The Internet of today would hardly be recognizable from the perspective of just five years ago. Back in 2005, Youtube had just launched and nobody knew how big a game changer online video was going to be. Facebook, which opened it’s doors in 2004, was a community site for college alumni and the not the social network of choice of a nearly half a billion people. Since that time social networks and video have gone from curiosities and play things to essential components of the online presence of both businesses and individuals.

A modern web strategy begins with your web site, which should act as the central hub of your online presence. Everything else that you do on the Internet should be done with the intention of bringing people to your site, because this is where you close the deal. To this end, the visual and architectural design of a site are as important as it’s content. If what you have to say matters, so does how, and where, you say it. This is not new. It’s about why fine dining and candle light go together.

A blog is effective tool for educating people about the things that you have expertise in and directing them to other web resources that can help them to understand what you have to offer. Blogs are not particularly useful as direct sales tools, that’s the purpose of your web site, but they can be advantageous in creating interest and that in turn can lead to visits to your site.

Just about all the evolution on the net in the last few years has been fueled by social networking. Social networking is the latest incarnation of what has always been true of people: we like to gather together to form communities, to talk, to play and to accomplish common goals. Social networks, and in fact the entire Internet, are a big, global conversation, one that’s a bit fragmented and has a lot of starts and stops. To join in, all that is needed is to have something say.

A Facebook fan page or group can be an excellent way to get your message out. Good content has the opportunity to go viral more easily on social networks than on the web at large. If you’ve got something interesting to say, that people find appealing, there’s a good chance that they’ll want to share it with their friends.

There are some differences between Facebook fan pages and groups, as well as advantages in choosing one over the other. We’ll talk about these in a future post.

Twitter has evolved into more than the micro-blogging service that it started as. It has become a fast moving indicator of what people are paying attention to and of breaking news. Add crowdsourcing to the mix and Twitter becomes a service that’s hard to ignore. With it’s 140 character limit, Twitter posts are short and to the point, so you may find it most useful for more frequent updates and linking to your activities
elsewhere.

Far from being replaced by the social networks, email remains central to online communication. While not as trendy as social networking and micro-blogging, an opt-in email newsletter is still one of the most effective tools available for staying in touch with people you’ve worked with in the past. We recommend using a mail delivery service for sending your newsletters. You’ll get much better delivery, better list maintenance and useful campaign reporting.

SEO, or search engine optimization, and analytics round out an effective web strategy. We’ll have an in depth look into these in a future post.