There’s no magic bullet when it comes to getting press, but these tips will point you in the right direction.

By Scott Steinberg

It’s every entrepreneur’s dream: to see your business’s name in lights. But with thousands of companies competing in hundreds of verticals for the same limited number of column inches, blog posts and precious seconds of airtime, let’s level: It’s not easy to score the precious publicity boost that placement in your local newspaper or an influential website can provide. Nor, for that matter, is avoiding the trap of becoming yesterday’s news.

However, the upside for even the leanest startups is that these days, it doesn’t take massive marketing and public relations budgets or lavish events to generate serious ink. Mind you, there’s no one simple strategy for breaking into every outlet–each is actually a broad collection of self-contained sections staffed by a unique team of reporters with various backgrounds, interests and needs. But employ the simple tips below, and who knows? You too could soon be making headlines.

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Useful strategies to help you maximize your campaigns and save money.
By Robert W. Bly

Most small businesses have modest marketing budgets, which means you have to make every dollar count. Here are 5 ways to get big results from a small budget:

1. First, use your ads for more than just space advertising. Ads are expensive to produce and expensive to run. But there are ways to get your advertising message in your prospect’s hands at a fraction of the cost of space advertising.

The least expensive is to order an ample supply of reprints and distribute them to customers and prospects every chance you get. When you send literature in response to an inquiry, include a copy of the ad in the package. This reminds a prospect of the reason he responded in the first place and reinforces the original message.

Distribute ads internally to other departments–engineering, production, sales, customer service and R&D–to keep them up to date on your latest marketing and promotional efforts. Make sure your salespeople receive an extra supply of reprints and are encouraged to include a reprint when they write to or visit their customers.

Turn the ad into a product data sheet by adding technical specifications and additional product information to the back of the ad reprint. This eliminates the expense of creating a new layout from scratch. And it makes good advertising sense, because the reader gets double exposure to your advertising message.

Ad reprints can be used as inexpensive direct mail pieces. You can mail the reprints along with a reply card and a sales letter. Unlike the ad, which is “cast in concrete,” the letter is easily and inexpensively tailored to specific markets and customer groups.

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Optimize your site’s search engine ranking with video
By Mikal Belicove   |   Entrepreneur Magazine - February 2010

Because video has become the new darling of search engines, many startups are rushing to create and post video on their websites. Just run a Google or Bing search on any topic, and links to video clips pop up right on page one. The reason for this is that search engines are tripping over themselves to provide blended search results­–links to news, blog posts, photos, video and other specialized content all mixed together. To ensure video is included in the results, search engines give them preferential treatment.

This trend presents startups that are able to produce quality video content with tremendous search engine optimization (SEO) opportunities. In fact, Forrester Research reports that compared with standard SEO techniques, a properly submitted video is 50 times more likely to achieve a first-page Google ranking. And because video is in such short supply, relative to other web-based content, the competition for search engine attention is less fierce.

Many startups and entrepreneurs are not yet taking full advantage of this opportunity. They are not using web-based video, are disregarding video SEO, or are trying but doing it all wrong.

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It’s essential to understand SEO before you spend thousands hiring consultants you may not even need.
By Erin Weinger   |   Entrepreneur Magazine - February 2010

Search engine optimization–the canny use of keywords and other techniques designed to shoot a website to the top of a search–is the make-or-break factor for many new businesses.

It is also the web’s unfolding, and unregulated, frontier. There are countless SEO strategists, consultants and self-professed experts who will claim they can beam your site up into Google’s top 10 search results–for a price, of course. Consultants commonly charge upward of $200 an hour, and most will pressure you to sign a contract that keeps them on retainer for months–at prices as steep as $12,000 a month. Unscrupulous SEO firms not only make promises they can’t keep, the worst of them also use shady practices that might produce no traffic, deliver the wrong traffic or even get you banned from planet Google.

“The SEO business is 80 percent scam,” says Peter Kent, an internet marketing strategist and author of earch Engine Optimization for Dummies. “It’s very, very difficult to find a good firm.”

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Don’t get tripped up by these common misconceptions.
By Starr Hall   |  Entrepreneur.com

Do you remember the story of Chicken Little? If one person tells you the sky is falling, you laugh at him. But if you’re told the same story over and over, pretty soon you believe it. This also rings true with branding–just because everyone else is saying or doing something doesn’t mean that it works.

Time and again I see entrepreneurs throw thousands of dollars away trying to grow their businesses with traditional branding techniques because everyone else is doing it. These branding myths can break a company before it even gets off the ground. Times have changed–technology has created new ways to build and brand your company; traditional techniques don’t always work anymore. Being aware of the following five myths will help you avoid these mistakes and save countless hours of frustration.

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13 things not to do when adapting your product to an online model.

By Guy Kawasaki | Entrepreneur.com

Here’s a compilation of 13 silly and even stupid ways some companies are hindering adoption of their products and services. So if you are doing any of them, don’t.

1. Forcing immediate registration: Requiring a new user to register is a reasonable request—after you’ve sucked him in. The sites that require registration as the first step are putting a barrier in front of adoption.
2. The long URL: Say a site generates a URL that’s 70 characters long or more. When you copy, paste and e-mail this URL, a line break is added. Then, people can’t click on the link or it only links to the first part of the URL.
3. Windows that don’t generate URLs: Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? Did the company decide it didn’t want referrals, links and additional traffic?
4. The unsearchable website: Some sites don’t offer a search option. If your site goes deeper than one level, it needs a search box.

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5 ways to save money and still get your message heard.

Meeting payroll and covering overhead are the first orders of business when times are tough. But too many entrepreneurs and small businesses look to their marketing budgets as a way to cut costs–a big no-no when clients and customers may be that much harder to come by. Here are five simple ways to save money while still reaching as many clients and customers as possible.

1. Cheap? Let everyone know
Cost is paramount in the minds of many consumers–the less expensive a product or service, the better. If that’s your business, have your marketing materials reflect that cost-conscious focus. “Right now we’re in a price-driven environment,” says Jay Lipe, author of The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses. “If you’re using marketing materials that show that price-driven personality, it really reinforces that image. Bare-bones positioning these days can really work effectively.”

That’s been the case for Monsoon Co., a Berkeley, Calif.-based software development consulting firm. While the company has long touted its low-priced services, it recently mailed out some 150 rather grungy-by-design mailers: five-by-seven pieces of cardboard, broken from a used box, with a handwritten “recession message” that read, “OK, this is a lame way to save money. Call us about smarter ways to save on design and development in 2009.”

Sandeep Sood, 32, president of the $2 million company, explains that the mailer “plays with the paranoia” that people have about the recession. “Yes, it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as many people might think,” he says. “And this message really made people chuckle.” Moreover, the results have been great. “We kept getting calls from people saying how much they liked the card. And any time a client calls is an opportunity to engage.”

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Check out these low-cost marketing ideas for your new business.

Google’s creation of sites’ titles and descriptions (or “snippets”) is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn’t available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

While we’re unable to manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, we’re always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the snippets displayed for your pages by providing informative meta descriptions for each page.

Read more about changing your site’s title and description here.

MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook are all the rage, but for most business owners there are better ways to stay close to customers

By Gene Marks

Comedian Jim Gaffigan has a suggestion for preparing a Hot Pockets frozen entrée: “Take out of package. Place directly in toilet.” Gaffigan is not a big fan of Hot Pockets. He doesn’t like exercise, either. But he loves bacon. “Without bacon, no one would even know what a water chestnut is,” he says. Gaffigan’s also a fan of social networking sites.

You’ll see him on Facebook, Twitter, and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace. He keeps fans up to date on his concerts, albums, TV appearances—and naps. In short, he’s a social networking success story. For a one-man band like Gaffigan, who probably has a decent amount of free time between eating bacon and being on stage, social networks and blogs have proved effective vehicles for marketing his business and staying close to his audience. But for many business owners, social networking is as valuable as a Hot Pocket is nutritious.

We’ve been misled as to the benefits of social networking sites. Many of us are finding that these tools do not live up to the hype, especially for small business. Once we start digging deeper, we’re finding a lot of challenges. Are you thinking of using Facebook, Twitter, or the like in your business? Before you go any further, consider the following myths:

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