That’s a good point about getting your stuff out there anywhere you can publish it. Great tip.

Chris

I feel people always think there’s more to SEO than there really is. Build your site with proper markup and be smart about your headlines – that’s it. People think I don’t know what I’m talking about when I say that.

An interesting overlap is that social networking can really help your SEO. Cross-posting your videos and microblog to every service available is a great way to fill up a SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

I didn’t mention it before but I totally agree regarding PR. We’ve found that many companies who are purporting to be PR companies can’t even write a press release, let alone get exposure for one.

And content we write for SEO Purposes will often get a better pickup. In fact, we’ve seen SEO specific press releases make it into print unedited and I recently had a conversation with a City Business editor thanks to one of our article writers.

I think PR, like much of traditional marketing, is a relationship exercise. As the demographic of marketing changes (most true in online marketing) the places where relationships are made changes as well.

Surely there are good PR firms out there but I’d bet they’re positioning themselves as something else, “engagement enablers” perhaps.

@will scott – SEO probably is a very good investment for question #4, the limited budget marketing strategy. You should at least have your site presented correctly for the terms you are trying to rank for. And you’re right, just producing content and getting articles out there will build your link quality.

@jessica – Not outsourcing your PR isn’t hard and fast rule, but I feel that its something that you should be doing yourself at a startup. Different rules apply for larger companies. PR essentially means personal branding at our level. No-one else is going to be able to build your personal brand for you.

Thanks for everything you do for the local startup community. Keep up the awesome work!

I would also like to recommend a tool called SharpForge. Basecamp is a great tool but lacks the ability for dispersed team members to easily share files and get access to the latest version of any file.

http://www.sharpforge.com/Web-Collaboration/Benefits/Document-Versioning

Great post.

Clearly I’ll take exception on the PPC vs. SEO suggestion. I say PPC until your SEO kicks in because in the long term you’ll have lower total cost per conversion with SEO.

I would add: learn to express yourself well in writing, we see more traffic from our articles, online PR and blogging than any other medium. If you, as the entrepreneur, aren’t comfortable writing find someone on your team who is.

Good content goes a long way and the bar is set pretty low online.

Will