There is No One Way to Internet Market

Having worked in traditional PR for the past (however many years), I’ve seen how each of my clients’ campaigns have been individual. Each have required a lot of focus to rapidly come up with a story that would work for them and that the media would bite at. Not only that, the ways in which you reach each client’s particular target market are always different as well. Part of the reason for this has been the huge influence the internet holds on most of my clients’ target markets. This is why developing an internet marketing PR branch as a part of my company has been so useful and changed the face of my public relations approach.

As I continue to use the traditional media, and have begun to combine internet marketing strategies. I have also found that the same is true for the internet. There is no one way to do PR on the internet. As we all have noticed, there are a million people trying to sell traffic advice online. Some of the time it sounds pretty convincing, but for being such geniuses at marketing, I am often surprised at how much I found myself wondering if they are legit or not. For starters you can tell they are trying to make a quick buck with a claim they can get you to the top of Google, and they know they peaked your interest because everyone wants to be.

That would all be fine and good, but the software they offer isn’t teaching you how to use the internet as your marketing frontier, they are usually just naming the traffic tactics that everyone supposedly uses. Article writing, social bookmarking, blogger relations, pay per clicks, etc. Sound familiar? Well if these aren’t working for you and chances are they aren’t if you don’t have someone regularly doing it for you and spending hours at it (especially on the social networking sites), then it makes sense for a lot of reasons. One being that there are a million other businesses out there marketing the same product or service you are, all competing for the same page.

This is just one issue. There is of course the fact that unless you know all the cool, hard-to-find tools that tell you exactly what keywords your competitors are using and who they are linking to…then deciding on keywords won’t even do you any good.

What I have found has worked for my clients, is taking a similar approach with internet marketing as I do with the traditional media. This means really understanding your story and how to pitch it to your target audience. Where would that audience go on the net and what would they search for. Here we are getting into keywords, but when I use internet marketing for my clients I find a way to separate their story from the stories of their competitors, and then of course all those tools come in handy, but without that you are not going to be original.