I’m constantly being asked by clients and prospects “how do I market my business successfuly online?” They tell me that they hear reciprocal linking is what they need to do or some even tell me that they want to start a blog but have no idea what to do or what to write once they get one. They get so much information and mis-information from so many sources, they often just give up and stick to the old fashioned methods.

The three steps you must take before you can be successful in any online marketing goal are:

1. Know what everyone else is doing right now!

If your competition is beating you now, you’re already way behind. You have to examine them closely to see what they’re doing. You may not be able to determine if they’re successful, but you’ll get a solid idea of what plans they consider important to their marketing. For example, check out their website - do they have a blog? How many lead generation forms do they have? Are they running Google AdSense or affiliate ads on their site? Do they have pop ups or slide ins? Who do they link to? Do a Google search and see if you can find other sites or forums they post to.

2. Learn what the top ranked experts think! Most marketing experts have a blog or forum where you can do in depth research to see what they recommend. For example, when I wanted to know more about search engine optimization many years ago - I found Jill’s site High Rankings and subscribed to her newsletter. Within a few months, I had a solid grasp on what the industry felt were the most successful methods as well as learning what ‘black hat’ SEO was so I could avoid it. How can you avoid getting scammed by a link submission service if you don’t know that submitting your website to the search engines is no longer even necessary?

3. Get Innovative! Kevin Rose of Digg fame went from hosting The Screen Savers and Attack of the Show on TechTV to launching Digg, a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. Digg is now ranked among the top 200 websites worldwide and in October 2005, Digg.com received $2.8 million in venture capital from major investors. Because of an innovative idea, Kevin was able to create something really fantastic and useful - and if you happen to get a “digg” (when someone enjoys a blog post or article from your website and posts it to the digg site) - you’ll get more website traffic than you can handle! What’s so unique about Digg is the fact that users contribute and vote or ‘digg’ a story if they like it and the more ‘diggs’ you get, your story gets moved to the front page of the site. The result is a site full of interesting and often very helpful articles that you may have missed if the Digg community hadn’t made their contributions.

The bottom line is any success online is exactly the same as offline - it still takes planning, research, creativity and hard work. So many people still look for the ‘overnight success’ that they see on the late night infomercials and it just doesn’t exist. Don’t give up! It can happen, but only if you put your heart and energy into it.

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