If you don't create an Internet presence, you may have a presence anyway - that you don't like. The more you get your message out, in your preferred style, the more you get what you want. By creating and maintaining a Web presence, I developed an easy way to inform interested viewers of my services and products.

Since I created a Web presence a year ago on LWPS, a lifework planning blogging platform (the technology of which is also available on Blackboard/WebCT), my Internet presence has shot up by 10,000 hits. If you "Google" me, you will find me listed over 24,000 times (as of today - this may increase dramatically within the next month because I just authored my second book on Starting and Growing a Business in the New Economy). As a result of my rapidly increasing Web presence, I have been sought after to serve as a keynote speaker and workshop presenter around the country and abroad.

An Internet-based blogging platform is an excellent place to create, as well as deliver, one's marketing strategies. I have started 15 e-communities in LWPS on topics that relate to my counseling/coaching business; for example, Private Practice Online). I link to these e-communities my other websites, such as JobJuggler.net and AskDrSal.com, as well as to other websites that I believe would be of value to viewers. In addition, I promote CEU and certificate courses that I teach, such as the Career Development Facilitator curriculum (eCDF) that I co-instruct with Roberta Floyd, through this medium. I have found a blogging platform useful as a marketing tool in many ways, such as virtual job search, business development, and bookclubs.

A lifework blogging platform is not the only way to promote your career services or products. Here are a few distance delivery strategies that Marilyn Harryman and I suggest, in a chapter that we composed for an upcoming textbook for school counselors:

1. Survey all of your students for best ways to contact them by distance.
2. Ask how many students regularly use cell phones, text messaging and e-mail.
3. Develop a counseling page on your school site and/or district’s Web site, if not already in existence.
4. Devote part of your day/week to monitor and to deliver essential messages to students/staff and parents who use e-mail regularly.
5. Familiarize yourself with current communication systems available and possibilities for use, which can include the school’s media class and/or cableTV/radio station. Instant messaging, virtual support groups, blogs, virtual job clubs, e-portfolios, podcasting, digital story-telling, e-forums, online courses (as well as cyber-high schools), career/college information Web sites, and online assessment tools.
6. If you decide to have a forum for students on a designated Web site, someone needs to monitor it.
7. Support students who are on independent study, short day, out for long-term illness, or out of the country.
8. Develop new skills and earn continuing education units (CEUs) for your professional development.

Blogging platforms and other distance delivery systems provide you with unlimited possibilities to manage your Web presence. However, they are just instruments. You are the "conductor" who controls how you portray yourself, your services and your products.