In this article we’re going to connect Apple’s iPhone to a global recession and discover how these two things, in tandem, shaped today’s online marketplace.

A few years ago, Apple launched their iPhone. Little did most bloggers realise that the iPhone App Store would revolutionise the world of online-information-marketing; not only as far as the iPhone and Apple were concerned, but the upshot from it all would reach into and touch the lives of bloggers and internet-marketers alike.

‘See, as we all know, 2008 wasn’t only the premiere of the iPhone’ as we know it: It was also the start of a global financial recession, kicked off by American bankers (I typed that very carefully.) lending too much money that didn’t actually exist within their vast coffers in order that people who had not a hope of paying the money back could buy property that, in reality, the bank owned; except for the fact that they didn’t as the money they put up front was only a number that wasn’t really owned by the bank, rather than real finance that actually existed within the bank’s finances… – And the rest-of-the-world, led by the UK, followed suit.

Suddenly and inevitably banks and financial institutions all over the globe started to go bust – because they couldn’t pay out all the money they’d loaned to the people who couldn’t pay it back because they didn’t own it all in the first place. The knock-on-effect was to start panic-trading on the NASDAQ, FTSE, and other world-financial markets, which caused, in turn, a massive devaluation of shares, wiping billions of dollars off of the value of major global-commercial organisations – financial institutions in particular, and leaving top-businesspeople wondering where all the money had vanished to as they struggled to balance ledgers that had the same real-time-valuation as ever in the debit column, but in the credit column the figures were in reality only worth a fraction of their stated value.

Everyone started screaming “What’s happened to all the money in the world?” and panicked. In their panic, they- the public, held on to their wallets and purses as if they were worth dying for. In short they stopped buying things so much because they, in many cases quite rightly, foresaw that their employers were going to have great difficulty paying them to enable them to buy things. As a result the Western Free-market-Economy, fuelled by retail-purchases, slowed down and almost ground to a halt…

Meanwhile the recently-emerged internet-economy was still continuing to experience growth. Growth which was not due to increased value of consumer-spending, but rather was due to an quickly-increasing volume of sales: As the internet grew, so did its market-potential, and it didn’t take long for entrepreneurs to exploit that opportunity to its full potential. One of those entrepreneurs was Steve Jobs; CEO and Chairman of Apple Computers Inc.

Jobs was on-the-ball. – He knew where the market-trends were leading, and he was going to get there first. His company had already launched the iPhone amidst great-publicity, claiming a large sector of the tech-market as its new customers, despite and in the face of the recession. In doing so, Jobs had sold the platform to provide the world with something it wanted more and more as the recession bit harder and harder. – Something that Microsoft and others were unable to provide because they had lacked foresight and failed to provide themselves with any solid foundation upon which to build a new business-model in the fast-changing economy.

The platform that Jobs had created was the iPhone; and on and in-tandem with that platform he built the App Store. Suddenly there was an App for almost anything, and new Apps were being created all the time.

Some Apps were free, some cost a few cents, some cost a few dollars. – Software – purpose-built software – was suddenly cheap if you happened to own an Apple iPhone… Whereas Microsoft and the like were still charging hundreds of dollars for software with multi-multiple functions; most of which were seldom-used, and some of which were so buried in complicated GUIs that most desktop-computer users weren’t even aware that they existed at all.

Apple, whose Apps mostly cost only a few dollars or less, suddenly started making a bigger profit than Microsoft, whose application software cost a lot more, in a lot of cases colossally more.

It was rather slow coming; but eventually the online-market too began to realise that it couldn’t go on expanding forever: there just weren’t enough people in the world to allow such colossal market-expansion to continue ad-infinitum. – Nevertheless it had grown very large and it needed feeding, There is still to this day only one type of market-fodder with any proper-nutritional-value: money.

The procedure is simple. – Input money into market and retrieve goods as a product: This is otherwise known as a fundamental part of the Free-Market-Economy. – No input of money means no product whatsoever as a result, and that part of the economy collapses. The knock-on effect of that could well be that the entire economy as an entity follows suite and also collapses – with the result that the world goes back to the Dark Ages.

The internet-entrepreneurs who had grasped the emerging, expanding, online-economy by the short-and-curlies had been selling huge products at big prices and making a killing by doing so. – But as the expansion ground to a halt and people began to realise that they were spending too much, the online-economy became in serious danger of stagnation and the volume of product-turnover began to dwindle somewhat.

Those entrepreneurs who had their eye on the trends took a lesson from Steve Jobs and began to sell smaller, cheaper product. rather than massive year-long courses on the be-all and end-all of a particular niche, information-marketers worth their salt began to create smaller, uni-functional products, covering single-aspects of a particular niche, and costing only anything from a few cents to a few dollars…

- So there ends the history-lesson, in the fairly recent-past.

Are YOU noticing a drop in sales-volume? If so, are YOU marketing big, multi-functional, costly products in the main?

If you reply YES to both of these questions then I suggest that you learn the lesson that the top-marketers and entrepreneurs have taken from Steve Jobs: Reduce product-size and functionality + reduce cost. Don’t forget to increase market-penetration by increased advertising, popularity by word-of-mouth, customer-referrals, and any other methods at your disposal. – The idea is to vastly increase product-turnover of low-priced, reduced-function products. This advice mainly applies to the information-marketing niche; but who knows, other niches could also benefit too.