Remember phone books? You know, those big heavy things that take up all that room on your bookshelf.

They still get delivered to us each year, but they’ve started getting smaller, not bigger. That’s because more businesses are moving their advertising budget onto the internet.

That makes sense when you consider that people are spending more time on the internet, and the ability to search is literally at their fingertips. Younger people especially are more likely to search online, rather than get out the big heavy books and wade through all the pages looking for something that could be found virtually instantaneously using Google.

Those Yellow Pages ads aren’t cheap, and they have to be renewed each year. Ok, so a website is often not that cheap either, but a basic online presence can be achieved at less cost than a yellow pages ad, and can continue to work for you year on year, as well as being accessible the world over.

As people transition from spending time offline, to spending more of their time online, you should consider increasing your online marketing budget to successfully engage your online customers.

In business today, the internet must be a part of your strategy. Where do you start?

First, get your website in order. Your website is the cornerstone of your internet strategy, it’s the place that you want people to go to, and it should be designed to make it easy for people to find, and easy for them to achieve their (your) goals.

You want people to go to your website because that’s where your message is, and that’s where you educate people about your products and services and prompt them into action, whether it be making a purchase or enquiry, or just signing up for your email newsletter, allowing you to market to them later.

You want people to end up at your website, but they won’t necessarily start there. They may start at Google, or an online business directory. The more places your presence can be found on the internet, the easier it will be to find, or stumble across, your business.

Consider a twitter account. Twitter allows you to ‘tweet’ about what your business is doing; new products, announcements etc., and link back to your website. People will find your tweets and click through to your website to read more.

Are you passionate and knowledgeable enough about your business that you can write about it? On the internet, information is gold. Start a blog and write about things that your business does. Write regularly. People will find what you are writing about when they search or browse the internet.

What do you do when you have many jobs to complete in a short amount of time, but finite resources?

I like to use the game of Ludo as an analogy. In Ludo, you have 4 tokens which all have to get from start to finish. Part of the strategy of playing Ludo is deciding which token to move forward on a given turn, when there may be four choices. Which one gets the priority? They all have to get to the end as soon as possible!

You could move one token on successive rolls and get it to the end quicker, but that leaves the other three back at the start. Or you could move the pieces in turn, so it will take longer to get any to the end, but they’ll get there together.

The difference between the game and the real world is there are often more than four simultaneous jobs, and they will have different priorities. The one that gets the highest priority is often the one that will bring the most pleasure (usually money) or avoid the most pain (an irate customer, for example).

Obviously the strategy is to get all the jobs to the end, but the tactics can change during play. You may have determined the priority is getting ‘Job A’ to the end as quickly as possible, but then new information comes in from ‘Job B’, and it suddenly becomes top priority, which makes ‘Job C’ get put on hold even longer.

Work can be stressful. The Ludo analogy is a way to picture all the jobs currently in play objectively, which can help to determine priorities. And, hopefully, add a light-hearted element to your workload, because remember, it’s all a game anyway!