Interactive Marketing for Beginners: First Steps

Subscribe to both general and niche interactive marketing blogs and news sites. You will experience using interactive technology and end up with a steady stream of marketing news and perspectives to keep you current on interactive marketing.

Must-subscribe marketing sites to get you started:
Buzz Marketing for Technology - innovative ideas for B2B technology marketers (also applicable to anyone interested in buzz marketing)
http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com

TechCrunch.com - weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
http://www.techcrunch.com

Conversation Agent - connecting ideas and people, how talk can change our lives
http://www.conversationagent.com/

Inside Adwords - Google's official Adwords blog
http://adwords.blogspot.com

Seth Godin's Blog - daily thoughts from the marketing guru
http://sethgodin.typepad.com

Adventures of a PPC Hero - heroic feats of pay per click management
http://www.ppchero.com

There is an ocean of SEO articles available on how to optimize your website to increase its organic rankings. (If you do not know the difference between organic and paid search rankings, please read Wikipedia's page to learn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_search)

Once you have a basic understanding of SEO, go into your website and go down the SEO checklist:
Title tags
Meta keywords
Meta descriptions
H1 headers
Alt tags
Keyword repetition
Link building (internal and external links)

You can also contract with a third party firm to help organically optimize your websites. A solid search marketing agency can significantly improve your website's rank.

Research across the web has shown Google to be the most widely used search engine. In three easy steps, you can launch your own Adwords campaign and begin driving traffic to your website.

1. Sign up for Google Adwords http://adwords.google.com/select/Login

2. Take the Adwords training

3. Set up your first campaign and begin tracking

Once you are comfortable with managing your campaign, integrate Google Analytics to site statistics in detail.

Unsure as to what exactly social bookmarking is? Watch Bookmarking in Plain English video to get up to speed! http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english

Once you have background on social bookmarking, read Ralph Wilson's ebook on Social Bookmarking and Marketing (http://www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/bookmarking.htm). He gives straight forward information about what works, what doesn't work and what you should be doing today.

In order to learn about and leverage social media tools, you need to use them yourself! Sign up for a Linkedin account http://www.linkedin.com/ and create a MySpace www.myspace.com or Facebook page www.facebook.com. Once you begin using social media you will have a better understanding of what is out there and how you can use it to meet your marketing goals.