I just read the greatest article on the Online Marketing Blog by TopRank (which I read religiously) about a keynote speech given at the Media Relations Summit by Mike Moran of IBM. The best idea from the article is that you can sip from the “web 2.0″ cup, you don’t have to drink from the fire hose. There’s a lot of new ideas out there and the whole marketing world has turned upside down, does that mean you have to put your entire business on hold and go obtain a doctorate in online marketing? No!

(It’s not that I don’t want the competition, I’m overwhelmed with business and would be very happy to share my workload.)

It’s just that you are already an expert at what YOU do. So Mike and I both recommend that you grab a single idea that intrigues you and look deeper into how you can use it. That will lead to the next step and the next in a nice, comfortable, organic fashion.

So continue to do what you do best, don’t worry about that which doesn’t excite you. If you like to write and are interested in blogging, go for it in a manner that suits your personality, work-style, comfort level and budget. Blogging just might lead you to some new ideas about viral marketing or social media networking. Or it might not.

Or if you dislike the idea of writing on a regular basis, maybe you’ve been using LinkedIn for a while now and are interested in finding out how to leverage that better.

Whatever it is, there’s a door out there for you to stumble through and you will naturally be led to the tools and techniques that will work best for you.

Along the way, be prepared to be wrong . . . a lot. So what? Just dive in and sort it out later. As Mike says, don’t over-analyze and close the door that’s open before you.

I liken this to what’s wrong in foreign language teaching in our country. We’re teaching kids who have already passed the best language acquisition stage how to speak another language and picking apart their grammar so that they can’t communicate an idea without getting a bad grade. Let them make mistakes, congratulate them for getting the idea across and learn the grammar by ear before you give them all the rules and mark up their progress with your red pen.

Internet Marketing, like learning a foreign language, can happen naturally. It doesn’t have to cramp your style!

Welcome aboard.