An internet business strategy is basically a plan in how you want to manage your online presence for your business. There are many components to the strategy where some are easy, some are tedious, and some are hard to implement. Regardless about the level of complexity, it is important for business owners to develop an internet business strategy.

So you may be asking, what are some of the key components of an internet business strategy? And here’s your answer… It’s the PITTS, which is short for:

• Planning: spend time research and preparing tasks for what you need to do to develop a succeful Internet business strategy
• Implementation: start take action on the tasks that you created during the planning stage
• Testing: create a way for you to monitor the status of your implementation to ensure that the tasks are affective
• Tracking: make sure you create a way for you obseve and report on the progress of your plan
• Surveying: get feedback for website visitor regarding what brought them to you or how their experience has been on your website

Hopefully the acronym “PITTS” will help you understand the importants of creating an Internet Business Strategy. I would love to hear of ways that you have created your own Internet business strategy. Please feel free to share your comments.

Did you realize that there are at least partners who should be running your business? Did you also know that if one of these partners is not included that it could affect your business? Let me introduce you to the three partners: (1) You, (2) Your business, and (3) Your strategy plan.

Image: SXC.hu

Now that you have met all three, let me share with you the importance of having all three doing their part. Let’s start with Strategy. According to Webster.com, the definition of the word “strategy” is “a careful plan or method”. This can be applied to the partnership as the key components that helps give your business direction and processes. Just as in chess when you have to always have a strategy in mind to win, the same is true for managing a business.

The next member of the partnership we will look at is your Business which is a necessity since it would be the cornerstone for the whole partnership. The last member is not the least at all but is the glue that keeps everything together and flowing smoothly which is You. Your purpose in this partnership is to provide the brains, the brawn, and the backing to make sure that all members of the partnership fit together perfectly.

To help you understand the importance of Strategy, I have included an interview video that was developed by Harvard Business School to help you understand the “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy” which is the brainchild of Michael E. Porter, Professor, Harvard University.

Allowing your business to constantly evolve is a process that affects the programs you use to run your business. Although Web 2.0 has been around for a while, there are still new programs appearing on the scene and you can incorporate this technology into your business. Check out Go 2 Web 20 website options of software available to you.

For those who don’t know, the definition of Web 2.0 according to Tim Brady via O’Rielly Radar is…

the era when people have come to realize that it’s not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company. The net has replaced the PC as the platform that matters, just as the PC replaced the mainframe and minicomputer.

The image below is a representation of the outcome from the Web 2.0 conference that was held in 2001 and hosted by O’Reilly and MediaLive International. As you can see, it has different areas that reflect ways you can strategically incorporate Web 2.0 into your business website.

Image courtesy: www.oreillynet.com

So what’s your Web 2.0 strategy? Have you incorporated it into your website so that it is intuitive for your web visitor? There are many examples of how you can do this. Such as incorporating Feedburner into your website if you have an RSS feed. This allows your website visitors the opportunity to signup to be notified via email that you have added content to your website. It is also one of the many Google products that you can incorporate into your business.

Please feel free to share how you have incorporated Web 2.0 strategies into your business.

NewsFlash…. Using YouTube as a marketing tool in your business may be a strategic plan that could put you ahead of your competitors. Have you developed presentation or videos that you have used to present to audiences? Did you know that you could turn either of these into a YouTube video to increase the marketing reach of your business.

I have begun to convert all of my PowerPoint presentations into videos and adding them to YouTube as a marketing tool so that I can drive traffic to my websites. One such video that was created as an interactive marketing tool for the Oscars and I have included it below as an example of what you can do. If you are not sure where to start in developing your presence on YouTube, just visit their helpful resource center (beware, a video with sound starts up as soon as you visit this page).

Now that you have watched the video, I would like to share a few simple things that you can do to develop YouTube videos as part of your business marketing plan:

• Determine your target or niche audience
• Review all of your presentations and videos to see if they will reach your audience
• Take advantage of the annotation functionality and link embedding that is available via YouTube (check out the video above for a great example)
• Make sure you use the “Promote” feature of YouTube to share your videos.
• Post links to your video via your social media networks
• Include your video in post on your blogs or website.

Do you have ways that you use YouTube as part of your business marketing plan that I have not shared? Please feel free to share your feedback.

Image: Newscom.com

Image: Istockphoto

Recently, ProjectManagement411.com was incorporated into the Bizzia.com website. The new topics will include business, strategy, project management, and leadership. The new location is on the Bizzia.com website under “Leadership”. Watch the announcement below about the change to ProjectManagement411.com.

Big agencies are good at systematizing strategy development, media buying and media contact management.

But can you automate creativity?

How do you keep from turning into a factory for homogenous advertising or public relations?

These question were asked 60 years ago by Bill Bernbach, as his agency began to grow. His response was a manifesto that calls for the nurturing of true creativity:

“…  [The] danger is a preoccupation with technical skill or the mistaking of technical skill for creative ability.

“The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinized men who have a formula for advertising.  The danger lies in the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.

“If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy and not have the advertising philosophy of others imposed on us. 

“Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.”

Indeed. Except for the use of “man” to include humanity, the manifesto holds true today.

We should never mistake comfortable tactics for effective tactics.

It’s easy to fall back on what has worked in the past.Few people get fired for repeating a successful formula. That doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do in every situation.

Link via Brett Duncan.