If I am not wrong, most of the Internet users are fascinated by the magic word “Web 2.0″ nowadays. After it exploded as a big boom in the market, main focus of Internet marketing has been shifted towards it. Everybody started to believe that if you don’t base all of your marketing effort on it, your business is bound to fail. That’s why most of the businesses whether it is big or small are adding additional effort to reach the demand of Web 2.0.

Before you get over involved in all the hype of Web 2.0, lets take a look at it. What does Web 2.0 actually mean?

Web 2.0 is just not a single entity with specifically defined shape and boundary. It is a combination of principles and practices tied together to create a whole concept. It has developed a new trend in World Wide Web and web applications to encourage interactivity among users. This concept has led to the evolution of new activities like social networking, social bookmarking, community building, blogging, collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, etc. It eventually refers to a new version of World Wide Web altogether.

Web 2.0 basically encourages more user participation in terms of user inputs, feedbacks, and interactions. It emphasize on community building and information sharing between the like-minded people.

So, any website that features a blog or a forum or anything like that and encourages for direct user inputs, falls under Web 2.0 category. A Web 2.0 website’s success is measured by direct participation of its users. If you have more user participation you are more successful.

But, What Does Web 2.0 Mean To Serious Entrepreneurs?

According to the concept and its usage, Web 2.0 means interactive traffic.

The widespread concept is – the more you interact on Web 2.0 websites the more your website get exposed to potential new customers. And the more potential customers visit to your website, the more chance you make sales.

Web 2.0 creates the opportunity of getting more incoming links from high page ranking websites to your website and as a result of that you get higher ranking and more visibility in major search engines.

So, the truth is – you can actually make more traffic to your website from all social networks and bookmarking websites.

A Big Question… How Much Worthy Is Web 2.0 Traffic To You?

Normally the people spend lots of time at Web2.0 websites looking for fun and entertainment. They come and visit this kind of websites mainly to socialize with like-minded people just for making friends, sharing thoughts, views, videos, audios and other entertaining and interesting materials. Although, if you manage to get a bunch of new visitors to your website, it is sure that they visit your website just because of curiosity and not to purchase anything.

If you think that getting into this kind of online communities and telling about your products and services provides you plenty of prospective customers to your website and making immediate sales of your products or services, then you are dreaming. This is not going to happen in any way. The problem is – you’ll get visitors and more visitors to your website but they are not in the buying mood.

Here, you need to carefully observe, how people interact with each other, how people establish their credibility and just follow their path. Here you need to invest lots of quality time and continuous effort to provide useful inputs and interesting information so that people begins to appreciate your work. Most importantly all of your inputs must not be directly related to your product information. You can’t directly advertise your product here. The only place you mention your business and website URL is your signature at the bottom.

Therefore, it is clear that your sole objective in the Web 2.0 websites is to create long-term relationship with the like-minded people in your community. You need to win their trust and establish your credibility so that they can believe in you and understand that you are someone who is capable of offering some kind of solution to your community.

Even then your Web 2.0 traffic is not going to covert in the same rate that you get from your other online marketing efforts.

Is Web 2.0 Traffic Meaningless?

It depends on your business situation. If 

• Your business is well established and profitable
• It is capable of getting targeted flow of continuous traffic to your website
• Your sales letter is well optimized to convert your incoming traffic into maximum sales
• A group of sales force (affiliates) continuously creating sales for you
• A group of reputed joint venture partners making it even bigger

Only then you should consider getting into Web 2.0 marketing. It will establish your business and product or service as a brand in front of hundreds of thousands of people on hugely popular Web2.0 websites. And this is the main reward a marketer is looking for from his Web 2.0 marketing effort.

And if your business is in the starting phase or your business is not getting that much of success, then it is better to concentrate on traditional aggressive marketing methods to secure your living first.

Before you invest a lot of time in Web2.0 marketing, you must concentrate on following activities: