This Web2.0 space is bursting with growth and it’s only ever increasing. The numbers below highlight to all businesses how much opportunity is out there on the web right now! Stop crying and start working harder in this space! 2009 for small business owners has never been so great! 

Hold onto your hats and fasten your seat belts!

Internet

1,596,270,108 people are actively using the internet (Internet Usage and World Population Statistics are for March 31, 2009)

Google

 1 trillion URL’s are indexed on Google –  Source 

Here is how Google grew in terms of number of indexed URLs :

1998 : 26,000,000 (26 million web pages)
2000 : 1,000,000,000 (1 Billion web pages)
2008 : 1,000,000,000,000 (1 Trillion web pages)

Google has done 2 billion searches a day, or about 700 billion a year Source

Top 100 google hot trends - http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Blogs

133,000,000 - is the number of blogs Technorati has indexed since 2002

A new blog is created every second, totalling 80,000 new blogs every day. 

900,000 blog posts are created daily

Blogging grew 68% in 2008

346 million people worldwide read blogs

77% of active web users read blogs

The average blogger in the US:

• 51% male 
• Aged 35+ (58%)
• Aged 18-34 (42%)
• College educated, 74%   Source

Twitter

Number of tweets as of right now! - 1,691,543, 819 - ( click here for an up to the minute count)

At the start of 2008 Twitter had only around 500,000 monthly visitors

Growth rate for Twitter was 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December 2008  Source

Twitter.com is a top 500 site that reaches over 4.1 million U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a more educated, slightly more female than male, young adult audience. Quantcast, March

Twitter is receiving 8million unique visitors in the month of March 2009.Compete (via Nick) March 10

 Melbourne’s top 100 twitter users

Facebook

• More than 200 million active users

• More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day

• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college

• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

• More than 20 million users update their statuses at least once each day

• More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week

• There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

• http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

• Inside Facebook says: “the number of Americans over 35, 45, and 55 on Facebook is growing fast. In the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 has nearly doubled. Developers and marketers may want to think about how to serve this group of new users.” Inside Facebook, March

• “Women over 55 remain the fastest growing group, and growth among the teen and college-age set has been relatively paltry. In absolute numbers there are now even slightly more members between the ages of 45 and 65 than there are 13-to 17-year-olds.” Wired Magazine, March.

YouTube

You tube nears 5 billion views Source

 Average internet users watch 2 YouTube videos a day

The average video length, according to comScore.com, was 2.7 minutes.

YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. 

One of the most watched videos on youtube in 2009 – set to break youtube records! 

This illustrates how web clips are mixing with TV shows and bringing in a bigger audience. 

Mobile usage

63 million on mobile internet daily

Significant growth in the numbers of people accessing the internet from their mobile phones vs. a year ago. The company says that today there are just over 63 million mobile web users in the US and 35 percent of them are online via their handset daily. Source.

I trust your mind had been sparking off like a new years eve fireworks show! Here are the numbers, now where are you seeing the opportunities within your own business?

I am always looking for quirky and powerful ways to market the business online, whilst exposing our clients too! WIN WIN!Being a Web strategist, I need to keep it fresh, original and catchy for my target market and reader base. I also need to think about how I can increase good quality traffic to my website via the platforms and keywords I choose to use – then capture the viewers interest so as they keep coming back for more.

Last week I had a MASSIVE brain energy surge (thanks to my broken leg).You know the ones I mean right? Those entrepreneurial light bulb moments, that wake you up like a bolt of lightening…usually around 3.30ish in the morning! Shazam!  

Here is what the early morning hours injected me with. Why don’t I utilize my supportive leg cast as a means of advertising space? Here I can softly promote the outstanding businesses I consult for (Rob Hartnett and Think Tank Media) ah, and of course Let’s Refresh too!  This strategy could be used to gain exposure via all the juicy web2.0 platforms in a unique, catchy and extremely powerful way. Now stick with me here!

Click here to see how we did this. It was such a fun and entertaining ‘cast paint branding session’ guys, with a few gin and tonics thrown in….because we can!

We used many platforms to expose the leg cast in a text based, picture and video format, this gained us an unexpectedly high amount of traffic and attention! We received a whole bunch of emails, tweets and we even saw people sharing this with their friends .Yet why? 

I put my inspector cluedo hat on (I do have one you know!)   and delved deeper.  I asked my trusty followers on twitter why they were sharing this. Here are some of the answers I received:

1.       Business owners saw it as a way to gain THEMSELVES attention-immediately (on twitter). Interesting hey!

2.        They wanted to help me out (sometimes people love to assist others, they find it easier to promote other people rather than        themselves-gotta love human behaviour for this-use it to your advantage guys!)

3.       Using our quirky pictures and videos got them more click throughs to their own websites.

4.        They believed their follow base on twitter increased due to “retweeting  this” (sharing my post on twitter via their tweets) .

5.       It got them thinking outside of the box, with new ways to promote their own business.

6.       They had a resource, some material and content that they could write about in their blog posts. Blush blush!

We even got asked how much would it cost to advertise on the cast! Hmmm… interesting!!!!So, they were using our pictures as a way to gain themselves attention yet at the same time, they were passing on our message (WIN bloody WIN)!

This is why social media and social networking works – I love it!  It’s all about word of mouth (and THAT my friends is one of the fastest ways to gain exposure, attention and build up a trust worthy fan base for you business – then drive traffic to your site).

What did I (as a small business owner) take from this, apart from a whole bunch of ideas and some quality feedback? Plain and simple – a new strategy to our business plan.  Let’s Refresh can now utilise Web2.0 even more. By using this strategy we can add value to our clients by gaining them some powerful and free exposure, yet at the same time we get a healthy promoting session too.

Each month we decided we would offer one of our lucky clients the opportunity to be promoted exclusively in an extremely quirky and catchy way- I’m excited already! When I say promoted, what I mean by this is giving them viral exposure, growing their presence through the wonderful web2.0 platforms (eg. on our blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, bookmarks, youtube plus many of the video platforms we use and drive traffic to their site too). It will be unique, catchy, and different! It also raises my heart rate above 100BPM, and I’m guessing you now me by now, I love that!

 Have a think about what you have just read!

How can you use web2.0 to shamelessly market your business?

How can you add value to your clients/target market through the Web2.0 platforms?

How can you make it fresh, different, catchy and at the same time make it a win win?

Click the comments section below-I’m really interested to hear what you come up with. If you need any quick ideas then feel free to comment too and I will get straight back to you!