7 Essential Tools for Building Your Marketing Empire

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

A client and I were scoping out some work at Four Barrel Coffee:

DrW: “Yeah, I was in the Marines before college.”

Client: “This guy I work with at the museum, he was in the Corps for years.”

DrW: “Tell me.”

Client: “He’s such a Marine, barking orders at everyone. He really gets the job done.” (pause… she looks at me reflectively…)

Client: “I’d trust him with my life.”

DrW: “Semper fi.”

[Marine Corps mode=on]

LISTEN UP LADIES!

You wanna market on the internet, you gotta take action now.

Stop wasting your time thinking about it. Just do it.

No back talk.

Here’s a list of 7 essential tools everyone uses. Without these tools, you’re not dining at the internet buffet. You’re slinking around under the table, fighting over scraps with the other mangy curs.

1. Your own blog. Doesn’t matter. Just get one. If you want to self-host, I personally recommend Bluehost. If you don’t want to self-host, I recommend wordpress.com. Taking action now is more important than doing nothing.
2. Twitter account. Twitter can provide you with important leverage. It takes time to learn to use it correctly (everything does), get started now. You can find me at @websiteweekend.
3. Facebook account. No, myspace doesn’t count unless you’re a band. Again, learning to use the tool effectively takes time. Start now. I’m easy to find on Facebook as Dave Doolin.
4. Bookmarking account. I use delicious. You can use whatever.
5. Content discovery tool. I use StumbleUpon; friend me there if you want. You can use whatever. Let me know and if it’s good I’ll join too.
6. RSS reader stocked with relevant feeds. No excuse. You need to be following RSS feeds of a couple of dozen of your friends and enemies, collaborators and competitors.
7. Gravatar. Imagine your brand out there for everyone to see. It might be your face, it might be your logo. Doesn’t matter. With a Globally Recognized Avatar, people will recognize you everywhere you appear on the internet. This is free exposure people. Years ago you have paid thousands for this kind of exposure. Read more about gravatars.

Because you’re a raw recruit, it’s really hard to explain why all this stuff benefits you.

But I’m going to try anyway.

You need these tools for two reasons:

1. Offensive, and
2. Defensive.

Offense and defense like for football. Or war. Not like being a socially offensive, socially mis-calibrated marketing nerd. Or a socially defensive, neurotic marketing geek.

Offensive marketing: You have to take the initiative. Get out there with your message (no matter how lame it is) and find out who’s listening. If nobody’s listening, that’s good data. Don’t shout, just change your messge.

Defensive marketing: If you don’t brand yourself with each of these tools, you will find someone else riding your brand. Don’t believe me? Go find website in a weekend dot com. I won’t dignify the site with a link.

It’s a parasite, riding on my work, giving nothing back.

I do get it, I really do: why do all the work when someone else will do it for you? But they’re going to have to do a lot of work to rank in the future, spend money to counter the massive amount of high quality content I’m producing. For what it’s worth, a year ago the domain was parked. Essentially worthless. Then it became a static web page with an H1 header. Now it’s packed with affiliate links and advertisements. It’s worth bank… because I’ve done all the work!

Don’t let this happen to you. Scoop up everything you can that’s related to your brand to defend it’s integrity.

Want some more irony? Sure you do… because that site is loaded with affiliate links, they’re making more money off of “Website In A Weekend” than I am.

Now drop and gimme 20.

Oorah!

[Marine Corps mode=off]

Tagged as: Four Barrell, Marketing, USMC