With the explosion of social networks, so many people promise to give away so many marketing secrets that I wonder how secret any of them can be if they are known by so many people.

It can only be a matter of time before someone invents the fact that you are never more than six feet away from a twitter expert.

But lets not deny the value of twitter and online services, just as other tools provided value in their time, from the telegraph to the typewriter to the fax machine.

What is probably more constant is the approach required for successful marketing, which remains neither secret nor exciting.

I would suggest that having an objective is a good start. This helps tailor activities to our target market by identifying what we want our customers to do, how we get them to do it and how we know when they’ve done it.

Next, it’s good to be interesting so that people notice that we are going on about something. It’s even better to offer something useful, even if it’s just entertainment value.

Generally, one-off activities are not enough and persistence is required so that people get to know us and our business without being annoyed by us. Add to this some consistency, so that over time people recognise our message and what we want them to do, eg make a purchase.

In simple terms, that’s about it. That’s not to say that research, planning, original ideas and hard work aren’t needed to put all this into practice, but it’s either that or knowing the winning lottery numbers.

And they are a secret that few manage to crack.

Follow me on twitter as I search for the winning lottery numbers @robertz