One of the most important things about marketing online is making information about yourself and your products available to potential consumers in as many forms as as possible.

For example, some people may be happy visiting your homepage, while others could be MySpace junkies and prefer to check what you’re up to there, others still might like simple email updates, a portion could be feed readers, and another group may be best reached via cell phone.

If you have marketing campaigns in place targeting each of these methods, you’re much less likely to leave a potential customer behind.

An added benefit of a multi-tiered marketing campaign such as this is that each of the methods you use leaves a little “breadcrumb” trail for new potential customers to find you. If you have presence on multiple sites, and via multiple mediums (text, video, audio, etc.) you’re sure to provide tons of ways for people to stumble across your work, and to also have a way to consume your work that they prefer.

To put it simply, the more places and ways in which you put yourself out there, the more people you will reach.

This is one of the primary methods used to market in the new world of Web 2.0, social networking, community building and social media. Leaving this multi-media breadcrumb trail is my focus in online marketing.

I received an email from David Vallieres that read:

I can tell you for a fact that this (Web 2.0) is nothing but a distraction that will likely earn you no or little money. It’s chasing the ‘next best’ thing and you’re likely to be disappointed yet again, by chasing these ‘fads’.

My advice? Don’t believe the hype and BS…

You have to get back to direct marketing basics, FIND the money.

You have to ask the tough questions. HOW is money being made by the BIG players in direct marketing NOW. Forget Web 2.0 and those who try to scare you that the ‘web is changing’ and ebooks and info-products don’t sell anymore. I’ve never heard such BS in my life.

Ok, wow…   I was shocked to see such… well… BS in my inbox.  I’m used to the hype, the ultra-insane marketing hoo-ha, and I’m also used to seeing a few marketers take the opposite side of what the pack is doing just to get some attention.  But to say Web 2.0 is a “distraction”?

Now, I’ll agree with David in that without the marketing basics (a sales funnel, great copy that sells, a hungry market) you’ll get nowhere.  I work with musicians on helping them marketing their music online, and if the music sucks, it really doesn’t matter how much marketing they do…

Assuming you’ve got the basics, social media optimization is the fastest way to customers.  There’s no waiting for your site to get picked up by the search engines and then waiting even longer to see if you actually rank for your keywords, there’s no pouring money down the drain into failing Adwaords campaigns.  It’s simply networking, sharing, creating a presence and leaving that breadcrumb trail for consumers to find you.

Plus, it’s evergreen.  If the search engines change their algorithims, you’ll still have your traffic.  If a competitor comes into your PPC campaign and outbids you, you’re still golden.

Add to that the enormous value of having people reach you from networks of friends they trust – that’s huge in getting them to later trust you – and social media is a no-brainer!

If you think MySpace is a fad and Del.icio.us is on it’s way out, so be it.  Perhaps you’ve bookmarked a site and waited for the traffic to bring your servers to a halt – and it never did.

The big thing marketers seem to miss about Web 2.0 and social media is that you absolutely do have to participate within the networks.  Throwing up a profile page and waiting for something to happen is as ineffective as throwing up an adsense website and wondering why you’re not in Google’s UPS club.

I do think Web 2.0 marketing has been touted by some as a quick fix, and I would never advise anyone to abandon other, more “traditional” marketing methods (i.e. SEO, PPC, article marketing, etc.).  But it’s important to embrace new technology as well – and I see a lot of fear of that within the internet marketing community.  Consider Web 2.0 just one more tool in your marketing toolbox.

So David’s right -  Web 2.0 is NOT the “next big thing” if you don’t have anything to back it up.  But if you’ve got a product or service that your market wants (even something that you are an affiliate of, it doesn’t have to be your product), you’d be a fool to ignore the possibilities social media offers.

With Web 2.0 you’re helping more potential consumers find you then would otherwise and you’re proving content to them in the form they prefer.  That doesn’t sound like BS to me.

   

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Tagged as: David-Vallieres, michelle macphearson, MySpace, peer-to-peer-pr, seo, smm, smo, social marketing, Social Media Optimization, social-bookmarking, social-media-marketing, social-networking, traffic generation, video, web-2.0