Marketing online is more challenging than field marketing in more ways than one. In field marketing, the whole market and industry is within your sight to analyze. That isn’t so with online marketing. The fact that the Web houses billions of users and businesspeople brings with it the fact that you do not see everything there is that is needed to know for you to employ the ultimate marketing strategy online. The only thing that an online marketer sees for sure is his/her computer and the sites he/she surfs. He/she does not see who’s behind this site or who’s conversing with him/her on that forum, etcetera etcetera…

In field marketing, you research the industry, your niche, the economy, etc… plan your business, your location, your organizational framework, etc… In online marketing, you study your site, take a look at other sites and your competitors, compare it with yours, research online the stats of your competitors and do hypotheses on how the higher-ranked sites went up to the top 10 of the search engines. It seems so simple and easy. But technically, the plan is really so vague.

For one thing, you have no real clear picture of who you’re playing hardball with — you’re competing against sites that are in the same niche as yours, yet you know that the strategies all of you are using are the same with what the other niches are doing. So in a way, it also seems like you’re competing with all the other websites, regardless of the industry you and they are in. Of course, it’s obvious that you still have to focus on your own niche.

Another thing that itches an online marketer is how big the number of businesspeople in the Web is. In field marketing, generally, you’d first just worry about your competitors in your local area. In online marketing, however, the whole Web is your local area, which means that the whole world is your market and your competitors are very very very many. Which also means that the competition is very very very tough. Hardball indeed.

The most annoying part in online marketing is the “hardball” part. There are marketers and competitors out on the Web who would either spam away or bring an enemy’s site down by ruining that site. And an online marketer wouldn’t be able to know who that was since it’s a very wide world and you’re just sitting in front of a pc.