The following is a guest post by Peter Rastello, the founder of Inbound Market Link, an Inbound Marketing agency specializing in helping small and medium, B2B and B2C businesses to succeed on the internet.

If you are a marketing professional in charge of your small/medium sized business’ (SMB) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Inbound marketing, you are not alone. According to Marketing Sherpa, SMBs spend roughly 20% more on staff salaries to handle SEO & internet marketing  than do large sized businesses who tend to out-source this activity. For this reason, it is critical that SMB marketers focus carefully. Here are the abbreviated 10 steps to effective marketing online:

1. The Importance of Google – with approximately 80% of all searches being conducted via Google, it is critical to primarily focus SEO effort on this search engine. Yahoo and Bing, are less important but still an important part of search engine marketing.
2. Keyword Selection – Pick keywords that are relevant to your business but also fairly easy to rank for. Look for multi-word phrases or ‘long-tail keywords’ as they are usually less competitive
3. Content is King - Prospects are more likely to buy from you if you are a thought leader, so establish yourself as one by creating extraordinarily helpful content. Take decisive action to ensure prospective customers are attracted to your site as a place to find answers.
4. Generosity is Also King – Another key part to attracting customers is your generosity in giving away information, access to tools, etc., which also earns you inbound links which improves your search engine rankings.
5. Social Media – Focus on the top three social media venues: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Remember, ‘be real’ and ‘be there’ to help the community rather than to push products.
6. Calls-to-Action – It’s important to provide something of value that solves a problem for visitors  in exchange for their contact information. Often traffic will not be ready to buy right away, but a tempting call to action will lead them down the sales funnel.
7. Landing Pages - Everything that has been done to draw qualified traffic to a site, from improving SEO, to generating great content comes to a head in the landing page. Leads should be confronted with an inescapable case for them to leave their carefully guarded personal information on the form. Having one offer, recapping benefits, and a short form are all key.
8. Lead Nurturing – follow up calls to action with a ‘thank you’ email and a lead nurturing campaign that further entices leads down the sales funnel with additional  free offerings– this is a free opportunity to keep touch with a lead.
9. Tracking Progress – Effective Inbound Marketing is all about experimentation. Select a strategy based on experience with customers and industry to get people to both visit and convert on the website. But anticipate that initial assumptions about keywords, or what it takes to get traffic to convert will not be right (or not right enough) and changes will need to be made. For this reason, it is essential to have a complete internet analysis tool-suite to help figure out what’s working and what’s not.
10. Patience & Tenacity – It’s easy to become discouraged and frustrated if Inbound Marketing is approached as a point solution. In reality, it’s a long term strategy only rewarding those who approach it with patience and tenacity

This was a condensed version of the full white paper, The Ten Essential Steps to Effective Marketing Online which you are invited to download for free.

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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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Give your business a boost with these no-cost marketing resources.

By Barbara Findlay Schenck

Are your 2010 marketing goals and plans ready to go? Or, are you working so hard to run your business, navigate consumer and marketplace changes, make payroll, and keep your business afloat that you’re greeting the second quarter without a blueprint for how you’ll steer its future? If so, take action immediately to get your marketing plan in order. This lineup of free resources will ease the process.

Market research MapStats. Don’t rely on guesswork to determine whether the region you serve can support your growth goals or whether new markets are good choices for business expansion. Instead, tap into government-assembled facts about any U.S. state, county, city or congressional district. With just a few keyboard clicks you’ll see the region’s population and demographics, as well as facts about growth, housing, income, employment, number and nature of businesses, and business activity by sector. Through this single source you can gather valuable information to weigh as you plot your next marketing moves.

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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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A simple service can win big in a small market.

By Scott Gerber | Entrepreneur.com

From aquatic sporting goods for dogs to Michelle Obama-inspired fashion websites, niche products and services have the potential to generate big bucks if they capture the hearts, minds and wallets of a dedicated consumer base. Unlike conglomerates that target the masses, niche businesses cater to highly defined markets that are often over-looked, underserved or disenfranchised by larger competitors. With an abundance of available outlets, resources and online platforms, identifying and reaching a target audience has never been easier for small business owners. Are you ready to become the big fish in a small pond? Is your passion unique enough to turn a profit? Here are 5 steps to make your niche business a hit.

Create a Simple Service
A simple service is a singular offering that focuses on the needs of a narrowly defined customer base. Whether you yearn to be the premier manufacturer of dog lingerie or the industry-leading producer of edible Christmas tree ornaments, make sure you can easily answer these questions: Who needs your service? What’s uniquely useful about that service? What makes your service better than your competition? Fine-tune your brand name, website, and marketing tactics to focus solely on selling your unique specialization and expertise. Remember: Focus. Focus. Focus.

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Social media has its place, but e-mail remains the king of online relationship marketing.

It can enhance both partners—or put a dent in one. Make sure you pick a partner that’s a good fit with your company’s products, values, and image

By Steven McKee | Businessweek.com

The moment Roger Penske announced his planned acquisition of the Saturn brand from GM, Saturn dealerships around the country initiated a spontaneous and organic co-branding campaign, erecting banners and billboards to celebrate the alliance.

Saturn of Wichita’s advertising proudly proclaimed: “Finally, a car guy owns a car company.” Scott Davies, owner of the dealership, explained the resulting traffic increase by saying: “People want to buy from someone they like. A lot of customers won’t buy a car from GM, but they will buy a car from Roger Penske.” That’s why Davies—and many other dealers like him—were so eager to associate Saturn with Penske.

It was an odd and unintentional (at least from GM’s perspective) co-branding effort, but it paid off. Saturn’s marketing director, Kim McGill, said the Penske announcement led to a 35% sales jump in June over the prior year.

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If you’re going it alone, avoid these pitfalls.

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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