Online marketing the old fashioned way

In the 80's there was a well known Smith Barney commercial featuring a dour John Housemann who boasted about the work ethic of the firm by saying, "We make money the old fashioned way, WE EARN IT!"

I have made my living for the past 2 years offering my services to a wide variety of web sites and every time I begin a marketing project I am reminded of his words and how aptly they apply to online marketing.

A common mistake many businesses make is putting the creation of the web site ahead of the conversation about how to attract visitors once their site is online. Early enthusiasm often gives way to despair when dealing with the task of attracting the targeted audience to their site.

It is no wonder this occurs, when most attempting online marketing run into a variety of the following problems.

Inability to get online (AOL users and others know so well)
Intolerably slow access speeds (I pray for cable in my neighborhood?)
Waiting for the page to load (Who designed this disaster?)
FRAMES (Why?)
Pages with Java applications (It must be cool, but I'll be old before I know)
Pages that NEVER come up (Help!)
Pages that no longer exist (Help!)
Type impossible to read on color backgrounds

And the worst being the dreaded message, "Your application has performed and illegal procedure and will be closed down."

In spite of the above potential problems, online marketing can be fun and rewarding if you have a good plan and are committed to success.

I highly recommend 2 shareware tools I use which make my marketing efforts easier:

The Perfect Keyboard is a 32-bit shareware program for Windows 95/NT operating system. The program allows you to define shortcuts for your mostly used phrases, e-mail addresses, file paths, URLs, etc. You can also define templates that allows to you fill forms faster and macros. There are two types of shortcut you can use -- text shortcut and key shortcut. You can purchase it for $21.

ClipMate sits patiently in the upper right corner of my screen waiting for me to copy something. When I do, it keeps it. Forever. It maintains a handy scrolling list of the last 100 items that I have copied and can pasted at any time. It was recently awarded 1997 Shareware Industry Award for "Best Utility." You can purchase it for $25.

Complete Site Registration with the 4 Star and 3 Star site announcement and registration sites
Registration with award sites (when appropriate)
Contacting aligned sites to establish symbiotic links
Advertising your FREE newsletter in the appropriate newsgroups
Monitoring and contributing to appropriate news groups and email discussion (listserv) groups to meet "centers of influence" type contacts
Banner advertising
Search engine resultant banner advertising
Press releases
Sponsorship of Email discussion groups (to targeted audiences)
Creation of a International marketing plan to focus on attracting foreign visitors

It works best for me to put aside a fixed amount of time for each of task. For example, I would try to spend a minimum of one hour's dedicated time to any one of the above activities as I find it takes time to develop a rhythm and each chore has its own pace.

I highly recommend the use of "preset email letter templates" which can easily be personalized. An example would be:

I would like to discuss ways our companies might support each other as we are in aligned fields. If this is something you would be open to discussing, please get back to me.

If your email package supports the "send again" feature, you can simply send the same letter over and over again while cutting and pasting a new mailto address and personalizing the Dear ____________.

I always try to remember that the Internet is a free invitation to the world's largest ongoing networking social for people who care about others and wish to exchange and share their messages in a respectful way.

A place where judgment can indeed be suspended, if but for a moment, to meet and greet another traveler.

As with anything new, you must find your own style before you can succeed. Remember that the level of truth you project in your communication influences how you are perceived. Take your time when writing and don't be afraid to add some humor to emails. Relationship building is a great skill and is the real way that you "EARN IT" online.