Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Digg, Delicious, Blogs, Myspace, Linkedin, Flickr, Bebo, DeviantArt.
Anyone in the creative industries could use all these sites to market themselves online, for free.
Except its not really free. To put enough time in to make it worthwhile (lets say 30 minutes a day) it would take five and a half hours a day to market yourself online on all the above sites. If it costs you ten pounds an hour to cover your costs, thats fifty five pounds a day to become prominent. And you haven't even made any money yet.
Of course, most people will only use a few of these, but being sucked in to these time portals can cost you money that would be better spent elsewhere. Fortunately, there are a few ways to cut down your costs.
First, you can link your sites together. For example, if I have a Google account, any videos I post on my Youtube account will automatically show up on my blog, my Twitter and my Facebook. Second, you can use shortcuts. Twitterbar by Christopher Fink enables me to type anything up to 140 characters in to the address bar of my browser, click a button and post it to Twitter. That saves my time logging in and diverting from what I'm doing. Third and finally, the biggest time saver, get someone else to do your work for you. Be creative, design a wonderful new service or product, get people talking about what you do. No-one cares that your dog just ate organic dog food for breakfast.
Unless, maybe, you run an organic dog food business.
