Yesterday, I wrote about three main considerations for marketing online: skillset, time capacity, and deadline.  Today, I want to categorize three types of web activities for marketing yourself or your company online.  As you examine the three considerations, look to see how these three types of activities may fit into your plan.  I am doing this to break down the complexities of web marketing into the framework of the considerations. 

Ultimately, you have to look at your goals and the resources you can put into place to meet those goals.

Participant – this is on most sites on the web that are owned and maintained by other groups: you contribute content but have no single point of reference that can be accessed easily (a landing page). There are no formal web pages that represent the person or company, but there are many entries scattered throughout the system.  This is categorized by the lack of a single web page representing the user.  This is being phased out towards a hybrid between contributor and participant.  Examples include Ask an Expert on Yahoo, and putting a resume on Monster.

Contributor – primarily on social sites, this consists of creating a profile and other elements that describe yourself or your business.  A web page or group of web pages acts as landing pages and the user provides (and builds) content on those pages.  Others may act as participants on those pages, but typically they too have to contribute a landing page in order to participate.  Examples include Linked In, Facebook, and MySpace.

Author – this covers both dedicated blogs (like this one) and web sites.  The web site serves the purpose of promoting you and your business.  By far this is the most prevalent form of sites on the web but I would imagine the most popular is participants. 

It may seem that the level of involvement dictates whether you just participate or contribute.  For instance, you can be either on sites like Facebook providing minimal information on landing spaces.  However, this may be a detriment because it shows minimal interest, and even lack of creativity.  As with having your own web site, a poor showing will hurt you.  If you cannot do a good job in your own eyes, then consider not doing anything. 

However, whether you are an entrepreneur, investor, or job seeker (or a combination) there are strongly recommended among the three applications.  There are also the strongly NOT recommended.

Where do you think the following fit in?  (remember to ask, who is your audience)

• Myspace
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Monster
• Hotjobs
• CareerLadder
• RiteSite
• Building a web site
• Running a blog

We continue this topic tomorrow…