The six marketing strategies for professional services described in Get Clients Now! are listed in order of effectiveness from most to least: direct contact, networking, public speaking, writing and PR, promotional events, and advertising. Seeing this list for the first time, you may wonder where the Internet fits in. How effective is Internet marketing compared to these six strategies?

The first answer to this question is that “the Internet” is not a marketing strategy. It’s a tool, a medium, a venue, or a channel for marketing to take place. Just like more traditional marketing tools or channels such as the telephone or postal mail, the Internet can be used in a wide variety of ways. Some are highly effective; others are less so.

Consider the telephone, for example. If you call someone you met at a business mixer to continue your conversation, that’s a networking and referral-building strategy and highly effective. But if you pay a telemarketing company to broadcast a recorded message to a list of phone numbers you bought, that’s advertising, and would be highly ineffective in the professional services arena.

So the second answer to this question is that the effectiveness of the Internet in marketing is completely dependent on how you use it. Sending a personal email to a prospect who you know is interested in working with you and will recognize your name is a direct contact and follow-up strategy — and effective. Broadcasting an anonymous marketing message to a list of email addresses who haven’t opted in to receive mail from you is advertising — and ineffective.

The relative effectiveness of Internet marketing activities follows exactly the same pattern as any other form of marketing you might choose. Networking online will typically be more effective than online publicity, for example, and writing articles for the web will be more effective than advertising on it.

The third answer to this question is that, really, Internet marketing doesn’t belong in any one place on the ranked list of effective marketing strategies. It belongs in all of them. Direct contact and follow-up can be done on the Internet, as can networking and referral-building, writing and publicity, and all the rest.

If you use the Internet as a medium for effective marketing, you’ll get results. If you use it as a medium for ineffective marketing, just being on the web won’t help bad marketing get any better.