Brainstorming & Internet Marketing 101

You’ve done this before.  They teach it in school when you first learn how to write papers.   Or what passes for a paper in second and third and fourth grade.  You learn how to write down all your initial ideas down on paper and do a little research to figure out how you want to write about what it is you have to write about.  The brainstorming process actually doesn’t change all that much when you get older.

What does change is how you process the ideas that your brain dredges up when you go through the motions of brainstorming.  For example, when my friend asked me to be a part of this, we did a lot of brainstorming via email.  Things that we wanted to do, what we wanted to accomplish, and also lists and lists of things that we were going to need to if we wanted to make her dream (rapidly becoming my dream as well) a reality.

One of the things I suggested in this brainstorming period was that we put up this blog and that we get a Twitter account, because one of the first rules of marketing is to know your audience and in knowing your audience, to familiarize yourself with the mediums that they use.   Generally you first have to identify your audience, but Kate and I, in this sense, started this project up already knowing who we wanted to target and why.  Which put us slightly ahead of the game, we know what and who we’re after, so we could immediately start working on some of the nitty-gritty parts that have to come before we can do all of the fun and creative stuff we really want to get to.

In this day and age, the single greatest marketing tool that exists is the Internet. Specifically it lies in the arena of blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, and other forms of what is called social media.   A trend I’ve noticed often is that in researching anything these days, Google is inevitably the first stop.  When it comes to looking for a particular service, more and more people are more likely to choose someone who can show themselves to be relatively current with the latest technology.  Currently this takes the form of business websites, which while they are an excellent piece of marketing, sometimes a prospective client wants to know more.

Enter the world of the business blog.  By providing thoughtful, provocative, field-specific blog entries and placing them out there for the world to see, shows that you are not just capable of providing the service you’re offering, but you are also showing off your expertise.   Not solely your expertise with current technology but also your expertise within your field.   They are an excellent way of getting your name out there/giving your business a boost in publicity.

The greatest part is that for the vast majority of blogging-specific platforms, you can set up a business blog for free, nine times out of ten.  It depends a lot on what exactly you are aiming for in creating a blog.   Word Press is one of the best(and most versatile) platforms and whether you set up your own privately hosted blog using the Word Press framework (WordPress.org)  or a free blog hosted on the Word Press servers (WordPress.com), the interface is the same and it is very easy to use.  Privately hosted blogs have a greater amount of flexibility than ones hosted on the Word Press server with regards to customizing, but other than that, there’s not a great deal of difference.  It also comes with free widgets and plugins that can be used to improve the functionality of your blog, from adding Google Analytics (also free) to check your stats and analyze trends (so that you can better optimize your blog and provide even more direct and helpful content) to an automatic upgrade plugin that in five clicks can upgrade your Word Press installation to the latest released version.

Catch and Release’s blog is synced up to our Twitter account so that anyone following that can know when new posts are up.  We’ve also got some cool promo ideas for it as we get closer to launching the project.  You can find it here.

These are just two of the ideas that were brainstormed up during our initial email session,  we’ve got lots of other ideas that we’re just as excited about!  So keep an eye out here and on the Twitter account for more news.

Bethany