This week's blog post is the the second in an eight-part series covering:

1. Why a Web site, online marketing, and digital AND print marketing materials are now necessary to successfully market yourself and your business.

2. What a Web site, online marketing, and marketing materials can, and cannot, do for you. (Read it below.)

3. How you can get a great Web site, and update it often, without going broke. 

4. How to cost-effectively create marketing materials for online and print use.

5. How online marketing and social networking sites fit into your overall marketing plan.

6. When to "do it yourself" and when to invest in getting help.

7. Myth busting: "If you build it, they will come."

8. Search Engine Optimization: what's all the buzz about.

Read all the posts here.

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Part 2:  What a Web site, online marketing, and marketing materials can, and cannot, do for you.

What they CAN do for you is support you and your business. They provide information about you, your company, they help create and maintain your "brand" - your marketing identity which means all the things you use that make people think of you and associate your work with your name: your work itself along with the colors you use, a logo if you have one, all the design elements that go into your website and any other marketing materials or strategies you use to create your "style."

A website can be a place to see info about your business, a place for viewers to see what events you have coming up, a place where they can begin to know you, even a place where they can spend money and buy your products and services.

Other online marketing ties in with your website and works to keep you out there and available to as many people as possible.  Your other online marketing also helps make it easier for people to find you online.

Online marketing is very flexible, there are many ways to market online. It's also trackable, which means that unlike, oh, a print ad, you know when someone has been looking at your ads online, your website, there is information you can see about them. No, not their personal information, but where they are, how long they looked at your website for example, what parts of your website did they view the most and longest? Things like that.

That information helps you refine and know what parts of your marketing are working, and which are not. It helps you learn what people are interested in, and so you can put your time and money into what's actually working for you instead of just guessing.

Other marketing materials, like business cards, postcards, brochures, also work for you and support your online efforts. They are something a person can look at even if they're not on a computer. They can carry it around, look at it, leave it on their desk, whatever. Printed materials are something YOU can carry around with you, to give to people as you meet them and talk to them. They're a great way to maximize your in-person time with people, every day, at the grocery store, at a party, anywhere.

What all this can't do for you is REPLACE YOU! You can't really just put up a website, Twitter now and then, and expect to have sales. Online and printed marketing can't replace the relationship you have with people who will come to be buyers of your products and services. Online marketing and printed materials don't bring people to them automatically without some additional effort. But we'll talk about that more later in "Myth Busting: If you build it they will come."

What do you think? What else can a website do for you? Let me know because I can't possibly know it all, and I love to hear your opinions!