What does 'online marketing' mean to a small business?

"I'm in online marketing." It's a conversation stopper. Unless you're at a Wired Sussex networking event. It's true that most small businesses these days have a web presence of some sort, and they're aware they need to be doing well on Google. But sometimes that's as far as it goes, especially if they went to a web designer who added 'website promotion' to the service description for another hundred quid.

Fact is, getting the right visitors to your website and converting them into customers now involves a complex set of activities and real strategic thinking. Or, as Lee Odden's suggests in his recent post Recession Proof SEO Tips,  "effective SEO in any economic environment means getting more creative, not mundane." Sensibly, small biz clients don't really care about the details, and even less about the jargon that goes with it. They're more bothered with results. How to break that down? Well, you could start with the desired result and work backwards.

Let's say you have a website which sells your goods or services. That means people want what you're selling and are able to buy. That means you have a website that works and a product or service for which there's a demand. If people are even on the website that means they need to have typed in your URL or arrived there from somewhere else. That means they have either heard of your company and URL or they've seen a link to you on the web and followed it. That means you've either done some traditional marketing already or there are links to your site on the web, in places where those potentially interested people were browsing or searching.

Where should those links be? How do we get them? How many do we need? What should they say? How do we know our prospects will see them and follow them? What other forms of promotion do we need to be doing? We've got the visitors - why won't they buy? How can we do all this without spending a fortune? Um... you need the help of an online marketer!