Doesn't this type of marketing remind you of a IPO.com frenzied "drunken sailor school of budgeting" – meaning, spend like a drunken sailor hitting his/her first port of call in years, with no thought other than "brand awareness" coming to mind? Got picture yet? Want cliff notes to rest of my article? Three words repeated from my header – "target customers online."

Some do and don'ts, with do's first:

1)Think digital marketing – use keywords your customers may punch in to a search engine to find your site throughout your overall online and offline marketing processes. This forces you to stay focused on your customer niche and ensures context relevancy for your web site. The latter is becoming critical to garner high rankings on Alta Vista, Google and Inktomi.

2)Advertise cost-effectively online where your customers go - this doesn't have to be top tier web sites (more expensive typically); but can be second or third tier community sites. Use online media buying to save money; look at One Media Place, formerly Ad Auction for some unsold inventory and bid with best of them for a deal! http://www.onemediaplace.com

3)Feature opt-in e-mail as a centerpiece of your marketing campaign – now is time to negotiate a 90-120 day media plan with some of market leaders. Yes Mail (one of our favorites) is offering a discount of 10-30%. And, use HTML rich media, your ad copy will look much better, in turn driving a better clickthrough results; but only if you are a B2C if B2B then don't use HTML, just plain text.

4)Immerse your business with online community – post to Newsgroups announcing a special online contest, promotion or giveaway that builds over a finite period of time. Get those geeks talking in virtual world – remember truism of good PR, any PR is better than no PR.

1)Publishers are finally starting to charge for branded content. It's still difficult to do, but we are seeing many newsletter publishers charging from $30-100 per subscribe per annum. And, most importantly, many people are finally starting to accept need to pay for quality content.

2)Contrary to popular opinion web's epicenter is not San Francisco, Tokyo, Washington D.C./northern VA, Seattle, London or Austin – there is no epicenter, its everywhere. We now have over 407M (estimated according to Nua) people using web and its become a global medium/marketing venue/information highway.

3)More good news for ecommerce enabled business models, recent published reports (Boston Consulting Group & eShop) indicate customer acquisition costs have dropped from $45. per individual customer in Q- 4 of 2000 to $18. in Q-1 in 2001.

4)Adobe continues to push PDF format as a web standard, over 32% of corporate web sites today have Acrobat PDF-enabling their web sites. Why we will never know (?), as it isn't an HTML standard but was originally developed to facilitate printing of documents. And, it doesn't work well on many web sites, especially for those coming in with slow connections or when you are trying to view more than a couple of pages.

5)Surprise, surprise splash pages are still increasing in popularity, with an estimated 18% of web sites today incorporating them. Let's be clear, we think they are really lame to use a technical marketing term – they slow down user experience and cause many people to click away from a web site in annoyance, no bookmark and no return visit.