Larisa, good first steps. A website is an absolute necessity today. And it must be a well designed site full of valuable content. To be honest, a blog is a great way to start your site because a good blog template will have static pages for things like a description of your offerings, your bio, contact page, etc... and you'll be able to easily author valuable content using the blog engine. Search engines will love you and you'll attract a following faster than with a "brochure" style website.

Good luck!

Thanks for all of your comments. It's good to see that more & more people are truly understanding what branding is all about. Five or ten years ago this definitely wasn't the case.

Thanks Paul. Glad to hear things are working well. Keep up the great work.

By direct marketing, I assume you mean tactics like direct mail or email mail marketing right? Something sent to individuals--even if in mass.

If so, it can still work very well as long as it's focused on the audience's issues, structured properly and has a strong call to action and valuable offer.