Well I’m back. Thanks for sticking around everyone and please excuse my last couple posts, the quality of which was due to very little time sleeping and a lot of time spent riding in a bus. Anyway…back to business marketing.

Presence is a strange thing. It used to be that if you wanted presence in people’s lives, you had to pay for it. Most likely, you had to pay a lot. This notion is changing. Establishing a solid presence online is one of the cheapest and easiest things you can do, and increasingly it’s become more accepted and effective than other media. Let’s look at some calls to action from personal and organizational standpoints.

Personal – Developing a great online presence is not only easy, but can be fun too. Here are the individual presence calls to action.

CTA 1 – Join every possible social networking site. Get out there and make yourself visible. It’s easy and free.
CTA 2 – Be consistent every time. Your presence is your image/brand. Put out a solid message and the rest will follow. (for more on this see Neil Patel’s QuickSprout)
CTA 3 – Add something. Post on message boards, comment on blogs, edit wikipedia, enter contests, etc. Do whatever you can to add to the universal discussion that’s going on. If you make an impact, people will notice.
CTA 4 - Get a website. Hosting is cheap and blogger and wordpress are free. It’s never to late to make a home for yourself on the web.

Organizational - Just having a website isn’t enough anymore. Being an active and engaging part of the community works much better than being an immovable monolithic wall.

CTA 1 – Open up. Just like Connect (of the 4 C’s), you must find a way to interact with your customers. You will be much more of a presence if people see you as a living organization that responds to what is going around you.
CTA 2 – Diversify your presence. Just because a you have a website doesn’t mean you’re done. Why shouldn’t you have a MySpace page or a Squidoo Lens for your company? If having a web site makes it easy for people to find you online, then having other pages that point to that site should make it even easier, right?
CTA 3 – Less is more. Are you over-advertising? Presence does not equal bombarding the marketplace with advertisements and endorsements. Think about other approaches and you’ll find a way to get your name out there with out all the noise.