Today, it is essential for every business to maintain an online presence. Without this, the business will completely miss out on a huge client base.

However, maintaining the online wing of a business is hard work - just like any other aspect of a business. Marketing and PR, in fact, are even more difficult online than offline, as there are a large number of online-only businesses which are also competing for visibility with the retail-and-online businesses.

Some methods to utilize for online PR include:

• Press Releases. Press releases are meant to inform the media about events in a company. Like a lot of PR, it is quite difficult to get your press releases noticed - instead of marked as spam - while you are a small company. Once the business grows, the journalists themselves begin to follow the press releases put up on the company's own page.

While emailing press releases is effective if one has contacts in the media, another way of getting press releases and press trip invites noticed is to put them up on PR wire services. These services forward the press releases to media professionals, and some of them even accept responses made by journalists to the company's press officers.

• Press resource on your website. First of all, all your press releases should link back to your web page. On your web page, you should provide additional material that journalists can use to write out their features. This could include photos(including high-resolution photos), interviews, additional event listings and so on.

• Social media. The phrase "social media" today is used mostly for sites like Facebook or MySpace, but everything from blogs to microblogs(e.g. Twitter) to the sites mentioned before can be used as social media. Putting up regular updates, following people in one's own industry or related industries, building one's rapport with potential clients... all of this can give a business visibility as well as creating personal relationships with contacts.

• Reputation monitoring. Monitoring reputation is one of the most crucial aspects of online PR. In order to figure out which of your online campaigns is most successful, to locate potential niche pockets of customers, to nip any public controversies in the bud and to feel the pulse of the client base, it is necessary to subscribe to a reputation monitoring service. While Google Alerts does alert you every time someone mentions the keywords you specify, it does not offer the sophisticated charting mechanisms that reputation monitoring services can do.

Using these tools, you can listen to what the public thinks of your business, formulate your public relations policies accordingly, and address any queries as soon as they appear. This gives you a much better reputation with your clientele, and makes them more likely to recommend you to others.