Page 122 - Duct Tape Marketing

A Web Presence That Works Day and Night

Marketing today means building a great deal of your thinking
around a total Web presence. I suspect you’ve heard this before because
this idea is one that is being voiced by just about anyone who’s online
today, but I encounter business owner after business owner frustrated
with trying to wrap their heads around this idea in a practical sense.

I would like to outline what I think is a very practical and doable
approach to building your total online presence. You can build your
Web presence out fully by taking action in each of the five stations of
work below. Think of each station as a bucket. You need to start add-
ing to each bucket in a systematic way, but don’t try to fill one bucket
before you move to the next—put a little in each bucket and keep
returning. This way you’ll build momentum in the short view, while
building value in the long view.

The Listening Station
Your online marketing will benefit greatly when you take the

time to monitor what’s being said by others. Creating an automated
way to do this, something I call a listening station, is a base strategy
these days.

 Create Google Alerts to monitor your brand, products,
competitors, and industry.

 Use tools such as Social Mention (www.socialmention.com/)
and Postling (www.postling.com/) to get deeper analysis of
what’s being said—even on review sites like Yelp (www.yelp
.com).

 Find and subscribe to industry or related blogs and feed them
into Google Reader for quick scanning.

 Create Digg and Delicious accounts to quickly scan what’s hot
and what’s new.

 Put key journalists in a Google Alerts track so you can
participate when they write or blog.

103