Where Should Online Marketers Go In A Recession?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Follow the news and you’ll just in circles. In 1998, Google was a startup, but by 2001 it was hot. Facebook kicked off in 2004 but it went hot by 2006. MySpace was hot a few years ago (2005). Now, it’s Craigslist.

The No. 2 search engine is YouTube. The top 3 most profitable companies online are Google, Amazon, and Yahoo!. All of these companies are great places to search in their own right. So where should you go today to market your products and services?

Obviously, you can’t ignore Google. But what about YouTube? I suppose you can do without video marketing, but why should you?

Then there’s Yahoo! and Flickr. A good number of searchers still hang out on Yahoo! They upload photos. The also browse Craigslist. Amazon offers companies a way to sell their products on consignment. And Facebook will allow you to network socially and build pages that achieve search engine optimization prominence.

The question of where to market yourself is as elusive as the answer. Really, you should be where your customers are. That’s why the search engines are always a good bet, but just building websites for search prominence isn’t the only way to get into the search engines. Listing your products on Craigslist or Amazon or building pages at Facebook and MySpace could get you those search listings as well. The real answer is to market yourself in more than one direction. Don’t slow down. Use all the guns you can get your hands on.