Why Being Online is So Important

By this time, the social media/blogging naysayers should be sufficiently humbled enough to admit that a business’s online presence in several forms is absolutely essential. That’s because the new marketing model involves engaging your target audience online through social media networking, offering blog posts that provide empowering information related to your specific industry, and building a supportive community around your business. You can only do these things online, and a content-rich, website optimized to the max with keywords and phrases strategically placed is the key to success in all this.

Remember these things before you take your business online:

1. Having a fully-optimized, content-rich website is the number one thing you need because it will be the hub of all your subsequent online activity. Your target audience should be able to find you online easily and quickly.
2. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace are only a few of the vast number of tools under the category: Social Media Networks. Many other categories exist in the online universe.
3. You need a social media marketing plan, just like you need a traditional marketing plan because there are thousands upon thousands of social media options
4. Although most social media networks and tools are free, you should know that it takes time, talent and resources – things you shouldn’t fail to calculate
5. Never, ever spam your online audience with direct sales messages. That’s not the way it works, and you will be run out of NewMedia Town if you do.
6. Word-of-Mouth advertising online (and off-line for that matter) is the most powerful and the most credible marketing around. That’s why social media engagement is so important.
7. The object is to build a social media ecosystem that will boost business. Use well-chosen networks to do this.
8. Use bookmarking sites/aggregators (that’s another social media category) to make your online life easier to track and participate in. (Digg, FriendFeed, WetPaint, and De.locio.us are just some of these)
9. There exist many productivity tools online at no cost that you can use to help your business’s daily operations. Google offers many of these. (Google Docs, Google Wave, Google Reader, etc.
10. If your business relies heavily on your blog, you may want to exercise the options that free blog platforms like WordPress and Blogger offer to give your blog a custom URL (web address) instead of using their subdomain as in [Yourblogname].Blogspot.com