If you are thinking about doing online marketing for your business (and you should) then you should consider that Internet market is different from traditional marketing in a number of ways. While there are similarities - you will of course require some of the same specialty skills - the differences are rather striking. One major difference with online marketing is the rate at which changes in the marketplace or the playing field can affect your business. One recent example illustrates perfectly what I mean.

Yesterday morning at 2:22 a.m., SEOmoz posted a blog post about how Google won’t index websites whose URLs end with .0. Later that morning, Small Business Mavericks followed up with a post about it as well. By 9:40 a.m., just barely more than one hour after SBMs post, Matt Cutts had posted on his blog that Google’s policy had changed to allow .0 file name extensions and URLs that end with .0. It happened that fast.

In the world of online marketing, things can change at the drop of a hat and because communication is instant, a company like Google can make a policy change and communicate that change worldwide within a short period of time. That kind of change has the ability to influence how every business online markets itself and if a change is sweeping enough it will bend the rules of online marketing just enough that those who know about the change before everyone else will have a distinct advantage over all of their competitors. That’s how alert and responsive you have to be to compete online.

When it comes to online marketing, you need to stay on top of the latest information by the minute or consult with a marketing company who does.