Here’s the TRUTH:

Most copywriters and social media “gurus” — these are often the same people, but I’ll get to that later — will tell you that a great internet presence is THE ticket to a smashing business success. The good news? In part, they are right.

The number of tools you can use right now to grab attention on the web is astonishingly long. Get a load of this “starter” list:

• Targeted Email campaigns
• Blogging
• Copywriting for conversion
• Squeeze pages
• List-Building
• A/B Testing
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Social Bookmarking Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon

…and that’s just the TIP of the iceberg.

The bad news? It takes a ton of work, a bunch of trial and error and a boatload of cash to execute on all these platforms.

So, what do you do?

Rule #1: NEVER hire anyone who tries to get you to do everything at once.

Marketing and PR agencies (both are working double-time to hop on the social media success wagon) love to pitch companies with a looong list of “deliverables”, each with a Big. Fat. Pricetag. attached to it. RUN!

Instead, start out trying to do a few things very well. Then build on those successes.

And remember… if a product or service STINKS (not yours, of course), using the awesome power of social media and direct response copywriting to spread the word FAST is only going to let people know that it stinks FASTER. So make sure you get most (not all) of your product ducks in a row BEFORE you hire me to kick your internet marketing through the roof.

Wondering what makes me such a smarty-pants internet marketer?