Iowa's favorite brand of...

That email was most definitely not written just for you personally but is a cheap mail merge where the main letter has fields that are read off a database, thus the next email to go out from that company will say:

Dear Mr. Jones:

Your family at the Jones household and your neighbors in Canyon Gulch all know that Utah's favorite brand of...

Surprisingly enough if this sort of email marketing is done properly, and usually through an outsourced vendor with extensive experience in what works and what doesn't, you can get a conversion rate of up to about 4% which is nothing short of amazing, given the fact that personally, I haven't responded to a mail merge email in many years so I must be bringing down the conversion rate single handedly!

Email marketing has gotten significantly more complex and intricate since the early days of sucking millions of email addresses off the web and then buckshot blasting everyone in sight. Email marketing lists these days can be extremely targeted and opt-in lists are by far the most valuable as they show that there is a consumer at the other end who isn't just an innocent bystander, but actually has an interest in the subject at hand.

Pop-ups, Pop-unders, Tracking Cookies, Trojans, and other heavy handed forms of marketing are fortunately seeing their day come to a merciful end, as web users strongly reject the marketing messages that are attached to them. Users are now the commanders of what is on their screens and any attempt to forcefeed them will be rewarded with a resounding sound of mice all over the world clicking on that big X at the top of the browser window.

Many a business has believed that the internet is just television with a keyboard and have trashed huge advertising budgets for no sales gain at all, and in many cases, considerable sales losses. All web marketers should be aware that the best online approaches are subtle and not sledgehammers to the consumer's head.

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