I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on website strategies. I’m being combing sites that I consider ‘leaders’ in the field (like Marketing Sherpa and Sally Falkow’s blog) to help me refine my process and I ran accross a link to a website for an Internet Marketing and PR company. The company seems to get it but I dislike their approach.

A little priortizing goes a long way.

I find that people talking about online publishing, PR, online marketing and website strategy often like to take the “shotgun approach” (closely related to, and often executed by the “panic button approach”.) They mix up all their ideas into a bucket of must-do action items - and if you don’t do or have all of these things, well, your website and business is just missing the boat.

I couldn’t disagree more. If you think of all the current online tools (blogs, social networking, website metrics, ADA access, etc.) as being pretty much equivalent when it come to PR and Marketing, you:

1) Don’t understand these components as well as you should.

2) Can’t utilize them as effectively as you should.

3) Will have an unbalanced overall presence.

The only way to consistently excel at everything online all the time is to have a comprehesive strategy, lots of time, and lots of cash. So what are the non-supermen and superwomen of the web to do when they want to make their web presence more effective? Easy - they understand the categories of a heirarchical website and they implement a few tactics at a time from each category.

Next Post: The categories of a heirarchical website…