An effective marketing strategy helps your business find potential clients and makes it easy for them to find you. Your website is the element that ties everything together. Place your site at the hub of your web marketing strategy and select the tactics to support your goals.

Social Media l Social Bookmarking l Search and Pay-per-Click l Publishing and Link-Building l More Online Tactics l Real-World Tactics

Which tactics are best? Be where your clients and prospects are. Choose tactics that are appropriate to your target market, at least one from each category.

Create synergy between your activities so, for example, mention a new blog post in your email newsletter, Tweet, LinkedIn and Facebook, then submit it to an article distribution site. Minimal effort delivers maximum results.

Publishing & Link-building

By creating and publishing articles with your target market in mind, you build credibility and authority in your niche. At the same time, you’re generating links and increasing your site’s visibility. Here are the top sites to consider.

Ezine Articles
Expert authors reach millions of readers & publishers and generate in-bound links. My articles on web design and optimization.

eHow.com
How-to articles and videos created by professionals and users covering a broad range of topics.

Squidoo
Write and publish your own overview page called a “lense.” Share your expertise, get found, get followed, grow your influence.

Online PR
Press releases distributed online raise your profile on Search Engines and news sites, helping you reach potential customers. Read David Meerman Scott's New Rules of PR (PDF).

Social Media

Social media allows your business to interact with potential clients, prospective employees, and referral sources in new and exciting ways. The key word is “interact.” It’s a conversation, not a monologue. If they engage with your social media campaigns prospects are more likely to trust you and do business with you.

Facebook
A social utility that connects people, upload and share photos, links and videos.

YouTube
Upload, tag and share your videos. Check out our website evaluation seminar video.

Twitter
Social networking and microblogging service. Getting Started on Twitter in Plain English. Follow Barry on Twitter!

LinkedIn
Registered users can maintain a list of people they know and trust in business. See Hubspot's blog: LinkedIn as a Lead-Gen tool or check out Barry's LinkedIn profile and let’s connect!

Yelp
Members rate everything from restaurants to doctors.

Social Bookmarking

Share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks. The resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that link to them. The links can increase traffic to your site and raise your search engine rankings.

Digg
Discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest sites to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by users.

Delicious
Tag, save, manage, and most importantly, share web pages.

StumbleUpon
Using ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality, Stumble helps you discover great content you might not find using a Search Engine.

Search and Pay-per-Click

Since the majority of web traffic comes from “organic” search (with most of it from Google) it pays to optimize your site for your most important keywords. It also makes sense to consider these other Search-related tactics.

Pay-per-Click (PPC)
The fastest way to get listed and the only way to buy a spot on page #1 with Google AdWords.

Landing Pages
Absolutely necessary to optimize your PPC campaign. Also works well for trade show and email marketing. Hubspot has some great free resources on landing page optimization.

Directories
There are thousands of them, some free, some paid. Yahoo! Directory (at $299 annual fee) is the most expensive and the most important. Make sure you have links from any professional organizations to which you belong.

Real world tactics

Even in a digital age, real world marketing tactics still make sense (well, at least some of them do). The big change is that now your real world marketing is designed to point people to your online presence. Don't forget public speaking, mentoring and volunteering!

Word of Mouth
Where do you go first when you receive a personal recommendation for a product or service? To the web of course! Word of mouth is familiar, trust-worthy, and timeless. Check out GasPedal's "30 interviews with word of mouth marketing supergeniuses" for ideas and inspiration.

Trade Shows
Your website, landing pages, blog, tweets, Facebook page and just about every other tactic can promote trade show attendance and help attract prospects to your booth. Trade shows also offer a great opportunity to create videos.

Direct Mail
How do you reach prospects who haven't opted-in to your list or simply don't see your email? Direct mail is still viable. With effective offers and relevant landing pages you can generate leads and get your mail-only prospects to opt-in to your email campaigns.

More online tactics

These don’t fit neatly into the categories above but they should definitely fit into your marketing mix.

Blogs
Setting up a blog in WordPress is easy. Keeping it current isn’t. If you have the time to write and promote your blog it can be the most effective inbound marketing tactic. If not, at least start following and posting on other blogs. Check out our blog, I, Resolve.

Email newsletters
Email isn’t cutting edge but don’t discount its ability to connect with your clients and prospects, build loyalty, and drive traffic to your site and blog. We use Campaign Monitor and have set up HTML newsletters for several clients. See a sample.

Webinars
Decide on your target audience and the content that would appeal to them. Have a plan to promote the webinar, rehearse and test. Send an email follow-up with a link to view the video.