Online Marketing

"If you build it, they will come" was a beautiful hook to a sentimental movie, but it’s a terrible approach to online marketing.

Yes, most businesses need a website that knows who its target audience is and provides useful content to that audience in clear language, easily navigated structure and attractive design. But you can have all that and still completely fail to get site visitors, readers and customers, because a lot of what makes your site successful happens outside your website itself.

Let me rephrase that: You don’t necessarily need a website. However, if you want your business to survive this depression, recession or economic downturn, you i need to be marketing yourself online.

I would love to tell every business owner I talk to that he needs a database-driven, content-management-based website, and that he should pay me five figures to build it. But it just isn’t so.

And I remember telling a number of business owners just a few years ago that they didn’t need to be on the web. And it was true then.