In theory, doing the same thing and expecting different results is silly.

There’s a quote (often wrongly attributed to Benjamin Franklin) that says doing that is the definition of insanity.

But the rate things change on the internet it’s often the case that something you did last week or last year gets totally different results even if you’re doing the same thing as you’ve always done.

For instance, if you’re still using MySpace rather than Facebook your audience will have dropped along with the relative usage of the sites.

And if you’re unfortunate enough to be a website designer then you’ll know that you haven’t changed your code but the browser you’re using has done so and your nicely designed page is now broken. You’ve done the same things you’ve always done but you’ve got different results and maybe even a few sleepless nights whilst you fix stuff that shouldn’t need fixing.

Does that mean the rule has changed?

Or are these just the exceptions that prove the rule?

The answer is “probably both”.

We tend to assume that most things don’t change – geographical features change so slowly that we need computer models to work out how they’d have looked when the dinosaurs were roaming the planet or the first tentative signs of life came into being.

Other reference points seem to have been with us as long as we’ve been alive – family, some friends, that kind of thing.

So we tend to attach a permanence to all kinds of things that are anything but permanent.

So how does this affect your internet marketing?

Essentially it means that you can’t assume much at all and anything you do assume needs testing on a regular basis.

Some of you reading this will be thinking of the Oscar Wilde quote “When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.”

Others – like me – who were taught social sciences at school and university may have been taught that we always had to state our assumptions. Because you can’t test everything to do with economics and other social sciences without making a number of assumptions. And stating them means that other people can challenge your basic assumptions and also test what you claim to have tested.

In internet marketing terms, it means that you need to always be checking.

For instance, Kindle books have become an order of magnitude more competitive over the years. Regardless of niche you’ll almost certainly have lots of competition: at the time of writing, there are 292 results in the Kindle store alone for Paleo Breakfasts. Double the number of Vegan Breakfast books in Kindle and triple the number of Low Carb Breakfasts in Kindle.

So if you’d bought a product a year or two ago that said to create a recipe book and earn your fortune, you’d now be competing against all the other people who’ve gone out and done that.

Promoting your Kindle book used to be a matter of setting it to “free” for a day or two, maybe getting a few reviews and shooting up the sales charts.

Try the same thing now and you could almost watch the cobwebs grow.

I read an article recently (I didn’t bookmark it so I can’t link to it, sorry) that said most of the internet marketing gurus who are teaching things couldn’t actually grow the same way they’re teaching if they started from scratch now.

That’s actually always been the case in my experience – playing “catch up” almost never works outside chase sequences in films.

Instead, I think you should always be questioning.

Ask yourself does what you’re doing produce the same results as it did even a few months ago? Or are there some subtle or not so subtle changes?

The technical term for this is disruptive technology.

Airbnb are doing that for places to stay – they started in 2008 and, at the time of writing, are estimated to have over half a million rooms listed. Which has been a major disruption to the hotel industry as most of these rooms weren’t previously on the market.

Uber and Lyft are doing the same thing for taxi rides, much to the dismay of people such as London black cab drivers who spend years learning the “knowledge” whilst their newer competitors just put the address into their sat nav system.

At the moment, they only seem to be targeting major cities but that is unlikely to be the case for long. Because even if neither of those two companies tackle smaller towns and cities, someone else will.

That kind of seismic shift is happening all the time.

Someone, somewhere (probably more than one “someone”) will be working on a replacement for Google search. That probably includes Google themselves on a “just in case” basis.

Why?

Because search isn’t perfect – if it was, you’d only get one result and it would be precisely the one you wanted.

And there could well be a disruptive technology waiting in the wings to replace the current solutions.

Testing is the only way to find that out.

Markets change with often alarming speed.

In my lifetime, I’ve seen written communication more from post to fax to email to texts to instant messaging apps.

Photos have changed from needing to have film developed and flash cubes where each flash was used only once, through to instant photos (including the Polaroid vs Kodak law suit), via specialist cameras through to high resolution cameras on your phone and specialist cameras where you can change the specification of the “film” with every photo you take. Which is a lot different from a few years ago where you’d be stuck with one film type for 24 or 36 photos.

Take a step back from your market and do your best to work out what’s changed since you last looked and what’s imminently about to change.

Even something as basic as an advert for baked beans changes over the years.

But the pace of change is probably faster now than it’s ever been (no pun intended).

If you don’t keep pace with the changes, you’ll find that your business model simply doesn’t exist.

Going back to photos, both Kodak and Polaroid were disrupted sufficiently that they both filed for bankruptcy protection.

Obviously you need to protect yourself as much as possible.

Make a point of testing things regularly.

Don’t just assume that because videos are sending you traffic that will always be the case – it certainly hasn’t been the case for those who relied on articles as their primary method of traffic.

With articles and written content, I’m finding that it has to be a lot longer to attract Google’s attention. I’m moving up from posts that were previously around 600 to 800 words to longer ones like this one which will end up somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 words.

That’s a shift that I’ve probably been trying to ignore for a while – I’ve been reading people who say that posts are articles of 2,000 words and more get more attention, pick up more long tail keywords, keep people on site longer (because they take longer to read) and generally help.

So it’s something I’ll be moving towards.

And it’s also got me thinking: the current video length being suggested by a lot of marketers is around 1 – 2 minutes. Logically that should be getting longer, much the same as pop songs have gone from being around 2 – 3 minutes long to quite a bit longer.

It could be worth experimenting with slightly longer videos – and probably longer descriptions – to work out whether that’s a trend.

Your video stats will also tell you how many people stop watching early on and how many keep watching for most of it or even the whole video. Monitoring those stats every now and then will alert you to any changes whilst there’s still time to react.

Which applies to any market you’re in – keeping up to date with changes will pay for itself over and over again.

If you’ve got any thoughts about this, feel free to add your comments below.