Lines Bluring Between Online Industries

This post is going to be a bit of a stream of consciousness type brain-dump. I’ve been considering this topic for quite a while now and I’m still not sure I’m any closer to “figuring it out” than I was when I started. In fact, if I did “figure it out” I’d probably be a huge success or at least well ahead of the curve. Anyway, today I’d like to talk about the blurring lines between online industries. I’m not sure whether it’s the advent of Web2.0, my increased participation in different blogs and different communities but it seems to me the online world is shrinking and beginning to overlap more and more.

Bloggers are becoming SEO’s, domainers are becoming SEO’s, bloggers are more and more becoming search engine marketers (SEM’s), SEM’s are becoming social media marketers (SMM’s) and SEO’s seem to be expanding into all of the above. One of the places this has become most apparent to me is my RSS feed reader. When I began subscribing to different feeds I tried to classify them into a handful of folders according to their topics. Shoemoney and blogs like his went in the Affiliate Marketing folder, Copyblogger went into the CopyWriting folder, Problogger went in the Blogging folder. Today I went to subscribe to a blog and spent 5 minutes trying to decide which folder it fit in! Heck, even some of the old stalwarts are now bleeding over into different areas! Aaron Wall has begun posting occasionally about domaining. Frank Shilling has begun posting more often about SEO or at least the intersection of SEO and domaining. I mean what’s a poor blog reader to do?

What’s worse is I’m pretty sure I have ADD or ADHD or whatever the hell you call it. I have a tendency, as pops will no doubt confirm, to get excited about a project or idea and lose interest over time until boom, the next project comes along. Shoot you don’t have to look any further than the post levels on this blog to figure that one out. Now I’ve begun taking steps to remedy that habit and so far it’s been going pretty well. However this constant merging of previously distinct niches or specialties has me wondering if we’re not all on the same road, headed in the same direction. Is SEM going to give way to some sort of Online Media Marketing? Can you still be a successful SEO without also jumping into social media and trying to harness it’s power through linkbait? If domainers can improve their properties with a minimal amount of basic SEO work wouldn’t that seem like a natural progression?