Where are the battles being fought?

A Better Title (and I think this deserves to go viral):

Where are the battles for iaudiences being fought in 2018?

Remember, you saw it here first. "IAUDIENCES".  Not a typo. Read it as "EYE audiences." It's an update to the tired talk of eyeballs which always seemed ghoulish.  Iaudiences is far more streamlined. Feel free to use it but do give credit to blorum.info).

For almost 15 years, I've been leading a consumer online marketing war in which we battle for market share. Over the years, I have had success by being nimble and lucky about fighting on the right fields at the right time.

When I started, the online fights had been about positions in directories and banner placements and optimization.  I however immediately focused on search engine position primarily natural search but also PPC. The trends were in my favor and I rode this for a decade benefiting from the tailwinds and fighting the right battles right up until 2015. Then the tailwinds of search growth seemed to have stopped.

We were big with the rise of email running both long term branding emails and timely newsletters. Very efficient until we felt that we had to switch to advanced nurture campaigns through the use of marketing automation systems where the complexity of the campaigns made, at least to the manager, the writing and effectiveness somewhat opaque versus the simplicity and transparency of old world stats (ie 470K on the last, 32K now at the 45th monthly email and still getting a 15% open rate!)

I also fought social media battles. We were early in working with mom bloggers and we even developed our own system for converting our mom fans into mom bloggers through our own training courses of blackbeltblogger.com and then the blogwritingcourse.com.  We were big on mom forums working both with our own and independent forums.

When new social media started getting big, we were a little slow.We were wildly successful with our forum and we wanted that to be the one and forever social media. That would have been nice.  Having wasted some time on MySpace, channels and vlogs, we were consistently late and clumbsy to the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin,Pinterest, and Snapchat worlds. Just as we got good with Facebook and were driving huge engagement and traffic (VSC), we invested with Facebook to grow our tens of thousands to two hundred but they tweeked the algorithm so we started seeing views plummet to the current dismal ~1%. Sigh.  We did however ride the Yahoo groups popularity and made good use of it for many years after everyone else seemed to have forgotten it.

On the school side, we were OK with Edmodo and Symbaloo when they were young and easy to work with but haven't had much success once they got to the big time.

Our usage of Youtube has been minor.
Our success with Podcasts insignificant.
Our ebooks on Amazon and iTunes insignificant.
The entire app movement came and went and with the exception of one app that we built as a web-client substitute, we have not been a player.

We remain very SERP and SEO oriented.
Lets look closely at how this is playing out with secular homeschool.