There are three types of people who could benefit from the information we provide in Marketing Loop and its sister sites/blogs:

1. Business owners, web publishers, and service professionals who have more time than budget. Those who are willing to learn, spend some time to get their work done, can get a lot from the information.
2. Business owners who hire assistant to help them accomplish tasks, but would like to educate them about new marketing technologies. Often, technical person is just too technical. They enjoy their work, but marketing is an entirely different beast. A fresh introduction of the technologies from marketing perspective often are needed.
3. Business owners who want to explore different technologies that they could use to help their business and marketing online. Only with a good grasp of what is behind the technology that we could decide if it is feasible for the business.

Why learning it and doing it yourself?

First of all, there are many people who want to start an online business or marketing their existing business on a shoestring. I have been in that situation and nothing is more frustrated than having to spend costly fee for hiring people without knowing anything about the work they must do.

There is no guarantee that people you hire know how to — for example — build and grow a blog, podcast, run email marketing campaigns correctly. They may know the ins and outs, but not from the marketing point of view, which is actually what you need to be successful in implementing it in your business.

The “other side” of the technology often scares people off. The fact is, we don’t have to understand the intricacies to get it to work for us. Most people think that involving in technology requires a steep learning curve. Nothing can be further than the truth. There are benefits if you know what and how it is done.

Imagine if every time you want to use email to send a short message to your business partner, you must wait the next morning and ask “the technical person” about it. Would it be worth it? Or, should you learn how to do it?

Perhaps, you can’t design a beautiful HTML email for your marketing campaign, but you should be able to use email to communicate effectively.

I guess the same thing applies to using technology in marketing. If you know how a blog works, how to use it to post and edit short articles, you just free yourself from waiting for overly simple task such as editing typos. Or, get more creative ideas on how to use it to enhance your business needs.

There are time you want to outsource and hire. Others told you to focus on your strongest point. The argument is, having the knowledge will be proven valuable in many times. Learning current marketing technologies also help you know your business better, which is really doing what you are best at.

Nowadays, I subscribe to more RSS feeds than email newsletter. I use blogs to post my thoughts more than any other way to publish on the Web. As they become more common, perhaps it is wise if you know how to do them right.

Just remember to keep the balance between implementation/ work and learning.