From Brian Armstrong I came across this quote from the Wall Street Journal:

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today’s high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

… Without knowing it, we have been training a whole generation of young entrepreneurs.

I spent 2 hours yesterday showing my nephew how to choose domains and build an online business. 15, and fast on the uptake, you could see the ideas take hold. Why work for someone when you can work for yourself?

When you market a business online, you have a lot of tools at your disposal. At times it can be very confusing to try and understand how they all fit in.

Here are 5 categories for the new tools of online marketing. Understanding these 5 categories will help you plan and budget for your online marketing.

I’ve used this categorisation for some time now, and its pretty useful. There are other marketing tools online that don’t fit that neatly into this model - feel free to suggest how you see those tools either fitting into these categories, or requiring new categories of their own.

Thanks to David Meerman Scott for pointing to this summary of the top marketing blog posts of 2007.

Rebecca Spicer of Dynamic Business Magazine prepared an article on Online Marketing for the October 2007 Young Guns edition. I was one of the people she interviewed for the Online Marketing story.

Here is a link to the article: Online Marketing, Dynamic Business Magazine, Oct 2007 ‘Young Guns’ edition.

Naturally I think the article is excellent, as I am one of the interviewees.

Rebecca also interviews Michael Rom of NetStarter (web design and SEO), Paula O’Connell of Returnity (email marketing) and our clients Paul & Jenny Geelen.

Rebecca’s summary is clean and to the point:

The general consensus among our experts is that while all these online marketing channels can be used individually, they’re likely to achieve better results when used together in an all-encompassing online marketing strategy, which should also integrate with your offline marketing.

If you live in Australia, there is currently a special offer that means you can subscribe to Dynamic Business for 12 months for $11. You can find it from their website, or here is a link to their subscription page.