Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

The growing number of options for online marketers is getting to be so large that I think it's past time to take a step back and look over the situation from an objective perspective.

Jason Heller wrote in Online Media Daily:

"It boggles my mind when a marketer considers focusing the majority of their efforts on mobile, podcasts, word of mouth, or virtual worlds, when they have not yet figured out how to properly market on targeted content sites, blogs or social networks, which all offer scale and levels of accountability."

There are people out there that always take the newest thing to come out and attempt to make you believe that if you're not in it from the start you're really missing out on something. On the Internet that's not true at all. Even some of the big companies stand back and let some things be tested and tried by smaller companies to work out the kinks in the systems.

Once they've started to figure out how to use them effectively, at that time the bigger companies will start to engage the various mediums to use them for their purposes. They didn't miss out on anything. They are basically watching other companies spend the time and effort to figure it out; using them as if they were their own research and development department.

We need to focus on figuring out one thing at a time. If we aren't even marketing on existing content sites, blogs or social networks, what benefit will we get from podcasts, video or virtual world focus? While we can tinker with these things as a small part of our budgets, they are a long way from being able to be effectively used to market on.

Again, this doesn't mean we ignore what's going on and the new things happening, rather it means that we can't just chase every new thing without getting a strong grasp and hold on what's already out there.

Every new thing out there will have a gestation period. We can count on that. If we become chasers of every new thing, rather than perfectors of what's already there, we'll find ourselves never quite reaching the potential of what the existing online landscape offers.

Our industry is in an exciting transformation that will continue on for years. Let's resist getting to far ahead of ourselves and take an occasional step back and look at how to use what's there now, before we pull up our stakes and enter into an endless migratory way of doing business. We need to root into what's existing while being aware of what can be comeing down the pipeline.

To only look at the pipeline will result in the eventual failure of much of what we're trying to do.