Once you've developed your online marketing strategy, you should use "seven P Formula" for continuous evaluation and reevaluation of your business activities. As online products, online markets, online customers and online needs change much rapidly than its counterpart, you must use a tracking system to continually revisit these seven Ps to make sure you're on track and achieving the maximum ROI possible.

These seven Ps are:

1. Participation,
   
2. Product,
   
3. Price,
   
4. Platform,
   
5. Place,
   
6. Presentation and,
   
7. Presence.
   

Participation
According to Tim, Web 2.0 is all about participation. The buzz is already there in the market with hundreds of social networking site allowing everyone to participate. An era of adsense than an era of Doubleclick. The story of digg.com in itself is a good example of participation, taking over the powerhouse slashdot.org . Participation brings diverse opinions and this gives more dimensions to your existence. Another success story is that of firefox, invading the market shares of IE when it allowed participation. Open (free) sources brought the revolution towards participation. Sharing revenue is a happening model of business, encouraging the key participation factor, and from ebay to Google the secret is wide open. Participation can be made viral and orkut is one nice example.

Product
There is a catch to online product management and I will explain it as soon as I finish the basics of product. A good product speaks for itself. The key to online success is simplicity and I believe there is a great market for simplicity existing, even for all highly over-crowded industry. Two easiest and most effective tests for your product (even you can choose one),

1. If I were the customer will I choose it over others?
   
2. Will you recommend it?
   

The catch to the online product is in is definition which says, "An evolving product". Perfection is not desired at this level but the freedom to evolve is essential. Hedir is a good example of evolving product, it started as a normal directory competing with DMOZ and now it is far better than DMOZ not in numbers but in model and concept. It offers better review than any other directory in the world.

Price
Be it online or offline marketing, price plays an important role. It should be well designed. Pricing as a whole is a big subject and offline marketing books will help you understand the need. In online marketing the word "free" works much more than in offline marketing. "Take the car for free and use it upto 100 kms", looks almost impossible. Consumer goods has given away freebies for promotions. In online marketing any big product can be offered for free with limited services. Another fact, in online business we can completely survive on free services. What better example that Google or yahoo. "I go to Google to search the World Wide Web for information and I get it for free so I visit there again and again.", this free service made Google a multi-billion dollar company. In online business there can be various layers of pricing starting from $0. Study of open and free source monetization can help in understanding online pricing.

Platform
Word "platform" is most important part of Web 2.0. "Web as platform" is the basis of Web 2.0. Providing a platform for participation can be taken as the highest priority. Injecting simplicity and removing the barriers at platform level should not be given a lower priority. Platform equipped with viral tools can be more effective that a million dollar campaign. Orkut is a good example of it. The platform should be able to extract the crowd wisdom.

Place
Is it important in online business? Technically the closer the server the better the experience for users (esp for dial up users). I want to focus on the domain name itself. In online business the place means the domain name and it is very important ingredient for online business. One of our Church leader wanted to open a site and he suggested various domain names which had great meaning with Greek words in it. I asked him to call up a friend to do a normal conversation and to mention the domain name once in the conversation. Can he recall the domain name after 3 days and if he can then it is as good as you can get. Finally we decided to go for goodmorningbible.com, which had some flaws but still was easy to remember and communicate. People still ask me about it at different meets and surprisingly with the domain name. Another one was myicpf.com, which helped me create the ownership inside the ICPF members. Ebay, google, yahoo are all wonderful place selection. The simple the better.

Presentation
If packaging is important in offline business then certainly the presentation is for online business. I have seen people working dedicatedly with Google analytics on navigation to supply the demand. Do not be surprised if 80% of you visitors report phpbb forums complex and hard to use, which is supposedly simpler for online marketers. You can learn a lot from Yahoo answers, it speaks a secret loudly; let the marketers with ears hear.

Presence
Your online presence is very important as one “W” in "WWW" means web. Inter linking is important, not only from search engine point of view but from visitors point of view as well. A good mix of product+platform+participation+price call assure a good online presence.

You are welcome to add your valuable Points (another important P here :)). I wrote this in hurry so please excuse me for grammatical mistakes.

Thanks,
AjiNIMC